It Could Happen Here Weekly 3

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

can make your own decisions. This is it could happen here a podcast that I opened perfectly as a professional, as a man who makes all of his money from the podcasts uh no, notes, How was syphilis doing these days? You don't hear a lot from syphilis? Is it? Is it holding up? Okay, yeah, it's around. It's fine. Thank you for asking it. I didn't know that. It's not the same thread it used to be. It comes back

in waves every now and then. It has had a good run for a couple of It's kind of like Star Trek, right, yeah, yeah, there's a well, I don't think there's like new versions of it. I think it's like the same, good old syphilis pretty much. I don't think it changes drastically, So it's like Star Trek on Netflix. Yeah, yeah, okay, Well, good to hear from syphilis. This has been your syphilis update. That's gonna do it for us this week until next week.

I've been Robert Evans, Dr. Cavajota, and of course Garrison Davis. All Right, everyone by, It would be pretty funny to just do that, Sophie, to just drop a one and a half minute episode on, But only if we put in ads. M Yeah, we really like every word. We have a full ad break in between. Yeah, then then people would probably complain lest about the nine ads that are in our episodes. Right now, I can talk about syphili What are we what are we doing right now?

What is this episode about? What's going on? I'm assuming you guys want to talk about the coronavirus or I don't know. I can talk about whatever you want, but I think that's probably what you guys brought me on for. All right, what do we what is this coronavirus? Is this a problem? It's a little problem. It's not good to hear it's it's it's not great. So why didn't you give me a heads up on this? So? Yeah, that that's me not giving you heads up on the plankue.

The thing's talking about hear anything about this? This is the mask thing. That's why you got those two jabs in your arms and that random parking lot. Oh I thought that was heroin. Sorry. First of all, can can we talk about the use of the word jab. I don't love it. It's I mean, you're not James Bond, you don't. Let's not use jab. Prefer it's fair. I prefer what I think is the proper medical term vain fucked. Yeah, but it's not really your vein either. It's really just

intramuscular fucked. Oh right, muscle fucked. Yeah. I mean, what what are the cool kids calling it? Is it a poke? What do we want? What are the teens call it? Is it? Are they calling it the TikTok's? Yeah, it's called it's called the TikTok. I don't know. I've I've been been working on I've been working on a all day Today've been working to find this proud boy who's pretending to take COVID vaccines but it's actually steroids. Um.

He calls the critical support, he calls the extracurriculars. Okay, So that honestly rules, that's extremely funny. I'm hoping an article will be out by the time this podcast airs so, uh, who's the article for. I'm not sure yet. I'm talking with Opossum Press. Okay, cool, Well that's funny, Garrison. What

is today's episode about? Well, we we want to talk to We wanted to talk to Cava about both what the current plagues had situation is because a lot of people seem to think it's over, a lot of people seem to think it's not over. Um. And then also, how is COVID and all the stuff still affecting our hospital and medical system? Um? Is there supply shortages for medical supplies? What's going on in different areas? Yeah, because all of that, all that kind of stuff got you.

Yes is the answer? Yes, the answer, it's the answer. Yeah, it's a it's still a problem. I don't think. Uh, don't listen to anyone who tells you that it's not um. Don't listen to anyone who gives you too Sonny of forecast on it. But it you know, it's different in

different places, is the long the short of it. In places where the vaccinations are higher and where there's mandates and there's reasonable laws about things, the rates are going down California, but also like Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont. These are places with high vaccination rates. The rates of cases are going down in those places. Places like Mississippi, West Virginia, Idaho, Alabama, these are places where like it's

vaccination rates and the cases are going way up. You guys might have heard of a couple of things happening, Like there was that forty six year old guy named Daniel Wilkinson. He's like a vet who developed something called gallstone pancreatitis, which I could talk to you guys about for hours. I won't, don't worry, but I could. I'm just like you know, I could. I mean the Idaho

they have been cleared. It's not a total DNR, but like anyone who has um cardiac arrest is on a DNR now in Idaho because they just don't have the resources to be well, that's not entire I mean what am I? Okay? So that's not your fault. You got it wrong, because there were there were doctors that were sort of spreading that story about now they are and

what's called the crisis standard of care. But and in part of that means that hospitals could go to putting everyone on DNR, which means do not resuscitate, which means if you have a cardiac arrest, they won't do anything about it. That's that's not what's actually happening. It could happen. What what when they institute this crisis standard of care. What it means is that if a hospital gets so short on their ventilators and they just don't have any

more room, then they could implement that. I mean, I don't know, I even't heard of anyone. I was I was asking around uh to see if any doctors in Idaho could tell me of a hospital that's actually doing it. I haven't seen or heard of one that's actually doing

it yet, but they could. The point is, it's it's that bad where that's a reasonable discussion where doctors have to discuss kind of like they were back in the day in New York, where they have to be like, okay, does this person do we put the you know, the young lady on the mental lator or the old guy? You know? Then we have to decide and they make those decisions. It's really awful. It's a position no doctor wants to be in, and now that's becoming a reality.

It's brutal. It's brutal out there and and that's bleeding into other states nearby, you know, So is that what you mean by the Welkerson situation because his doctor like couldn't find uh an ICU bed for him. Is that that is that the story you're talking about? That's the story. So he's this guy who had a problem that can be fixed. I mean, it's a procedure called an e RCP that he can get done at specialty centers. And he didn't live far from Houston. Houston has plenty of

the specialty centers that can do it. They have great guests from urologists like myself, not as good, but you know, the same sort of thing. And they could do it if they if they, you know, if they had the availability to get him in. But they didn't, and so he died. Is something that he shouldn't love. It's basically the example. And I'm sure there's more examples of that.

And what really worries me is the examples that you're not hearing yet, like cases they're delayed now, cancer screening, things that are being delayed now in these hospitals that we're gonna be paying down the road. That's that's the ship that really scares me great, like just people not

going in for things in general. Yeah exactly, I have friends other than you who work in E R s and stuff, um, nurses and the doctor um, and it's up in the pm W. But the ship they're saying, it's like in the day's crap, like like I they are working on like building capacity and making sure they have things to like treat their friends because it's they're like the advices do not go to the hospital like if if, if at all possible, because there's just not

capacity for you unless it's like literally an immediate life and death thing. It's it's almost uh not worth like trying because there's just nothing. There's no slack the system is and it's it's it's starting to turn. It looks like here in in in the Portland area, but like it's it's frightening, like these are not people who would be bullshitting or or are are are prone to panic,

you know, they're e er professionals. But it's it's it's fucked up, like it's it's it it's this thing where like the scary thing to me is not even necessarily where we are right now, because it does like there is some kind of broadly positive news in a lot of areas about like where the pandemic is going. It's just like this situation won't be fixed when case numbers go down. It's it's it's going to be permanent damage

has been done to this system. And I guess what I'm wondering, first off, like from what you're seeing, like, what what is the extent of the permanent damage done to our our emergency medical system in particular and our our ability to even like get care at the moment. Yeah, that's a really good question. I don't I don't know. It kind of goes back to I think what Garrison want to talk about, which is like the collapse of

the medical system. I think we talk about it a lot in terms of we're on the edge of collapse, we're near collapse. I think there are places in this country where or he has collapsed. I think that's pretty evident. It's really it's not homogeneous in any way across this country. There are certainly places that are better than others, and there's certainly places that have a lot more uh leeway and flexibility, but everywhere is strained right now. And in

regards to your question about permanent damage. I'll answer that in regards to just the personnel. You know, because um, because of the show that I have, the House of Pod follow us on Twitter at the House of Pod, and I talked to a lot of doctors and nurses from all over the country, talk to them a lot. And it's bad. I mean, the stress that they're under, the pts D that they're that they're dealing with, the burnout.

The level of burnout is just intense. It's intense and and it's I think we were talking about moral injury and burnout before all this started, and now it is to a point where I don't know what's going to happen to the medical system, just in ms of the personnel when this is all over. I know a lot of people who are getting out of medicine, getting out clinical medicine. I mean out of like I would I

would say, out of just my immediate friend group. I can think of a couple off hand excellent doctors, really great I c u e er doctors who are already planning their exit. And when I don't know, I mean in the next coming years, that's gonna be a major issue. And I don't know how we're going to address that. And our nurses in the I c U. S. Man, the stuff they have to put up with is and is insane. You just see it in their eyes. Eyes

are broken, like I was. I volunteered on the wards a couple of weeks ago, and people, they're the doctors and nurses taking care of these CODE patients day in day out, like they there's like a little bit of their soul that's been broken, And just see it in their eyes like I was there for like just a week, and it's terrifying. You know, you're going into a room with a patient with COVID. It's scary. You know, even no matter how much ppe protective equipment you have on,

you're always a little scared. And I just think years of that that way is on a person in a way I don't I mean, I am worried about. I don't know how we're going to address that. M h yeah, that's cool. Yeah, And it's frustrating because like from the perspective of people listening, right, the thing you want to ask is like, well, how can I help, And it's like, well, you can't because you're already if you're listening to the show I assume you're masking. I assume you've gotten vaccinated.

If you don't have like a condition that that renders you unable to get the vaccine, you're you're I. I think our listeners tend to be pretty responsible people. It's just not enough because of the country decided to like Leroy Jenkins a plague and um god, Garrison, do you know that reference? Is that? Get that reference? I'm familiar with Leroy Jenkins. That's good. Were you born when Leroy Jenkins became a thing, I don't know, you would have been like three, would have been. Yeah, yeah, it was.

It was deadpool that them to your attention, isn't it? No? No, I it came to my attention just doing general Internet. Yeah, it was one of the first. It was the first meme that you could show your parents pretty much. I guess they were like Badger Badger, Mushroom, a couple of others in that category, but like, it was one of the first memes that wasn't a man's gaping asshole prolapsed. But I showed my parents that all the time. I don't know. Yeah, there was a beautiful moment back in

the day with some sea a stadium. Yeah, that's what brought you in the medicine. This is what I saw work. They were so proud of me, like, look at look at our look at our boy, Look at our boy. He can tell us exactly why that man's asshole looks that way. I have a weird job, I guess. One of my questions is, with the assumption that people are taking the actual plague related steps they can to reduce their burden to the medical system, what can people realistically do?

I mean, I think part of that is and this is and I'm not gonna have you to like explain how you can take care of your own medical treatments in an emergency on a podcast. That's not the time or the place. Although I do think it's probably a good idea for people to read up on first aid and basic life saving emergency Like it's always a good idea to to have some training there. But yeah, I mean, do you have other advice? You know, you're exactly right.

The people that are listening to this podcast are totally on board already, and they're super supportive, and we appreciate that. I mean that is not unnoticed. I mean, um, you know, it's having people like, uh, outside the hospitals every now and then, applauding doctors. I know it's cheesy, but it's great. I'll take that over the blue angels flying overhead any day, you know. So it's that's that stuff is really important, and masking and taking care of themselves is is great,

you know. Um. The the real practical things that people can do, I think, uh is help contribute to sites that will help get the rest of the world vaccinated. I mean, we can definitely talk about that the question of boosters here versus you know, vaccines for the first time elsewhere. But there That's the one thing I would recommend right now if you want to help, um, let's put our money into places where we can get vaccines to other places. And I think that every little bit

of that helps in the long run. And and that's the sort of thing that we could use. Other than that, I mean, I just hope that people are still going into medicine and in nursing. You know. That's the only thing I can still hope is that people who haven't interest in it, you know, continue to do it. And and for those people who are just their training, those years of their formative years are during this time. I just want to let them know. I swear it gets better.

It's not always gonna be like this. And if you make it through this, you're gonna be an amazing clinician, You're gonna be an amazing nurse, You're gonna be an amazing doctor. And I really want you guys to keep doing it. That's that's one thing I would say to Yeah, I mean, and I I'll certainly add that if you're someone who's contemplating a medical career, please please, I mean, just from a there's a couple of things on that, like just from a perspective of what the world needs.

It's what the world needs. But also, if you're listening to this stuff we're saying about the crumbles, about the possibility of the collapse, if you're someone who who foresees things getting potentially much more difficult in the future, not a lot of things more useful in a bad situation than somebody with medical training. I don't count on that getting me through the apocalypse. I'm I'm soft. I am so so. I went camping and I couldn't handle it.

A couple of weeks ago, I went camping. It was awful. There was so much dust. It was an awful experience. But I just thought, if the apocalypse comes, I will hopefully get placed in a very nice tent because I'm a doctor, so I'm counting on that to get me through.

There are so many dumbass boogaloo type quote unquote preppers who focus on the guns and the gear and the dried food but thrown in the shirt, throwing knives but don't even have a n I fac an individual first aid kit or like a tourniquet, and like they talk to you, talk to like like I mean, this is a little off topic, but like talk to combat marines about like their favorite person. It's always the corman. It's the guy who knows or the lady who knows how

to like patch a bullet wound and whatnot. Like there's there's nothing more useful in any situation pretty much that that is dangerous than somebody who can do medicine. So please, if you're if you're studying to do medicine, if you're contemplating becoming an e M T. Or a paramedic or

a nurse or whatever, good God, we need you so badly. Yeah, we've talked to a little bit about just in the medical system in general, and then we can also kind of discuss more stuff related to how COVID's impacting certain areas more than others. And like, let's say someone who's someone who's listening, who's in one of these areas that it has only vaccinated, you know, not not a lot of people are going on with masks on, and you know, schools starting back up, maybe they have kids are going

to their school system. I know in Texas they have you know, child deaths arising. That sounds very frightening to be that kind of person who, like you know, would like like to see that stuff happened in their state,

but it's just not really possible. And I don't know, with so much of the rest of the world kind of slowly taking back restrictions, and I'm sure it feels very jarring to be in a situation like that and kind of like there's really nothing you can do right besides you right, because you can talk to your family, talk to your friends, but like overall, it's hard to hard to make you know, a big impact in a state, you know, like Texas, Alabama, like Idaho, all the ones

that you that you were mentioning before from a medical kind of perspective, is there is there any way people can kind of start to talk about those things with their family And because the way we've been trying to get people take the vaccine, with the marketing we've been doing, has not been super successful in these demographics. Um, do you think there's other conversations that can get people to slowly kind of be more, be more able to you know,

contemplate that. Yeah, that's a that's a tough question. It's particularly tough if you're someone who is believes in the importance of vaccines and you'r or the importance of masks and that sort of thing, and you're in a place where you're a minority. That is tough. The first thing I'll say is definitely know that the vaccine helps. You're

in a much better position because of the vaccine. When I was on the wards and I was looking at patients that they're almost all unvaccinated, those are the people that end up in the hospital. You can't still get into the hospitalize if you have the vaccine, but it's it's much less likely. And you know, not that these people don't count, they count just as much, but if you don't have an underlying problem like a liver transplant or some immune suppression, then you're less likely to have

a really bad outcome with COVID if you're vaccinated. So just know that it helps. You still might get it, it'll suck, um, but for the most part, you're gonna stay out of the hospital. And that really, I think is something have a little comfort in. It really does seem to work. You know. Outside of that, the schools thing is is a real concern for me, and I'm gonna feel a lot better than We're going to be in a much better position once we are able to

get kids vaccinated. So there's there's two things. You guys probably heard that there was, um this this committee that met to advise the FDA about booster shots. That's one thing. So booster shots are gonna go out to people who need them, uh sixty five and older people at high risk, people in high risk occupations. They're gonna like frontline workers. So there's gonna be booster shots coming out. And then the data is coming out now about five till Yeah,

and that's pretty promising. Um, it looks like they're gonna do okay with lower doses, so they use about one third the dose of the vaccine that the adults get and it seems to work. We haven't seen much other than the pre press release from uh Fightser, but you know, if you really pick at it, it looks promising. So I am that's something that makes me hopeful. That's something I'm definitely clinging to. I think there's no way we're getting out of this without vaccinating kids. That just has

to happen. Um. I think once that starts rolling out, and hopefully it will soon. I mean I don't want to put a date on it, but I'm hoping within the next couple of months this starts happening. So you know, once, once that starts happening, I'm gonna feel a lot more comfortable. I think people in those situations are gonna feel a lot more comfortable too. Yeah, the booster thing is an

interesting question to me. I mean, they're methical standpoint, particularly, you know, I think I think it's not a fair narrative to say it has to be one or the other, and I think people are saying that. I don't think. I think we can do it. I think we can produce enough vaccine here for people who haven't got it yet, and enough for the boosters and start supplying more to the world. I mean, we can do more. Our Government Sharing Visor Maderna definitely need to do more in that regards.

They definitely need to do more in terms of production. They haven't hit their goals in a lot of these places. And but it's also not like they haven't done anything yet. They give about like a you know, two hundred million doses are being donated just this week. I think, so they are doing things. That's happening. It's just we need more of it. Everything needs we need more of it.

