It Could Happen Here Weekly 33

can make your own decisions. Hi, you welcome to take it happened here the show where we just spent a few minutes not recording by accident and also trying to shoot my cataway so they would stop throwing uh old grenades off my desk. So that's the vibe that we're going for today. Okay, and oh do you know what today is? Today is May Day, famed famed one of the best holidays. Um so in the Mayday tradition. I'm not doing my job today, so we're not doing a

real episode. But but don't don't worry. We still have other content for you to listen to. Uh speaking of content of the friend of the pod, Marcat Killjoy, Hi, do you have anything that we can listen to today? No? Was I supposed to prepare something. Oh oh wait, what if I released the very first episode of my new podcast today and what if it was a May Day themed episode? Would that sound good? That would sound, as

the kids say, very based of you. That would be so cool because if if you like May Day and only working eight hours a week, which is still too many hours, but if you enjoy that as opposed to more hours, you should probably thank the anarchists. And you can learn more about those people at Margaret's new show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff here on cool Zone Media.

Also featuring also featuring friend of the pod Robert Evans. Yes, Robert Evans is a guest all that episode, so if you're familiar with that guy, then you could also listen. So yeah, episodes dropping every Monday and Wednesday until the world burns. Yeah, so like three months? Three months? Well? Actually did they said like what like forties six weeks? Oh yeah, I math it out. It was nine. Um, it's nine months that the UN says we have to

turn everything around. But as as my friend pointed out, we're gonna waste a month of that just trying to do the math of calculating the weeks in ten months I do love optimism. Well that does it for us today. Go enjoy your May Day by not working or at least just kind of sucking around. And that's what I'll be doing. And cool people who did Cool stuff is out now, so check it out wherever you get your podcast. Oh my god, I just realized I wasn't recording. Oh

we are not doing this again. It'll be fine. It's like a bunch of different illustrations of dictators all done. It's like little anime chicks. So they're all hot, so like pol Pot's this like sexy girl and a throat of skulls. But Tito they made into a milf like she's got all of her kids around her. It's the only it's the only one with kids. Um. I don't know why they picked Tito for that, but it does kind of work. This is it could happen here a

podcast about which anime war criminals are hottest. And it's idiomine. Actually, the idiomine in that book is pretty pretty pretty smoking as a like wearing black lingerie on a throne of skulls. Okay, nice, just kissing you make it in no no kissinger all all like like world leaders. Um, I would. I would argue that, but he does not make the book. No, it's sad tragic anyway, this is it could happen here podcast, Things Falling Apart and other stuff. I'm here again with

my buddy Jay James James, Hi Hi hi one. Which dictator do you think would be hottest? They were like gender bit Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I'd have to go for like one of the old timey ones press one of the one of the one of the one of the os. Yeah. I think Kauzar Nikki had nothing to do but like look hot and he was a big workout guy. Yeah, big workout, got nice to rip, nice nice outfits, tight trousers. I think I'd probably go with him. Yeah, that that scans now which was hottest?

As they were, like, which is the most fuckable war criminal? That's a tough one. I'd probably have to think about that, I know. Not a coming to mind. Actually, oddly that Stalin Pictures of Fake Yeah not not not nearly. Actually that's sexy. Um Joseph the Stallion, I gotta go. I gotta go with Saddam Hussein. Yeah, that's true. He has a sort of lustful mustache and it's good that mustache Fox James. We should probably talk about something that's not

which dictators are most falcable. UM. Today we're going to chat about he fat courses uh, and about emergency UM and particularly like combat medicine, which is a more relevant topic for a lot of people. In the wake of a couple there's a mass shooting at a protest in Portland. Uh, There's been a whole lot of threats made against LGBT people. Uh. Jack poss O Biak launched a T shirt that was basically threatening a mass shooting at Disney World. All sorts

of fun ship has been happening. Yeah, it does seem like we're aspiringing towards the end of times. Yeah, it certainly seems if you want to be less, you know, apocalyptic than that. It certainly seems credible to say that there's a pretty good chance people there are people listening to this who have not been present at a shooting, who will be present at a shooting at some point in their lives. Yeah, And I think given that, it

doesn't make sense. So like I'm joking about the end of times, right, Like we shouldn't panic and things we should think about ways we can protect each other and keep each other safe. Yeah. So what is a he FAT course because you recently went through one. Yeah, so he FAT is an acronym right hostile environment first Aid training. Um, it's a British thing. I think that's the syllabus I

believe is standardized by the government in the UK. So most of the courses you'll find are in the UK, clustered around Hereford for pretty obvious reasons, but that there are there are a couple in the United States, and there are some in other countries too, And it's for journalists, aid workers and GEO staff and anyone else who's working in an environment that would be considered like high risk or hostile. And to your point, that includes most of

the United States at the minute, right. Yeah, Well, I mean we are in this funds place where literally any moment could turn into a situation with the intensity of a of a low density war zone. Yeah, I mean we have more weapons and than most war zones, and also people who think it's okay to kill other people

because they like Mickey Mouse. So it does seem like you said, it is more likely that we will see more shootings, even bombings, and that kind of thing like we can't say for sure, but yeah, now you you have done some of the same kind of work that that I and some other colleagues of ours have done, you know, in in hostile environments, difficult places, prior to

going through this course. Obviously, when we're talking about like what sort of first aid skill should people have, the most basic stuff is like how to apply a tourniquet, which we'll talk about a bit more later, how to um if it's not because tourniquets are really only for extremities, you know, you can't really turniquet a gut wound or whatever, and so for that it's more like packing it but outside. So I'm going to assume you had your more than

your share of experience with that kind of stuff. What did you learn new going through this course? Like, what was the stuff that emphasized that's kind of beyond the basics? Yeah, so, um, the stuff I've done before has been some of that basic start the bleed stuff, and then a fair amount of wilderness medicine stuff. So some of the improvised stretches

and stuff I was for Milliar with. I enjoyed some of the releases they did, like I'm not talking about like necessarily like a hand to hand combat or open hand combat, but like ways to release yourself in a non violent fashion. I thought that was very good. Ways

to move through crowd I found that very interesting. And we did a lot around how to move under fire, how to react around explosives, how to react around indirect fire, and most of that had already covered, and then some of the stuff around hostage situations to include a simulated a hostage situation where you're blindfolded or hooded and sort of ask questions and poked with a blank firing weapon.

As such, I think it's really good. You can't really have enough fix what you can have too much experience for that, but to simulate that and as realistic as

setting as possible I found was super helpful. So I think, yeah, I think that was probably the most interesting thing for me now when it comes to what kind of training people can get, because the heath had courses a couple of thousand bucks, which is beyond I know we have some colleagues listening, and I think it's a good thing for people who are going to do this kind of journalism to consider, or if you're in you know, an aid worker or someth someone who is going to be

going into these situations for a living. That's but for a normal person listening, it's probably more than you're likely to want to get UM or have the resources to get So what what people because, because especially in the wake of shooting is pretty much any time there's a mass shooting or violence at a protest, I will tweet about I FAX again. And an I FACT is an individual first aid kit. It's what like every soldier is supposed to have on their belt or on their plate carrier.

And it generally consists of what are called and this is when people ask, like what should I get to be ready for a shooting UM. Generally it consists of consists of two chest seals. These are called eclusive dressings. They're basically like kind of sheets of adhesive plastic. I would say that you like put over if you get shot in like the lungs, you your lungs kind of depressure rise UM and that's bad. I'm not a I'm not a biology expert, but you're not supposed to have

a whole three year lungs UM. And one of the things that you do to treat that immediately is you put this kind of addressing over it, which stops the lung from collapsing basically. Um, So that's one thing you'll find in an IFAC. You'll also find what's called a combat tourniquet. There's a bunch of kinds of tourniquets. Um.

I was doing a stop the bleed course. We'll talk more about that in a bit, but that's the thing everyone should do, like in terms of you know, he fat is kind of more advanced and for people who are going to professionally put themselves in shitty situations. Um,

stop the bleed is for everybody. And one of the things I was having a chat with people who were teaching them, we were doing a little meeting, um, and one of the things that was brought up people always talk about, well, I wear a belt in case I need to make a tourniquet or this or that, and virtually never works, like close to zero percent success, right, Um, even when it's someone who's trained and experienced providing tourniquets, like random ship does not make a good tourniquet. Tourniquets

make good tourniquets. Yeah, They's more that easy to carry. They down't cheap, right, But on the same you shouldn't cheap out on them either, right, Like we've I know we've talked about this on Twitter, and I know like Amazon Sales M they force had a problem with selling fakes sor like North American Rescue. I think it's called emergency rescue. I'll give you something. Yeah, North American Rescue is really good one of the so, yeah, rescue essentials.

So what a combat tourniquet is, because there's different. Some tourniquets are just like a plastic band almost almost like if you go to a gym, those things that people like wrap around their legs to do squats or something or lifts. It's kind of like it looks a little

like that. Um and those Yeah, obviously like those can work, but they're not nearly A combat tourniquet is basically it's a little um like kind of Nyloni fabric belt thing that you strap around and you tighten it um and velcrow it tight and then there's something called a windless which is basically a metal or plastic stick that you then twist around. Uh, and that twisting action when you twist it, that's going to tighten it and that's going to stop the artery from bleeding. Um, and then you

lock it into place. There's a little place to lock it. And so when you get a cheap tourniquet, it generally means the windlass is made out of something flimsy or the fabric at hearing the windlass to the belt thing is not very good and it will break when being tightened. Yeah, and you don't want What you don't want to do is not have enough pressure, have sort of weird pressure, because what you're going to do tomorrow, I'm not that

kind of doctor. Right, is you can cut off the venus return and not the arterial flow, and that's what you can give yourself compartments in direct right. I just wanted to backtrack quickly. And we're talking about how expensive he facts are. If people are listening and they are in that kind of line of work. The International Women's Media Foundation is doing free he fat courses for women, gender nonconforming, non binary people, and I gotta I got a grant from the Rory Peck Trust to go and

do mind so for journalists. Both those are really only for journalists and media. I would really encourage people to apply. Yeah, um and that's that's great information because if you can even if like your journalism has been sort of like citizen journalism where you're showing up at a protest and you know, taking pictures or whatever. UM, give it a shot, like if you like, the more people who have this

kind of training. UM, as a general rule, the better. UM. When it comes to stop the bleed courses are generally going to be much more available. Some of them are operated as charities and we'll give out an I fac or something at the end. Some of them have a nominal fee. It kind of depends on where you are. I've seen both. Portland has a lot of stop the bleed courses, which is why when we had our most recent mass shooting at a protest, UM, more people didn't

die because folks had equipment and we're ready. UM, you're you should expect to spend about thirty bucks generally on a combat tourniquet. UM, sometimes twenty, but like the good ones are all about thirty. UM. I would shoot for something with a metal windless that's generally assign. Again, there's like Rescue Essentials and a couple of other brands that are reliable. But it's called a Tactical Committee on Combat Care,

which is the government finding thing. It's so like if you let them do the research so you don't have to. They provide a list of cornic tornic case torn cats. The one that most people have is that could cat right combat application tornic. If you get that, even if it's not the best one or the smallest lights or whatever, every that's the one most people train with they know

how to use. And I think you've said this before, like, even if you don't know how to use it, if you are in a situation where it's needed and you just say I have this, have a tornic, that someone might take it and use it. So yeah, and it's it's like it's okay if you panic, as long as you get that into the hands of somebody who can use it. But it's also important if you're going to

carry it to train with it. I heard when I posted about this recently, someone said that they and their friends have a game where when they're like hanging out, somebody will toss a tourniquet at someone else and say, like, you know, right arm or something like that, right arm above elbow or something like that, and they'll have to apply the turn, get and get it on as quickly as they can in that place, which is a good game.

You're not going to like in twenty or thirty seconds, like you know, you don't have to like injure yourself doing it, but you can you can get it on and get familiar with the motions and build like a competence with it. Yeah, work out when you're going to lass through the limb and when you're gonna take it off and go all the way around. But I think standardizing one thing certainly among you and your affinity group

or your friends is probably a good move. Yeah. Yeah, And it's it's one of those things the kind of injuries that tourniquets are most needed for our like arterial bleeding um, which is the kind of thing that if you don't get a TURNI get on that you're dead um very quickly. Like people will bleed out in seconds sometimes from like a femoral Yeah, you've seen an arterial bleed, and I'm sure that I know I have. I'm sure you have. You know that that person has an arterial

bleed that is a pressurized gushing of blood. It's like bright the blood arterial bleeding. It comes out in spurts, and it is like right, it is not. It does not look like when you cut your finger the blood tends to unless you're really cutting the ship out of

that figure. Yeah, yeah, you. And one of the things we did at this course, which is called at You is they had like a simulated arterial bleeds and a person was wearing it like a camelback, and then they had like a hose pipe and it was just gushing out and then you could actually cinch down on it

right with the strap and that actually stopped. Now, I mean when it comes to like more advanced bleeding care, because there's some wounds where number one, if it's like, for example, too high up in your like crotch or something, you know, you're not necessarily going to be able to get a cat up there. Sometimes people will literally hold the artery closed like that is a thing that and that is more advanced certainly, um, but it is. It is also like the physics of this are very basic.

If you can figure out where blood is coming from and close it, blood will stop coming out, right, Like that's the principle of all immediate wound care for that

kind of thing. Yeah, there's an acronym that you use, right Dr March, which we can go over danger right, So, and I think this is the thing that often gets forgotten actually, especially if you're doing like somebody's start to bleed, which is focused on first aid rather than specifically in kind of combat carib If you get hurt, not only are you useless to that person, not only are you hurt. If someone comes to help, now they have to think about which person they're going to help. Right, It's how

much harder to carry two people than one person? So don't do that? Uh? And then response right, so, Robert, I see you've been shot. Doesn't look great? You okay? And then massive bleed, air way respiration, check head to toe and then hypothermia. And you know one of the things that is so like a combat tourniquet, you just generally you can keep it in like a kit. It's also fine to keep it loose in your pocket. You are not worried about sterility when you are applying a tourniquet.

It does not matter if you get shipped in the wound like, because they will die. They will be dead in a minute if you don't get the tourniquet on um anyway, right, Yeah, yeah, you're not putting it in or whatever like it. So yeah, so that's that's one kind. And that's again you're talking about extremities, right. You can't put a tourniquet on the neck because that would kill the person. Um. You would use an inclusive a lot of times on the neck, especially if like the airway

gets Again. This is stuff that you would you would get in to stop the bleed. Course, and I recommend people for that. So we're not going to go over treatment outside of like these basics, but we'll talk about like you should have an inclusive dressing. Two is what most effects come with. People I know who have responded to shootings say you want more like four because they

are a lot wind up getting used. Yeah, I think about I think those specty chest seals and something that I've been told by people with a lot more experience than me. It's like when you're dealing with a military setting, most people will have their chests covered with plates, right, and plate carries, and a civilian setting most people want so you're going to see a lot more of those like a sucking chest wods or penetration of the thoracic cavity.

So yeah, and in that setting, and they are very small, right, you can put them into back pocket of your skin cheets and no one would notice. So another kind of thing that you'll find in an I fact that's useful is combat gauze. So there's two types of gauze that you'll get in kits. One is just gauze, which you know what gauzes um most wounds, if they are not life threatening, packing with gauze and wrapping is perfectly sufficient

at least for immediate care. But combat gauze is impregnated with a thing called cell locks, which is our little granules. You can actually get them, just as the powder. You shouldn't because it's it's not going to be useful to you as a random person. Um, you should get it in gauze, like impregnated into gauze, but it's made from ground up crustacean shells and it basically makes blood clot

very quickly. Um survivability of arterial wounds in combat, which was extremely low before cellos jumped to something like or so like. It's it's pretty remarkable the degree to which it's made certain particularly like fomoral bleeds survivable um, and it can be used if you've got, like it's a serious arterial bleed. It will often be used in conjunction if it's on an extremity with a tourniquet um. But you can just use it to pack a bleeding wound.