We need to ramp up production. Yeah, it's weird because, like you're right, we could produce enough vaccines for the places that don't have them and enough vaccines for boosters over here, and all it would take is a couple of months of our Afghana stand mad money. But we're not going to do that, and so it probably will, like I don't know, contribute to an issue effect. There's there's a chance that it will contribute to an issue

of vaccine unavailability. But also it's not like if we don't get the boosters, those vaccines will be available because we're just not giving them out. Yeah, in the extent that we need. So I yeah, I don't know, I understand what you're saying. I'll get the booster if they decide to give out boosters because I like not having not plague damage or getting long COVID. Yeah. Yeah, that that seems great. And a lot of the vaccine has

been see kind of relies. It tracks back to how we've been marketing in it, and I've I've been on the team that's like, we should stop using Fauchi because every time Fauci goes on TV to talk about vaccines, more people are going to do like a backfire in fact, to be like, no, I'm not gonna get don't trust Fasci. So there's a particular like marketing thing that I think we've failed on. Like America is very good at marketing when we can make money, but when it's not related

to getting gaining more profit. I think the government is very bad at marketing these types of things. Um. And on the kind of the marketing side of things, I don't know, this is this is kind of old news at this point. But the whole smoll and testicals thing, um, which we have you have not talked about on this show about but I'm sure you have thoughts about how this thing has kind of balloons, which is that can be like, so, how how the marketing and misinformation relates

to this cool kind kind of current problem. Yeah. Yeah, first of all, that particular story, I mean that's hilarious. I mean, like this, I've never I've never seen someone's excuse for venereal disease becomes such an international issue. Yeah, contribute to the desk probably of hundreds of people. Um, you know, it's it's the marketing thing. Is a really great question, and and and it's been driving me crazy because like part of me at this point just wants

to be like, get the fucking vaccine. What the fund's wrong with you? Get the vaccine part of my language and like, um, but then the part of me knows that that doesn't work. Like I do believe doctors should be able to express their frustration. Um, they need to be able to do that. If we can't do that

right now, I mean, it's game over. But they need to at least have that ability where doctors can voice their frustration with antivactors but still give them the same high level of care that we're always going to give them the matter what when they show up in the hospital. But if not working to do that, we need other approaches.

I don't I don't entirely know what they are. There are some people they're they're so far out there that we're just never going to reach the people, the microchip people. There's like a level of deep programming that will need to happen to those people that we just it's it's too exhausting to do that. You really have to, like, if you can't scale that in any meaningful way for the country, I think I think, Yeah, I don't know.

I think calling it the Trump vaccine was the closest we got to have possibility, and that fucking I'm interested in your thoughts on the fucking bright Bart article and if you're not aware, if you're less online than us, and God bless you if you are right Bart, the

which is I don't know. CNN for Fascists came up with an article blaming the Democrats for the fact that Republicans don't want to take the vaccine and saying it's a secret liberal plot to exterminate conservatives because conservatives refused to take vaccines because they're fundamentally oppositional, defiant. Um, and like it's it's the fault of people who are telling them to take the vaccine that they're not taking the vaccine because obviously, why would you trust the liberal on anything?

But also they're trying to kill us. We're going to lose the election because we're all dying because we refuse to get vaccinated for a preventable disease. Anyway, how do you feel about that guy? I don't. I don't love it. I don't love it. Um, I'm vaguely familiar with bright Bart. I don't know that exact because I have enough pain in my life. But um, but you know, I do wonder.

It's like when they put out articles like this, or when Tucker Carlson goes out and he does his thing questioning vaccine, just asking questions about vaccines that lead to vaccine hesitancy, Like what calculations are they doing? Are they doing calcular? Is this just him being callous in not giving a fun and just doing it, or is there some calculation that him and some sort of right wing fink tank are doing where they're like, hey, look this

sells to our audience. They love it. Let's keep doing it. Yes, we are going to lose ex portion of our audience because of this, but we still have plenty of audience left. Like, I don't, I wonder how that's happening. Like it is hurting. It is true, it is hurting them more than than other people. It's hurting everyone. Everyone's getting affected by this, um but there it's those states that are being affected, the people not getting vaccinated who are listening to people

like Tucker Carlson. I don't. I don't understand what their endgame is here, Like this is their market? Why why not protected? And that I do not have a good answer for. I was hoping one of you guys would. Um. You know, it's there's a lot going on there. I think a decent chunk of it is the assumption that whatever they lose in terms of dead followers won't be worth more than continuing the cash bonanza. That is owning the lips, right because that's all they that's all that's

the entirety of the right wing media. It's just owning the lips. It's just oppositional, defiant, it's just hating anything Democrats do. So you you kind of can't. You're a cuck if you tell people to receive basic medical care if Democrats are taking that basic medical care right, Um, so it's a pride thing for a lot of them. To two things I love is when you when you use the word cuck or when you do Ben Shapiro's voice, Like those are like two of my everythings that you do.

It's you're saying really well, far beyond anything rational on the right. Um, and it's it's difficult to like I I I think the calculation is just like I think a lot of these guys is the same thing with climate change. Like they're smart enough to know that they're contributing to an uninhabitable world, but they want to cash in first. They want to get as much as they can out before it falls apart. And I think that's all any of these people care about. Because I think

there are the true believers. The radio guys are true believers, right, the radio guys who keep dying because they don't be vaccinated. Those guys did believe that it was some sort of weird conspiracy, it was the communist whatever, um. Clearly because they did management level, yeah, mid management level. They don't know all the stuff that they're being told from above and they kind of believe it enough to where they

kill themselves for the company. I think for Tucker, it's more a matter of like, hey, I keep making money and I maintain my power if I If I continue to hold this line, you you lose power, You get weaker. It's like when Trump got booed for telling people to take the vaccine. You know, um, yeah, crazy. You can't go back with this ship. You just can't, and you certainly can't admit to ever having been wrong. Right. Yeah, man,

it's good ship. What a what a fun note to end of the episode on what a good society we've built Bravo. M hm ah, well cover it. People can find you by looking up the House of Pod. Yes, uh was slightly less depressing, but not not super uplifting either at this point. Uh. Follow us at the House of Pot at Twitter, and you can listen to our podcast pretty much anywhere you listen to podcast. We'll talk about medical type things, but not so deep into the

woods that it's not entertaining, I hope. Yeah. Fun the woods, Yeah, the woods. We have fun guests ranging from the world's best medical experts to you know, you guys. The best medical experts. You guys are right up there for medicine, right. There's no better medicine than just a big fat pile of cocaine. And the good thing about cocaine is it's a sterilizing agent. So if you're worried about COVID getting in your nasal passages, just rail cocaine before you and

after you go into the store. It's like getting a COVID test, but more fun. Legally, I have to tell you that's false. Well, we all have our opinions about how cocaine works, and I have my facts. Now, if you excuse me, I'm gonna go pick up a single item at the grocery store. Hey, leath the listeners tag here. Last season on Lethal Lit, you might remember I came to Hollow Falls on a mission clearing my aunt Best's

name and making sure justice was finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself and my friends in danger. Though it wasn't all bad, I'm going to be real ify Tig, I like you, but now all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting. You better believe I'm gonna win.

I'm Tig Torres and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on season one of the hit murder mystery podcast Lethal Lit, a tag Torre's mystery out now, and then tune in for all new thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February nine. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Leave the Lit on the I Heart Radio app,

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Is this fascinating world? Find a forest near you and start exploring and discover the forest dot Org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad Council. Welcome It could Happen Here pod, a podcast that is today about the fact that ten years ago it did happen. And when when I when I say it did happen, I mean we occupied an extremely large number of places, and we did so in interesting and incredibly bizarre ways. And with with with me to talk about this is

Garrison as always. I like that you used the Twitter handle for our podcast, not the actual name, but that's fine. Where can it where can it go for it? But helloon with me? I have I have my special guest, Vicky Ostrowil, who is an agitator, who is a writer, who has done many many things, probably most famously writing the book in Defense of Looting UM from Bold Press, Bold type Press, bult Type Press. Yeah, very good book. People got very bad, people got very angry. Yeah, thank you.

It's it's really I'm really excited to be here to to talk about the the anniversary of Occupy from basically you know when I when I all got this whole train rolling, so yeah, and the the other the other thing um that that is probably relevant here is that Vicky was one of the first people at Occupy and and little correct me if I'm wrong about this. I found an oblique reference to this in one of the

things I read. You facilitated the first meeting. Yes, the yeah, I got this on the record now, yeah, I I uh yeah, during UM during the general New York City General Assembly, it was called in August. Um, there was you know, uh, ad Busters hopefully called for a general assembly, and you know, a bunch of us sort of went down there and there was a tanky party there um doing a general assembly, which was just them on speakers, UM doing their regular ranting. Um hadn't changed much in

ten years, um and uh and we um. Yeah, so a bunch of us just went and sat down, uh, you know, to the side of it, and started an actual general assembly. And by by by happenstance, I I associated that meeting and it was the first and last

Occupy meeting AMATE facilitating. Yeah. Okay, so I want to rule back a little bit too, just before the start of occupied because yeah, the more be thinking about this, the more have just realized that two thousand eleven was just a profoundly weird time in a lot of ways. I think people have forgotten, like the entire American security

state is at this point being terrorized. When you joint anonymous lull sick hacking campaign called anti Sick, the symbol of which he is a guy in a guy fox mask wearing a monocle and a top hat, and this was just like normal, Yes, this was the thing that I was like, Oh, yeah, yeah, it's it's the it's it's the it's the anti sick top hat, full faced

guy in a monocle. Fun fact about that, just before we forget David Gramer Rest in Peace, who was there in the early days organizing claimed and um that he had he had heard and talked to the some of the like overheard the police talking about the reason they didn't sweep the occupying encampment the first day when we were pretty weak, frankly, or the first week, was because there were a bunch of guy fox masks and they were scared. They were scared they were going to get hacked.

If they were scared, they were gonna hack them and steal there. Yeah. So so it was a weird time indeed. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think the the other thing that's, you know, I think important about this time period if we were looking back at what occupied was is that this so this is this is three years after the the financial collapse, and you know, so I think this is you know, in the room to two eleven, there's been a few there's been a few protests, there's been there was a big thing in Grease in two thousand eight that was

kind of related, kind of unrelated. But I think in my sense of you know, I was like, I don't know, I was like thirteen. I was like I was like an actual baby child. But my sense of it was kind of just like like there's that there's this like sense that everyone just kind of waiting for something to happen. Yeah, and it's like hadn't and it's just like kept going and kept going and kept going. And then you know, and then and then Genesia starts and suddenly there's you

know there there there's Protestant Tenessia, there's pertest Egypt. There's like people fighting tanks in the street in Bahrain, and you know, and this this is you know that this this becomes down as the spring and it starts to spread to a lot of places. And VICKI I want to talk. I want to ask you about this because you you were in Spain when it started started. There we'll talk about what what what was going on there?

And yeah, so I wasn't there when it started. Um, but but but yes, um, basically you know, and then and I want to shout out like there were there were a bunch of like movements like in two thousand eight, right after the crash, there were a bunch of protests, like outside Wall Street. They were very small, but they

were like sort of the like produced some images. And then there was you know, in two thousand uh nine, there's the Oscar Grant rebellion in Oakland, and you have the Madison occupation earlier in two thousand eleven, um, where they were the workers unions took over the state House. Yeah,

everyone does. It was actually really important at the time. Um. But yeah, so so you know, so I think I'm glad you brought up Greece because I think actually Greece really that that sort of anarchist rebellion in two thousand eight thou nine really kicked off the cycle in a certain way, but also didn't quite It wasn't quite the first domino, you know. It was sort of more of a like forecast. So yeah, so Arab spring, uh you know,

is huge. It's this huge, huge event, and the US media is thing it because obviously like these sort of old you know, quote unquote Marxist dictators are falling, um, and so of course the US is like all about it, um, which of course later later on the return of the tankies will use to um to confuse everyone on the US left and destroy all solidarity with Syria anyway. Um, but that's neither hearner there. Um. So then then in then in that summer, um, you get this this wave

of early summer like May in June. In fact, the fifteenth of May was when the movement started in Spain and then it starts student again in Greece. And it was similar to occupy and that there was these people coming together in these sort of encampments in the center

of the city. Um. I don't know if people remember um or or know this history economically, but Spain and Greece had recently been sort of going through these like big big booms economic booms just for about five or six years that turned out to be real estate bubbles funded by their entry into the EU, and two thousand and Age just smashed that and they were just like incredibly impoverished. I mean, like Spain was facing unemployment, Greece

was like similar. Spain has recovered more than Greece has in the intervening years, but it's still bad. Um So so yeah, so you had all these it was it was you know, predominantly young folks who were um, you know had been pushed out of the economy, who had been pushed out of their homes, whose families had loft their homes. Um gathering together and it was all over both countries and it was huge. Um. I happened to just be in Barcelona. I had been on a planned

vacation with some friends. Um you know that we had we had planned like sort of six months earlier when it all popped off. And I had also just started my writing. Um, I would say career, but that's very generous. UM. I had started technically being paid for writing things. And they were like, oh, right about it, Like, let's like cover it while you're there. And because no one in the US was talking about what was going on in Spain when my article popped up, like and this is

like this is really strange. But it was like the early days of Twitter as well, um two eleven, Like I guess Twitter started two nine or something, and so like, so the the one of the accounts, the camp tweets out my article. So I went there the next day. I was like, I wrote that article and then I was like embedded for a week, and I was there for like kind of the height of the popular power of the movement in Barcelona only for a week, but I was there on the day when there was a

two and a half million person march through Barcelona. UM just like still probably the biggest march I've ever been part of it and probably who ever will be UM was like la And so you know, so that goes on for for a few months in Greece and Barcelona, it sort of hits similar limits that occupy would eventually hit, which is that like you know that that if you can take the space away from people, that's that's the common ground, and like you can't really have the movement

without the encampment. And also all the way in which the camps sort of force a kind of internal naval gazing and people like get really obsessed with maintaining the camp rather than the struggle with the city at large. All of those, all of those contradictions sort of like came up in Spain and Greece as well. But at the time, you know, I was there for the height of it. I come back to New York, I'm like, this is going to happen in the US, like it has to. UM. I think a lot of folks who

had been watching felt that way as well. Um. I actually took part in this thing called bloomberg Ville, which was like, yeah, fifty people on a sidewalk, um was from Michael Bloomberg, right, Um, fifty people on a sidewalk.

Fifty people was general. I was like, when we were doing really well and mostly fifteen of us, It's like fifteen of us on a flidewalk um in the financial district, like getting yelled at by cops, um, you know, sleeping on cardboard, you know, occupy style, but without any attention or solidarity. Um. And but because I had been in Barcelona and I still have these carbrads in Barcelona, I was like, oh my god, we're doing it in New York.

So we had this thing where bloomberg Ville, which is like twenty people like got to talk to a general assembly in Barcelona at the height of its power, like on a like internet link, like a really early internet link, you know. Um, and you know so so so. So there was all this energy that was happening. And then I think, really crucially, the London riots pop off, and that doesn't get talked about very much anymore, partially because

the UK left really stabbed. Here's the back during that and and have and and repressed the memory of it largely UM, and have suffered ever since, in my opinion, strategically UM. But you know that was for us in the US, that was huge. It was huge watching UM, watching those riots unfold. Like you know, again, this was like early live streaming, so like we were like watching live feeds of the riots, you know, which is like it was not a thing that you could really do

without a TV before. There was just like there was a lot of stuff going on that felt exciting and and it was and really important and inevitable that it would come to the US because things were so messed up over here. I think we should talk about what a general assembly actually is because I think a lot of people aren't. We're going to have like never actually ran into what exactly is going on, or have sort of forgotten in the last ten years after this sort

of fallen out of favor. Sure, yeah, I mean it's UM. It was never my favorite either, honestly, but it's a it's a meeting style UM designed UM. It actually does largely actually come from from European anarchist traditions, UM from from Spain in Greece, but as as many of us know, UM, A lot of those traditions go back further UM and have crossed crossed the water general somebody's actually there's a long history of them in indigenous communities in Turtle Island,

for example. So it's an old meeting style UM, in which um, the Quakers also the Quakers UM famously also sort of uh sort of co opted it from from indigenous folks out here on the East coast. UM. But UM, it's a meeting style in which, uh, you know, with the exception of a facilitator which is occasionally but not always present, UM, everyone is able to speak UM together.

There is something, there's an agenda sometimes, but it's basically a meeting designed where everyone present in the meeting has like an equal voice, And it's not really designed generally for UM decision making specifically or in with like really specific goals in mind. Often, although there will be sort of like things that are trying to get settled UM.

But it's it's it's it's designed to allow, you know, a very very multi vocal approach and for everyone to sort of put in their their thoughts and their ideas UM and often is connected although not necessarily, but is often connected to consensus UM operation where UM things can't get sort of decided on unless everyone sort of agrees UM. And in occupy UM, that was the general assembly was sort of UM was a bit controversial because it was

just whoever showed up obviously participates in it. So, you know, unlike unlike you know, an organizational meeting where you you know, everyone knows each other and you have to have a you know, you have to be there with an invite or whatever. UM, you know, whatever cranky wing nut UM wanted to show up could UM. And that had pluses and minuses. It was charming sometimes, but it was also

very frustrating UM. And in in New York where I was UM, it was made almost impossible to function by this thing called the people's mike UM oh, which I think still happens sometimes people even mike check UM and and then everyone repeats what was said. But that means that it takes four times as long to talk as normal. So when you have a wing nut, you know, like advocating for wrong Paul, and then you've got thirty people echoing him every four yards, it makes it makes discussion

completely impossible. And a microhistory of the people's mic. The reason that happened was because in the first week in Zukkati Park Um, whenever we got on a megaphone, police would come and arrest whoever was on the megaphone because you weren't allowed to use amplified sound in New York. And one organizer was like, oh no, no, we can like use the people's mic. We can repeat back to each other. And this is when we they're still mostly like thirty to forty people in the park at any

one time. It's very small. That didn't feel so bad, but then when the movement really got big, the people's mike became completely unwieldy and also was a response to a was a cowardly response to police repression frankly UM, and was a way of So the peopil's mic is is, in my opinion, reactionary form anyway, that is hit. So

it's been ten years. I haven't been able to complain about this in like eight years, Thank you so much, UM anyway, So yeah, the general Assembly is just a meeting form um that often often associated with anarchy, anarchist practice or radical democratic practice um in which sort of consensus is aimed for by allowing everyone to speak there much I would say. Yeah. And so this, this, I think gets us back to where we open this episode, which is Adbusters calls an event with literally no plans

to like do anything. They're just like, yeah, everyone, we're occupied in Wall Street. And then yeah, and you know, as it's talking about the beginning of it, you guys basically hijack well sort of, I mean, so Adbusters. Adbusters doesn't show up, like you said, there's I've never met an Adbusters person, um. And it was funny, like we would do jokes about it. But I think it's also

thinking about this in preparation for this interview. It's also interesting because Adbusters and their culture jamming is kind of like one of the results of the sort of altar globalization movement of the like late nineties and early two thousands, the summit hopping stuff um, the enarchy movement of like one generation ahead of occupy UM. So I think it's sort of appropriate that Adbusters sort of, like you know, was present in this legacy in a certain way, and

a lot of those organizers were as well. But yes, I'm sorry, I did I just jump in for you. No, no, no, okay, um the yeah, so so so so, a bunch of people I don't actually know who calls for an August second, you know, general assembly to talk about the call for

September seventeenth to occupy Wall Street. UM. And at that at that point, that's when the thing I was describing earlier like happens where where UM, you know, we a bunch of folks and and I really want to underline that most of them were people who had been in Spain or Greece. UM. David Graber was also. There was like a lot of old heads. There was like a there was a comrade from Japan. UM. It was a very international crew who had like had experience in these

movements over the summer. UM came and had this General Assembly and sort of ran it that way and broke out. We had we broke off working groups and then there was meetings sort of once a week and then working group meets within that UM and general assemblies from August second ttil September seventeenth, at which point, UM, you know, occupy the day, the day that Adbusters had caused for actually happened. So my my impression of this, and I was I was very small. I had very limited idea

of what was going on. The way I remember in the media is that like the there, the media was weirdly interested in it in a way that I've never seen them. I've never seen them cover another social movement that wasn't like literally burning their offices down, And it was like it was like in the beginning, it was I mean, you know, obviously the right wing media is losing their minds, but they were kind of kind of supportive of it, and I think, I don't know, I

you thinking about this. One of the things that that happens in both in both Greece and in Spain is that the product movement of the squares is these electoral movements, and these electoral movements just fail like catastrophically, like Starsia takes power, like like the they like you know, they they have they have they have a like their their

finance minister is a left communist. He's like he is the most fire left person ever like to hold office since like the Spanish anarchists in ninety nineteen thirty six, and they employed austerity. Anyways, in Spain, you get put demos and it's like wow, okay, you have you know, they had this thing called the electoral war machine. They're they're gonna take over the Spantish but because something they just it collapsed. It just doesn't work. They've they've never

like they've they've they've they've never taken power. They've never really got anywhere. They they successfully evicted a bunch of squats in Catalonia. But yeah, but and I think this is my impression if it was that I think the US media thought they could they could do this to occupy and and I think they kind of it's weird because looking so you know, like I I come in and like to to this kind of stuff around on seventeen,

and I think it it's like it weirdly worked. But it worked because they were able to group the anti occupy people. So it's like, yeah, and so they did finally get their like cadre of like pseudo left organizers so they could used to build a democratic party. It's just it is like Jocobin and then I'll think the whole, the whole sort of anti occupy group. Yeah, so those folks were actually UM active during Occupy UM, critiquing the people who now most loudly UM claim the legacy of

Occupy UM. You know, as you said, Jacobin, a lot of those sort of social democratic groups um. At the time, UM, and those of us who were there, remember they hated Occupy. They would show up, but they like would critique it constantly. They would write all these articles about how it was terrible, there were no demands, it was too disorganized. And then I think, you know, when Black Revolt got put on the table, they were like, bring back Occupy. We liked

that better. But but I think to be as harsh as possible, but um, I think like, um, you know, yes, there was there was a lot of media coverage. It didn't feel super friendly at the time. Um, there was a lot of There was a lot of media coverage, Like the media was very curious, it was very interested, but a lot of that coverage was like why do they have no demands? Like why are they so disorganized?

Why are they so smelly? Whatever? Like there was a lot of like there was lot of slander in the press, but also a lot of attention, um, which you know, I turned turned out was as good as you could get, but at the time didn't didn't feel very good. Particularly I think, yeah, but yes, those those forces, those forces were already present um in you know, in in occupy itself, um, you know, sort of denouncing it um for its disorganization um and then eventually claiming that it was the reason

that Bernie Sanders happened, um, which isn't totally wrong. Yeah, I want to be really clear, like I think, and I think what we'll get into this more. But I think like the thing that about the thing that was important about occupy and the thing that the people who in my opinion, like my comrades during Occupy or people I meet who were like doing Occupy stuff but like who I didn't know, but like now we I you know,

I roll with them. Most of us have the have the you know, the analysis, like it was really important that we were doing politics in the street. It was really important that we were back together they were talking politics. And then there were really really intense, extreme limits to what Occupy could have done. UM. And I think Oakland really pushed those um and and you know, and got to those but um. And I think the folks who are like, no, no, Occupy was good at the time,

we're like Occupy is terrible. UM. And I think that's worth notice noting and thinking about. So I think, yeah, before we sort of going into talk a bit about what happened to Oakland to talk about some of their stuff so on on day to day basis, like what

is occupy actually doing? Because I think that's also been sort of lost in this whole, Like everyone remembers like the slogans and everyonebers fact that there's a thing, but you know, like that there's there's a bunch of working groups and they're doing things like what what was that like like day to day? And then I sort of brought a lovell yeah so so um So, first of all, again I was only in New York. I spent some

time at Occupied Boston as well. UM, but like I don't have a sense of what other places were like, so I really can't, I mean other than having heard from people. So I want to be very clear that I'm like mostly addressing that. Um. I think the thing that was going on was that the Zakati Park, like

the park was like total chaos. Um. Part of that was because there was a drum circle that basically was owing twenty four hours a day um there, which meant that whenever you were down there and it was like a canyon. Scotty Park is surrounded by skyscrapers, so it was just this incredible cacophony all the time, um, which I think was cool. It really ruined a lot of finance bros, like like like orally with an a there um but I think like, but it also was pretty

intense and unpleasant. Sometimes you were like please stop, oh my god, like that's at one point in general assembly, I think decided that drums were like only acceptable during certain hours, like near the end of the movement, like the drums the drum circle got reproached, when in fact they were like actually the biggest agents of chaos in Zuccoti, which is another important lesson, but um, yeah, I think so.

So you know. Also, because I had been in bloomberg Ville, because I've been in Barcelona, I didn't invest myself very heavily in camp management stuff, so I mostly was doing

um work. One of the things that I think it's forgotten about is that there were snake marches basically three or four a day every day after after the first week when we were really small, when it got big, they were just constant, constant marches through the city, just like always going off, like you would run and you'd be on one march you run into another march, like on a Saturday or Sunday, when like people were really like out there like it was, it was really like

there was a lot of mayhem. There would be big planned marches that would then be bigger. Um. So there was like a lot of like, um, what people now would call direct action, what I would call largely like sort of symbolic practice for direct action. Mostly, UM, I don't mind, I like marches. I certainly got my miles in then like I don't feel like I need to do that again. But um, but you know, so then

at the camp people were just living there. There were a lot of like a lot of punks, a lot of like you know, a lot of homeless folks obviously, and some and some encampments had more at a higher concentration about the house people. Some in New York because of all the media spectacle and all the money that came in. We had a lot of nonprofit drifters by the end in the encampment. But there's also like a library, um, a free library with all these books that like would

be donated. Um, there's a lot of like you know, political agitation. There were people standing around the Um, the you know the corners of the park, you know, with with signs and you're yelling at people. And it's also important to remember that like Zuccatti Park in New York is tiny. It's tiny. We originally wanted to do it on in this big plaza like City Bank plaza. Um, and the cops have heard about that and fence it off. So on the seventeenth we just like we just, um,

what's the word we get? We we did a oh my god football metaphors we called an audible thank you. So we said, Zuccatti is this tiny little park. It's incredibly dense, and it's surrounded by you know, like I said, to skyscrapers, it's in this really weird part of the city that no one would ever spend any time and if they didn't have to otherwise. Um. So that's sort of So there's all this stuff going on, and then they're all these their general assemblies twice a day, um, which,

as I said, in New York, we're particularly unhelpful. Um. But I think anarchists and a lot of cities we have talked to you, like I had a comrade down in DC one in Denver, they sort of said that the general assemblies either quickly like got shifted or got or became irrelevant. UM. I think the general sumblies were not we're not in the end where we're symbolically important but not but not really driving force um of my

experience UM. And then there would be there would be, like I said, there'd be a lot of organizing outside of the park. There'd be a lot of like meetings and you know, talks and UM, direct actions and marches UM. And then there would be you know, uh, I guess that's kind of the extent of it, right, is that there was like a lot of direct action that but there was always this park where you could go and like run into people and like hook up with people,

meet people and like do a weird thing. And I think that was really like the heart of the movement was the fact that there was this place you could go meet someone and like link into something weird and maybe cool and maybe not it doesn't matter, but like there was always something to do kind of and it was constant, was like this or twenty four hour right

like experience. And I think that was really what um, what separated it from from are from other movement waves that we've had, we've had since um and was was was probably I think it's greatest strength in many ways. Yeah, I think that that was That was the the impression that I got. And part of this also was when I when I was in college, like every once in a while, you just get assigned like some person writing but occupy, and it was like most of them were

just extremely cranky about the whole thing. But sure, you know, one of one of the things I think was interesting about it is that everyone seemed to eree, at least to some extent, that part of what was going on was that it's it's it's this way to do I don't know if I had any formations quite the right word for it, but it's it's this way to sort of like rebuild social connections and rebuild like social sort of bonds in a way that just had you know,

as public space becomes just the cops. And like there's there's a table in Chinatown that I like called the cop Table. Well I'm really mad about that, Like, because this is Chicago, chin To, I would like go there staring from the library and there's a sign sign on the table that says if you loiterer at this table, you will be arrested. It's like this is a picnic table,

Like the cops are you. This table is threatening that it is going to arrest you if you use it for what's using you know, for what you're supposed to use tables for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think I think that's right. I think like it was, you know, there was a lot of UM at the time. A lot of people were talking about UM uh embarrassingly about heart and negrees sort of like multitude stuff. Really really a much better book that was important was also UM,

David Graber's debt UM. But I think, like, you know, and there was like a lot of like people saying things about like the Agora you know, UM democracy list sort of political the political encounter space of encounter UM,

and that stuff wasn't all wrong. Like I mean, I'm sort of being a little sarcastic with a lot of it, but like, but I think, like, like there there was a lot of you know, UM part of how we should I think we should understand UM, the over discussed under under you know, like over analyzed word neoliberalism like

has largely become meaningless. One of the things I should I think I think it's valuable for understanding is a process by which capitalism responded to the Long Sixties by disorganizing its production process such to the Long Sixties could never happen again, right, So like like the four the the control the like the concentration of workers within within production in such a way that they could be agitated by students and then like sort of radically unionized wildcat

and sort of like almost overthrow a government, right Like the neoliberalism is like you know it smashes the unions, yes, but it also also like distributes out the active production, right,

so that so that that's not so easily done. And I think one of the real problems of you know that was facing social movement, um you know in the in the period, you know, the long period, like you know, you had stuff like in the U s again that this is where you know the best, but like you know, you have the l A uprising which is huge, um and you have you know, the summit hopping movement and anti globalization, which you know what could attack a target.

But there wasn't really a sense of like how it felt hard to do a local struggle um beyond like literally like a revolutionary riot like l A, which you know, you can't really precipitate. UM. I mean you can't really precipitate a movement either, obviously. But I think like but like, but like uh, a political political movement, a form of political organizing that didn't require something on the level of George Floyd, which is what the l A rebellion was, right, UM.

But that also didn't require, like, uh, an action from capital that you were like striking against, right like the the uh you know, the Summits or whatever. UM. And that that again and like all of these eras are very important. This is not to like, you know, obviously like this is with with respect for those movements. UM, but yeah, we felt I think it felt like we

were in a political wilderness. And I think that that, like UM Occupy really and the movement of the squares globally, I think UM really like demonstrated that it was possible to practice a kind of street politics even without UM, you know, a shop floor where you can organize even without UM, you know, a a a capital p party to organize within UM. And I think that was really important.

I think it also scared a lot of people who and and continues to who are committed to those politics um and um to the twenty century workers movement or the nineteenth and twenty century labor movement, which they somehow fantasize will come back, um if they just wish hard enough and write net books or whatever. Um. And I think like, um so, I think that was powerful. I also think like like, yeah, sorry, we can move on

to legacy later. But yes, I think that was Like, I think that was very much like an important thing was was just like and you know, um, I graduated college in two thousand nine, um so I was like part of that millennial generation that like, you know, had gone into incredibly deep debt, Like we'd have a college degree and then like the bottom fill out of the

economy there were no jobs. Um And Like I think there were a lot of you know, like people who like had anticipated a middle class life um of some kind. Not that I really had at that point, but whatever, like, but but a lot of people, like in my economic cohort like had um uh suddenly facing you know, proletarianization, right. And I think that was one of the strengths of the movement. I think that was that, you know, like

I mentioned the statistics in great in Spain and Greece. Like, I think that was a global aspect of this kind of movement um uh Arab Spring to like there was there was a lot of like that was really a response to the economic crisis. Obviously, those folks were already more proletarian than the people who the young people and in the squares movements, UM. But they they innovated, they created the tactics in in Arab Spring right um Terrer Square,

most famously in Cairo. Um and UM I think like those creating a meeting place where um, you didn't require a preconstructed like political community um in order to engage

was a strength and a weakness UM. And I think it also, you know, as a result of the dynamics of the General Assembly, the dynamics of the sort of volunteerist nature of that what I'm describing, um, it led to a lot of people who were already confident, who are already feeling good, being able to like take more power right like um uh And I think it also was a very white movement um certainly in New York, but but I think I think across the country, UM,

it was largely it was largely you know it was. It was majority white in a way that you know, by higher percentages than any movement that we've really been part of since um was UM. And that was obviously a limit um for for reasons that will be obvious to everyone, including the idea that like a lot of people pushed that like the police are part of the right. Um. Okay, so let's let's talk about the police, because you know, that's you know, that's that's one of the other extremely

important aspects of this is this immense militarization. I mean, okay, so I think that the militarization of the police as a phrase, I think it's somewhat misleading in that like the cops have always like shot people. Yeah, but you know, there there's yeah, there, there's there's there's still like there's an intense sort of ramp up of of the prison sector. There's you have this intense boom in the size of prisons.

You have, Yeah, you have you have increasing parts of the economy that are just the entire towns that used to be sort of manufacturing sectors, used to be sort of involved in sort of industrial production that are just like the economy is now just there's a prison there and right, and I think this is also looking back, one of the things that look like occupy kind of ran ran up into because you know, occupies this attempt to like you know, form a democratic space, and it

relies crucially on this this thing that is nominally in the Constitution but doesn't exist, which is the like the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom of assembly and freedom assembly like that is that is

like that is bullshit. It does not exist. If you like, if if you actually believe that this exists, like try getting like seventy people into a space and see how like just like I don't know, like into a street or just just like into into like have one of people on a park and just like see how fast the cops show up, because you know it's like, yeah, the first time yeah that I was I was at any kind of protests, cops immediately wanted to take anything

I was holding. You're not you're not You're not allowed. The first thing if if if if you have anything in your hands, that's that that is a that is

a problem. Yeah, it's like the First Amendment is just it's super completely superseded by traffic laws, like laws about like sidewalk maintenance, like no, it's it's all fair, like none of it like you're you're not You're not allowed to And this is this is I think is partially what this is kind of a talk, but this is part I think why there's so much focused on the right about the first Mont because they want to they want to draw attention away from the fact that, like,

the actual thing that's fake about it is that you can't gather people and meat anywhere, and they want to draw it into these like inane like this professor like said the N word a bunch of times in class. Isn't it bad that people are mad at them? But but if I think also go to tyn this sort of back to occupy. You know. Okay, So, so occupy functions right insofar as there is a a physical location where people can go and physically interact with each other.