And if you pack it and apply pressure, sometimes you'll pack the combat gulls into there and then add other gals outside of it. Like, but it's it's most wounds that are bleeding aren't going to require sell off scars. And it's pretty expensive, but it's another really useful thing to have if there is like an arterial bleed. Yeah, I think actually the where we first I think kalin might be what the stuff is called. I believe it comes from indigenous practices using it to stop bleeding. But yeah,

it comes in a small package. Quicklot is the normal brand, and yeah, it's a lot of what we've learned about stopping arterial bleeds has come from twenty years of war, right, and they're obviously a lot of town site but yeah, learning about how to stop those things is one of the things that It's got a lot better in the last decade or so. That's another thing. And you can always buy these kids pre made. A lot of people

make various premate kids. Yeah, you can google i FAC and make sure it's you know, rated, well dot do your research. We've mentioned some brands here, but like, it's not hard to find I Fax. They're they're made constantly And it's one of those things we talked on this show about being armed and whether or not people should should have firearms. And I'm broadly supportive of of particularly threatened people having guns. But there's downsides to having a gun. Um,

a number of them. We don't need to get into the statistics, but there are a bunch of downsides to being armed. There's no downside to having an i FAC and keeping one in your car, keep one in your backpack, you know. Um, there's absolutely no way you will have a negative experience as a result of the fact that you keep an eye fact on you and it might

save somebody's life. Yeah. I have a little ankle holster that I use when I'm working in places where we wouldn't look very you know, it would look off to have it on my belt, Uh, And I don't want to carry backpack. Maybe I needed to wrap around my ankle and it has a tiny combat dressing, which you haven't really talked about chess seal tornique and it doesn't have the quick clut. But then the combat dressing has its own goals. Yeah, we can talk about that in

a second. But like I just have like I have a up effects but also just in all of my light jackets because you know Oregon, usually you can wear some sort of jacket. I just have a bunch of cats and quick clot gauze packets just kind of scattered around, like there's nearly always something just in my pocket or in the center console in my car um in addition to the actual packed I fax and yeah it's handy. Um, it's just good to have around. It never hurt to

have more of that stuff. Or you have the means or you know, if you are in a situation where something horrible has happened, right like what happened in Portland, if you in your truck, have three or four of those and you can just be to go go goes. Anyone know how to use these? Use these if they're in your backpack when you're at a protest, like you

could potentially save several lives. So if you have the means, said give them to strangers, like, it's not like it's not like a gun, right, Like you can't end your life with with quick cloth. Yeah, so yeah, I would. It's a thing that everyone should feel good about having. We should note again, you wouldn't want to use quick clot on a wound that was not serious because there's some concept like it burns, it's it's kind of nasty

stuff in some ways. Um, it can cause some complications for for like when the e M T s get there, Um, it's often recommended that you keep the packaging and give it to them. But if it's if someone is clearly going to bleed to death like that, then that then

that's when you use quick clot. And if you're questioning whether or not a wound is serious enough that someone might bleed to death from it, assume they will, right like air On the side of that, if you're wondering is that a deadly bleed, you're probably should probably treat it as if it is. Yeah, I mean, you're always better of keeping more blood inside the person, right Yeah, with that, Yeah, I've been told to take that to

the person. And the same with the tonic gate, where we should say that there will be blood around, you can put a T on their forehead with the blood. It's pretty normal and that works in almost any language. And then you want to write the time it was applied to, and again you can do that with the blood. But I have a half sized sharp that often comes in those kids. Yea, yeah, And it's one of those

things like assuming. It kind of is depending on your situation whether or not you'd likely to have the time to mark that before the E M T s arrive, But it is one of those things even if it's even if your first responding is a minute and a half or two minutes with a serious bleed, that can be the difference between life and death for somebody. Yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah, And it's different what you do when carry than coming

to what you do when carries coming. But the first steps are not right stop the blood coming out of the person. So we should probably talk about combat dressings a little bit. Yeah, yeah, there are several types. The one I've had suggested that I prefer, I think, I don't know how it's pronounced. It's O L A Y Slays dressing and has a little eye cup in it as well, which you can use for eye injuries, Like find someone more of qualified than me to teach you

how to do that. I don't need to get into that, but yeah, but it's it's a pad with gores in it and then a sort of ace bandage, right, And what it does is provides compression and obviously like an absorbent goals, you can also pull the goals out. A fun thing to do is to find an expired one and pull all that goals out and there is just an unfathomable amount of gores there. So you can use that like pack a wound, and practicing packing a wound is also something that you can do. They're like little

little bottles. Yeah. The team I know who does stop the bleed courses will take phone rollers and cut holes in them and use that as like to so you can and you can do different sizes, right. You can actually just like get a knife and like jam at its stab at a bunch and like use those as different practice wounds. Yeah, it's a good idea. Can you pack with two fingers? You know more than that even one finger? People can pack with one finger. So like

what this dressing does is opposite. It's sometimes they're called is rarely bandages, olas bandages. They often come in like a tan package, the Israeli ones. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Again, like I would buy that from a reputable source, and they come in various sizes. Emergency dressing is another name, and yeah, those are great for things where you don't need to use quick clot where you may not need yeah,

significant bleeding, but not like immediately life threatening. Yeah, in some areas well, like sometimes in the forearm, right, Like it can be hard because of these bones structures to get the tornic a to work, so like you might be able to use that start the you might have to use quick club, right, but like having those options is important. And again they're pretty small, probably the cheapest

of the things we've suggested so far as well. And again they didn't they make giant ones from abdominal wounds to um and so like, I actually have one of those in my truck, have a bunch of more stuff in my truck. I wrote a piece about a first aid kit for your vehicle, which might leave me look slightly different, right if you imagine again, Like, and we've talked about shootings, but uh, car accidents, that's that's when I the only time I've had to use those dressings.

Have been car accidents that helped pull the fucking dude out of a truck that flipped on the way outside of Los Angeles during a rainstorm, and his like whole fucking like right here in his hand had been gouged open where like the it was quite a bit of blood. Um. But yeah, like that, that's a bit. It's not all

just like action movie ship like. It's something you should keep on you because there's a wide variety of things that can cause people to bleed a lot, Yes, exactly, Yeah, yeah, and I think we are we always underestimated risk of these drivings by the most dangerous thing most people do. And yet having that in your car, you know, you don't have to worry so much about carrying it. It can just always be there. Don't leave it where it's going to bake in the sun if you're in a

hot place. But yeah, again, the potential for you saving a stranger's life or a friend's ie, Yeah, it's high. Yeah, keep it in a center console, keep it in a trunk, you know, keep it in a trunk alongside a machete in a golf club. You know, you're always ready for anything. With that, I'm never ready for golf. But aside from that, i'd be Oh, I wasn't saying for golfing. Yeah, for

exactly for crime. Medical actually make a read. Yes, they make a lovely vehicle first aid kit and the very nice people to so, yeah, that that's want to look into. And they also do the bags. I have a mystery runch bag that also clips onto it replaces the hood or my backpack, and I have that in my truck and then if I'm going out, especially when I'm going out climbing, I'll just click that on and have a

slight different kit that I take just for climbing. But that's one of those scenarios where like, you could hurt yourself climbing and even if people are coming very quickly, it's going to take you a while, right and and thinking another thing, I would be prepared to self rescue. That's part of why you bring that kind of stuff. Self rescue a massive part of climbing, right, learn learning the lots sing the transfer of learning, the ways that you can get yourself off of one of you hurt

yourself on the wall. And the American Alpine Club actually publishes a thing called accidents in North American climbing climb. This okay, this person sunked up by this, and they did this and this and this, and they were okay, they weren't okay. So I think that's a very good practice learning from other people. And with that, a big thing that you focus on a wilderness medicine is rather than what can I bring with me, what do I have to already have with me? And how can I

use that? Right? So, for instance, you need to splin a leg, right you have a broken leg using a sleeping pad or something which already has those redid sleeves to do that. And that's something that like I don't want to obviously advise people too much. Yeah, I don't want to, like because again, so the difference this is useful. People should be thinking about this UM when it comes to emergency first aid, Like somebody was a broken leg.

If you're not, like, there's no real response that you should like, that's not what stopped the bleed is for right, Like UM. One one of the nice things about emergency medicine like this, like when you're talking about someone is bleeding to death, is that one of the ways I guess that you can. You can you can separate the two kinds of like first responding, because there's the first

responding where you can make it worse. And if you like somebody like breaks a bone or something and you can make that worse, yes, but if somebody has an arterial bleeding, you can't make that worse. There. It's the same thing with like um chest compressions. Right when you get trained as an e m T, one of the things they'll point out is that, like, you shouldn't use um an a E D on an infant, but you do because if they're needed, they're dead. And in that case, Yeah,

I think it's important. Also in the thing that I didn't mention that I found very helpful about its course, some of this psychological aspects of this is to remember that if you do find yourself in this situation and you try and help and that person dies anyway, then you did your best right and that is of value.

Like I've been in situations where I've tried to help someone and they've died anyway, and I think just remembering that like that person hadn't something terrible happened to them, and that your help didn't you know, like you tried your best to give that person at the chance it is not. If you are responding to somebody who has this kind of injury, there is a pretty good chance what you do won't matter. Like it's the same thing if you are giving someone chest compressions. That's very unlikely

to save their life. Like a fraction of the time when that happens, does it save anybody, But it can't make it worse if they're not breathing. If they're not breathing, yeah, they're going to die. Yeah, yeah, And I think you know, it's not like the movies on television, and sometimes it doesn't work, but it's important to talk about that in

the context. Yes, actually much probably much more likely the person survive if you're doing this stuff right, you're slapping on the torn again, you do it right, you will stop that person, yes, yes, and and but you know again it is a lot of times what you might be doing is keeping them alive long enough to get to the hospital, and you can't guarantee anything other than that they don't bleed out right there, right, and then

maybe other injuries. You haven't seen this where we did the check head to toe, right, and stuff like that, Like especially in blast injuries, you might not notice injuries

to the back. Yeah, shrapnel as a whole. I mean, but all you can do is like try to treat what you can see, yes, exactly, and make sure that you don't miss anything by going through that doctor March procedure right which you're learning the course, but yeah, you're having a procedure that you do where you make checks so that you don't miss something that you could have stopped,

because then I imagine you will feel bad. Yeah, and none of what we've said we should probably bring this to a close should be seen as like the end all be all, or our attempt to give you comprehensive training on this is in no way training. This is advice on number one, the equipment that's necessary for stopping someone from bleeding to death, and number two the kinds of training you should get in order to use it, and you should seek training. You should find a stop

the bleed course. You should take a wilderness medicine course if you can. If you if you are someone who is in a field that it's relevant for, you should try to get a HEA fat course. Um, don't don't just like be Okay, I listened to a thirty minute podcast. I'm ready to stop a bleed. Go go get some training. Um, but definitely get a tourniquet and practice with it. You

can do some training yourself. You can find videos online by reputable people who are affiliated with different rescue organizations talking about and showing how to apply tourniquets, how to apply dressings, UM like that. That's available, and you can provide yourself with a useful amount of education and some

of the basics that way. Yeah, I think just to give out some resources on how you can get the education right to stop the league to org should be free almost anywhere you are and you'd like to get more training. Most community colleges have an E M T course that is very affordable. Yeah, a heat fat course can run you a couple of grand if it's not subsidized. The last time when I took my impute training, it was a thousand dollars. Yeah, I think it's less than

that now. I know people don't have many students who are going through empty training, and it's pretty affordable free often enduring California, it's often free. The other things you can do are wilderness medicine that is expensive. The American Alpine Club has grants, like more and more diverse group of people should apply because all of the outdoors could do with a lot more diversity, and encourage people to apply. Yes, so for all of these training there are grants, and

I would encourage more people to apply to them. But you, yeah, you can learn a lot for free or online. You can and should try and educate your friends. Like we're saying is some of this stuff is hard to funk up. And even if you don't feel confident, confident using stuff rescue essential with North American Rescue, Chinnook Medical there's a places where you can buy a pre made I fact

carry that around and someone else can use it. And again for talking about like the benefits of this versus the cool looking tactical gear and guns and stuff, it's entirely possible to have a bunch of military equipment that is worse than useless if you don't know how to

use it, is actively a danger to other people. If you have a bunch of medical gear and you don't know how to use it, but you have it on you, you can always shout like I have a tourniquet, I have like a combat dressing or something like, does anyone know how to use it? No one is going to make fun of you in the mike of a mass shooting for trying to hand off your gear to someone who knows how to use it. Yeah, exactly. And like you don't have to carry around a little green multi

camp out or something like. You can get a bum bag, put it in a fucking purse, like whatever, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter at all. They have a very small, very compact and like a bumbag or family pack is very handy because you can switch it from the back to the front get to all your stuff. So, yeah, you don't have to be all like tactical fucking Sammy savior.

Just be sensible and safe. Yeah, even if you don't, even if you panic or whatever and can't be the one to use it, you can still help save somebody's life by fucking having the ship, because it's it's irreplaceable when it's not there. Yeah, I would just to encourage people to not use to the elastic cornicate. Yes, don't go and buy Nils up stuff because you know you can probably pay the same price to get on that's not expired and to yeah, just be conscious buying from

those reputable people. They often have sales, especially around holidays. You can you can hold out and wait for those. Um. They were pretty good resources on Reddit as well. Actually there's a tactical medicine subreddit where people will sort of list their kits and often posted as a sale. So sometimes worth cruising that. If this is something, yeah, do some research. Um you may find right now, especially from

places like Rescue Essentials. It is harder to get combat tourniquets because the war in Ukraine has caused a shortage of the good ones. But you can still find them. You just may need to search around a little bit. Yeah. What I found was that because you've posted about this after New York shooting, was that they were out of the straight tornic it, but they were not out. They wanted to go with the pouch. Pouch cost like six or eight dollars. I know that that that's more of

an expense if you can. If you can afford that, then getting that's not a bad idea anyway, because you can put on your boat, put it and have one of my backpack hiking right, So that's definitely something that yeah, all right, well that's gonna do it for this episode. James, you want to plug anything um anarchism? Oh good, yes, absolutely, um yeah, go uh to find a hierarchy and like throw a rock at it. Yeah. Just look after other people and don't resort to the state to do it.

Be kind to each other and uh get getting MP training if you can. Oh yeah, that's a beautiful sound. This is it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. I'm Robert Evans. I'm here again with Dr James Stout. James say, hello, hi people. We are in an undisclosed location. Is that

going to get you in trouble with your immigration stuff? Yes? Yeah, okay, well let's just bleep out the rest of that, but keep the thing with me asking if it's gonna get him in trouble with this immigration officer, that'll be fine. This is a podcast that all too often, as Garrison and I say, winds up us being like here's a problem, goodbye, um and telling people about problems is important, but it's

also important to talk about solutions. Now there's been a discourse not just on the Twitter but on the subreddit for um. It could happen here repeatedly over the last few months of people talking about like how would anarchists handle things like large scale distribution of food, UM, an industrial base, you know, how how would anarchists? How would

anarchist society handle infrastructure in any meaningful capacity? Um? And I think there's kind of a wide spread idea among some people that like, you have to have intense centralization UM to do that. UM. Now, James, you are I

wasn't joking about the doctor thing. You do have a PhD. In Your specific area of specialty is the Spanish Civil War, that's right, Yeah, even more specific than that, actually, my h my very specific area of a specialty is the second republics of a period before the Civil War and really like the first week of the Spanish Civil War.