And that's a problem because at some point the police are just like no, and they start clearing the encampments. And I think this is this is the other thing that occupy is that outside of like parts of Oakland, and that that's a whole other thing that yeah, but it's it's it's incredibly studiously non violent in a way that like nothing I've ever seen before since is yeah,

so so so there's a lot there. I'm gonna I want to talk about it because that's there's a lot um but yeah, so I think I think the militarization of the police thesis um is is incomplete if you

don't also talk about the policification of the military. Right, so, like part of what happens with with the great expansion of the of the uh Carcel state, part of that is also a response to the Vietnam War um and and mass resistance within you know, the troops they were like in the Vietnam the in like the last two years when ground troops are there in Vietnam, there's like four hundred fragging incidents where where um you know where

where privates and recruits killed their officers. The U. S. Army during the during Vietnam was on the brink of of collapse in the way that like like the Russian Army was looking in it was like like like the numbers I think I think still number one point there was like forty of the army by the end of Vietnam was either on strike or just like not following orders. Yeah, no,

it was, it was complete. There was the reason that Nixon pursues Vietnam sizzation, which is when they just started doing air campaigns, bombing and napalm, is because they couldn't rely on ground troops anymore. They just they were useless. They were all high. Um, you know the talk about you know, there's a lot of talking about like heroin, but like that was actually kind of a form of

resistance within the lines in a complicated way. Whatever. Okay, that's all very So the military realizes that it can't function as a mass military in the model that nation states have done since the Napoleonic Wars, right, which is like the mass you know, the mass recruitment of the citizen soldier. Um, that's sort of how war is fought

between you know, eighteen ten and nineteen seventy. And then it becomes clear that that's not gonna work anymore because because the aims of the countries and the power of nationalism have become too abstracted. Fascism has done too much damage to that image. There's just like there's it doesn't really work anymore. So the military turns into a sort of what it always was also which is like a colonial policing force, and so the police the military drift

towards one another in form and function. Okay, So in Occupy, Um, one of the microhistories that I think it's forgotten is that, like, I mean because because it took a week, and like, who remembers this week except for like weirdos like me who were there. Um, is it like there was no one at Zuccati in the first first week. And one of the big things that happened was these these these you know, young white girls got caught in a police net and pepper sprayed, and there was this video that

went around with them getting pepper sprayed and screaming. Is particularly this good this woman on her knees, you know, screaming with with tears and pepper spray going down her face, and that really outraged people because you know, they were you know, it was police depression and police violence. So in terms of the question of non violence, yes, Um, there was a lot of non violence. It was a constant fight that took honestly took until the George Floyd

uprising for the right outside to win. Frankly, but but but but during occupy there was you know, there was a lot of non violence nonsense. Um and I think like, but but another thing that happened though was that like you know, like I said, people were marching every day. So even in New York, where I think the political height was kind of achieved, October one when we took the Brooklyn Bridge. Um, I think I think New York never really like had a big moment again, Like it

was largely sort of like smaller things after that. But um, but like and there was a mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge. We marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, the brookn Bridge got shut down. They arrested seven hundred of US. Um. It was the first big infrastructure shutdown that happened in the US since the l A Riots. It was a

big deal at the time. Now, can I put a note doubt though, specifically for the Brooklyn Bridge if you're because people I've seen every every single time there's one of these movements, people try to take the Brooklyn Bridge and they all got arrested. It's like, can can you all like please, I am begging you if you're going to try to take a bridge, make sure you have a way out, Like, yeah, you got to hold one

of the sites to get arrested. Yeah, yeah, exactly, you got a way out a bridge designed to not have a way out. Exactly. Please please don't all get arrested. It's it's in fact bad and yeah, sorry, exactly. I have seen a few people successively take bridges a few times, but that's because there was like three cop cars and like people, if you have like a block with two hundred kids, you're not going to be able to hold

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On the podcast nine O two one, OMG joined Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh from the very beginning, we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen, so they know what happened on camera obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been

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that show. Listen to nine O two one OMG on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Dick hauld Happened Here, a podcast about a crumbling empire and planting seeds in the spaces between. Here's part two of our interview with Vicky Ouston while about the legacy of Occupy Wall Street. But but you know, like you were saying, you know like

that that you know, don't get arrested, it's bad. So I think when occupy really started, you know, we were mostly people who had been educated by the co optation of the civil rights movement, which is that it is all non violent and that the whole thing was getting arrested and Martin Luther King was like the only voice that made any sense and that was what was effective.

Blah blah blah blah blah. Um. We had all learned that in school, right, We had all been trained that like non violence was like the only thing that made sense and that worked. Um. And I think like those of us who learned about it at all in school, which is certainly not everyone, but like I think, like like the the experience of occupy of like every day just getting beat up by the cops every day, like

getting attacked, getting arrested. Some people got really some people got really nihilistically nonviolent, Like some people like really dug in and they're like like like we're like no, like there is nothing we can do except be beaten in the turn of this like real masochistic game. But that happens, that still happens all the time. Oh yeah, yeah, that's that's one. That's one common response. But another thing that happened was that people started breaking through that that that ship.

People people started on the ground. Like I remember a march, you know, early on, you know, the police would attack and everyone would sort of like d try a d esco late and people would try to like you know, like like talk to the cops or whatever. And like by November when right before the camps got cleared, I remember being on a march where we stole all of their orange meeting using and you're just holding it over our head at large and like trapping cops in it.

So like even in New York where things never gotten that intense, um like in some ways in terms of direct action like that lesson on the ground, like you have to be you have to be very ideologically committed to get hit with the baton three times and still think the police are on your side. You know, you have to like really, you have to really be drinking kool aid. And some people are like some people really

do want to believe that. But I think, um, I think that was one So during occupy, like those of us who hated the police were pretty lonely even though the police were beating us up. But by the end of Occupied the seeds had really been sown for a lot of generational understanding of the police that didn't necessarily immediately so fruit like it wasn't immediately obvious, but I think, like I think like folks who stayed in struggle from there grew more and more anti police. Yeah, that was

that in general. That was well, okay, so my stress was less with occupying more with like the two thirteen stuff in Turkey. But it's like that that was because I was brought up in that like this sort of like Foe Gandhi and like, yeah, MLK civil to Subians. And then it was like like I watched Turkey happened, and it was like, hey, here's my friend just like

getting his ribs broken by a cop. And then like there's Raba and you know, and it were bas sort of where whe the Egyptian movement dies and were bad, they just you know, they bring out the machine guns and they just shoot everyone. Yeah, and at a certain point, like you know, this is the limited non violence, right is that what happens if they just shoot you and

and Gandhi? You know, if what if you ever want to like go down to the Gandhi rabbit hole, like Gandhi like writes this letter to like like the Jews of Germany where he's telling them to like throw themselves on the blades of the Nazis, and it's like this, it's it's this is this is like yeah, it sucks. This is ridiculous, like just this is just like it's

being complacent for abuse. UM. Anyone Too Studios has a really good video on why non violence helps the state UM and how basically activists that try to force other you know, demonstrators to adhere strictly to non violence, that's basically that's that's them in that's them basically saying that if like that, that's then endorsing the police beating somebody

up like like that. Like that's it's it's not actually tied to any kind of movement and it doesn't actually help like I and we could actually see this last year with like the first few weeks of like you know, abuse from the state actually making headlines and actually changing people.

But after a while it just didn't matter. Like a cop could put someone down and pummel their face in like August and like who gives a ship nobody, Like it doesn't it doesn't matter, you know, like that's that's why I found it funny when you talked about, like, you know, people getting mad because the cops are like mazing people when they turn into them, And I'm like, if that happened, no one, no one would give a

ship Like yeah, well, like I think not at all anymore. Yeah, totally. Well, I think I think part of it is the first time that you see it, it's like what on earth?

Like this this? This I think has been one of the things that's been the core of the whole sort of nineteen like late sort of cycle revolutions, is that like if if you're just like a dude in a grocery store and some guy runs in is like running away from the cops and then like fifteen riot cops and just start beating the shout out of them, which

is the thing that happens like a lot. Like if you just see that, right, there's no way you can actually, like like if you ordinary person just witness the cops running up and just being the show of someone, like, there's no way you can't not be sort of radicalized against the police by it. But like, yeah, but there's there's a certain point where you hit it. The decentitization happens more quickly than what it should. Um, and we

stopped caring. I agree. I agree with both of you that like that, Like both it is shocking and radicalizing and we get desensitized because there is so much spectacular pressure to naturalize the police and non violence ideology is part of that is part of naturalizing police violence, right, Like there's nothing you can do about police violence. Um, so all you can do is control yourself, and therefore

you should you know, you should be better or whatever. Yeah, Gandhi had this whole fantasy about, um, the perfect army would march unarmed into machine gun fire, um, and would

just be mowed down. It's it's he's a fascist, frankly um and and yeah, and you only need to look at his opinions about black Africans when he was when he Africot to see that even if you even if you just read like like even if you just read like self reliance, it's like this is you know, it's not everything I want to talk about with with the peace police though, which is that like they're also like in terms of like fighting, like inflicting violence on other protesters,

like they are the most violent like of of of the factions you've seen in a pro that does happen very well, maybe not the most like like that, it does happen like like they beat people up. Like yeah, I'm just gonna say, like it ties into like protest security, and when protest security is usually working with these more like peace police type organizers, and then they use protest security to literally beat up people who are doing more

radical action against the state. Um. That happens all the time. Yes, oh yeah, protest security. When I see protest security or marshals, Um, I know exactly that that the that we're in a bad We're in a bad march. Um. The only time I've ever been physically assaulted by another protester was during Occupy actually, um during after the night after you've been evicted, um,

which is like November, I think. Um. And if people don't remember, Obama and the FBI coordinated this nationally, all the occupying encampments got swept within a week of each other. Um on that march. Um, we're marching around, We march around all night, UM. And I'm just dragging a trash can into the street because we're being followed by police

cars and I'm literally attempting to do some education. At the same time, I'm like pulling the trash can in the street, and I'm yelling, you know, I am doing this because I want to protect us from police violence. Like if this is in the street, then the cop cars can't catch us as much. That's why we build baraka.

I'm like literally trying to like yell this because, like, you know, because pulling a trash can in the streets incredibly and effective ultimately, so it was like literally it was literally just like for education purposes at that point basically anyway, especially since a lot of people would like

pull them back out of the street. Whatever. This guy runs up on me and grabs me by the collar and lifts me up and like threatens me with this fucking fist, and he says, if my mom can't get to work tomorrow because of you, like I'll beat the ship out of you. And we're like we're marching in Manhattan a like one am. I'm like, what the hell

are you talking about? And like he would have he would have hurt me like pretty bad if a friend of mine hadn't like luckily had my back and like de escalated a bit That's the only time I've ever been like physically like brought up like into a fight um with by by another protester. Was was a guy insisting that me dragging a trash can into the street.

It was beyond the pale and I but I want to just talk a bit more, but like how systematic the violence was, like because Okay, so originally I was gonna try to get someone from Occupy Oakland to come talk about this, and I talked to a lot of people and the biggest thing that I got was that no one would talk about it on the record because they got because Oakland had Oakland had a blacklist and if if you were inoccupy and like anyone else found

out about it, like people like people couldn't people spent half a decade just not being able to find jobs because they just play blacklisted everyone and like to this day, like the thing I was told was like, yeah, I'm I won't talk about this because you know, like if if I talked about this, like I will be fired, all of my family everyone around me will be fired. And there's like I think, like this is the everything.

But when we talked about sort of the collapsive occupy, the the extent to which, after a bomb in the ordered the camps closed. The policy is that the comps are going to torture anyone who attempts to like gather in a place yep, yep. For for two years, you couldn't have a meeting outside without a police attacking basically, and yeah, um and and yeah, I mean it was

it was. You know, I think like a lot of UM, the people who now claim that that occupy is the reason that they do politics or whatever for burning standers or whatever, UM, at the time they were saying that the reason it collapses because there was no UM organization. There was no structure, there was no political party, there

was no you know whatever, there was no demands. And like it's true that it was poorly organized, like there's no doubt, um, but like we got beat out of the streets, Like we got beat out of the streets, and like people tried for six months really intensely, and for another six months after that less intensely to restart

that energy. Um. There was all this works forwards, like a general strike on May Day, UM two thousand twelve, which ended up not really working, which is actually actually the kind of demand filled one day of action kind of politics that they were demanding actually really failed, which I think is telling. But but in the meantime, like you know, like occupy like Zuccati got cleared. But for a while, there was a thing. No one remembers this, I don't think, but there was a thing up in

um uh Union Square. Um. There was an occupation for three weeks. There was like all the Union Square freaks um and like a bunch of occupiers um. And yeah, the cops just like it was just like batons out on site for a few years in New York. UM. And I know it was like that everywhere else or most everywhere else, and that that came down from on high that like the police were just like, oh, what

was dangerous about this was people gathering in public. So we really need to like we really need to like enforce the Second Amendment being meaningless now, we really need to stop meetings from happening in public. Um. And that violence was super intense and super real, and a lot of people got beaten out of the movement, you know, and a lot of people got really demoralized and left.

And I understand why. It was scary and awful and there was a lot of repression, and um, you know, and it and it, and it has continued to sort of that that kind of repression has continued to escalate. Um. But what has successfully happened in our movements, I think to our to our credit, is that we haven't actually formed the kinds of hierarchical organizations that allow for more effective police repression. All the police have right now against us, for the most part is batons in the street. Um.

They have a lot more trouble infiltrating. UM, a lot more trouble, Which doesn't mean they aren't trying like crazy, but they have a lot more trouble um, um taking down the movements in the in a sort of cointel pro way, right. Um. The modes of repression have changed a bit. UM. But that's also because we don't have It's a combination of the fact that we don't have those forms of organization, but we also don't have those forms of organization because they don't emerge spontaneously from our

living conditions like they used to. UM. So I think it's it's you can't just give credit to any one thing. There's a lot of different factors at play. I think I will say one of one of the other things that that I've noticed, and I think I think I'm

pretty sure this has happened. Talked to talk to people are talking about that occupies it like the first thing if you have a group of people who are just there, the first thing the cops trying to do is a point a leader so that they have one person that they can go to and this and this lets them sort of this this sort of like access point to which they sort of break like the demands of the crowd is that they find one person, they point in the leader and they get that person to sort of

like be the liaison. My favorite Occupied joke, I gotta give respect to Occupy Denver. This is the best joke that ever happened to Occupy. They announced the beginning of one week on Friday, we are going to announce our leader. Occupy Denver has chosen a leader, and the whole movement got so upset. Everyone was so angry. I was like, what the fuck and like they have this like big press conference and their leader was a Golden Retriever and it was like, as as who knows to Occupied Denver?

Whoever organize that prank? I love you, I guess, yeah, speaking thinking of kudos to a place. The last thing I wanted to talk about was the giant like port occupation strike thing in Oakland, because I mean that that wasn't the first time people had done it, like I know, I know during the anti war movements even till like aw eight there's one of people trying to occupy ports. But and in Oakland they like did it. They really they put like forty thousand people like in this in

the port of Oakland and they shut it down. And I think that was like that was one of the things one of the stories kind of been lost from this because like you know, like that was the point.

Like so like I know people in Oakland who like they got like drugged, repeatedly drugged by police informants because particularly Okland, it's also Oakland is also way the walking by ok Bood is way way less white than any other movements, and they get like the kind of police oppression they get is like it's just like yeah, you know again like people people being repeatedly drugged by informants, like cops shooting people in the face, like the you know,

you have you have the black list, you have all this stuff, and I think, you know, part of it, Yeah, And I think part of it is because part of it's because it's a bunch of non white people and that's you know, that's just what happens. But I think another part of it was also that there was this fear about Yes. So so the reason the port strike is able to happen is because there's sort of there's a complicated game here where the other people like sort

of got involved in in like longshoreman union politics. But that sort of like fusion of of you have all the people in the street and then they start showing down ports and that like like the cops like lose their minds over that. Like that that I think was like extremely scary to them in a lot of wiz. Yeah, I mean, you know, I would you know, I would defer to anyone from Oakland who was who was there during that. You know, I have comrades there, I've talked

to you have read about it since. But you know, I think I think part of the heightened police oppression and the heightened power of the Oakland occupied Oakland folks was Oscar Grant rebellion. Like I mentioned the two thousand nine which had happened, which had you know, it had been a few hundred people, but it had been really rowdy. They'd been like looting and smashing. Um maybe maybe more than a few hundred, maybe near a thousand people in

the big on the first night. UM. And you also obviously have the legacy of the Black Panthers in Oakland, So you know, the Black Panther Party, you know, forms in Oakland at last in Oakland a decade and a half longer than it does anywhere else in the country. UM. So there's a lot of like and you also have the really really intense getrification of the Bay that's happening.

So there's an incredible political and economic pressure in the Bay combined with this history of radicalism that really you know, um, but yeah, I think also the other thing that's really interesting. I think what you said, like you you put your you know, you hit the nail on the head, like it was largely like it was terrifying that it was the most effective direct action in the occupy movement I

think was that port shutdown. I think, without a doubt, like the biggest mass direct action that that occupy achieved, um, was that November twelve was that was that with the data that I remember near the end of the near

the end of the cycle. Um. And I think like the other thing ing about um about that though, was that that was very similar to the altar globalization movement, right where the unions had sort of teamed up with you know, like in Seattle there's a lot of trade unions on the ground next to all the black blocks, right, um And I think like that that image, Um, I

think really it's really interesting. It really terrified the police, and it really it could be it could have been a vector for a certain kind of like labor first politics that could have emerged. But instead, like the labor first people have turned out to be all electoralists. Yeah, it seems that that's sort of a weird blip that

hasn't really returned. Um. Yeah. And it's interesting too because like because now like you know, like the the the a f l C. I oh, just like you know a f l C A is like no cop unions great, and it's like there's this there's this sort of like split between the street movements and organized labor because they're off doing like electoral stuff and like cops ship, which is this sort of yeah, and and and and have been now for for seven decades, you know, I mean,

I mean really like like the the buying off of the unions and the New Deal, um, you know, with some brief you know, with brief windows of like wildcat action in the seventies and the nineties, Um, the buying off of the unions has has never really gone away. Industrial unionism in the US has has long been and in and in Europe everywhere where everywhere where those developed in the early twenty century, that labor movement, Um, they've really been successfully bought off. And I don't think there

is uh. I don't think that those unions are like a big easy route to power any more than I don't. I don't like I don't think they're gonna overthrow the government. I mean, but I will say, yeah, this is this is my my also my the thing that I plug every time is at the a f l C. I oh overthrew a end a like yeah, like like they they they're there are people on the ground were like directing like like we're directing a bunch of the anti

a end a stuff. And it's like and it was the and it was the union bureaucracies like more recently in two thousand one, who are in the wake of September eleventh, who transformed the anti globalization rhetoric into buy American, which it turned out was often buying prison made materials. But like that was that was the union. The union sort of um defanged, defanged, alter globalization into buy American.

And there's there's something like there's a whole another story there about how that like how anti globalization turned from like you know, the Zapatistas to like Trump, which is incredibly depressing, and yeah, goes goes through this line of sort of like the replacement of internationalism with nationalism and that kind of like by local stuff and the fact that like these people sort of just decided that you know personally after Seattle Port step and eleven, they're just like,

we're not doing direct action again. And in Oakland's like Oaklands like like that. That's like that's like the one big exception to that was that moment, and then it just kind of just has never happened again. And that's partially because that that union that I l W is I l W I think out there is on the on the boards that was a particularly like radical union that had happen in wildcats like and and like like more democratic than any of the many of the other

unions in in in those those ships. But uh yeah, but that's that's also like a big story for another time. Obviously. The conotation of global antiglobalization over the twenty year period, Yeah, you know, it's just kind of corny. But like what what can we actually learn from what happened there? What

went wrong and sort of what the limits of it was? Yeah, okay, So the legacy, So I think one legacy that um, the legacy that is most widely accepted and known, which we can go over quickly, is that it reintroduced class discourse, largely into the popular you know, the n which is a very very bad class politics. But like you know, like um, like the you know, it reintroduced some of that sort of class war class war discourse and UM and I think more important than that, but but not

that dissimilar. It um reintroduced um street politics into the US. UM. I think a part of legacy that gets forgotten UM because like the general the global nous of the wave gets forgotten as well, Like is that when when ship pops off in New York, everyone in the world knows, or at least they did then, right, because America had been so successfully you know, appeased politically for so long that I think that when occupy popped off um in rather it really like signals to the world, like the

rest of the world like, oh, like this is real, like even in the you know, even in the center of empire, like like people are rising up. UM. It's hard to remember, and it's weird, but like there was an occupy in uh New York, in a UK, there was one in tel Aviv. There was actually kind of like a pro Palestinian occupy in tel Aviv briefly UM.

And you know, I think maybe the most powerful sort of immediate tactical um offshoot of occupied was occupyed Nigeria UM in the first weeks of UM when President good Luck Jonathan um took took the fuel subsidies away and they were like sort of two weeks of really intense revolutionary rioting um in in Nigeria. That that then called themselves Occupy as a way of being legible to the rest of the world. UM. I think the other legacies though that are that are a little more sort of subtle.

I guess is like that a lot of folks still in the struggle now, Like I will still meet people you know, my age, who like I've met I have two comrades here in Philly who I didn't know at the time, but who were organizing in New York, right, Like we probably hung out in rooms together, Like we probably like we were probably in the same space as But like so like a lot of folks, you know it each of these waves that has come has left.

You know, some people leave, some people swing right, but like there's a residue of folks that like becomes the base for the next movement. And I think like occupy really did provide a lot of people in a way that the gap between alter globalization and occupy didn't produce nearly as large a contingent of people, although of course there are those people, UM, but I think also like

really importantly like the tactics of occupy. Like one of the things that was incredible about the George Floyd uprising was that every tactic that we UM have tried in the last ten years re emerged. Right there was a prison strike, there were indigenous blockades, there were me too style callouts UM, which of course developed out of um punk and queer scene callouts that have been going on

for a decade. But there were occupations, right, you had the chairs in Seattle, which we can you know, well, well what we're yeah, we will get to that one day in any case, In any case, like I think like that that has remained in the repertoire of poltarian struggle, like as a result of of occupy and and and if it had just been occupied, maybe it wouldn't be as a result of the global movement of the squares, which obviously goes until Terrier Square and Turkey, I think

it's probably the Gezi Park in a Turkey, UM, which is like the last big moment of the squares really, um. But that five year wave like it was really really important, um globally, really really important locally as well, UM in terms of building activists, building a class of of well I don't you know whatever, building revolutionaries, whatever you want to call them, the good version of the thing, not

the bad version of it produced a lot of them. Um. And and I think like in terms of its limits and like what we can learn from it, Like I think I think taking the police more seriously, it was really important. I think taking police violence more seriously was a really important legacy of occupy. I think, um, I think pushing towards the limit of what total democracy meant.

A lot of people and Occupy remember that, like a lot of Ron Paul people and like weirdo like and the Fed cranks and like right wingers like spoken Occupy

and like that. That that total open populism of of occupy I think was both probably its greatest strength and its ultimate limit, right, which was that like it was never going to be able to really like sharpen itself into the into the knife, and it wanted to be to like really change the face of of global capital or whatever um because of because there were so many white, yeah, middle class like like a bunch of the like a lot of the like the current for right media people

came buy like Center Fairbanks was like an occupy streamer Simpool, Yeah, you're welcome. For Tim Poole, um, who was filming on the last day, a bunch of us um doing some things and Tim Poole did not manage to continue filming, is all I'll say. And after that is when he started swinging right. So you're welcomever um anyway, Sorry, that guy is a fucking asshole. He was an asshole then. Though.

I think what's important to know is that a lot of these people were suss as hell back then to occupy folks, like they were around and occupy because of the nature of occupy, like but like they were, we already didn't like them, you know, like a lot of these people were already unpopular. We're already just liked in

the movement. Um. So yeah, um, but yeah, I think I think so, I think you know, there is there there are all these different legacies, um from it that I think, Um, ultimately, the legacy things that emerged are much more important than occupy. Um. I think, you know, one of the things about it was that it really was just like the reemergence of street politics, and like like as the re emergence of street politics, like it was pretty limited, and it was not that effective at

changing things. Um. And also it was incredibly effective at leading to those last decade of struggle in the US, And I think you can't you know, I think there's a tendency to want to judge movements by the immediate

results that they produce, you know. Um, And like you know, I think it is my about to quote now, I think I am was it like when when he gets asked, you know, what was the what was the you know, in in the twentie anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, he gets asked like, what was the what was the outcome of the Chinese Revolution? He says, it's too early to tell, right, Like, I think, like that maybe that's I don't remember who that is. They were right, Yeah, they were right. A

lot more people died than what we thought. Yeah, it's like, yeah they successfully transition to capitalism and yeah, yeah it was yeah. So, um, so what was the results of occupy? It's too early to tell, um, But I think like I also think, like the things that we've talked about here um where we're core components of what what why it matters. I do think one other kind of effect

that it's had. And It's hard for me to gauge this because I've only been around post occupy, but I feel like now when people try to get stuff started, they really fall kind of into an occupy mindset where they're like, the only way to make this successful is to hold this space. And I think that is really a default way that even more experience, like both experienced organizers and new organizers. Really, can I keep you saying we're default it's because like that's just that's just really

like what they go into. You saw this in a lot of different cities last year, really like people trying to set up spaces to hold UM. A lot of them did not work. You know a lot of them. A lot of them were like, oh, yeah, we're trying to try to hold the space for like an hour, because then the cops pushed us out right, and you know, in a place like the Chairs, it got extended out a bit longer that Chas had its own problems UM and other cities in the Pacific Northwest. This happened a city,

it happened, and it happened a lot of places. I mean, like I think George Floyd Square is maybe one of the more honestly successful ones UM for how they were able to actually kind of keep police away, and they did they avoided turning it into this big media thing

like like with the Chaz did UM. And I don't know, I think I grew very and I saw a lot of people kind of grow kind of frustrated with this like kind of occupy mentality, because what that kind of results in is people just setting up outside of a police head quarters and trying to stay there for as long as possible, which is like that's not doing anything, You're just kind of waiting to get beat up. Um. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's complicated though, right, Like in defense of that tactic, like I think like like that was also very color. That was also very core to Ferguson. Right, they held West Florescent for a week and a half. Now, they did it much. They didn't do it by setting up tents and sitting there. Um. And also like you know, like like a thing that gets forgotten a lot in the lot in the histories, you know, Occupy Ice it was pretty spot. I was big here in Philly, it was.

It was massive here in Portland. Yeah. Yeah. So so like there were moments when that tactic really does like it's important to have a space to meet in, and I think we did learn that. But I also agree that it has become like any tactic that works once it becomes a fetish, Right Yeah, it's always trying to balance space because like you know, the two big things that have happened the past ten years, it's occupying Hong Kong. So people try to balance these two kind of almost

opposing things like hold this space and be water. That's kind of the two things that people yell at the street back and forth, and no one really knows what to do because it was yelling slogans and and and

I was I was there saying about this. So they're like the one time the people in Hong Kong got pinned down when when they had to and they had versa siege, it was a ship show, like you know what, I like, the people in Hong Kong, like you know, okay, like even when they're like they they did not have by by by the time you're getting to the sort of decision of the universities like that, like you know, like they had like Moloto they had like like Molotov workshops,

Like there were people like standing on the roof shooting bows and arrows and cops and it's like it just wasn't enough. And I mean and part partially partially that has to do with the fact that, like you know, Hong Kong is in a uniquely bad position insofar as it is one city, and it's like the the the only possible way that a supposed movement in Hong Kong, like ever just doesn't get crushed by just the fact that they're outnumbered, like a thousand to one is if

it spreads. But like yeah, and it became this you know, like that that moments like yeah, that the this that that the whole problem with with friend to hold space because really apparently because even if you have an extremely large number of people right like like attacking one isolated space in mass even think the cops are really good at and I think they really bad at is trying to deal with like you know, like five hundred people,

like seven hundred instances of five hundred people going through places because it just aren't enough of them. But yeah, that was what was it? Like the head of who wasn't it was a big and then National police in the National Police, uh you know whatever um said that like we can very easily handle one march of ten thousand people, but we can't handle ten marches of one. It was and you gotta see this in Chicago too, like this is this is this is how the police

lost control of of of the miracle miles. Like yeah, it was just there's people everywhere for everywhere, and yeah, I don't know, yah know, And that's and that's how that's that's what you know. I mean, certainly in Philly

where it was where it was very very powerful. That's what the George Flood rebellion looked like, was with people were everywhere in Philly, all the neighborhoods, you know, people didn't you know, like we were out there, you know whatever, um and like they're like people didn't know what was going on three blocks south, you know what I mean, Like it was like that, like there was just there

were fights happening everywhere. And under those conditions, the police can't can't, no matter how tries they are, they can't act um effectively anyway they can act. They certainly will they will act like pigs um. But but I think like, yeah, so I think that that that sort of dispersion. But I think the other there's so there's I'm going to promote a really really weirdo crank book right now, but

before twentie century, like literary weirdos. Guy uh Elias Connetti um Italian wrote this book called Crowds and Power, where he attempts to he attempts to describe the entirety of human history and anthropology in terms of crowds. This is obviously impossible and ridiculous, but that book has the best descriptions of crowd dynamics I have ever encountered anywhere, And I like, I like people who take big swings because they end up they miss. Yeah, miss has lots of

interesting stuff. UM. I think that's why people like Settlers by Jason Kai so much. Like I think the thesis wasn't great, but there's so much incredible stuff in that book that like it works anyway. UM that having a really wild thesis allows you to like really like get into some so anyway, one of the things that Connetti talks about in that book is that UM a crowd UH, an open crowd, as he describes it, an open crowd is UM must constantly be growing, and the moment it

stops growing, it starts shrinking. Right like this, I think that dynamic UM in terms of both movement and like a momentary protest or riot, right is like really real, I can and I think one of the things that UM, particularly organizers, are trained to do and like that that that we learned to do, especially in law periods, and we're like organizing these little you know, you know, these little crystallized groups of like hard cadre or whatever is that,

like you that like what we learn as organized is something that is defendable. But once you start defending something, you start losing it because we cannot take on the state or the police in a head on confrontation. Um. And this is this can be confusing because sometimes you can successfully defend for a few weeks, maybe even a

few months. You can defend a space sometimes, but once people get really interested in the defending, then they begin forming bureaucracies, governments, internal policing, security forces, whatever it is. They start becoming the like the the They start undermining the very thing that made it powerful, which was this sudden rapid growth, the sudden like you know, like like big explosion of power and self recognition that comes in

the beginning of movement. And I think, I don't think there's a way to will that problem away, Like I don't think we can just like think our way out of it, like it's just a problem. But I do think that like one thing that we could take from the experience of occupying the experience the last decade is that like if you do, you know, consider yourself someone who wants to participate in these kind of movements, which

is probably why you're listening to this podcast. UM. Right now, UM, don't try and defend, like, don't try and defend Like some things will need to be defended sometimes obviously, but like if your main thing is like the thing, we should never defend something we've achieved so far, UM, we should never not be willing to destroy it in order to like build something bigger. Right, Like we should never no movement thing that we have, be it an occupy part, be it, be it like a take in space. Defending

that should never outweigh the possibility of expanding. And if that's our strategic mindset. Obviously moment to moment you can't just be thinking that constantly. But the strategic mindset is like what we have now is only good to the extent that it can turn into something more, UM, rather than we have to defend what we have now. If you can think that way, I think it opens up

a lot of strategic possibilities. UM. And I think it's it's what has worked over the last decade that I've seen is UM, when people attack, when people expand, when people try to do try to do new stuff. It doesn't always work and it doesn't always hold, but that's what When that stuff stops happening, the movement is doomed. I think I think that. I think that's a really good way to wrap things up. I think that's a nice,

beautiful sentiment. I kind of view this type of thing in more than just protests and you know, and into differentastets of life. I think you can always learn from past experiences, from past struggles, but if you try to perfectly replicate them, you're absolutely gonna fail. You can should always learn and move on, but you should not be focused on any kind of replication. Is there any of your book store writings you'd want to plug before we

wrap up here? Sure? Yeah, I mean I wrote a book that came out last year, UM called Defensive Looting. UM came out UM with both type UM. I am currently also writing. UM. I'm obsessed with movies. I write a movie review UM column for the Al Jazeera plus UM I did not know letters. Yeah, the news letter sub stack UM. If you want to read, I mean, it's really it is really a movie reviews. So if you want you know, cranky anarchist theory, it's not the

spot for you. Um. Otherwise, Yeah, I'm I'm on a pretty long social media break right now, but good for you there. Eventually I'll probably come back inevitably, um unfortunately. Yeah, you know, I just have I have writing popping up every every now and then, and um, and if you read it, I would appreciate it. Well. Yeah, absolutely wonderful.

Thank you, and yeah, thank you for so much for coming on to talk about, um, occupying stuff that I think a lot of people hear about, but you know, at least all of my generation does not fully kind of grasp it. Um. It is. It is literally my pleasure. Like I you know, i wasted so much of my life thinking about this. I'm so glad to be able to share some of it with some people. I'm so so glad you're able to join us too. This is I've been looking forward to us for a while. Yeah,

that's very excited. All right. That wraps up us today. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram, at cool Zone Media and Happen Here Pod. We'll be back in for a few more episodes. This week. Audios executive producer Harris Hilton brings back the hit podcast How Men Think and That's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone, get an inside look at what goes on in the mind of men from the men themselves.

It's real talk, straight from the source. How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun and formative and probably a bit scary at times because we're literally going inside the minds of men. As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise. When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions. No sugarcoating, no mind games, and

absolutely no man splaining. Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to How Men Think on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halbern, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts, we controlled absolutely everything. He brobed judges and even helped a hit man walk free, until one day when he started talking with the FBI

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

the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to deep Cover on the I heart Rate your app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm Dr Addina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise and the

science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast Time Out, a production of I heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine, we're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen to Time Out a fair play podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, that was the introduction, I

did it, Sophie. Sophie's saying, that's an acceptable introduction. You know what podcast this is. You clicked on it, so I don't need to tell you the title. I don't need to say who we are. I'm just going to dive right into the fucking episode. No I'm not. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and uh and what to maybe do to to arrest that and do something better in its place? And uh.