But yes, Catalonia specifically, like revolutionary Catalonia. And I guess my thing is the anti fascist Popular Olympics in six but more broadly Catalonia and Catalonia before and in the

Civil War. Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting about this period is you did have one of the fairly rare times in history where a significant number of people were living in an industrialized Ish nation UM with with anarchists under anarchist principles UM and a number of things were done in an anarchist fashion, including the production of armored vehicles, the maintenance of large amounts of agriculture, you know, power and whatnot. Um. So yeah, how how

how do how do James? Yeah, how do anarchism? Let me tell you? UM? I should start by saying like, I'm not like a big, big theory guy and more of a sort of doing things guy, um. Person. But yeah, so if we look at what we had in Catalonia right in six, the Spanish Civil War, if you're not familiar, starts on the nineteenth d N six with a coup. Right, Um,

some of this will sound familiar. Maybe you should listen to our podcast about Me and mar But we have a military uprising against a leftist democratic government that has just been elected in nineteen thirty six after two years of a right wing It's called the Biennio Negro, like the Black by any and the you know you've lived

through the Trump Ship, you understand. Um. So we have this coup that happens and in cities across Spain, the coup is largely stopped the differentiating factors we talked about this in our podcast is where the people are armed, the coup is stopped. Where the people are not armed, where the government says, then we weren't released weapons to you the coup, the coup succeeds. Right now, in Barcelona, the coup is stopped almost entirely by the anarchists, with

a little bit of help from the police. Actually, oddly right, Um, the one classic allies and the police fighting it together. I mean it is also a very different kind of situation with the I mean yeah, culturally, like how does that happen? How does that happen? Well, in Spain, you have various police forces, right, and some of them are created by the Second Republic, So they are police that exist really to protect the republic from things that would

attack it. That does not mean that they do not attack for workers, right, the Republic was often called the Republic of order because they violently put down strikes and the anarchists killed them. But in this instance they remained loyal g the cops. Yeah, that's that's a pretty steady thing. But in this instance, the Republic was under attack from the right, right, from the military, and in some towns, the police split for the military, but in Barcelona they

largely did not. Write. We have various police guards, police groups in Spain, federal and local, but the assault guards and the civil guards in Barcelona largely remained with the republic right. And it's important to maybe if we if we step back a second to explain the concept of a popular front, then we can understand them more easily, right,

And we do for more detail on this. We talk about a decent amount of this in our Behind the Insurrections episodes on the Spanish Civil War and the popular fronts, which aren't just a Spanish thing. They exist in France, they exist in a number of other countries. It's the thing that gets tried on several occasions, often successfully, at least from an electoral standpoint. Yeah, yeah, it's very successful

at this time, right. And it's important to understand that the r C, which translates his Catalan Republican left, had more or less been on popular front since nineteen thirty one, and a popular front is basically this thing we keep talking about, where what if everybody on the left could

get on the same page about stopping fascism. That's the basic idea is like, you've got your libs, you've got your commies, you've got your anarchists, you've got other weird junks of the left, and everybody agrees, let's all work together to deal with this specific right wing threat right now. Yes, yeah, exactly, like we can put our differences aside and move forward. Um. So that's what you have in the Second Republic is explicitly called the Popular Front right, and so that is

why the police in Barcelona split with the anarchists. Now, what happens in Barcelona is that the military march into town from outside of town and just pretty much get get they their ship pushed back in by the anarchist right. All around town, gunfights breakout. In one instance, um, the anarchists are able to persuade the soldiers manning a machine gun that their class solidarity is more important than their obedience to their offices, and then they turn the machine

gun on their offices and or their officers instead. Unbelievably, this exceptionally fucking cool. Right. The Spantis Civil War has all these amazing stories like that, but that that's one of my favorites. Right, doesn't happen often. It's great when it does. So what we have by the end of the first week of the Spanish Civil War is a situation where in Catalonia the city is in the hands

of the anarchists. As this meeting that happens between the President of Catalonia and the anarchists, it may or may not be apocryphal, or the exact words may not be apocypal, doesn't really matter. What happens is that the anarchists go to the President of Catalonia and they he says to them, you're in control of the city. The city's in your hands. I've been he actually the president. He was liberal, but he'd been a lawyer for the anarchist when they kept

getting fired. Um, he said, if you want me to be another foot soldier in the fire, will quit my job. I'll just be another fight. But if I can be useful to you as a politician, I will as well. Right, So it's a submission, amission and from an elected Borgeo politician that like, the city belongs to you, now, to the people, and it's up to you what we do next. Right,

what they did was they founded this. They didn't actually sort of go right, it's all anarchists right to salient anarchist groups of the CNT and the f AI, the Anarchist Federation of Iberia and the National Confederation of Labor. He didn't they didn't sort of be like, okay, you

were on anarchist control. They found out the People's Committee of Anti Fascist Militias and they said, this is an anti fascist catalonia, right, And then they began to control the industries according to the principles of anarcho syndicalism, right, which is the idea that the way to move towards a more libertarian society under moving from industrial capitalism is

through industrial unions, right. And they were extremely effective. I see this discourse a lot on Twitter or on Reddit or on places where where um, I don't want to just like dismiss people as tankies, but where we're because like you know, maybe there's people can can listen and

we can talk and we can understand each other. But where people go on the Internet to talk about politics and say that like it's impossible for anarchists to do supply chain, it's impossible for anarchists to do logistics, right, And sometimes I think they think of anarchism as like like only able to work in groups of five people

or something. There's this broad spread attitude in part because of like some social attitudes among a lot of American anarchists, certainly American anarchists who are very online that like anarchism is when you live on a farm with four of your friends, right, like that that it's very pastoral, it's anti industrial, and a decent amount of American anarchists are. It's not uncommon to find people who are like anarcho,

primitivist or whatever, um. But it is important to note that there's a very long anarchist tradition as we're talking about now that's deeply industrial. Yes, and like the anarchist a right, the anarchist symbol that we all see that comes from America. Right. The industrial workers of the world come from the United States. The raised fist popular salute comes from the IWW goes to Spain. Right, we have

this long tradition. But yeah, I think a lot of American anarchists because it's easier to live and work cooperatively in a small group somewhat detached. But what we have in Catalonia that we don't have here is the majority of the working class committed to an archo syndicalism. Right, so people return to work and work very effectively when they're not also volunteering also fighting in something like a Druti column. Right. Um, these anarchists malicious with which we

can also talk about because I think they're very interesting. Um. So for instance, one example they like, the site is the Hispaniol Sweet factory right Spain, Swiss. It's just an automobile manufacturers like the GM factory within three days after the revolution. And bear in mind that most of them have been out shooting at soldiers for most of that time. Right. Big thing that they had to deal with was the soldiers often us of churches. They would burn the churches

so like it was an extremely vicious urban battle. They were. They had converted their facility to go from producing automobiles for rich people at the time right now everyone had a car to producing technicals armored cars. Right. And you can see them if you google c Anti technicals the anti Arca because she's amazing like a Hodgepodge technicals that they had, well did these things on and they were able to turn those around and produce weapons for the front.

Another good example to see as castle pistols right to us Castle is a famous anarchist leader. Um and Askasso was killed in the first day of the revolution when they were fighting the Coupe. There weren't there wasn't much weapons manufacturing in Catalonia, right, and we're very familiar with that from our work on Miamma. And what they did was they set up a factory in Tarrassa to make weapons.

They made copies of ruby pistols actually, but then they named them after us Casso, so you can still buy them. I sure you can google them, you can find them, but these they set up a weapons actory, right, and then under anarcho syndicalist principles and the principles of sort of unions controlling this production system, unions controlling the supply chain system, which let's be honest, they do largely anyway, right, Like it's not Tim Apple who buys a circuit board

for your phone, it's someone else. This is slightly more globalized system with with Apple phones. But um, the the unions were able to set up and change their production right, not just keep doing what they were doing, but also pivot without the need for people exercising authority over each other. This important understanding because you asked like, how how would

anarchists contende industrial production? And it's like, well, have you ever had a job that it had you work in a factory on an assembly line or in some sort of other industrial way. Have you ever been a contractor and had a boss who sucked? Would it have worked better if that boss hadn't been there? That's the basic that's like the like, it's entirely possible for large groups of people to coordinate in a way that is not

a capitalist system where you're accountable to a shareholder. Right, Like, there's there's a number of different ways to do that, but there's a long tradition and and in fact, some corporations that are still around today and quite large. You can look up the mon Dragon Corporation in Spain that

have a lot of anarchist principles in their organizing. Um, not that like it's an anarchist company or whatever, but like, but there's significant, like significant amounts of anarchist theory and why that operates the way it does and has been significantly successful. Um. There's some other examples, and I think it's Brazil. Um there's a large like steel corporation and whatnot. Um,

But yeah, like there's there's it's not. There's nothing about anarchism that means you can't have a factory producing armored cars. It just means you're not producing armored cars for the profit of the Lockheed Martin Corporation or whatever. Yeah, you're producing on the cause because you are fighting in a conflict that you hope will liberate other people, right, And

that is agraby a more important motivation. And then wage labor, and certainly they in some cases increase activity, but they were able to sustain all the functions of an industrial society. And Catalonia was very industrialized, much more so than the rest of Spain, right, And that's perhaps why anarchism was so so important there. And and yeah, Verry, it doesn't require the arbitrary exercise of authority for that to happen. And like you said, there's plenty of examples of that.

I think both of us really enjoyed David Grabe's book. But this idea that we move from one phase of society to another and that necessitates a different form of political organization just isn't borne out by the historical record. And I think Catalonia is a really good example of that. Yeah.

And a further example of that is in a pretty similar time frame you're talking earlier, but not but maybe like less than twenty years earlier, you have an esther mack No and mack Nova in Ukraine, this kind of independent, autonomous anarchist society that is extremely successful in war that the Soviet Union does not exist without mock No fighting the whites. Um as as successful easy didn't stopping in

advance on on Moscow. And that's a rural that were not industrialized, and in fact their anarchism was very much based in kind of the traditional methods of organized rural societies in Ukraine. UM. And you have that a lot in other like you have a lot there are a lot of areas in which anarchism is common in rural areas and it's more of like a state socialism in industrialized areas. But you can have you also have this deep history of industrialized anarchism and there's uh, it shows

that there's a capability for anarchist principles to function with infrastructure. Yeah. And if you want to look for rural anarchism, and you can look in southern Spain, right is um If you want to look at a small case study of the anarchists of Casas Vias is a great example of that. Right, people can find I'm sure it's free online. Is a pdf now, um, But yes, it doesn't have to just exist in urban or rural society or between the two, right,

like whether Druti column went south? Okay, the drug column is an anarchist column. There are a number of other anarchist columns, but this one is the sort of the pre eminent one, the one that was most successful because they tended not to get bogged down as much in fighting in rural environments where they were not skilled, but they were extremely skilled, much more so than the military, and fighting in urban environments, right, So they were very successful.

They went to Zaragotha and then fought there. While they were there, they were collectivizing the farms, right, And I'm sure some of that collectivization was forced. I don't want to be like everything was rainbows and unicorns, but it's

a war. There's no side in a war whose handstake lane, right, Like that's not minimizing or ignoring it, it's just stating that, Like you you have to sometimes talk about the broad strokes of what's going on with without pretending to whitewash the fact that I'm certain ugly things happened there as well. Yeah yeah, and like yeah, you say, ugly things happen in war, and I think if you if you want

that not to happen. Maybe I don't know you live on the internet, but like, um, the dirt decorum then goes to it right in the seat at Madrid, which was the also the first conflict in the International Brigades, the first battle of the International Brigades fourteen. It was a very successful battle for the Republic. It was a

bottle that allowed the republic. If we look at the two battles that allow the Republic to exist, right, it's conflict in Barcelona, the battle for Barcelona, the first days of the Civil War, and it's a battle in Madrid right now. Madrid is not as much of an anarchist city, is a city with anarchism, but it's also more salient

other socialism. Um. So when the Drouty column arrives right and takes part in the combat there, because they have been successful, because they're very good urban warfare, and a lot of the people in the Druty column didn't want do Routy to go, but he decided it was important to go as part of this popular front, right to fight this this huge push of Spain's most professional soldiers. Right, and that's where Derouty. You can read. I know somebody's

working on an unlike a graphic novel about him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you should give them your money if you have some but able path. His book about Druty is very good. It's an amazing book because you turn out the line of notes and he's like, oh, yeah, this book has taken me a long time to write because I was involved in a resistance against Franco and spent twenty five years in jail, solitary confinement. But what a chad. But so you can read about Druty there, and Druty dies

in the Battle for Madrid. But it's also kind of important to look at Spain is effective anakast, Spain is effective in fighting fascism. Um, what stops it being effective? To my mind, it is not anarchist principles military organization. The other thing that was that was impressive about Druty Column was that they had embedded army loyal army officers and they listened to them and they learned from them and they said, Okay, we don't good at some stuff,

not good other stuff. We will learn. Other anarchists didn't. It didn't tend to do as well. Yeah, this is a common misconception because the anarchists are very much against hierarchy, um, which doesn't mean being against professionalism or competence, right. Like, it's the idea that like the hierarchy, For example, that led several million young boys to get machine gun in World War One because the people who were in charge of them had not learned how machine guns functioned. Um,

is was a problem. But if you've got someone who has been training their entire life as a soldier and understands very effectively how artillery functions and how machine guns function, and because they have professionalized in that, it's not against anarchist principles to listen to that person in a gunfight. Yeah, yeah, expertise, it's not a it's not Yeah, it's not incompatible with liberty, right, and so yeah, they were very willing to listen to that.

And in the same way they would be in a like. Again, these people have worked in factories, right, they understand that you don't know how to use a lathe and you exert your liberty to use a lathe, and your hand's gonna end up in a lathe when I when I go to a doctor and say, I'm am, I have gotten this horrible infected wound. What do I do about it? I am not yielding to a hierarchy. I am. I am accepting their expertise, you know. Yeah, yeah, I think

sometimes people. I think your listeners are much better informed than this Germany. But people confuse anarchism with a predilegtion for chaos and violence, and it isn't that right. It's just it's a desire to to be more free and to not be controlled. And I have a boo on your neck. And but to to wind up that thought, like the reason that Spain that the Republican Spain starts to lose is not because there are anarchists. And you will definitely see this discourse on the internet. Many people

will tell me that I'm mistaken about it. It's my fucking degree, But um yeah, I would argue that it's because the whole Western world that did quote unquote democracy is at the end of them, right, Yeah, this is like there's there's this. We talked about this a bit in the episodes we did on it. But like there's this whole argument that I'm sure you'll get into more between like the socialists, the communists, you know, and the anarchists.

But a huge part of it, probably most of it, is that, like the fascists are getting guns from other fascists and tanks and aircraft often flown by professional ash just pilots who are training for what's going to become World War two, whereas Republican Spain has some old bulk action rifles that got smuggled in through France. Yeah, and some mosens. It was sold by America to Russia, from Russia to Mexico and then from Mexico back to Spain.