You know, folks who are are regular listeners who listened to the original scripted episodes of It Could Happen Here, the first fifteen episodes, which I certainly recommend to everybody. Know that one area in which I kind of separate from a lot of particularly more liberal folks and even some folks on the left, is an embrace of the fact that firearms are sometimes necessary tools, especially in times

of collapse when things get bad. Um. Now that said, we're also not uh kind of gun culture people here. We try not, to, for one thing, recommend that everybody necessarily pick up a gun. There's a lot of people, perfectly nice people who shouldn't have them, who don't need to have them, you know, if you're dealing with suicidal

ideation or whatever. We're not. The point is, we try to be very careful about how we we talk about firearms as a potentially useful you're being potentially necessary tool in the times that we're in. And today, since we're a few weeks into this, we've covered producing food, We've covered some medical stuff. We've talked about uh, community organizing, and a number of other things that I think our priorities for most people before you know, getting strapped. Today,

we're gonna talk a little bit about getting strapped. And my guest today is Paul. Paul, do you want to kind of introduce your background in brief so people know why why you're on here. Sure, Robert Uh I was in the Marine Corps and Infantry, and after that I went to security consulting and then to the Federal Protective Service and finally the A. T. F some of our

funnest agencies. Yeah, all my favorite organizations there. Well they're bet in the what is it, the f d A. Yeah, they beat the f d A. I mean in terms of body count, they'res certainly better than the f d A. And what what do you do now, Paul that you're you're you're out of that line of work. Uh, well, I do two things. I got a day job at disney World, and then the side gig is we run a explosives and machine guns supply company, also body armor, a handful of other things, but that's the big thing

is destructive devices. Yeah, and uh, you've you've got I think experience that a lot of people, particularly on this side of the political i'll lack you know. One of the one of the downsides of kind of rejecting the federal government in the military and all its forms, is that there's a lot of people who may accept the validity of being armed and don't really have much in the way of practical training. And firearms are tools that

to use most efficausly do require training. In practice, you can't just you can pick them up and be dangerous, but not in a way that is particularly protective. To you in your community. Oh yeah, UM, so I wanted to talk about kind of recommendations and and everything. We talk about nothing. We're not talking in the context of forming a militia or in the context of you know, showing up with guns to to yell at people at a protest. If that's the thing you're choosing to do,

that's a whole different ball game. We're talking about, um, kind of responsibly arming yourself and your community in a way that is not going to get you in legal trouble. Um. It is also not going to endanger them. Because one of the things you have to accept about firearms is that, um, there's a risk you know, related to owning a firearm. Um. Not just the risk that like you know, suicide risk raises if you have a gun in the house, but just um, if you don't use them properly. Even carrying

a gun. You know, it's not unheard of for people carrying guns to have those weapons taken from them and used against them. It happens to police, and it happens to armed citizens. So it's it's a matter of um, you know, I think when you accept that you're going to be armed, there's something incumbent upon you to understand the risks of being armed. And I guess that's kind

of where I want to start. Like, what are some of the big pitfalls you see people uh fall into, like, um that I think traditionally training is supposed to help allay to some degree. Uh. Well, probably number one is uh grandpa's gun in the closet that's been there for forty years unfired, and somebody just picks it up and throw some ammo in it to go huna deer, and you know it's got a barrel obstruction or something just

blows up, you know. Um. But number two and and the one that can be mitigated by training rather than just general uh not being stupid, because it's kind of stupid to pick something up that's really old and just try to shoot it. Is um, not shooting yourself, and when you do go out to the range, not shooting other people, and then not shooting people in your own home.

M you know, you don't, as much as you might want to say, defend your own home, do you want to shoot your wife when she comes home at two thirty in the morning, uh, after work and wakes you up. And there are ways to mitigate that, and and it's really easy and it's really cheap. So yeah, let's let's let's start with some of those just if you're if you're new too, if you've decided I need a gun for whatever reason, you purchase a gun. Um, you know, I think the most basic first things are in terms

of like actually making that relatively safe. Is number one, knowing which which kind of firearm to purchase and number two, And these are not in order of importance, these are both very important. Number two is securing that weapon properly, as opposed to just having it laying loose in the house, which is never the best place. The best way to store a firearm, is it. Um? Yeah, I mean I

own a number of personal firearms. Um. You know, I'm in my office right now where I got a locked door nobody can get in, and I got a gun safe back behind the monitors. Um. And you know I'm comfortable with that. But if if it was in a place where kids could get at it, you don't want to just stuff it in, uh, in a sock in the closet, which is actually what my mom did when

I was a kid. Yeah, I mean safe storage, and I mean really being able to identify your target is probably the biggest preventer of like inter family accident because I know, you know, we do talk about safe storage, kids and all that, but um, back to the wife coming home, if you just put a light on your gun, a hundred dollar light, you can look at the thing that you're shooting in the middle of the night and uh,

not shoot someone you don't want to shoot. Yeah. I would go so far as to say that, like, if you've got a a home defense weapon without a light on it, Um, you don't fully have a home defense weapon. No, no, yeah, you know, Um, it's gonna be useless in roughly half of the situation. And statistically, like if you're looking at when people are actually tend to be endangered in their own homes, the vast majority of the situations in which

you might be in danger. Um. When it comes to weapons selection, uh, this is another area where like if you go on maybe one of the worst places in the world to have this discussion as Twitter, because everybody has the opinions on Twitter. Um, I tend to say because I think most people when they're looking for a first gun, if they're if they're committed, just like thinking of personal defense, they're going to go for like a

lock or something. And I think unless you're planning on carrying a gun, and you can correct me if you disagree here, but I tend to think a handgun again, unless you're intending on carrying a concealed weapon, is the last thing that you should own as a gun owner. Um. I got a mixed opinion on that. I mean, yeah, I think that, uh, the handiness of a handgun can outweigh some of the issues. I know you guys dealt

with fires up there, we have hurricanes. Um, being able to stick a handgun into a backpack you know it can go a long way, or being ab um, keep keep it on you in your car, because here we're depend on state laws. Everything you say depends on state laws. Yeah,

there are states where you can Yeah. Yeah. If you're in California and you're in one of the counties that it doesn't issue a concealed carry of license like l A, it's really hard to get one from what I understand, Berndino, if you want to get one of those, yeah, I mean, first off, like tooth, I got a short list of guns, and like two thirds of the list illegal in California. They're they're not on roster. But for what's most usable

against our most handy, it's probably a handgun. But if you're expecting a threat more than uh like thirty feet away, have something other than a handgun. Handguns they suck at hurting people, they suck at killing people. Yeah, they're they're ineffective. They're hard to use. I mean, say thirty feet away. But if you're not training regularly, hitting something reliably in a stressful situation at thirty ft with a handgun can be difficult. It's not easy. Yeah, um, it's not easy,

and I tend to recommend number one. There are some options, like even if you're sticking with a handgun, there are different kind of um like uh options for that. Like I I'm a big advocate of pistol caliber carbines, which is essential the size of a small rifle, so you can fit them easily in a backpack. Every backpack I've owned, you can you can stick something like um like a

Sazy scorpion in without much difficulty. And because they're so When you're talking about what makes a weapon easier to use, number one of the number one things is size. So the longer the barrel, the more accurate it is. The heavier the gun, the less recoil is a problem, the easier it is to use it. Range um and a pistol caliber carbine. You know you stick a light on that.

That's a really good home defense weapon. Oh absolutely, yeah, I mean especially uh, people will argue about the different types of magazines, but if you buy one that takes a glock magazine and you have a glock, you can build a full little load out that's just takes all the same magazines. One is more accurate, one is a handgun UM, and you know, all the same AMMO. You're not having to uh figure out and read a bunch on on what kind of AMMO you need and stuff

like that. You just buy one and it works for everything. Yeah, and when when you're talking about AMMO, I think one of the most important things, like especially if you're worried about a survival situation, is is availability um. Which is the nice thing about like what we call the NATO caliber.

So the NATO calibers are nine millimeter seven six two by fifty one better known as three O eight your grandpa's hunting rifle, and seven six two by fifty one UM or it's thirty six but whatever, UM and then five five six slash two to three and those are the rounds that's like six is the standard. That's what's

in your bog standard a r UM. And so almost no matter what happens, UM, including you know Ammo crunches, you will be able to find some amounts of these fliverers genital day through your neighbors and you're going to find a box of bullets. They might not even owe a gun and they got a boxing nine millimeter. Yeah, everybody's got nine millionaire and UM, so yeah, I think that the basics of like, um, what to get if you're looking at kind of just a basic defensive arm, um,

you know how to store it safely? You know those kind of questions are important, Um when it comes to training. Uh, what are some of in your opinion, like the mistakes that you see people make when it comes to kind of of of practicing training with their weapon. Um, going to an n R A basic like four hour class and thin king that you are a god. Um, They're there are people who have spent UM five days a week going to classes and doing training because there's practice

and then there's training. Training is where someone teaches you something. Uh, practices where you go with what you're already taught. Right. Um, So there there are people that spend all that time and there's still not the best in the world. Um, there are people who do a ton of practice. Jerry Micklock, you know, I don't know if you ever seen him shoot, but he's uh he's like the fastest gun in the world or something like that. Um, his videos are crazy.

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean he'll he'll outshoot a full auto gun. Yeah, with with revolvers and it's just like, you know, it's just absolutely mind blowing. Um. But now he's like he's like he's like Michael Jordan or something. You know, you just get people who have it's just

that natural ability. Um, certainly married with a practicing But yeah, continue, if if you had a fight, a gunfight, which they really don't happen that much, but if you had a gun fight between um, a guy with a high point C nine who had the cheapest quote reliable handguns on the face there, if you had a guy with that that had had paid five hundred dollars for a training class over weekend and still went in Uh, went to the shooting range every week and practiced and um, or

not even every week, just every month, and then did dry fire drills once a month in his garage or whatever. Versus a guy who went out and bought a Wilson Combat three thousand dollar nineteen eleven but had only taken the n R A class. I will bet on the guy with the eight or the C nine all day long. Um, even if he's only got one bullet, you know, yeah,

don't don't care, He'll win. And often, like for all of it, for all of the guys you see, you know, in all of their tactical gear and whatnot in the spare mag's taking a three hundred rounds out. If you actually look at most defensive shootings, UM, it's very common. And I think, like like three to five rounds, three to five rounds generally closer than thirty feet, sometimes closer than like ten or fifteen sits in my pocket most of the time. It's nineteen so tiny. Um, it has

more bullets than I'll ever need to gunfight. Probably. I think I want to pivot from this point to UM. We started this by it introducing that you you spent some time in the A t F spent some time in the FPS. I haven't had any personal interactions with the A t F, but I have met some FPS guys support. You know, I'm kind of curious, especially as because I came in contact with you through your through

your Twitter, where you're you're very my personal Twitter. Yeah, and you're you're quite politically active now, um in a way that I think is surprising people for someone with your background. Are you in protable with kind of tracing sort of the broad strokes of your journey there, because I think that's instructive um for folks oh at FPS specifically, Well, just kind of what brought you from there to hear? Oh? Um? So I got kind of uh, oh man, what what's

what's the word for when you just get uh? I don't know. I just I got to a point. I showed up for for work at four thirty in the morning and I was literally shuffling through some some paperwork and and was getting ready to file a warrant and just kind of realized, I I didn't think that it needed to happen, And you know, I talked to my supervising agent about it, and UM was kind of told too bad. And and I put in for some vacation time and ended up putting in my resignation while I

was on vacation. I mean that that's the gist of how I became not a cop. Yeah, And um, I'm wondering, kind of what do you think? Is there anything that kind of I don't know, what looks different to you now as you've kind of left that behind? Was it like sort of, Um, I'm guessing there's like a period like a goldfish, you know, in a new bowl of

of acclamation to to life outside of being a cop. Um? Like, what what were the first kind of things that started to shift in your perspective when you left that that thought space. I'll tell you what, watching or reading whatever, an article or a YouTube video, especially now that body cams are more and more prevalent, is watching something, reading the the press release and going But that's that's not

what happened. Like I just watched it and and and going from being able to justify it in your own mind and literally argue with people and be a hundred percent convey like that was a good shoot. Um. Castillo? What it was a Philandro Castillo? Yeah, oh god? And he was man if you've if you've gotten lost track

of this shooting in between all the others. Filando was a black man, a legal gun owner with a legal concealed carry permit, who was pulled over with his girlfriend and child in a car and hands on the wheel, told the officer he had a gun, uh, and got shot. Um, you know, and it did the thing you're supposed to do. Although now actually since then, you will get like some states will and some training classes will recommend if it's not legally required and you're carrying a gun, don't say

anything for that reason. But I mean, yeah, the command to not reach for the gun to being shot multiple times in the chest was like under two seconds. Um, So I mean, I mean the decision was already made as soon as as soon as he gave the command, the decision was made. Here's what that brings me too, in terms of a question that's relevant to the topic of community self defensive potential community armed self defense, because that's not that is a that is a cop problem,

but that's not just a cop problem. And what happened everybody problem in the chop in the chairs in Seattle, the the autonomous zone is evidence of that. You had this situation where people, after nights and nights of mostly inaccurate warnings about proud boys coming to attack, got amped up. They had guns, some kids drove by in a car and they fucking shot him to death. Um. And it is the same, it's the same mental thing happening. You don't have to have a badge for that that mindset

to infect, especially when you're carrying a gun. Um, how do you, in your opinion, fight back against that chill? Uh? You know, like like honestly, Um, if you were a teenager, which we grew up in almost the same place you're from, plane oh, from Capel, So I would have argued with you about them being the same place when the same But they're the same place. Yeah, they're absolutely the same place. Yeah one has uh one has uh woot dot com and the other one has raytheon so you know, and

a bunch of hospitals. Um. But uh, you and I grew up in the same time, same place, same types of schools. How many times did you see in like high school or even middle school, just a guy hit on a girl and then the girl's boyfriend comes over and just starts fighting him, like like like the guy had no reason to know. He didn't know he was doing anything wrong. Um. And I'm not suggesting, I'm sorry.

What I'm pointing out is that, um, it's almost ingrained in us at a societal level to to react violently to maintain like our personal position. And if that means that I'm in my neighborhood and I don't recognize someone, it may seem like violence is the right way to go. That's actually what what you're doing when like what's it called, Karen ng you know where you call somebody the black

kid yell uh selling water bottles or whatever. Um, I know that was one in New York where the police came and harassed you know, some like twelve year old black kids because they were selling water bottles. Um, it's the same thing. I mean, you know in that case, you're not personally doing the violence, You're just calling somebody else to do it for you. Um, because you know the police are kind of violence, violence of monopoly and

all that. Yeah. Yeah, And that's some one of the most I think important things about that is the idea of violence is like when you when you're willing to accept violence to kind of mean hein your your your social position or something. UM. And I think that has a huge amount to do with with the kind of violence you see um at protests with like we've had, you know, protests quote unquote security here in Portland, people kind of declaring themselves security And what does that mean

shooting other kids within guns for graffiti liked up? But it is it is a matter for it's they're not doing it to protect anybody. They're doing it because they've declared themselves security. Somebody doesn't listen to what they say and their ego is hurt. It's the same thing that again cops do. It's this it's a human mindset. It's not just a a cop mindset. And UM, I think you when you're talking about like, I think there's a

couple of things. Number One, if you're going to be armed, and if you're going to be armed in a community self defense role, one of the things you have to accept is that like you're not, as a person who is armed and cares about the defense of your community, you're not a separate thing from them. I think that's one of the areas where which policing goes wrong. May view yourself as a separate Yeah, And I know, you guys have a big problem with that. Um, what we

do here too. I live in a metro and our metro police, like them, don't even live in the county. Yeah, they all go the same here. Yeah. Yeah, they don't even not just the city, they don't live in the whole county. Um. And that's despite they get a living allowance if they'll live in the city, and there's a bunch of if they live in the city, they get a take home car. There's a bunch of incentives to try and get people to live here, and they still

won't do it. They want to go live in the next sheriff over, the next county where yeah we have a very vocal sheriff the next county over. Who's who's really racist and all that ship? Um? And I yeah, I think if you're if you're talking about like the potential of again of like armed community self defense, um you almost I almost would prefer phrasing it de friently community self defense, you know, um, which should be the entire community. Yeah. Yeah, community And you're not the gun

isn't what you are. You're not you're not security, you're not self defense because you're armed your self defense because you're a member of the community, and if you personally choose to be armed, that is an option that is expanded to you specifically because you're armed. But it doesn't change fun. It shouldn't change what you are. And if it does, there's a phrase that I think is really useful, Um, the finger pulls the trigger and if you want to

avoid or the trigger pulls the finger. Sorry. And it's this idea that when you show up armed, and you're showing up armed as someone like your purpose there is to be armed, you're at at heavy risk of the weapon guiding your responses. Um. And that's the most important thing in any circumstance to avoid if you're carrying a weapon. If if you've gotta hammer, everything's a nail exactly. Well. And and uh, the last twenty years we've had kind

of a with the War on Terror. You've seen a proliferation in media around um making Navy Seals and all that ship look really really really cool. Uh, every other movie is about that, even though like, really they're just drunk guys who yell at people a lot and who occasionally commit murder to protect. Or was that was that the Seals? Was that the Green Berets who killed that guy to protect a drug trafficking Greg, I mean probably both. Oh you know that that was the Green Berets in

North Carolina. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it crosses all all borders. Um. But one thing that's come out of that is we we've started to call those guys operators, right, So you've gone from a gun being a tool that someone trains there to use too, they are merely an operator of a weapons system. Um. And it it's kind of dehumanizing, like it allows you to get out of the thought on that. Um, it's exactly what you were talking about. Where where the triggers really

pulling the finger at that point? Um? Yeah, And it's it's I think there's a number of I don't know, there's a number of tactics and more than we can get through, and that we'll be talking with some other community to self defense people at some point in the near future about this, because this is a big topic, right, and it's not one I haven't seen anyone do it super well yet in the United States like we anytime you have kind of persistent right wingers every once in

a while, yeah, yeah, they take over blm Land. Yeah, yeah, but then they die. I forgot about that. Yeah, they did die get killed. Um And I think that it's it's a it's a really messy topic because of you know, what you brought up is a valid point, all the reading that all the kind of social baggage there is around weaponry in this in this country and in our in our culture. This kind of like worship of the gun. And if you think like the left is any more

immune to that than the right, you're wrong. You see the same you know, toxic behavior all around. You have to be extremely cognizant of it, even if you know it's something at the risk for there is um weapons in general have a mental impact on us carrying them. Um. And there is there is a level of just like being around weaponry that is entrancing. It's it's a human thing.