Right like um, and and yeah, these old mouses are all well talks about that are rusted and they can't open the bolt after they fired them and they reload their ammunition and it's ship. But yeah, and on the other side, right, like the coup doesn't work. How does the Army of Africa get from Africa to Spain. It doesn't swim, right, how do these generals get from Africa

to Spain airlifted by other fascist nations? Right? We don't see that, right, Actually, France wanted to sell planes to the Republic and the early days of the war that Britain pretty much put the kibosh on it. And there's an interesting parallel with what you're seeing in Ukraine right now, because in Ukraine you have a republican government, um, in

a military that has a fairly wide selection. Jake camerhanters posted like a vegan at streamist who's fighting on the front lines of the because it's like, yeah, there's a whole bunch of different ideological tendencies fighting on behalf of

the broadly Ukrainian side. They're including some very nasty ones. Um, but you're kind of seeing what happens when a fascist power invades a country like that to stop a republic and democratic powers send them the most advanced weapons on the planet, right, which is all it would have taken

to roll back fascism in Spain. And then perhaps you know, there were a lot of German Italian exiles fighting in Spain, right because the Second Republic had relatively liberal, silent policies and they knew the only way to stop fashion Italy in Germany was to roll a bank in Spain and keep going right. I often have this, and I've had this as we've reput it on me an more, this weird thought of like I'll be reading about the Spanish Civil War in my office and I'll look at my

gun collection. Although if I took every if I had, if I could go back in time with everything I have in my house, all of the m O and guns, there are a couple of battles that might have been turned around by just that. Because while for one thing, because modern semi automatic arms are much more effective than bold action rifles. But just like the level of armament that those people had was um that there were eighteenth

century armies better equipped for combat. Yeah, I mean you see people with muscle loaders and stuff in the Spanish Civil War, right, And then the only place they can term for arms is the Soviet Union. Right. And they don't just get arms, they also get these generals, right, who are quote unquoite advising. They're not, they're commanding units. There's a lot of Soviet politicking at play, right, and

as much as anything. And you can read like um, like Peter Carroll's book on the Abraham Lincoln Brigades Brigade UH Battalion. Sorry, they want a brigade that will give you a better idea of like exactly how this strict authoritarian communist control really sacked the spirit out of the republic Um. And you can see this in May of seven, right, which is what which or Well writes about in his

book Right the May Day. When we see a conflict between the non Stalinist communist they weren't Trotskyist to pum right, very often portrayed to trot to Trusky himself, like you can see the letters that he wrote to them where he had thrown disagreements with them if you care to look. Um. But we see this conflict, the shooting war right between

the anarchists and the non Stalinist comunist Understanish communists. And what comes out of that is this idea among people on the libertarian left, its broad spectrum of libertarian leftism that we saw in Spain, but it's not really worth fighting for the republic or for the fascists, because either way we're just going to have the boot on our neck. Right. The secret police, I say, were like the secret police spent far, far, far more time going after anarchists in

the Republican Army than they did after spies. Oh no, really, the authoritarian left spent more of their time fighting anarchists than the fat wild. Yeah, crazy is it? And it's never happened again. We learned from it. We moved on, we've become better people. Yeah, yeah, it's great, We're we're fine now, we've fixed it. For a lot of the people fighting for the republic, Right, what are you fighting for?

And I think that's important that we remember that even in times when things are bad, right, you have to think about what things should be like you have to try and model that in what you're doing now on an economic level, when you're talking about like they come in they collectivize these farms. There's like anarchists, like the anarchists in large chunks and like in Catalonian in particular, are kind of running what at the time as a

fairly modern industrial economy. How does that? How does that work? Like, do do you have any kind of like overall state, like during the period of time where you know they had reasonable control and also weren't completely overwhelmed with the fighting, How did it function? Yeah? You kind of have a state, right, you have this sort of people's committee anti factism, militious but Uh, not really, because things things are somewhat chaotic. Rights on the states, we would maybe understand it now.

So what we have instead is is anarcho syndicalism. Right, these unions going to other unions and organizing among themselves. Right, Like you know, the steel workers need X from the miners, right, the miners, then the the tube makers need extra the steel workers and the gun company need X from the from the tube makers, right, And so organizing along industrial union levels allows things to continue. That allows the trains

and trams to continue, allows them to continue manufacturing munitions. Right. So it's it's an archo syndicalism, it is. It's a type of libertarian leftism. And then we see these collective or sort of cooperative I should say, farming arrangements, right, where again people people are farming, people are sort of joining together their industrial small holdings and then delivering those,

contributing those to the city to the war effort. And there's something, as you see in Ukraine right, relatively special that happens in these times of conflict where people are I think more willing to just step aside from the a and I think that's always been that was a thing for the Spanish working class for a long time. But to step aside from the accumulation of stuff, right from the accumulation of individual goods and wealth, and to say like, yeah, well, let's all get stuck in together.

And I think that helped to allow that to happen, helped to allow it to continue. But yeah, these organizations between unions and collectives worked, right, they functioned. You can't argue that they didn't work. The Republican Army didn't starve in a week or ran out of fuel and things, right, These these anarchist columns were able to travel from Barcelona to the Agostina and from the Agossa back to Madrid like that. That that doesn't happen if if you're incapable

of organizing. Right. So in the factories, these people had already been organizing together, right, They were on strike often right there. They knew how to. They had an existing system for organizing things because they already organized to pay strike funds. They already organized to look after other union other parts of the C and T when they were out right, they organized to have policy statements on various things. So they had these existing means to organize. They just

didn't have or alretis told people what to do. They knew how to what to go to the side, what to do. Yeah, I had this beautiful moment during the uprisings where I was in a city, UM, and I was hanging out with members of a medical collective and the building that they were in there was a couple of thousand square feet of they were producing by assembly line kim wipe's for clearing mace out of your eyes. UM.

They were producing like I fax medical kits. They had racks of body armor that had been donated or purchased with donated funds UM. And it was all it was a substantial amount of equipment that was being and and respirators and stuff that was being organized as symboled, put together, UM distributed, putting people's hands, put in the hands of people who were going out and utilizing it on a regular basis. UM. And it was being done like with within the principles of kind of like like a number

of things can be organized that way. It's it is it is handling the collection, the distribution um of of of equipment and the collection disbursement of funds like for potentially like thousands and thousands of people. Um, that's perfectly doable under anarchist principles, and anarchists have done that kind of thing a number of times in the world. Yeah, Like if you look at the example of the soup

kitchens right at proletarian dinas or restaurants they called them. Right, So in in Barcelona, a Madrid, they took over the writs right and and sourced food from rural anarchists to to feed people, right, rather than saying like, oh you know you have to buy feard, you have to buy food. You have to buy food. You come here and anyone can eat if you're hungry, right, and yeah, you see people doing that. Look at the unit that we we

spoke about Miama, right, the Crenny generation c Army. They those guys they didn't have like you know, no one was wearing rank right now one was a general or a captain or or a sergeant. Right, they talked and to our point before by expertise, some people we found out are the person we were talking to, Zara who was who was killed. Um was seen as a commander by people because of what they wrote about him after

he died, but he never talked about himself that way. No. In fact, he told us, right that if some people knew more, they've been in the fight for longer, they knew the terrain, and then we listen to them and

they have a bit more way in that conversation. But we all just decide together what we what we want to do m and that that works, right, Like, because those guys were very well respected right among the the anti coup forces in Mihama because of their willingness to fight, their effectiveness, and those guys have a good battlefield record

against the government troops. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, And like it wasn't just again, like it's not just five guys fighting, right, it's also they were able and and in Mihama we still see this with like the underground and they called the Development Committee LS and the people who are they were the people who did the shield walls and that

kind of thing. And people will be familiar with the George Floyd uprising for them, they went underground of their developing ways to make weapons now, right, so they're the people you'll see making three D printed guns. So the people you'll see making improvised explosive devices, fertilized bombs, working out how to make handmade to two rifles we've seen

right like and again they don't. They don't need someone in charge for that, right And in times of difficulty we revert to taking care of one another and getting things done. We we don't contrary to I think what what we're led to believe, sort of revert to we don't need like a strong leader, dear leader. We are capable of looking after one another outside of authority in

the state. Yeah. And it also stands to the point that like accepting the authority of someone with expertise in certain situations, like the fundamental way in which effective military is organized tends to involve the existence of an n c O corps, right you, Every military that is good at fighting has it in c O core. Part of why Russia has acquitted itself so unbelievably poorly and the fighting in Ukraine is that that that does not functionally

exist in the Russian military. Um. It is absolutely the basic idea of an n c O COREP is that with among fighting units, there should be dudes whose job and I say dudes in the non gendered sense, there should be people whose job is to make the functioning of that fighting unit be their whole life, and they stay at that job for a long time. They don't just like move up and ship. They're just they're there

to keep that unit functioning. Um. And from the perspective of like someone who is an anarchist, I mean as an anarchist who's been shot at a number of times. When I'm hanging out and there's like some grizzled ass fucking veteran in the unit I'm embedded with, I'm gonna do whatever that fucker says, right absolutely, because you're crazy,

not too, because that's just good sense. It's the same thing as like if you're in deep bush or whatever with somebody who knows wilderness survival and they tell you don't eat that plant, or they tell you know, this is a bad place to camp for this reason or whatever. You listen to them, like that's again, and you know, factories function the same way. Having been on building sites, they function this same way. Somebody tells you don't do that it's a bad idea, and they clearly have been

doing it more than you. You listen to them. That's not accepting that you have a boss. That's accepting that you have people who are more experienced and competent in certain things. Yeah, And if you look at what ineffective armies sometimes have, it it's it's it's it's in the office of core. Right, it's people who are in charge but maybe you ought not to be, but it's because of their status with their wealth or something else. Right.

And you see like very effective fighting in the anarchist units, right, with men and women, and actually people who would were non binary as well, or people who would call non binary didn't call themselves out then. Um, but um, we see that because they were willing to elect officers, right, but then listen to them. And it wasn't it was listened to not obey, right, But but that was an

extremely effective way of doing things. Yeah. I was having a conversation with a body of mine who was a marine and saw some very heavy combat in Iraq years ago about like the way in which certain anarchist units had worked over time, and talked about the fact that

they elected their leaders. And he was like, well, we didn't do that obviously, but there were people you knew you shouldn't listen to and people you did, and you understood who you wanted calling the shots when bullets were flying, right, like, regardless of what the actual hierarchy was. It's just like you know, in the U. S. Military, you have a platoon leader who was an officer who has been to college, and you have a platoon sergeant, and they do somewhat

different things. But every reasonable person who has interfaced with those units will agree that like any good platoon leader, even though they're an officer and a higher rank, it is gonna listen to whatever the fucking platoon sergeant says because they've been doing that job a lot along. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't right, and the arrogance will find you out during it in

a difficult situation pretty quickly. So yeah, I think it's important to look to look at those anarchists militaries, right. And then there are lots and lots of accounts of the of the anarchists and the Spanish Civil War. Julian Casanova's book is one of my favorites that people want to read one and married book Junichurse has written to the Spanish anarchists as well, so they're there are lot of books you can read about, and some of them

micro case studies are really fun. Right, if you want to look at like what is it like to live on an anarchist farm in ninety six in rural Catalonian Yale or something like that, like, and I would encourage people to read them with an open mind, and I understand that like the world was different than than it is today, but to look at those historical examples and realize that, like, what people were doing them was fundamentally

the same. Right, they were trying to take care of each other and make the world better for their children, and they didn't want the boot on their neck, and they were all prepared to work together to do that, and that that was an extremely functional way. And what didn't work for them was being controlled by people from the SO Union who maybe didn't understand their struggle because

they often volt it wasn't worth fighting anymore. And that's true for communists to actually, right, Like if you look at the American communists who went and fought, and they were overwhelmingly Communists who went and fought for the for the International Brigades. The International Brigades were not the public's army per se. They were the comm Interns army. And if there is one group of people who was hated

more than anyone else. It was commissars, right, these people who were sort of there to enforce this very strict interpretation of what they saw as Marxist Leninism. So even those people right who were communists might have had a more slightly more libertarian understanding, didn't really take that well to being bossed around and lost a lot of their wills what they were fighting for because of that. Right. Cecil Lbis book is another really good book about that.

If you want to read that, well, I think that's going to bring us to an end here, James, you have a book about the Spanish Civil War that you should probably plug here. Yeah. Yeah, it's called The Popular Front and the Learner Olympics. It's about the anti for Olympics that were held as an alternative to the Barslona Olympic. Tics explains how the Popular Front used sport to build an anti fascist identity in Catalonia, and it used sport

to bring together anti fascists from around the world. The Olympics actually happened on the nineteenth of July, which is the same data civil War startists, and they never they never occurred, but many of the people who went to take part in the Olympics, decided to stay and fight, and so that's what my books about. It's quite expensive and you can I understand that people can't afford it. That's fine. I keep saying I'm working on another book,

but I'm not working very hard or very fast. Yeah. Yeah, look it up and someone's probably bootlegged it. Actually, the book is often free at universities and other libraries. So yet to go to your library and I'll see them to get it. And uh where else can people find you? On the internet? At James Stout on Twitter, same thing on Patreon. Those are my two main things. You can find my writing a muck rack to google my name. Yeah, and again help us, Daniel, please bleep that out for

the sake of James immigration cases. And yeah, that's good. That's that's an episode. Yeah. Despite it being past midnight, you can still see through the dense forest. The moonlit sky combined with the urban light pollution, make traversing the messy woods easier than you thought. You relieve that you don't have to use your head lamp, which could have drawn unwanted attention. The company of a few of your queer friends makes the walk through the confusing woods less intimidating.

Dressed in gray and camo, you make your way through overgrown trails and hop over a small creek. Save for the occasional train, all you can hear is the croaking of frogs and chirping of cicadas, crickets, and grasshoppers. The night air you breathe through your mask is noticeably cleaner than the air from downtown that you spent months riding in during not even counting the tear gas in the air. As you and your pals slowly trek through the forest,

your feet squish into the grassy, wet ground. You avoid the area's caked and clay and stick to the cover of trees, brush and the soft wetland. After a short walk and with only a few wrong turns, you reach an artificial break in the embrace of the forest. You look at your masked up friends, and for a brief moment during the moonlight night, you can't quite tell who's who. Which is a good thing, you suppose. Everyone exchanges glances, but no one says anything. Everyone already knows what to do.

As you approach the barren mound of dirt, you get angry a jarring crack in the beauty and mysterious allure of the forest. You're no longer in the woods. You're at the site of destruction, a clear cut that seeks to expand its radius. Without the tree coverage, you can see the harsh blue light of LEDs in the distance. There among the mounds of dirt and fallen trees are several unguarded machines of destruction. With no cell phones in sight.

You and your friends get to live in the moment your agenda becomes the sound of shattering glass in the cold night. Hammers meet windows and serrated knives cut the inner tubing of bulldozers and excavators. The undoing of the mechanical monsters that have violated the forest has begun. No tool of the evil doers goes unharmed. Rattling cans of spray paint leave antagonistic and proclamatory messages with rebellious hiss for those who intend to continue destroying the forest. Defend

the forest, no cops city, no Hollywood dystopia. In little time, the light, pollution, moonlight, and distant LEDs are accompanied by a bright orange blaze emanating from the machines, lighting up the area around the sad mound of dirt. A splash of gasoline acts as the extension of the blood that fuels the burning fire in your hearts that became a light with the rage felt at the sight of the

decimated woods. By the time the fire department took notice, you've already disappeared into the night, like a specter, fading like the curling black smoke that drifted into the midnight sky. As you exit the forest, you go about as if what happened tonight never did. You never tell a soul, You never talk about it with your masked up queer friends, since they were never there either. Details fade in your memory like a dream, but deep down you still remember

the feeling, the peak moment of true freedom. When the fire engulfed the machines. It was upon broken, uneasable machines that the fires were extinguished, laying incinerated the excavators and bulldozers who are rendered immobile worthless. Piles of trash. Fires are only temporary and can be undone. But the connection between those who live in a forest, who breathes air, and who drink its water filtered through its wetlands, is

not so easily broken. Any further attempts that destroying the forest, we met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us, and we'll be here long after. You and your friends, among many other anonymous strangers will see to that. Welcome. Took it up in here a podcast about things falling apart and how we can put them back together, And today we'll be spending that entire spectrum. I'm Garrison Davison. The story I just read isn't merely

a fictional one. It was inspired by over a year's worth of communicators and report backs coming out of the Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia. So excuse the pretentious poetry of anarchists and speak. In early one, it was real to the public that mainly four entities, namely the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, de Cab County, and Black Hall Studios, had dual plans to devastate two

complementary sections of the South Atlanta for Rest. The City of Atlanta and Police Foundation plans are to turn the area of the forest known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, into the largest police training facility in the country, complete with a mock city helipad and bomb range. Meanwhile, Entrenchment Creek of a public forest land will be traded by de Cab County to Black Hall Movie Studios to clear cut the land on which they plan to build America's

largest sound stage. This project lies at a horrific intersection of police militarization, gentrification, copaganda, and exasperating the local effects of worsening climate change by clear cutting hundreds of acres

of forest. In the last year, activists, ghosts like saboteurs, and open source researchers have vultraals together into an anonymous and diverse movement that's brought the plan to destroy the forest out of the shadows of secretive, backdoor corporate deals and into the public spotlight, forming the Defend the Atlanta Forest move mint that's consistently been able to get ahead of police and media by breaking news about the forest destruction plans and setting the terms of engagement and what's

deemed as acceptable direct action, all well being able to foster relationship with the woods that they are defending. I've been really interested in this project since I heard about it last summer. Along with the intersection of police militarization and climate change on the flip side. There's this unique intersection of urban city protest and classic forest echo defense. The mix of tactics have produced a movement unlike anything

really seen before here in the States. Not to get ahead of myself, but ever since last fall when the Atlanta City Council approved the plan to build the largest police training facility in the country, dubbed cops City by activists due to the plans to build a mini version of Atlanta within the facility to practice urban combat. But I figured that I would eventually find myself inside the forest.

So this last April, when an opportunity presented itself to travel to Atlanta, stay in the wood and talk with some forest defenders, I couldnot pass it up. I packed a tent, sleeping bag, and some microfilms and made my way to Georgia. The first thing I noticed upon arriving in Atlanta is that when they say Atlanta is a city in a forest, they really do mean it. The amount of continuous tree coverage throughout the city was astonishing, and that's coming from someone who lives in Portland, Oregon.

As it turns out the city of Atlanta actually has the highest amount of tree canopy of any city in the United States. On top of the citywide tree coverage, there is the South River Forest, which makes up the largest continuous section of woods and serves as Atlanta's first line of defense in the face of rapidly accelerating climate change. The forest in southeast Atlanta is said to function as

the lungs of the city. The canopy offers shade and traps carbon, with some of the more heavily forted areas acting as wetlands that filter rain water and prevent flooding by collecting runoff. It's Marsh is one of the last breeding grounds for a lot of amphibians in the region, as well as an important migration site for wading birds, and serves as a home to a lot of local wildlife. Nearly five acres of this forest is under threat by

the Atlanta Police Foundation and Black Hall Studios. If plans succeed to develop this precious strip of forest into the massive police compound and adjacent movie sound stage, the entire metropolitan area will face much harsher effects of climate change, including worsening floods, higher temperatures, and less clean, tree filtered air, Not to mention the increased police militarization and gentrification. Speaking of the second thing I noticed once I arrived in

Atlanta is how much gentrification is currently underway. The amount of hideous five of our one apartments that are being built was impossible to overlook. And as we'll see, the way police feed off gentrification, which feeds off the corporate and movie making sides of Atlanta, is not merely a coincidence.

Last fall in of view to Jamal from the Atlanta chapter of the Community Movement Builders, a Black lad collective of community residents and activists serving poor, working class Black communities. They focus on responding to encroaching gentrification, displacement, and over policing. Here's what Jamal had to say on the intersection of issues owering around the Cops City and defend the Forest project. Just to piggyback off of that, I think it's extremely

important for us to recognize the connections between all these things. Right, Like, Cops City is a perfect blend of UM environmental justice issues, uh just flat out racism, police brutality, and also gentrification. Right, it's not a it's not a mistake that they're building this Cops City right at this moment when UM Atlanta

is also becoming the for the first time. And I don't know how many decades, um non no longer majority black city because neighborhoods like pittsburgher we're located out of and all across Southwest and West Atlanta have becoming more like the black people have been being displaced from me,

from our communities, right UM. So a perfect example is that with my organization, Community Movement Builders, we UH purchased we've we've been doing work in the pittsburghighborhood for a while, but we purchased a community house in the neighborhood about six years ago. Right at that point, we purchased the house for fifty thou dollars, right UM. Pittsburgh has been historically uh poorn working class community. It was uh it was founded as a black community, which is different from

a lot of other other neighbors in Atlanta. Was founded as a black community from UH freed Africans UM who were trying to escape some of the more rural areas of the South and found work in Haven in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta. And it's been a poor and working class black community ever since. But now UM, because of the gentrification has been going on. How a house just sold, maybe about a month and a half ago for seven dred and fifty thousand dollars, So the person's

house at fifty thousand dollars six years ago. A house just sold, um, just a few walks away from that house for seven fifty thousand dollars. Now, it's not every house is selling for that amount, but that just shows you the rate of gentrification that's happening. And then and we know that cops are on this necessary part of being able to defer to displace people from gentrifying communities.

They play an integral role within gentrification. Yeah, I'm just wondering, does any of you have anything like even like anecdotal experience with like basically Marvel and Men, tons of other industries like invading Atlanta. How is that like affected specifically, Like you already talked about how how you know, increased the increase in the film industry and other things. Has

you know, has made more gentrification? But like, how has that even affected just like like other types of stuff, including like policing, Like has has this type of like growth um affected people or people you know in in other ways? Yeah? Absolutely. So I think a lot of this kind of got I won't say it got started, but a lot of it went even uh you know, escalated when Tyler Perry Studio opened up in East Point. Um, and a lot of people, you know, we're praising. It's like, oh,

look at this. Uh you know, it's a black man. I was able to move down and be able to start this thing within Hollywood. But no, it's all that is one of the things that also spurred the gentrification in East Point, which is you might not be familiar with Atlanta, but East Point is like literally right next to Atlanta, so it's a lot of it's it's really close proximity. And so that also spurs over to the gentrification here in the city as well. Um. Property values

have gone up since that point, even more. Um. Even my tax bill has gone up a thousand dollars a year per a year um for the past like three years. Right. UM. So it's yeah, it's it's definitely we definitely see the effects and you know, and just talking to you know, we do we do do a lot of work around gentrification. UM. And I think this is in tandem with you know, because we have COVID nineteen out here now with the eviction moratorium which has now been you know, denied um

with by the Supreme Court. Um. But even when there wasn't vision moratorium, there were still people that were getting invaded from their homes. And I think all of this in tandem when Atlanta specifically has already been going through a gentrification crisis and um with COVID nineteen where people have been losing jobs left and right, or not been able to go to their jobs that they've had um

and loo and having us salaries cut. People have been hurting, and the response from the city has not too been that has not been to provide more resources to people. It's been too fund cops city to be able to get more police out who are the ones that execute the actual evictions themselves? And I think it all, it all, it all is connected in that in that type of way.

I arrived in Atlanta a few days before the Muscogee Summit, a weekend event where the original indigenous people from the area of the South River or for the native name of the said land, the Ulandie Forest, traveled back to their ancestral homeland to discuss indigenous environmental philosophy what land

back and rematreation means in theory and practice. Several Indigenous authors were present and led workshops, including Indigenous feminist, scholar and community planner Laura har Joe from the University of Oklahoma, author of Spiral to the Stars Muskogee Tools of Futurity, and Dr Daniel Wildcat of the Haskell Indian Nations University, who wrote the book Read Alert Saving the Planet with

Indigenous Knowledge. In the less academic portions, there were forest walks, community meals, and singing of old Muscogee songs, including ones that are performed two centuries ago during the Trail of Tears. Muskogee Creek attendees also gathered around a sacred fire to perform a stomp dance, recreating rhythms heard and sensed in the forest long ago, to rekindle the relationship with the

Earth and connect back to the ancestral presences. This was the second ancestral migration the Muskogee Creek title members have done since being forcibly removed two centuries ago and displaced to Oklahoma. The first one took place just this last November, and both times the particular section of land they gathered on in transparant Wee Park is one of the areas

under threat of being ecologically destroyed and clear cut. Over the course of a few days during my week long stay, I sat down in the woods to record with two groups of forest offenders, one group sitting around a campfire at night next to a high security child prison and the other group during the sunny bird chirping day outside the Black Hole Studios movie plot. So if you hear campfires or bird sounds in the background, just embrace our

forest punk aesthetic up front. I think it's really important to first talk about the history of the land that is under threat, because, on top of issues regarding gentrification and the plans of this police training facility as a response to the George Floyne Uprising and the false manufactured crime wave media narrative intended to rejusify American policing in the wake of the uprising, that the fact that the Atlanta Police Foundation shows this plot of land in particular

is particularly gross. The history of this small section of land in the South River Watershed is deeply scarred and desperately needs time to heal. There are centuries of oppression and state violence tied to this particular spot of land, and now we're seeing that trying to be continued with this Cops city plan. Local tribes were expelled for millions of acres in the southwest region of what is now known as the United States during the early decades of

the eighteen hundreds. Forced removal and displacement of the Muskogee Creek people began in the region in eighteen twenty one through a series of treaties, which then eventually led to a quote melee of removal. More on that from one of the force defenders I spoke to, and I'll note we'll be using a mix of voice distortion and voice actors combined with other audio distortion to help protect the identities of the forced defenders that I spoke to against

possible state repression. So enjoy our our our cool voice distorted audio. Yeah. I think it's important because a lot of our comrades musk of the comments and extended relatives that are identified as Muscogee that we're pushed off as lands in the early eighteen hundreds. They a lot of

them did not go quietly in the night. I think that's important to remember because I feel like a lot of people are just like the Trail of Twos or like they were pushed out, but they're they fought against being pushed out, and then when a lot of them were pushed out or killed off, then it was used to incur story and house mostly black people. So we're taking it back. That is most of the people that I have seen involved. It is a diverse group of people.

It's not just like white anarchists in the woods. That is a misconception. There's all kinds of folks, which really I think is interesting and makes the struggle unique and important. But there is also a lot of like white anarchists that are using their privilege to help take the land back for our comrades that want to see it back,

and it feels things feel like they're in a good way. Um, there's good relations that are existing between like the anarchists and indigenous alliance down here, where like obviously no one person speaks and represents any one group, but the alliances that we do have are very informed of the variety of activities that have happened down here, including the arsons of machinery, and we were positively told to quote unquote keep on going, so that feels empowering and it feels beautiful,

and it feels important to note that some of the comrades that have ancestral ties to this area such a dark history and they're still here. Is something that they're mentioning, and they're excited the people that were close to obviously they're not close to all of them. They're excited that people are choosing to use their privilege to help make

sure these facilities don't get built. Continuing with the scarred history of this land, shortly after the lands of the South River Forest were stolen from Muskegee Creek people, plots were distributed to white settlers in the Fourth Georgia Land Lottery of eighteen twenty one, which made available landlots of two hundred and two point five acres. Many of these white settlers established slave plantations on which cotton and other

crops were produced through slave labor. Through archival records, we know of at least twelve plantations that were on this land that existed from the eighteen forties up until eighteen sixty five, and then in the early nineteen hundreds, the very same land started being used as a prison farm,

now known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. The Old Atlanta prison Farm was originally bought in nineteen seventeen to incarce rate prisoners of war, but this plan was abandoned within two years and the land was converted into a prison farm where inmates including moonshiners, public drinkers, and just loiterers and really anybody were sent to and forced to perform unpaid agricultural labor. This shift from plantations to prison farm marks the rebranding of slavery into for profit prison labor.

This labor in fluded washing cows and arsenic laden water, which led to the early deaths of countless prisoners. The facility ran up until in which it was shut down, and then two child prison facilities were put on the adjacent land, and the Atlanta Police Department already currently uses sections of this hollow ground as a firing range tear gas canisters and bullet casings from found throughout the forest. From where on that, here's some other parts that might

sit down with the forest offenders. And then I guess like fast forwarding a little bit from this land where indigenous people lived to the prison farm um, and then how this has like a long incarstral history and history of being tied to policing, both with the child prison that's still here, the prison farm, and then now trying to build this militarized training facility that just like continuing on this legacy of state violence, which is like other

massive aspect in terms of like they're trying to take this very like land that needs to heal from the centuries of violence and just tear it all down and build more of that. Um. I know, there's like there's the firing range that we've been hearing shots from. Uh, there's it's like just this never ending thing. It just like just keeps happening. It's a pretty weird, surreal experience. Makes me feel like we're all like an endangered species living in like the last part of the forest and

fucking South Atlanta. I remember, and I was explaining to one of my relatives, are like I was reading the internet about the family Atlanta forest and not sure quite what's all going on, but sounds like you're living in hell there between two different chapters and Sons of High Security was as security, a large massive power land cut and old Prettison farm and two sides of the road at least three different police firing rangers and always wider

treatment plant. The doubles as a firing range and super training facility for the police. Another interesting facet is this particular piece of land where they're trying to build uh Top City is like a really important turning point in history of slavery in the US. And like this is where a lot of things went from like shadow slavery um and transitioned into what we now have as prison slavery.

And as we're sitting here on what was literally a prison farm, even people in pretile detention were here and used for unpaid labor, even people who had not been

convicted of any time. And so it's kind of like it's like I like very like visible, like Dane on the like history of of like what you used racist policing, but it's harder to cover up and harder to like pink wash um and so like even as there is like a place where children are locked in cages over they're not yards from me, so too, is this a place where people were brought for being used as slaves and like died and were buried in unmarked graves? Yeah, Um,

can I talk a little bit more about that? This was the transition, This is like the intermediitary intermediate transition between child slavery and mind by prison slavery. UM. And it was like especially horrific, Like there is two lakes on the property, but where at one point said to be filled with arsenic um where beyond slates were not only watching cattle um with the arsenic to remove them like bugs, but also in those in those lakes and

like suffering horrible diseases and like dying from this. The reason they present, I'm actually that closed down was because of the amount of people going in and out of the reason why this city proached to close it down was because of the amount of UM people being sent to the hospital week after weekenday after day, like a fish, like actually overloading the medical system in the area. UM. That's like publicly recorded information. UM they closed down like

the eighties or nineteen nineties UM. And like during the Civil War, escaped prisoners from here would be are sorry, escaped slaves are from here would be h like going across battle lines and feeding information to a Union side in order to like serve their informs of liberation. I mean we like this land also exists right next to a major or like major road that serves as a car serral center. Um. It has not both like the Metro h reentry Metro Reentry facility, the Metro Youth Detention Center,

and like a couple other buildings. Um uh. And like it's not just like the eighty lands of a plan to clear cut here, it's also the like three hundred that they plan to continue with the car serial legacy

of terror and horror. Um from going from like chattel slavery and indigenous displacement to um be inter intermediary UM poor that the prison firm was, to this new legacy of like cover up of it all and then and yeah, the continuation of this land being used by the state, by police, by um all these like oppressive groups to further their causes. A really interesting aspect of des and for going to prison farm and then police trying to

now turn it into a militarized police training facility. UM yeah. Yeah. So first I think, um, you know, this is mimiscogy land and it's during the Scurgy summit. It's cool, you know, miscry people have any were displaced for the most part,

and there trying to participate in this migration back. And so they're on the land right now, and it's been very special to have them UM here and to be able to express solidarity and like work together with them has been really amazing and learned a lot and it's

yet it's cool to understand that. And you know what you're saying, that interaction of like UM settler colonialism displacing people UM, like early slavery, prison slavery, and this this specific land has always been UM a place that I feel like has been almost like the vanguard of how like policing has and like such a settler colonialism, UM has experimented with how to reproduce itself in sustainable ways UM with like just in general domestication of humans and

the domestication animals. And that's like what APD is trying

to do on this land. And it's a direct reaction to the George Floyd uprising, which caused a cry assist and policing is it actually been back with serious power, and so they're trying to figure out and experiment with ways of reproducing policing for the future in the exact same way that when slavery took a serious owl, they said, how can we recuperate and how can we reproduce this in a way that's sustainable, and that why we have a modern prison system that lives on to this day.