You know, we make weapons. It's we're too using apes and weapons are some of the first tools that we made that that are responsible for why you know, we get to tell the dogs and the cats what to do. Um. And you have to you have to really approach being armed from a standpoint of rejecting a lot of that.

If you're going to do it responsibly. I mean, among other things, the idea that you might have to use a gun UM has to be you're you're very close to your worst nightmare UM, because it would be it would be if you ever actually had to use one. UM at minimum, you're talking like when you actually look at like legal self defense shoots, you're talking minimum. The next if you kill somebody, at least minimum, the next year of your life is dealing with the legal consequences

of that. Sure, and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, I mean, if you're having if if IF IF file, if charges get filed, you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars for like a capital defense case, if not millions. Yeah,

And and that's in you know. There's one of the gun YouTubers that I like to push people towards it for this kind of stuff is a guy named Paul Harrold, who is certainly more on the conservative side, but who actually killed somebody in a self defense and went through the whole legal process afterwards. And he has a couple of videos where he talks about it, and he gives I think pretty good advice on that. That is that is completely without ego because it was a nightmare for him.

It was the worst experience of his life, which is what it's going to be if you ever have to use a gun, and that should be like, that should be the top of your that should be the top

of your mindset. You know, I've been in this situation a couple of times at protests where like someone pulls a knife and starts lunging at people and I have a gun and I'm fifteen feet away, and I never drew in part because it never quite crossed that line for me, and I knew that giving people the chance to deescalate was vastly more important than um introducing a second weapon to the situation immediately. And if things had gone differently, perhaps I would feel differently about my choices

in that moment. But um, they didn't and nobody got hurt. And that's always the best case scenario, even if it's somebody you really dislike who is who is threatening people with a weapon. I swear that happened up in Olympia like two weeks ago. Yeah, Well, the shooting in Olympia, which was a guy named Tye Me who got shot UM, and there's video of it. It's absolutely not illegally justified shoot for sure. Like, yeah he was he was like forty feet away, you know. Um, yeah, but he's really tall.

He is big, he is I think that counts for something. He was tall, he was tall, he was chasing them, he was armed. Um. Not making a moral case here. I think legally they would have had a trouble had they stayed around. Now, of course they've got I believe they've been arrested at this point. Oh have they? I just didn't think so. So sorry. I don't mean to crash it for a second. I think I saw our best friend Andy post something about it three days ago.

Three Yeah, okay, so they did. They did arrest the guy. Yeah. And it's you know, it's another thing if you, um, if you feel if if you're involved in like a shooting that you feel is a just defined legal shooting. Um, you don't. You don't leave the scene. Uh. And in fact, one of the better videos you'll get on like what to do and uh, this guy's life has gone to

ship because of the political nature of your shooting. But the guy in um in Denver who shot that dude at a protest, the pinker, I'll tell you, you know, no, no matter what you want to say about whether or not it was a good shoot. Yeah, that that he dropped that fucking guy. I mean he dropped head down on his knees. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. You know, again, the court case is not settled out, so I don't know if that guy's story is going to end happily.

But in terms of if you want to not get shot yourself and you want to have the maximum chance of defending yourself if you have to shoot somebody in a situation that's legally justified, what that guy did after the shoot is how to handle it. Um. And I mean the evidence for that is he did not get shot. And obviously your mileage with that's gonna vary depending on

your skin color. Uh yeah, that's actor. Yeah. In terms of actual training, people can like pay for if they if they want to take that step, which I think is a good idea. Um, who do you do. Do you have kind of like broad recommendations for how people can know if some things you know, because there's this is certainly a space where there's a lot of grifters and whatnot. Um, yeah, I mean most of the beginner level, Uh, how to fight with a gun. Classes are two to

three days long like that. That's a good starting point is the fact that you're going to pay probably three to five hundred dollars per day, um, and it's going to be multiple days long. You can't because you're going from a baseline. You know, they know you already know how to point and shoot a gun, but they're going to go up for everything on how to draw, how to move, how to reload. Um. You're gonna have some classroom time going over their specific safety instructions and stuff

like that. UM. But anything you can do in one day or four hours or forty rounds or whatever, it isn't going to cut it. Um. You need to go get something, and you need to listen because they're going to ask you to do things that might not be the way you want to do it. You might say, yeah, that's not the way my dad taught me how to reload a handgun. UM. A good example is actually UM tactical Response in Tennessee. They a lot of people hate them, but they have a very specific way that they say,

everyone reloads this way in our class. You know, you put it in and you sling shot the slide um. And and people will argue and go, well I want to just press the button. Well the button is cool and all, but we want you to sling shot the slide. Just do it for this class. Um. Sorry I got a little off topic there. No, no, no, that's a good point too, because I mean and listen, um. And

you don't have to take everything away. You you take what you saw as good usable information and merge that with what you already know, maybe throw away some of what you already know when you've got this ball a goo that you can work with h for practice. Um yeah, yeah, and yeah it is. And to that point when you're talking about like training, one of the differences between handguns and rifles, Like all all shooting, as always there's a degree of perishable nous to it, but shooting a handgun

is a much more perishable skill than shooting a rifle. Um. And it's it's so if you're going to be armed with a handgun, UM, it really behooves you to take to train, you know, because you're only as good as how often you've been out there. Really um and having a state a good foundation, like taking some real professional classes will help a lot in that as opposed to just kind of going out to the range every now

and again. But yeah, um, let's talk at the s. The last little bit of this here about kind of the gun that's always on the tip of everybody's tongue when you start talking about being armed and armed self defenses. You know, the A R platform. Um, it's a gun with a lot of baggage, a tremendous amount of cultural baggage, and it's it has become vastly more than just a firearm in our culture. Um what a what? What do

you what? Are kind of? Because I am a big advocate of people who who are open to being armed getting an A R platform. I think it's a great gun to learn. I mean it goes yeah, it goes bang really well almost every time, as long as it's from a reputable manufacturer. Um, despite what some people say, they're very reliable. Um, they're easy to clean. Literally as

long as you keep them lubricated. Even in the field, you keep it lubricated, it will just just keep banging out rounds and it functions in you know, we talked about this during the episodes on like you know, food storage and in and whatnot, Like where there's A. There's the there's the cheap version. I like stuff where there's there's the cheap version that works, and there's the expensive

version that works. And you you have that with an A R. You can get a very inexpensive ARE and you can you can replace every part of that ARE over the next five years and have a six thousand dollar gun. I I did um minor price checking last night because I was like, you know, I haven't checked the price the retail prices on stuff right, so in like your your budget tier normal price that that's out right Now, you've got like a Ruger, a R five

five six, there's seven hundred bucks. That's that's dirt cheap, and it's gonna go bang, just in the same red gun. Yeah. I have a friend who who's who's a R is a RE five five six and they're very solid. Yeah, they just they go bang every time. You're not going to break up, um, I mean, as long as you don't use it like a baseball bat, you're not going to break up, especially now that the Russian steelcase dammo

has been banned. But then like the the other end of the spectrum is you got a sick right, Yeah, I've got a couple. Okay, so you know what the rattler is. Oh, yeah, that's a fun one. I do not own a rattler, but they are they are cute. Do you know how much? Well, first off, the rattler it's a short, bare old five five six. It's not really an air of fifteen, but like technically it kind of is. Yeah, um, and it's well, how about this, how much do you think that the rattler costs? Right now?

Don't don't go look it, just just say probably bucks would be my guess. Now it's uh now, I actually put it in my category of honorable mentioned slash meme because it's kind of a meme. Gun. Uh it's so tiny, um, but I don't want to get out with it. But that's kind of the spread we were talking about, which is, you know, you can get a seven d dollar gun

and it'll go bang the exact same way as the rattler. Um, it fires the same bullet um, and you can build up to something not like a rattler, but you can build up to um a bunch of novesky parts. You can throw a bunch of novesky parts into that ruger lower and upper that you bought and build a really awesome gun that will be you know, nine percent reliable. Yeah, yeah, and you can you know, I think generally if you're buying like a again, you're you're getting kind of a

bargain basement. Are one of the first things that that it's going to behoove you to replaces the optics. You know, it'll probably start with ion sights. But these don't even come with anything. Yeah, usually they come with nothing on him and you have to stick the irons or you stick a reflex site. There's a whole world of um of optics. And I think one of the actually one of the websites I recommend people check into if you're looking and kind of reading up on this and and

doing your due diligence is Pew Pew tactical um. They do not written from like a super you know, chutty or whatever. Like you get a lot of very political gun websites that may have some good information that are frustrating to read. They're not that way. They're written you know, four people who are not super aggro about guns, but who are are are interested in guns, and you can

find really good reviews on stuff. But as a general rule, modern optics beeed iron sights every day of the like they prefer I I and I do in some case on my a case, I vastly prefer using irons, But that would never be the weapon I would pick if I was in a situation where I needed a weapon,

you know. Yeah, I mean I think everyone should learn how to use iron sights, absolutely, But if I can hand someone a four D and fifty dollar aim point pro which which is uh the budget for version of a high end optic, if I can put a four under and fifty optic with the mountain everything onto a rifle and just go, hey, just just put the dot on what you want to shoot, You're done. Um. Now, there's a lot that goes past that, but we got rid of the entire proper site alignment and all that.

They just got to put the dot on the box and squeeze. Yeah. Yeah, I mean even even the Marine Corps, famous for for fielding marksman, has gone we're going to switch over to optic based training. Yeah, they're just I mean you look at even guys in like id Lib Province, which is like one of the rebel provinces in Syria that's been persistently under siege for most of the last decade. Um, they're all using fancy optics now like that generally alf and Ali Baba versions of like brand optics. But it

does the trick, you know. I mean it's a it's a sig Romeo that never got the role market for cig on it. Yeah, exactly, and they paid a hundred bucks instead. Yeah. Um, alright, Well, I think that's most of what we can responsibly get through. I do want to end on the caveat we started with this with, which is that um deciding whether or not and and I we advocate, uh, firearms is an option both as a legal option and something that can be for your

community and for you as an individual potentially practical. I don't blanket advise people to buy guns. I think in many cases it's going to be counterproductive. I think you should not own a firearm. Again, if you're someone who struggles with suicidal ideation, they they can be a very dangerous thing to have in your home if that's something that that you battle with. I do think that they

can be owned and used very responsibly. In addition to I think shooting can be a really enjoyable pastime um, and I think more than anything, when a whole bunch of people who are talking about killing you all have guns, it can behoove you to own a firearm as well if you're a member of one of those communities. So please don't take any of this. As Robert Evans says,

everyone go buy a gun. But if you're going to buy a gun, there's there's a right way and a responsible way to go about it, and there's you know, picking up a random twelve gauge and shoving it under your bed, which is no more shotguns for home defense. Yeah, they're not. They're not ideal. Um, yeah, I mean we can, we can talk about over penetration and stuff, but yeah, I mean just being able to move lead in a direction they're very bad at. Yeah. Um yeah, yeah, they're

they're They're not They're not. I mean again, something like uh an a R or a pistol caliber carbine is in a lot of situations going to be a much more practical and and have less risk of hitting stuff you don't want to hit necessarily. Get the high point? Um yeat yeah, they eat cannon. Well, we'll discuss that on our whole episode of about high points. So you've shot yourself in the dick the high points story. All right, well, um, do you wanna Paul, you've got any got anything to

plug before we roll out here? Uh? Give food to homeless people? Well houseless, houseless, I think is yeah. Um. And if you're in an area with a based d S A, joined the d S I and then vote out the ship loads. That's what's happening here in Orlando. Um. But yeah, embrace anarchy. Well, I'm Robert Evans, this is gonna podcast. And uh and remember as we sail out, there's a reason the episode talking about guns came after

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make sure you leave a review. Welcome back to the It could Happen here. Yeah, that's the podcast we're doing right now. It's a podcast about how things are kind of falling apart, but maybe they don't need to, or at least not as much as they have. Then I'm Robert Evans with me as often is my co host Garrison. Davis Garrison, UM say something inciting to the audience. I'm on my second cup of coffee. Yeah, because it is. It is the early morning for you, by which I

mean to eleven in the afternoon. UM, also with us today. Our guest for this episode is David van Dooson. Uh. David, you are the president of the State Labor Council for the Vermont a f l c I O and there's a bunch of stuff that's interesting about your organization. Will dig into it in more detail in a second, but first I just want to say hello and thank you for being on the shower now, David, the big thing, I mean, the Vermont a f l c I has

been in the news a couple of times recently. The most recent one is y'all issued a statement making you the coverage I've seen has said the first labor organization in the US to like support gun rights. I mean like as is stated in a lot of the stuff you've put out, like Blair Mountain. There's a long history

of labor organizations making use of the Second Amendment. But UM, I certainly haven't heard of a labor organization stating at the way you did, which is basically the case you've made, is because far right fascist organizations are so heavily armed and any gut all of the gun control policies being heavily debated, at least among liberals, are likely to ignore those people while restricting the ability of working class and

particularly marginalized people to arm themselves. Um, you do not support those regulations because you support the rights of those groups to be able to defend themselves from fascists. That more or less correct. Well, Look, we believe in the right of the people to defend themselves, but our policies, including that one, are not adopted by the elected leadership, including myself. They're adopted by our members. We believe very

firmly and democracy participaty democracy. So with issues like this, we're happy to bring into our convention, which we recently did, and facilitate a full debate on the issue. So that's exactly what we did. We talked about it, our rank and file members talked about it. They made amendments, They debated passionately different sides of the issue in a respectful way,

in a productive way. A number of amendments were made, that were adopted, and then ultimately the resolution was passed with over a two thirds majority of our recopil delegance in favor. So that's where we are right now. Yeah, I've read a bit about this, including you know, there's been some critiques from a representative from the a f T,

which is the local teachers union. But there was also a member of the Vermont a f l C i oh who essentially stated, like, hey, I didn't actually agree with this amendment but or with this resolution, but it was made democratically, and like I I support the process by which it was done, which is one of the things I think is it is so interesting here that this isn't like um UM a kind of a group

of activists at the top making declaration declarations. This is an organization that is really um dedicated itself increasingly to I think a kind of progressive ism that we we haven't really seen in an organized way, and a lot of the American labor movement until recently. Well, when you're talking about democracy in the labor I mean we could be just as well here about democracies in society as such.

The fact is is that organized labor today is not particularly democratic, and we're looking to change that, and our world is not particularly democratic now. The vision that we hold our slate are progressive slate called United, is one where we increase the means for direct producerary democracy, both

within labor and within our society. So of course we're going to go to our members and our rank and file and ask them to debate the issues of our day and ultimately to make a decision on these major political and social issues. This was one we again, we do believe that people need to have a right, the working class needs have a right to defend itself, and

we can't bury our head in the stand. Anybody that's even followed a little bit of the news lately will know that between November up until late January, we were one general shy of a coup in this country, in the upside down world that we're now living in. It was because of the joint chiefs of Staff and the head of the c i A not supporting a coup that a neo fascist cou didn't totally in fold materialized

in a more mature form. Let that sink inform it our democracy, or the vestiges of the democracy we have in the United States right now is precarious. Uh. They just because they've been there for two hundred years doesn't mean they're gonna be there tomorrow. The new playbook from an increasingly far right Republican Party is to limit as much as they possibly could let people's right to vote and to participate in the political process. We see this

happening in Texas, We see this happening in Georgia. We see this happening in Florida. We see this happening in Red. Uh. I shouldn't say red, but I should say Republican states all throughout the US. So these are dangerous, dangerous times, right, so dangerous that our top generals were trying to decide what their position would be and make plans in case a coup, a full encoup, not just a hint of a coup, came into being within the last year of

our republic. Now, given those realities and giving the rise of the far right, given that our former president Donald Trump told the neo fascist Proud Boys to stand what did you say, stand back and stand by? Yeah, that's right. And now at least they claimed that forty thousand members around the United States and they are armed. Uh, you know, we can't just rest in our laurelds and and pretend that the state as such is going to keep us safe.

So it seems prudent and reasonable for us to have taken the action and say we defend our constitutional right to bear arms as intended to defend our communities. They

defend our unions, to defend the working class. And one of the things that because we were just talking about the the coup that very nearly got pulled off your organization, at least in UH I believe it was right after the election, issued a statement that if the president illegally attempted to stay in power, the former president, you would participate in an attempt to help organize a general strike. Now that's something we talk about a lot on this show.