And that's why they're realizing as Pepper gaining and threatening it. Oh, we have to do something good and this lamp has always been a site for doing that. If it's they're an keep tracking. Atlanta is a heavily corporate city. It's been dubbed the Silicon Valley of the South by people who surely must be insufferable to be around, but it is true that Atlanta and Georgia's economic policies have attached a swath of corporations to either start to grow or

migrate to the city. It's home to Coca Cola, Delta Airline, Bans Ups, home Depot, Chick fil A, and multiple media conglomerates, as well as having headquarters for like Google and other tech companies. As well, the city serves as a massive transportation hub. In fact, Atlanta the city started off as a train hub, and now it boasts the world's busiest airport. Recent tax credits for the film industry have made Atlanta and Georgia the new hot place to shoot high budget

Hollywood movies. There's a whole effort to make the city effectively the new Hollywood. But like all economic growth, uh, this comes with some heavy consequences, most often affecting those at the bottom. Atlanta is also the most surveilled city in the United States and the city with the most wealth and equality. All the corporations and film industry stuff moving to Atlanta has indeed created jobs, but many of

those jobs go to workers from out of state. On average, less than one third of new film industry jobs have gone to people who were already living in Atlanta. The result of this out of state economic migration boosts cost of housing, cost of living at Bush's lower and middle class residents of Atlanta out of their neighborhoods, disproportionately pushing

out to black people. And this is all while the increasing corporatization and gentrification is actually pitched as quote unquote providing opportunities to the city's black population, which is certainly something. Because the state of Georgia has the fourth largest incarceration rate in the entire world. If you put a U. S States on the same level as like every single other country, the other top three states or countries with

the highest incarceration rates are Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. So yeah, but Georgia's number four. Those in Atlanta's top income bracket make nearly twenty times those who are at the bottom. And if you map the wealth disparity onto the layout of the city, it's a one to one match for the city's old segregation lines. The entire city runs on these like reignite newliberal policies, but under this mask of woke identity politics. And who enforces that wealth and equality

and gentrification. That's right, police, which leads us to the origin of this plan for so called cops City. I'm gonna quote a crime Thing article that came out last month called the City in the Forest, Reinventing Resistance for an age of climate crisis and police militarization, which recommend you guys read I'll I'll have it in the habit in the source notes. But yeah, here's the quote from Crime Thing quote. The government of Atlanta has developed a

few tentative solutions to the dilemmas they face. To follow through on their commitments to their backers, city politicians need to continue sacrificing public assets on the altar of the economy in order to attract more major investors to the region,

especially the film industry and technology companies. To maintain control in a period of rapid displacement and rising cost of living, with chronic tension between the conservative state government and the liberal city administration, they need to funnel more resources towards law enforcement throughout the region. Finally, to appease the increasingly rebellious lower classes, they to frame this process of restructuring and repression in the language of black empowerment, social justice,

and progressivism. The bureaucrats are not in a good position to handle this. Decades of tax cuts and deregulation have created infrastructural failures and breakdowns of all kinds, among other concerns. Atlanta lost the bid for the second Amazon headquarters because the public transit one of the least funded in the United States. It was not even operable when the corporate

scouts came to visit at the same time. It's precisely the low taxes and absence of regulation that attract capital to the state of Georgia, so cultivating a social democratic governing strategy may now be impossible without creating a flight

of wealth to other parts of the country. It seems that the current plan is to give over as many public contracts and resources to private developers as possible, to allow them to incur the costs of social disintegration and anger, and to use police to control the blowback, and to use images of Martin Luther King Jr. To preempt any meaningful resistance. Thus, the plan to transform a wild space into a police training compound is dubbed the Institute for

Social Justice. That's right, the plan to make the country's biggest militarized police training facility. They're planning to call it the Institute for Social Justice. Ignore the bomb range and uh urban combat mock city section anyway. Um here is

Jamal again from the community movement builders. I think one thing that's also really significant is that so my city council person for his District twelve, Joyce Shepherd, um District twelve is where Pittsburgh is, where Summerhill is, where several of poor and black working class neighborhoods of Atlanta are located. There are also the areas where they're the most gentrifying areas of the city as well, and it's in and

city Council District twelve. Joyce Shepherd she is the person who brought this proposal forward, right, she is over the quote unquote public safety. Um, you know they aren't keeping it safe quote unquote public safety. Um, you know, commission and Um, she brought this forward. And she has been since she's been in office, she has been a even uh, she's been a champion of gentrification. Right, she's been a

champion of over policing as well. Um. And I think it's it's a tie between even our city council or even our representation has in their interests of being able of of gentrifying the city because that gives them more tax stars. It gives them a way to be able to say that they are decreasing their crime rates except and all those all these different types of things when it's really just dep deplacing poor folks. Um. And so I think that's an important about talking about how this

kind of was established. That's an important topic to be able to address, is that even and she's a black woman, right so even um, you know, even how like when people when when people might you think they might be in representing your interests, when they get to be in these positions, we have to recognize that they are not

necessarily for the people. In the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising against police violence, the city responded by striking down any police reform measures and restricting opportunities for republic input,

while increasing the police budget and upping citizens surveillance. On a national level, a media manufacturing crime wave narrative has been used to rejuify American policing in the wake of the uprising, and the City of Atlanta is using that narrative while wrapping their increased militarization plans in a nice woke social justice package, i e. A militarized police training

compound being dubbed the Institute for Social Justice. Heading up this effort is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a nonprofit police advocacy organization that claims to have quote united the business and philanthropic community with the Atlanta Police Department.

It's a It's backed by an array of Atlanta area corporate donors, including Delta Airlines, Upstrick fil A, Cox Enterprizes, which owns the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which is like the city's biggest newspaper, and they were formally formally backed by Coca Cola. They Coca Cola dropped out this last November. A leak promo video for the Institute for Social Justice details some of the features of the Atlanta Police Foundations quote world class training campus. With an estimated cost of

ninety million dollars. The space will provide a place for recruiting training, mid career education, and practice with new technology and equipment for police and fire department personnel. The renderings show the campus will house a quote mock city for real world training, a canine training center, and forty horse

stalls for police horses. Twelve acres of forest land are slated to be converted into an emergency vehicle operations course, and the whole compound will be located across three hundred and the acres of the old Atlanta Prison Farm, which is a city owned but technically outside of city limits, located just east of the city in unincorporated Dekapp County.

The Police Foundation has proposed funding the training center through a public private partnership, which will leave taxpayers to pay an estimated thirty million dollars for this out of city police training facility one, which is one third of the early estimated cost. According to the land Use Ordinance. The property will be leased to the Police Foundation by the city for ten dollars a year for fifty years. It's almost four acres of forest land for ten dollars a year.

The grund lease will quote provide that the city will be able to have input or approval on the stages of construction along with the development of the property, and will allow waving of certain code requirements. Such a facility would be three times the size of the New York Plice Department's training facility and four times the size of the l a p d s and worth noting that the NYPD and l a p D are the two largest police departments in the country, while Atlanta is the

only the nineteenth largest. Yet they'll have a facility that's like three times the size of New York's. According to the Mayor of Atlanta during the time of the facility's announcement, the massive training complex would quote raise morale among officers

and hopefully bring more recruits to the department. And importantly, the whole project was initially supposed to be totally under wraps, approved through backdoor deal making the social justice something socialist justice I believe in the promo video specifically, which was not likely even a public release. And this is like very much designed to be under the table, pushed through as fast as possible of the public, whereas it really

supposed to know about it. The videos that existed were only meant to be UM the Sponsors Boardnembers unders of the Atlantic Police Foundation UM and MIGHT. The Police Foundation, unlike most like police unions, is a foundation made to final corporate money into the handsOn police. The Cops City side of things is just one part of the Defend

the Forest project. The other big aspect of this is pushing back on the movie studio Black Hall from being able to clear cut more forced to expand their sound stage. Projects shot on their current lot include A Godzillak of Monsters, Venom, der Van Hansen, HBO's Lovedcraft Country, and Amazon Primes The

Tomorrow War. On the east side of the forested land, the part that's referred to as Entrenchment Creek Park was bought by Hondy Booko founder Arthur Blank and the early two thousands with a plan to combine UH that section of land with three acres at the Prison Farm to create a five hundred acre park, a project that never came to fruition. UH and now the park is currently

under control of the Cat County. On top of the heat insulation and air filtering that the tree canopy provides, Entrenchment Creek plays a crucial role in maintaining the South River Watershed, being a partial wetland and marsh that mitigates flooding in South Atlanta. Quoting that crime thing article again, quote, the plundering of public assets from the benefit of a movie company and real estate mogul is described as an opportunity to create quote good jobs for local Atlanta's, not

as a criminal expropriation of infrastructure. The clear cut that Blackall Studio has planned to trade in exchange for a section of forest is to be renamed Michelle Obama Park unquote. So yeah. That also clearly demonstrates the type of gentrification wrapped in this nice woke package by doing this really sketchy land swap and then building a park on it

and calling at Michelle Obama Park cool stuff, guys. Black All Studios is currently a hundred and fifty acre complex about ten minutes south of downtown, and they seek to add over half a million square feet of sound stage two hundred thousands square feet of offices UH four hundred twenty thousand square feet for warehousing square feet of catering space, according to a filing made through the States Development of

Regional Impact Program UH. The d r I s are filed when the projects size is large enough that it's likely to impact the infrastructure of neighboring communities. The De Cab County Board of Commissioners in October voted to approve the land swap deal with Blackhe Studios. As a part of the planned expansion, the county would give approximately forty acres mostly wooded land around the South River Forest, and then in turn, Black Studios would give the county around

fifty acres of nearby land as well. The project has faced some legal and construction issues ever since then, and

we'll discuss the details of those shortly. Also worth noting that Black Hall Studios was sold to a private equity firm in l A just last year, and this last February announced that they purchased another one thousand and five hundred acres in Newtown County, Georgia, which is about forty miles east of downtown Atlanta UH, and they plan to shoot productions there for an upcoming quote action oriented streaming

service dubbed black Hall Americana, which sounds horrible. Um, here's a here, here's a quote from black Hole CEO Ryan millsap quote. This is the kind of space we need to fly in black Hawk helicopters and drive humpies at speed. We have lakes, we have swamps and rivers and forests and fields and hills and dales. That's the nice thing about one thousand and five hundred acres. Yep. So look forward to uh, black Hall Americana, the new hit streaming

service coming out of Georgia. Um, destroying the forest for Black Hall Americana. Oh boy, but yeah, if if, if, if this project succeeds, it would cement Atlanta as the new Hollywood, along with like Tyler Perry Studios and all of the other movie studios moving to Atlanta, and it would continue the skyrocketing cost to living in Atlanta and

accelerate gentrification at a even more horrifying right. So, Um, Actually, the black Hall side, but in as like being defended as well, is also in the Welining Forest, which is like what's been escaping name for the South Atlanta forests. Um, And it's actually right across the road from where we currently are. Um. So the and it's like I want to believe three or four acres by itself. Um, and

that is actually under imminent threat as well. They're waiting on the land destruction permit to pass, and that can happen any day or any week on on what you were saying about the gentrification issue. Um, that's something that's been really noticeable to anyone that lives in Atlanta and has for any amount of time just looking around them, like the filming that is just regularly happening here and all all these kind of new companies popping up around it.

Black Hall was sold maybe a little over a year ago now to a hedge fund out in California. They're getting funding for all of these projects. And the rent here in Atlanta, I'm sure across the country, I'm not sure what the trends are elsewhere, has been skyrocketing. Like you'll see homes that sold during the financial crisis for like eight thousand dollars two dollars selling for like half

a million dollars today. And you know, I'm not like a fucking economist, but the way that the film industry has been exploding and other industries like Google and Microsoft have been building these massive, expensive new headquarters while people literally go out on the street because they can no longer afford to pay rent here, and people just get displaced. It's like the opposite of white flight back into the suburbs, when you know, folks are moving into the city for

economic opportunities that only very wealthy people can get. I mean, it's it's difficult not to see Black Hall as ushering in just another huge wave of gentrification. Yeah, black making movies to support the American way of life, but Black Hall explicitly says they're making movies to support the American way of life. We hear gunshots from the police firing range all the time, and we hear almost as many

gun shots from the Black Hall filming sides. Um. And Yeah, it's very much about creating propaganda that makes people think they need police. Um. And that's like a huge part of kind of what they're doing. A life of film

and all the gentrification thing. Like even just driving to the city the past few days, I've noticed so many places that used to be wooded, uh, totally towards down and they're putting up these horrible quote unquote luxury condos which are like, you know, two thousand dollars rent from on for a tiny studio. UM. And I've even seen things that were used to be secretionated housing turned into

luxury condos. Like it's it's been absurd driving through the city and watching so many places that used to be wooded just turned like so much like active construction sites building these exact same like these identical apartment complexes that are the most hideous things you've ever looked at, and completely unaffordable for any for anyone who's not like someone

who's working for a tech company. Like they are like destroying a section of Atlanta called Park and it was like a large green space that was largely unmaged in Lakeland. UM and creating quote affordable housing, which is really just the legal term for they have a certain amount of available housing, like like like taking units in like a like one unit thing is affordable house. Like affordable just means market value or like like the medium market value.

Low income is things that people that aren't like average money makers come for, right And I think one of the like I think it's has kind of kind of gotten lost about the struggle about the actual defending the Atlanta force struggles like not specific to just cops of your black hole is actually the entire forest as a city, UM.

And that like part of the reason why it has been so focus is because of like how pressing these currents um things are and how like stretched thin people kind of a who are working on this um and that like yeah, Chosea Park is an example. There's also an area and that's like near Grant Park and like the Zone three old Zone three precinct, and there are like the zoo they were like actually in the same

property area. UM. They kept the pigs near the zoo. UM. And like it was an entire forest land like absolutely mouth of every app every clear gardner doing disgusting condos all along the rod um. And it's it's a continuation again of a distinctive political pattern in Atlanta. Back when Mayor Jackson was elected as the mayor, he at first tried to build like affordable not affordable, like low income

housing and do community projects and stuff. But the business end of Atlanta fought back against those efforts and that is what saw projects like the Olympic Games, which destroyed

an entire community in Atlanta. You should look up people's down here in Atlanta was just in Summer Hill completely raised to build arenas and all of this ship And it feels like a continuation of the powern where politicians decide what is best for the city the Olympics, a new police training facility or whatever business measures on the table today, not to mention that like during the nineties six Olympics, they're like specifically built Atlantice City Detention Center

for the for a place to put houseless people who have been sweeped up the streets and like criminalized them. And during the George forlid uprising in that was reused too as detainments and overnight states for protesters who are like going to get low bail justice a form of repression is regularly used. Again like that jails regularly used

specifically against protesters and isn't used for anything else. Is a like absolutely still around the face of humanity and Artisha Lance Bottoms said during her turn that she was going to turn that into a social justice side or right, it's still a jail. It probably already it probably all

ways will be until he fucking destroy it. Uh. And like now the Fulton County sheriff wants to take over the jail and use all of those beds because the jails here are so overcrowded with bullshit charges that they are just expanding and expanding, expanding, and there's no sign of stopping. For every one time that they promise that they're going to be closing jails, repurposing ship doing all this liberal reform bullshit, there's a new training facility, they're

selling jails to people that are using them more. The system just continues to expand and expand and expand until we fight back and destroy it. Need black haw Yeah, police need Black Hall just as much as black hall needs the police, you know. And these are the symbiotic relationship between the two. Police are instrumental in gentrification and also police need gentrification to capture poor black and brown

people and lock them in case. And so these are two things that that feed each other in a relationship. So it's very important to do our best to attack book is Atlanta. Was it the Atlanta police who have like the point system for rust? Yes, Atlanta Police. Yes, Atlanta Police has actually a point system where among the highest points is capturing a child. For capturing a child and arresting them are alongside felony charges, folony warrants and

other things. Um longest point system. They use it as a rubric to measure how well an officers doing. Um yeah yeah, I mean in terms of like needing gentrification to continue your job. Yeah, that's that's the exact same thing is, let's have this point system so we can get races and it arrest all the people who are on the street. And it's uh a mask off moment,

as they say. And I also think it's this funny thing, like I don't know, right, they're building this fake city to train in, and I wouldn't be surprised if Black hawns up renting it out from time to time to shoot films, right absolutely, But also at the end of the day, even if they don't, it's literally the same exact thing, right, one is training people to actually do it and the other is performing it too. People think

it's cool exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I just pulled up the actually my friend just pulled up there like chart which is it's a one to five scale. It's five scale. It's five for juvenile arrest, five points for felonies, four for a misdem or charge three for a city, charge for for deal wise and it goes on um and like the fact that juvenile rest is the top one is sucking monstrous. No I expected like they are the

monster like that. Yeah, like if it's not, it's not shocking, but it shows the extent of like the the horrible nous of what of like what their job is like, that is their job, That's what that's what they do. That is the entire thing. One thing that's given the Atlanta Defend the Force movement and edge is being able to consistently set the terms of engagement and establish a media framework regarding the instruction of the forest and the development of Cops City to stay one step ahead of

the enemy. Like we've mentioned, the Cops City of project was never actually initially announced by the city or the Police Foundation. It was brought to light by activists digging through open source data and public records in April one, when activists discovered the proposal to destroy the South of Our Forest. First, news spread via word of mouth for several weeks about a large information sharing session at Entrenchment

Creek Park, one of the areas under threat. On May fifteen, over two hundred people gathered for a barbecue and info presentation night on the threat of the forest and the broader campaign to defend it. The city government had yet to announce its plans publicly, so the activists and Force defenders were able to craft the public narrative first and

lay the media groundwork. At the information session, presenters were able to accurately contextualize the development within the cross section of racist and authoritarian backlash against the George Floyd protests, the increasing gentrification and urban displacement, and the devastating climate

effects such a project will inflict upon the region. Having activists and Force defenders break the news such a development denies the city and the police the opportunity to introduce a development to the public with a distorted narrative, assuming that they were gonna announce their plans and make them

public at all. And then, on May seventeenth, less than forty eight hours after the info sharing barbecue, seven unguarded machines at the forest destruction site, including excavators, tractors, and other pieces of heavy machinery, were targeted by sabotage, with smash windows and severed inner tubing scorched by fire. The

destruction equipment was left inoperable. An anonymous statement appeared online detailing their motivations and methods of attack, while tying the actions to the struggling and colonialism, authoritarianism, and the history of this particular land as the site of horrific abuses, of the site of displacement, child slavery, and prison slavery. The communicate ended with quote to the developers, governments, contractors,

corporations and politicians have perpetrated the heinous deforestation. Any further attempts at destroying the Atlanta Forest we met with a similar response, the forest was here long before us, and we'll be here long after. We'll see to that defend the Atlanta Forest. Today, no one has been arrested for

these actions. The presence of such a targeted direct action campaign this early on in the movement is important for a few reasons, one of which being it's meant in sabotage as a part of this movement from the very beginning, like it was moven into the genetic fabric from the conception, so any debate around the validity of these tactics was virtually non existent because they were there from the beginning.

That's what this movement is and that's been super interesting to watch because usually this type of sabotage or direct action happens later on in these movements, you escalate to that point, But in this case, it's been happening since the first week people knew that this thing is was existing. Over the following weeks, there was meetings, posters, and flyers that spread throughout the city. People organized public forest walks

through areas of the woods that were under threat. Even a few candidates for city council adopted the struggle as a component of their electoral campaigns. The movement's consistent ability to break the news on the development and the destruction of the forest has been crucial in the efforts to gain public trust and setting the terms of engagement and the ground rules for the conflict. The type of public discourse regarding the forest was successfully established by anonymous activists,

not by politicians, and not by police. Think something that's been really cool about this movement. From the early days of when this was going on, it was extremely radical, like it wasn't It wasn't three or four months after the first initial meeting, it was like a barbecue at the park where people were lighting bulldozers on fire to prevent construction from happening. The Atlanta Police Foundation has had its offices, its office windows smashed, like people are not

afraid to fight back physically. And this was occurring at the same time as the more electoral tactics as how I'll phrase it, and I think that you know, we've seen neither of these being able to successfully stop the movement. But when it comes to like being able to measure that the police have and their allies have slowed down, the electoral tactics have been a complete utter failure. Um and physically harming that property of the police, end of the black Hall and all of the forces that would

destroy the forest. That's been shown far away to be a tactic that's not only acceptable in this movement, but it's something that's seen as like one of the go to strategies. It's we haven't had to work our way

to that. People were there from the getto. Yeah, it was like a day or two after the Young for a night, but the very first public facing event, but like bulldozers were set on fire in like Michelle Obamba Park, which is funny or enough of another like recuperation tactic of like destruction of the environment and like on Ding gentrification where that's actually Black Hall Studios old plan site

for their um new studio. And the idea of the land swappers they take this shitty land where they destroyed forest type, replace it with an earth ground and in and as long as they turn into a park, they're allowed to UM build and construct on public forest land UM, which is like a Bunker's idea. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's actually like a new precedent right here back has

not been done before. I think that like one of the other things, you know, along with the fiery start kind of kick off, is that the folks who you know, like in my experience, most like kind of big broader campaign type things that people who are doing jail support, the people who have abroad reach, the people who you know,

have access to resources, etcetera. Kind of the like backbone life sustaining things of a movement tend to be folks who have really rigid moralizing ideas of like what is acceptable, etcetera. And you know, people in Atlanta have been there's a lot of credit due to folks who have been putting in a lot of work and are a little wiser than to have such a limited narrow view. So most

of the folks that control and are not controlled. Most of the folks who like backline and are working really hard to do them more like reproductive things and jail support and get food and things like that, are also people who have a really like, um, creative and accepting view of you know, like what kind of things are okay and really don't want this movement to fail and

aren't going to limit themselves based on abstract ideas. And so that's something that is really special and um, you know, one gets excluded for for doing things that are effective.

When talking with the force defenders, the other thing that was really emphasized is that instead of waiting for distant politicians to say the environment, and instead of dedicating tons of effort into petitioning companies with moralized grehtoric to make them feel bad in hopes of them dropping of the the project, you can instead have immediate material attacks that hit them where it counts, and where it counts is

their pockets. Because you can't expect companies to be swayed by moral decisions around harmful policing or the environment, but you can attack their physical and social capital if it's framed as, hey, this is something that is not a good look, fam, and uh, this is going to hurt your bank accounts. That is the type of general language that these corporations do understand. I feel like this is the most intersectional thing I've been a part of in

a long time. There's just like so many different ways to oppose the facility, and there's so many different people involved. And I'm really grateful for all of the comrades, especially the anarchist comrades, who've been holding it down for years and helped push the struggle in a certain direction. I

think other people are touching on this. We want to keep bringing it up because it's important, and other struggles we've been a part of, like the liberals control a lot of the money for jail support or bail funds or food distract and a lot of those mutual aid aspects of the struggle that help maintain an occupation which has really turned this place up are in the hands of mostly anarchist folks, and that has also really set the scene for what we're able to do and not

able to do, Like no one's getting thrown under the bus for a leisured behavior like when I was reading about this before I came down here almost exactly a year ago, there were like machines are on fire, and I was like, holy shit, it's like usually that's like the way later in the struggle, and that was like

right out the gate. People whoever they are, were attacking the machinery, and I think, to be honest with you, that was drawing a lot of people here because people are tired of the n v d A or non violent direct action. It's not about like let's criticize something to death that makes us feel bad. It's like people are tired because they're losing a lot of comrades to long prison sentences. They're getting three different felonies that are like the same amount of time or more than if

you would allegedly arson something. So these are things that are coming up for people, and people are realizing that old tactics aren't working anymore. A lot of the comrades that were burned into a weird shape from the Green scare are aging out, or the things that they're afraid of are very valid, but we're living in two dire of a time to neglect those tactics or a larger level and people are just are seeing how terrible things are, and it seems like more people are down or just

don't care anymore. Ever since the George Floyd uprisings, they've just seen an uptick in a lot of this behavior.

There's a campaign that launched publicly that mentions all the subcontractors that Reaves Young, one of the construction companies on the project, has to employ to make the Atlanta Police Foundations project here possible, and a lot of that could be home visits, it could be going to where they I don't know what it is, obviously, but I'm just saying, long story short, everybody knows this, but you find where they store the evil equipment, that's the best way to

stop the project. Long story short. They usually don't listen to what we have to say, but actions speak louder than words. And if you really want to hurt them, you hurt them in their pockets. And if you cost them enough money damage, they may pull out of the project.

They shut down. And even if there is other subcontractors that they could get to write machinery from to cut trees, whatever the funkt is they're going to do, we want them to be afraid if you look at very romantously struggles that have largely been successful in their own ways throughout the world. I'm just going to mention a couple because people talk about them constantly, like the Zon in France, on a Hambach in Germany, or no Time in Italy.

Blocker laws around property destruction and defending your area. Another strong point of the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest is that it's not simply coalesced around a single coherent strategy, whether that be sabotage or above ground organizing. For over a year now, force defenders and movement participants have employed several parallel strategies in tandem. Strategies of one approach can fill in for the shortcomings of another. Often these differing

strategies can be mutually beneficial. As sabotage was happening, opponents of Cops City also organized a continuous stream of educational events on the land, as well as pressure campaigns aimed at pushing city and county officials, investors, and contractors to

drop out of the project. As summer began, more traditional political activist organizations like one connected to nationwide socialist organizations, abolitionist networks, and ecological advocacy groups began doing more direct community outrage by knocking on the doors talking with people in the neighborhoods next to where the forest was being

slated for destruction. Forming connections and ally ships with the local community in the vicinity of the South River forest is crucial, especially since that they would be among the first of those impacted by deforestation and the close proximity to such a militarized police hub with you know, explosive testing and helicopter pads um plus you know, local community outreach is useful for learning what might help mobilize more

regular folks. Other tactics and strategies emerging during early summer included getting those involved in the planning of Cops City to realize that they don't get to operate in some safe politics, only realm Their political decisions have real world consequences and real world effects for those people that they allegedly represent, so perhaps they too should be forced to

feel real world consequences. On June six, there was a city council meeting which was supposed to voute on the Police Foundation's land lease ordinance, sponsored by then Councilwoman Joyce Shepherd. At this point. Back in, the meetings were all virtual due to the COVID nineteen pandemic, so the city council members hosted their conversations from inside their homes. With just a little bit of work, activists and researchers were able

to locate the home address of Councilwoman Shepherd. A group went to her home and displayed a banner during the city council meeting. Most protesters just chanted from the public sidewalk, and one individual approached her house, knocked on the door and ring the doorbell before returning to the street. Turns out, council Woman Shepherd did not like this very much and

went into a bit of a panic. So like kind of a recording terms of like city Council or other targets has been like whenever the first time they were going to vote on this uh like UM Institute for Social actually copsody UM. When they were going to vote on copsody UM, someone went up to Joyce Shepherd's house

and knocked on her door. They're so painful of protesters outside and someone just knocked on her door and she went to her frenzy freaked out, called off the vote, left the meeting, ran to the precinct and comments during the bough the corn section, and then gave a like long speech to like a bunch of police and press, which like called out, which effectively called off the vote for another like three months or so, just because someone visited the house of a politician because they had names

and addresses, and like that also happened with Ryan Mills. App that's happen with that's CEO and chairman of Reeves Young. There's this whole idea of politics as existing within this political astral space. Right, It's it's it's the same thing with like corporations. Right, everything exists in the corporate space that's removed from people's actual lives. Right, it's it's removed

from actual personal consequences. People in positions of power assume that their actions occur in this political or corporate astral plane. That means that consequences of their decisions won't directly impact them. But we don't need to play by those rules. After a friendly knock on her door, Joyce Shepherd called off the vote and left the meeting early to call the police,

who arrived after the protesters had already dispersed. Immediately after, Joyce Shepherd held a press conference from the newly constructed Zone three police precinct. Their Shepherd stood surrounded by police officers and news media and described in detail the aims of her land lease ordinance, the nature of the cop City project, as well as the efforts of protesters to stopper.

By doing this short public statement, she catapulted the movement and the story into the mainstream, out of the political backdoors that it was existing in previously, and Atlanta to any councilwoman says protesters came onto her private property to speak out against a piece of legislation. Joyce Shapherd says, well, she supports the right to protest. This time it went too far. People have a right to come out and say whether they four or against it. I have no

problem with that. I've been doing this for years and know that people have the right. But what they don't have a right to do is come up on my private property, knock on my doors, protests on my lawn, on my poech They don't have that right. So I'm fair tonight that I'm still supporting the academy. I'm not scared. However, there will be no right for people to come up

my property and protests. The next day she made another statement which you just heard a little bit of, where she also claimed that she would be pushing through the ordinance no matter what the city residence that she sensibly represented had to say. And her and her fellow city officials took a stand against the protesters and rejected their tactics, falsely implying that the methods like going on a sidewalk

were illegal. But by showing up outside a politician's house and knocking on her door, just a few people were able to achieve an early goal of the movement to transform the cop city and black Hall developments from back to agreements into big public scandals. It got out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As a bonus, the vote was delayed, buying more time to develop further strategies

in defense of the forest. It was an effective demonstration of the potential of direct confrontation with people in power, and it led to the emergence of another strategy that's become a big part of the genetic fabric of this movement, pressuring decision makers directly and dissolving their notion of a safe political or corporate astral space. During this time of showing up at Politician stores, more sabotage and direct action

were also taking place. Signs appeared in the forest warning that trees in the area had been spiked, making it possibly dangerous to attempt to cut down trees, with the risk of saws being damaged and possibly injuring unlucky workers. On June tenth, three more excavators were burned at the black Hole Studios the site. Neither action appeared much in the local news media, but anonymous communicates and photographs of the incidents and damage circulated online among the radical anarchist

mill us. In late June there was the first planned Week of Action. There's been another one since then, and there's another one upcoming from May eight through May fifteenth. We'll talk more about the upcoming Week of Action in the next episode, but I strongly encourage people to travel to Atlanta as soon as possible if you can make it for any of this upcoming weeklung event again, that's from May eight through May. If you make it front of that, please go to Atlanta. It will be it

will be fun, I assure you. The June Week of Action featured a guided walks through the forest by day and by moonlight discussion and conversations on ecology, abolitionism, colonialism, and queerness. There was a nightly bonfires and safe open sections of the woods at a nearby radical venue. There was a hardcore punk show during which hundreds of concert goers repelled the buzz kill police who are trying to

shut it down. And there was a night rave deep into the woods where five hundred people were dancing with glow sticks late into the night and early into the morning. In all throughout the week of action, thousands of Atlanta's got to gather under the banner of Defend the Forest. They were able to learn about the project and get plugged into taking action. During the week, people under the cover of night visited the home of black Hole Studios