We're big believers in the potential of a general strike. Were also big believers that the kind of general strike that we need to i don't know, potentially get climate justice and a number of other major things is an undertaking on par with the space race. You know, you're

talking about an enormous task. I'm really interested in picking your brain on when we talk about a national general strike, what is the kind of infrastructure that's actually necessary to make something like that feasible, because there's a lot of talk on like Twitter and Facebook of like, let's just

do a general strike on this day in October. I six months doesn't go by, as President c I O ver month where I don't left this group of some kind of contact with me to endorse their general strike, right, going to shut down on data X And it's yet to happen, at least in our country. So that's a great question. A couple of things. When we voted, and again this wasn't a decision of myself and the leadership.

This was a decision we went back to the rank and file with to our to one of our conventions of our delegates, after our long debate, voted to authorize the elected deecutive Board to call for a general strike in the event of a coup, in the event that there wasn't transfer power on January as the constitution requires.

It was our feeling that in that very specific space and time, in that very specific political climate, um we would be able to call for such a strike and with a serious amount of work and a serious amount of organizing, pull that off and make that happen, and the thought was if we could do it in Vermont because the call was a further Mont Channel strike, then it could spread to other states, which would be absolutely necessary if there was if our country descended into a

fascist dictatorship of some sort. But generally speaking, when we talk about climate issues, when we talk about the fact that millions of Americans don't have healthcare or aren't paid liv wages, all of these issues are at least these issues together certainly warrant us looking at things like a general strike, but they're a bit it's a bit phine this guide to think that, hey, we got ten grade issues that we want to see progress on, We're gonna

call for our strike and is going to happen. The infrastructure is not there, nor is the political will within the large labor bodies at this praised present time. Without participation from organized labor, first of all, I don't think anything is going to happen. So you're gonna have to achieve buy in a certain level. But even with buying from key leaders or even a localized shop stewards, you still need to have infrastructure in place. So one of the things that lacks in the a f l c

I O as a national organization. We don't have an effective network of local union contacts in every shop, at every shift, in every factory that's represented by a union, let alone the majority of workplaces at this point that aren't unionized. So what our top priority is as far as the vermontney a fl Sea goes over the next two years, is to build a network of local union contacts in every single shop and every single shift that we represent folks here in Vermont. So we see this

as a way to increase communication. Without communication, you're not going to be able to pull off mass mobilizations and what and also you're not going to be able to conduct mass education on issues X, Y or Z. So over a period of two years, we're looking to build this network that would function not as a one way means of communication, but almost a two or three way. Imagine that this is a way for the rank and

file to communicate up to the leaders. This is a way for the leadership to communicate down to the ranks, I mean down to the lunch room level of what it means to be in a union shop. And also ideally it's going to be a way for local union leaders to horizontally communicate with each other. With such a structure in place on a grand scale, on a state scale, on a federal scale, then things like organized general strikes

over political issues and social issues become feasible. And even when they're feasible, though, then we still have the political question of you know, will they be supported by the internationals, will they be supported by the executive board of the National a f C AL And that's a huge conversation, you know. So, Yeah, it's interesting to be hearing your perspective on this because my experience with kind of activism UM has been much more of kind of the decentralized

and kind of much more recent groups, you know, since occupy. UM, you're dealing with these these structures that in a lot of cases there I mean, the A f l C I O goes back like what like a century, right one one way or the other. Yeah, you know, I think, UM, because of kind of how shall I say, online, a lot of the discussion about this stuff seems to be

organized labor often gets left out. And one of the things that I think is most important when talking about the value that organized labor has in any kind of discussion if a general strike is what happened during the during the budget uh negotiations or whatever you want to call them in twenty nineteen where you you had UM airline workers threatening a general strike that effectively brought it into a president's saber rattling over over the budget like

it's it's president Sarah Nelson. Yeah, headlines over that and that was the right thing to do, absolutely her and would love to sear a a stronger positional leadership the national level. Well, I'm interested because I see a lot of potential in Obviously organized labor has had a lot of problems, particularly in the last you know, during my lifetime, UM, And I think part of it is what you said earlier, there's it's not as democratic as it should be at

most levels. UM. What you guys have done with United is attempting to reform that, you know within Vermont. I'm wondering, first, how did that kind of come about? You know, twenty nineteen is when you first got got put into office, when when the United State got put in the to the office in Vermont? What was kind of the back

story to that? And then my second question is kind of what do you see as necessary to like what what what's what's the fight as you see it to get stuff like that done on a larger scale around the country. So our story in Vermont is probably a lot like the story of organized labor in many different places are starting point. So in two thousand and seventeen, not that long ago, ah, we had a convention with

something like twenty or twenty five delegates there. Imagine that twenty delegates representing T at the time ten thousand grown since but ten thousand members. That's called the democracy. So there was a problem, an existential problem. Now I come out of Asked Me Local Me four thirteen in the northeast Kingdom of Vermont. So when I got together with a number of other leaders from different unions, different Asked Me locals, but also United Academics is part of a

f T the building trades. A number of folks. Uh, there was a general recognition at the leadership level that something was very wrong. Member participation was weakest can be, and things had to change. And we continually as an organization, you know, with some exceptions, hitch our wagon to the shortcomings that are the Democratic Party. So all of these things together led to inactivity, apathy, and lack of democracy.

So we started going around we started talking with workers, we started talking with shops across the state, and one of the first things that was striking. People would say they would know what union they're n be a A PWU or asking me or whatever it was. But we'd say, listen, we're talking. We're thinking about running a slate progressive slave for office with to take the a f l c I O in a new direction. The next thing they would say, is, what's the a f l C I

think about that? Right, workers involved, some of which were union stewarts and their locals didn't even know what the a f l c I O was. So that was our starting point. It was an excellent crisis of labor. And mind you, during these what I would call some dark periods, we would often endorse a hundred candidates for state House, nearly all of which being Democrats, and then we they would win. They would win their elections, like largely our candidates win, and then we get nothing in

the state House. Right, there would be no labor bill, there'd be no advancement of card check. Differently, the organized labor and yet we keep repeating the same mistake year and year out and not figure out that something was wrong. So when we formed the United State as a coalition of a number of different unions to recognize it was time for change, we really brought the discussion into the grassroots level. We developed a ten point program we called

our little read book. It's now the policy and the platform of the Vermont f l c i A, and we ran an organized campaign based on that right at a very local level. And here we did all the things that you know you should be doing, the phone calls, emails, the shop visits, all of this and created a sense

of excitement going into our two convention. Our two thousand nineteen convention with over if I recall, over a hundred and five delegates and alternates, was the largest convention we had up here in in something like thirty plus years. So that was an exciting atmosphere where something was going to be different and something was going to change right. So we swept. We essentially slept those elections. We want

all the seats except for one. We had a follow up convention in two UM sorry election in two where we won every single seat, and then the last selection UM we won all seats except for one where one person who's a good, good person from the building trades

ran but was not part of our state. So the real question is what have we done in the intern how are we changing that direction, and how are we changing trying to seek to change the capacity of labor, and what lessons does it add to the national room.

I would suppose so on that for one of the first things we did is we took money out of our lobbying operation and put it into an organizing the department, whereby we would hire and we have hired on call organizers to assist our affiliates in either new organizing or

internal organizing, therefore delivering an actual benefits to our affiliate unions. Now, mind you, we represent just about every sector of workers all across the state, but forever they very rarely got a concrete, measurable acts of solidarity from the Federation as such, right because all of a lot of too many of

resources were put in belonging. And we also took a critical eye towards the Democratic Party and recently we've instead endorsed the Social Democratic Vermont Progressive Party slates and their runs for state House and state wide office. In many cases, so we've done a few things differently. We're continuing to do things differently. We've expanded the size of our executive

board so you we elect more leaders now. We've more than double the size of the delegates afforded to each local so we could have more rank and foot file voices present when we're meeting at a convention. And we've taken a strong um social justice position where we think that organized labor must work very closely in an alliance, form alliances with groups like Migrant Justice or Black Perspective

or environmental organizations like three fifty dot org. And we've done those things, worked on their issues where we have common interests, and we've asked them to support us on our issues where where they've I have some common interests. So those are things that are very different that the National a f l C is not doing. Other state labor federations largely aren't doing enough. And we're hoping now to build that out, and we're engaging conversations seeking to

form a national progressive Caucus within the National ALC. I and I think that's so important when you talk about kind of on the national level for progressive number one to not not continually kind of reflectively support the Democratic Party when the Democratics parties is failing progressives, which you know, we have a perfect case study right now in Congress

with the the Reconciliation Bill. UM. It often does seem like such an insurmountable task just because the inability, like a bill, the three point five trillion dollar infrastructure bill, is so widely supported by Americans, but it just keeps coming down to this tiny number of folks with you know, finding anential interests in donors um, who are who are

pushing against something that's widely supported. And I feel um optimistic when I look at state organizations like what y'all are doing and the fact that I can see something building, but I also does it is such a titanic task to imagine translating that on a national scale in a way that actually gets us the things that you know, we we really can't wait for when you're talking about some of this infrastructure stuff, when you're talking about healthcare,

when you're talking about climate justice, Like, I do feel the clock ticking um, and I'm wondering what you see as the hope on the national scale for actually putting some muscle behind the progressive movement. Well, look, it's not just the the issues of the Infrastructure Bill and the budget bill. It's also the Proact right, the bill that is language in the Senate. And let's not lose track of the fact that those efforts are all stalling and

likely very likely to fail. And I hope they don't because of Democrats, because the Democratic Party is not united. They ran on a platform saying they were going to do X, Y and Z, and now when they're in a position to carry it out, they're not going to do it. And Joe Manchin, uh far as I'm concerned, UH call him a class trader, but I don't think he's ever was part of the working class. He claims to support the Proact, but in the same breath he he won't get rid of the filibuster. So, I mean,

that's absolute bullshit as far as I'm concerned. So how do we change that? Well, the National a f l c I O puts millions and millions and millions of dollars into elections. We have gotten so many of these people elected and back them in Arizona and West Virginia,

you name it, and then we get nothing back. If we were to take that money instead and put it into a robust new organizing department or a recrafted organizing department and actually assigned reel on the ground organizers in every single state in the country to help our affiliates, to help our state federations and their affiliates to internally organized, to build a kind of network I talked was talking to me about before, and to be active and build

alliances the Social Justice Group, our power would be amplified five million fold. This is the way we do it. Politicians aren't going to do what's right because it's right. Politicians are gonna do what's right when they feel so much pressure that they have to do it. Now, the victories that we saw for working people during the Great Depression under FDR, that wasn't just because FDR thought, you know,

this is the right thing to do. It's because people are going on strike, because people were organized because they were scared of revolutionary change in this country. So turn to meaningful, true, true um of major reforms as a way to blunt that perceived threat that they have. And that's what we got to get back to. Not our power is never gonna grow from people who are wearing ties in Washington. Power is going to grow based on our solidarity on the shop floor and in our communities.

So that's the direction we gotta go, and we got to do that rapidly, very rapidly. It's been clear to me for quite a while both that the reason workers gain so much in the wake of the Great Depression and the only kind of hope we have for doing that now is, um, they have to be scared, you know, to an extent, they have to be scared of of what's arrayed against them, both in its organization and in

its ability to disrupt things. UM. And I'm wondering what you think people listening, people um, who maybe are not involved in organized labor, Like what what what do you think people can do to further those ends? Like this is like when we when we start talking about national level a f l C I O politics, that's not something I think most people listening feel like they have any kind of ability to influence. Um, what do you think they can influence? What do you think people can

be doing to build that kind of capathitate? Well, you gotta be active, and you've got to engage in the political and social movements. But also most folks, you know, they're gonna have a job of some time and a lot of folks aren't getting treated the way they should in their job. I don't care if you're work in a coffee shop, in a restaurant, or in a gas station, or in manufacturing, and you could start by organizing with

your coworkers to form a union today. You know, you could reach out to a local union to ask for help, or you could do it on your own. Frankly, but if we're not organized as working people, and we are we are most of the world. If we're not organized amongst ourselves, we're not going to be able to become that expression of power that we need to be in

order to create the change. If we're just a collection of individuals, then the ruling class, the wealthy, the powerful, the elite, they're gonna have all their ducks in a row to keep us divided and to keep their foot on the pedal of the status quo. So we need to come together. We need to organize in the natural place to organize is in the workplace. In my opinion, yeah, I mean it. It is the natural place to organize. It's also become an increasingly difficult place to organize. We

all watch what Amazon did in Bessemer this year. You know, UM, and and that fight is still ongoing to an extent. UM, but it is Uh, it is a continuing challenge, um to to actually effectively unionized in a lot of the industries where it matters most you know, UM, like we have some choke point industries, like we talked about aircraft employees that are heavily unionized, thankfully, and that do have a lot of power, as has been demonstrated recently when

they when they go to the mat. Um. But I I'm interested in kind of we we've got, you know, Amazon employees is really one of the areas that I'm looking at where, my god, if if we could actually if something significant could actually get off the ground and a significant number of those workers could get organized, it can make a real difference. UM. But you know, you've got effectively what are community organizations for the most part going up against um. You know, Amazon at this point

has more resources than most nation states. Yeah, but so did the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and the folks like this and and are particularly and it's always been hard, uh too long ago in our country, maybe during our grandfather's day, where there was a very good chance you'd be shot or at least beat over the head with a club from the Pinkerton's if you try to organize.

Organizing has never been easy, and yeah, such as Columbia today, trade unions are killed at an unbelievable clip, almost on a daily basis, and yet still they organized. So I'm not suggesting to any of your listeners that if this is easy, what I am that it has to happen. It has to happen. And there's different models too. Like in some Place is one of the models that's been effectively used as forming workers centers, right, So that's not

a traditional union. It's a center in a city, or in a community or in a town where workers come together and strategized right at a in a location, to strategize how to be effective as a group, as a whole, as a class on issues that are important to them, you know, be an economic, be its social, be it um, fighting against racism, whatever it may be. That's a model that I suggest folks could could look into as an

alternative way. If, for whatever reason, you don't feel that the time is right for a union in your shop today, although it needs to be tomorrow, take a look at workers center and see if there's one in your community, get involved, if not, get together a few people and see what it would take to start when where you live. But one way or another, we have to be organized, we have to come together. We cannot just be a collection of individuals. That's a great point, UM, and useful information.

I think kind of the last thing I wanted to get into UM was one of the things I first learned about your organization that you issued a solidarity statement back and I think it was two thousand nineteen UM with the YPG and J in Rojaba. UM. And you've issued you know it stated your solidarity with Black Lives matter, with the Zapatista's currently what they're undergoing in Mexico, UM,

which is massive repression from the government yet again. UM. And you know your support of Palestinian rights and of against sort of the U S occupation or not occupation, but a blockade of Cuba. UM. What do you see when we're talking about this struggle, this broad struggle we've been talking about all day, what do you see as the role of internationalism and both in both organizing people in organizing resistance. Well, our starting point today is capital

is international. So we're going to have a foundational challenge to the power of capital. We also have to be internationalists in our altbum. We supported the YPG y p J and the newly elected government in Rojava because they are struggling for economic equity and a direct prot history democracy in that corner of the world. We see this as the most significant revolution in in the world, uh

in generations. I mean this in our mind is on far with the Spanish Civil War and what we saw around Barcelona and the c n T then or the Paris Commune of EE. If this was happening in Europe, a day wouldn't go by the where this wouldn't be front page news. But in the Western world we often the corporate media terms of blind blind eye to many of those struggles. So they're doing their part, and we

have to do our part in our country. To the Zabatistas, they're doing their part in Chiapas, in broadways, in some regards in Mexico as such. But we need to reach our hand out in encouragement and say hey, we're here

to support you. One of the things we sought to concretely do in the Vermont labor movement is in two thou nineteen one of our Central Labor Council's passed the resolutions for we said, look, if you are go over to fight and volunteer with the YEPG and y p J, because there's thousands of volunteers right uh, they're are volunteered to go over, if you return and your American will hook you up with a union job, and we'll hook you up with three months of room and board so

you could get reacclimated, you could get back into the community and get back into the local fight through the labor movement. And we were proud to actually have an opportunity to do that for one returning American fighter in our latest resolution in two one, and this one was broader because it was the whole vermonti a FO, not

just the Central Labor Council. We again offered, we encourage folks to feel so inclined if they're in that place in their life to volunteer with the YPG and y PA and if they're Americans and they come back, we're happy to hook you up. We'll do our best to get you a good union job when you return. So we felt that was a very small least we do kind of thing. But concrete way to provide solidarity. We

all have to stand together. It's really one fight. But the place we're going to be effective is where you live locally, in your town, in your city, and your state and in your country. Yeah. I think that's a great note to end on and a great thing that you all are doing. And I really do appreciate that, and I appreciate you, David coming on and talking to

us today. Um, is there anything else you wanted to to to get out or anything you wanted to like any you know, charities or mutual aid funds or whatever you wanted to uh push before we kind of roll out today. I'd just like to push for folks to go to work out tomorrow and and organize, organize with your fellow workers and let's change the world solidarity. Thank you, David. Robert Evans here and I wanted to ask for your help. There is a Portland area woman rub it to me me.

She's an Arabic interpreter and a Palestinian liberation activist and she is trying to save her home at the moment. She's got to go fund me. If you go to save Ruba's house, are you be a on go fund Bank, you'll find it. Save Ruby's House on go fund Me if you've got a few bucks, um, she could really use it again. Save Ruba's House. Are you be a at go fund Me? Thanks? 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

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