CEO Ryan Millsap in the Atlanta suburb of Social Creek. UH. They also visited his second home in Tuxedo Park and the ups he frequents in Edgewood. According to an anonymous online statement, quote flyers were distributed to all his neighbors mailboxes, as well as plastered on his front gate and the streets that he frequents. The flyers let fellow concerned community members know about the harm he is responsible for, and ically provided the address to his one hundred acre farms

and that grievances could be addressed there. The flyers placed all throughout his neighborhood and investment properties were also distributed in hopes that it would quote inspire others to research and take the fight to those directly responsible for the destruction of the forest. Two days later, on the final day of the week of action, around fifty protesters marched to the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Foundation, quoting crime

Thing again quote. As the crowd emerged from the Five Points metro station, a small contition of officers attempted to arrest somebody. The crowd engaged hand to hand fighting with police and successfully repelled them. Advancing past the security, they marched straight to the Alant Police Foundations office and smashed the glass doors and windows before overturning tables in the

towers lobby. According to police, on Friday, around four pm, multiple protesters stopped the flow of traffic on Peachtree Street and Andrew Young International Boulevard. Photos taken by a local freelance photographer showing a group called Defend Atlanta Forest shattering glass doors and also holding signs that say our woods, not Hollywood's. CBS forty six reached out to the group

but have yet to hear back. Atlanta police believe the protesting ignited over the building of the new public safety training center. When officers arrived, protesters quickly fled the scene, but the damage still remains. At this time, we know no arrests have been made and the investigation continues. In Atlanta on Barbawayans CBS news momentum was growing throughout the summer, Police and corporate press had failed in crafting a counter

media strategy. Meanwhile, the Offend the Forest project brought together police and prison abolitionist organizations, environmental justice and preservation organizations, civil and human rights nonprofits, and even neighborhood associations near the proposed site, including the East Atlantic Community Association, the Grant Park Neighborhood Association, South at Lantin's for Neighborhood Development, and the Kirkwood Neighbors Organization, each of which passed resolutions

opposing the proposal. Grassroots organizations that mobilized against the proposal included Defend Atlanta Police Department, Refusal Communities, the Atlanta Sunrise movement, community movement builders, the South River Forest Coalition, A World Without Police, and the autonomous organizers working under the banner

of Defend the Forest. Organizers spread informational flyers and online graphics, conducted interviews, knocked on doors, and organized phone in campaigns during subsequent city council meetings that were still held on

zoom because of coronavirus related restrictions. Through in August and September, the Stop Cop City Coalition and others worked to introduce tension and clog up the city council process, digging cues from the protest outside the home of Joyce Shepherd, which resulted in the vote being delayed for over two months. Protesters gathered outside the homes of possible yes voters on the nights that the vote was related to take place, causing further delays in the entire process got pushed back

from August into September, so again, another another delay. Briefly it seemed like there was a possibility that the Stop Cop City campaign might be victorious before the end of summer. Votes on the groundle sordidents were repeatedly delayed because of these objections and demonstrations at the homes of Atlanta Chief Operations Officer John Keene and City Councilwoman Madeline Archibond. Eventually,

September seven was set as the final vote day. Seventeen hours of pre recorded comments from over one thousand Atlanta residents delayed the discussion. Due to the sheer number of public comments, the vote got pushed back another day as Sydney Council members spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday listening

to the playback. After months of organizing, community outreach and public education efforts from these top Cops City organizers, approximately the collars fiercely opposed the proposal, explaining in great detail why they are quote unquote representatives should vote it down. The minority of callers who supported the Cops City project either self identified as residents of the disproportionately white and wealthy Buckhead and Northeast Atlanta area or we're just like

actual cops. Uh. At least thirty officers called in to say that they support the instruction of the forest to end the building of Cops City. Big big shocker, the cops what Cops City pro Cops City collars invoked the false crime wave narrative propagated after the George Floyd uprising and used the language of so called white flight by threatening to leave the city if something wasn't done to

stop the growing crime wave. Uh And Yet, when the seventeen hours of public comments ended and the council's discussion began, council members largely failed to acknowledge the hours of public comment that they had just spent two days listening to, much less acknowledged the far ranging movement that produced such overwhelming public discontent, quoting crime think again quote as those who study revolutionary movements, No, the police perform an essential

function in class society, without which many other hierarchies and exportitive relations could not exist for very long. This is not simply an economic or civic issue that can be worked around with some clever ideas in a bit of

pressure unquote. Despite the efforts of organizers, which culminated in seventeen hours of primarily oppositional public comment, the ordinance was passed on September eight, while the police arrested protesters outside the home of councilwoman Madaline Archibong about an hour before

the final vote took place. During the Council's final session on September eight, the City Council voted by a margin of ten to four for the creation of the ninety million dollar facility, handing over almost four acres of for us to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Obviously, many folks were pretty disappointed and kind of demoralized about this. UH. Some turned their frustrated energy into the upcoming local elections, hoping that the city government may be stacked with abolitionist or

progressive candidates that might strike down the project. Mayor Bottoms did not end up running for re election, and the former mayor of Mayor Read lost to the now current Mayor, Andre dickens Um. I do think it's really funny that the old mayor of Atlanta was Mayor Bottoms and the new and the new mayor is Mayor dickens Um. Anyway, UH, City Councilwoman Joyce Shepard, who introduced the Cops City Plan,

also lost her campaign for re election. But since the elections in November, nothing has actually changed regarding the black Hole and Cops City developments are nothing has changed on the electoral front. There's there's no indication of electoral strategi as being impactful, and thankfully not everyone focused their efforts on electoral ref warm. I'll leave you today with this sentiment that I kept hearing during my stay in the forest. When you criminalize a non violent direct action, the end

goes away. On the final day of the vote, people went and protested outside a city council member's house, and eleven of them got arrested, despite the fact that they were already dispersing and following orders. During the top line three movement, people were receiving felony theft charges for using lock boxes to attach themselves onto construction equipment um, which of recent hasn't even really been an effective strategy resulting

in any material winds. But if they're going to arrest you for standing outside of a politician's house and give you charges, you may as well consider doing something a bit more spicy. If you're gonna get felonies for basic non violent direct action like locking yourself onto machinery, you

may as well light that machinery on fire. When non violent direct action result in felony charges, if they're going to criminalize standing outside of a politician's house and holding a sign, then going into the forest and doing monkey wrenching suddenly becomes a very similar consequence level, and the action that can be done in secret turns out to be actually a bit easier to get away with. The funny thing is is that this is the state's fault,

not anyone else's fault. When state repression against public non destructive tactics increases, then what happens is the less public and more fiery tactics, which in this movement we're already present. We'll just end up becoming more and more prominent and even more integral to keep the movement going. In the next episode, we'll hear about how the more radical folks continue to defend the forest after the vote, and you'll hear a lot more from the force defenders that I interviewed.

And finally, if you can please head to Atlanta if you're able to, for the upcoming week of action from A eight through. More boots on the ground are crucial as the large scale destruction of the forest is becoming more and more imminent. You can go to Defend the Atlanta Forest dot com and scenes dot no blogs dot org for more information. See you on the other side.

Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis and this is part two of the two part mini series on the Defended the Forest Movement in Atlanta, Georgia. Last month, I traveled to Atlanta to stay a week in the woods and talk with some of the Forest offenders. In the previous episode, I covered the movement from its inception to where the city council approved the Cops City

project near the end of last summer. I went over a lot of historical background between the land itself and the history there, the increasing gentrification of Atlanta, how the movement pulled the veil off the secretive plans for Cops City and pushed it into the public spotlight. We talked about the early days of sabotage and the targeting of individuals and positions of power. Basically, I did a lot of a lot of talking, maybe maybe too much talking.

This episode will be more led by the discussions with Forest offenders that I had during my weeklong excursion to the woods. We'll learn about how the movement evolved in the wake of the city council vote up until the current state of affairs. One thing that makes to Defend the Atlanta Forest Movement very different from previous eco defense projects in recent memory is that it's right in the middle of a sprawling metropolitan area. Right outside the forest

is an Amazon facility. Downtown Atlanta is just a ten minute drive away. We'll be talking tactics a bit later on in the episode, but just the simple nature of doing a forest equo defense project while still inside the city gives a lot of pretty interesting tactical opportunities. You have to selectively use some of the older, more rule equo defensive strategies while having the backing of a city

based mutual aid network. There's the option of rapid response popular mobilization that city based protests can have but are more challenging for equatif and stuff that's like three hours into the middle of nowhere. For the people camping in the forest, they can easily get supplies or switch out who's staying in the woods and who's living in the city. The combination of forest and urban prompts and necessitates the crucial experimentation and innovation that's been badly needed in eco

defense projects and protests for the past decade. There's a lot of trains to go by here. It's really pretty, so it's definitely the most urban forest defen I've ever been a partner. But it's really beautiful and unique to see a lot of urban the city be able to be involved and like urban tactics kind of mixing with

yet more traditional, more earth firsty forest tactics. It's kind of like the rule book and a lot of people saying this like it's repeated, the quote unquote rule book for how to indeede with the multiple enemies in this area has been like chewed up, spit out, shadow and burnt over because it we're kind of doing something that

doesn't really happened a lot. Something similar I can think of is the Sacred Old Grove that was being protected in Minneapolis in the late nineties maybe thousands, and that was another kind of anarchists alliance at the big earth first presence. But that's kind of one of the more urban in this part of Turtle Island struggles I can think of like this, but this is unlike anything I've ever I think. Another interesting part is like a lot of force defense stuff is focused on like old growth,

being like we should defend it because it's old growth. Yeah, this is not an old growth. For this is like a messy, dirty um confusing. I've gotten lost so many times. It's yeah, I just did there's tires, there's barrels where it was built. On the prison farm, you'll find like old portions of the prison which is incredibly fucked up and haunted, right, Like in terms of like haunting is like there's the specter of what used to be there.

Police are trying to build over it with their more like a bomb range, right, It's like that's very much like they're just building over the thing. Um. But it doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending. And that's an idea that I think people need to understand more, is like it has value even if it's not like five hundred years old. Like it has value despite not despite being one hundred year old old forest,

and it's about because it is in one forests. Like it has value because it is a forest in a city, and that's something that's worth like emphasizing. Yeah, I also think that's cool. And like people talk a lot about like invasive plants and there's like I think the Brandford pairs in this forest are a really interesting example. There are these trees that are like feral. They used to be part like planted here when it was a um the farm plantation or whatever, and um those trees are

fucking spiky, fine trees. They're spiking ship. Well but you know, the good news is they're awful, and the bad news is they're awful. Like I know where there are when I halass in the forest, I usually don't get Bradford pair in my eye, but um, but some chasing the cap well yeah, and and so it's just it's cool to kind of interact with all these things and get to choose how you want to interact and like, yeah, it is a um you know, I think it's interesting.

It's not yeah, like a traditional forest or like whatever forest that people would value in that way. Um, but for me, I connect to it, I think even more than that, because it's not this like held up is this thing of like purity, like they fucking buildoz and like a month later that ship was overgrown. You couldn't see it again. And that was all quote unquote invasive plants like whatever funk that means, which is often that's the whole thing. They're often racialized plants. You know. It's

it's almost like a punk forest. It's like we're surrounded by enemies. And that is the problem is, um, they see this as a cess pool, and something I talked to a lot of liberals about, like when they're taught, we're talking them about defend the forest, like, oh, is it a pristine wilderness with large old growth trees, and like,

you know what, that would be cool. The problem is this forest needs to be allowed to return to that because there's been so much abuse and part of like whether I don't know what it means to quote unquote win or lose, but there's a lot of little winds and losses all along the way, and we've had a lot of winds. There is some big cheese that are

left in the forest. They're legally supposed to leave all the big trees by the creek, But from what historical um, president, do we trust the cops to quote unquote be accountable to anyone? I don't know where we're thinking that. I've I've had a lot of people be like, oh, some of these three houses are strategic. Then in the spots they can't cut, and I cannot. Friends. I've looked at the map and it looks like this whole motherfucking play

is Society for clear Cutting. Exactly one month after the city council voted to approve the land Ley's ordinance for cops City that defend the force slogan was put to the test. On October, contractors and land survey workers showed up around the forest and appeared to be clearing land to take reference photos and collect soil sample. Two dozen force defenders emerged from the woods and confronted the workers.

The people hired to destroy the forest fled the work site, and after they left, police surveillance tower in the area was toppled and the force defenders were able to disperse with no arrests. Ten days later, a similar turn of events took place. A group of survey workers and construction teams were on site. Again, a small group of rapid response Force defenders disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at

the old Atlanta Prison Farm. Simply the mere threat of an on site protest shut down construction for the whole day. Key access points for machinery were blocked using available materials like piles of nearby tires, preventing vehicular machinery from moving

freely through the destruction site. No construction occurred, despite the attempts of the Decab County Police and the Atlanta Police Department, who mobilized twenty vehicles in the vicinity of the forest in an effort to prevent the protest or punish the participants. By the end of the day, no was arrested, and yet again, select monitoring systems and police surveillance towers were

toppled and dismantled. A statement released online from anonymous force defenders read quote, this war will be one, one battle at a time. Pressure must continue in a variety of ways to halt all construction. It became clear that for the next phase of the struggle to defend the force, people would have to directly target and oppose the contracting companies hired to decimate the woods and build the facilities.

Today we know of at least three companies that have been contracted by the Atlanta Police Foundation to do work on the old prison farm land. Some of the surveying work appears to be done by Long Engineering, and two companies, Reeves Young Construction and brass Field and Gory, were hired

to do grounds clearing and early construction. It is not yet clear who will be contracted to clear the land in Entrenchment Creek Park, where Black Hole Studios hopes to expand their sound stage again quoting the crime Think article the City in the Forest Reinventing Resistance for an age of climate crisis and police militarization quote. The information that is known to date was hard won by diligent activists

on the ground. Shortly after the city council voted in September, surveyors and small work crews began entering the site near two key roads. The trucks and uniforms revealed the names of the contractors, which once again gave opponents of the Cops City project a chance to initiate a struggle on

their own terms. Had the force defenders utilized only virtual or bureaucratic channels to collect information, they might not have learned that Reeves Young were being called in to do the actual destruction until it was publicly announced much later. The ability to break news to the public before the city government has been a consistent advantage in trying to keep the momentum of the movement going. Post the city council vote, a second week of action was planned for November,

albeit with some new twists. From November tenth through, various groups organized a wide range of cultural events, info nits, bonfires, and meetings for this Week of Action. Many of these events occurred in or near a publicly advertised encampment on

the Entrenchment Creek Park side of the forest. Days after the second Week of Action, thirty people converged on the Reeves Young Construction headquarters in sugar Hill, Georgia, forty miles outside of Atlanta, holding banners and demanding that the company severed their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The group was able to walk right into the offices, disrupting a

board meeting involving company president Dean Reeves and CEO Eric Young. Initially, the executives tried to keep their cool, but in short time the businessmen started getting more annoyed and eventually violence towards the protest. There was a protest that it was at the Reeves Young office. Went into the office, Disrand disrupted a board member meeting that happened to have a lot of the people who were like seers and chairman

there and um, from what I gather as a brawl. Yeah, I know, there's reports of the Reeves CEO guy like punching punching protesters. There's a joke that a worker puts someone a guillotine, and I love the version of these workers doing ww referred to love We'll love from more cop fights fights with cops to just be w W E style match. Disrupting the board of meeting was another successful step in the goal of applying direct confrontational pressure

to the Atlanta Police foundations contracted construction service providers. Days later, two more bulldozers were lit on fire entertaining about the road and sit. We got two construction vehicles all involved in the till Radio quid and simpedia my location as well. There this equipment was located on the land swap parcel by Black Hall Studios, the planned future location of quote

Michelle Obama Park unquote. These were the eleventh and twelve pieces of heavy machinery to be sabotaged, and I think now we're at like around twenty five, which is a lot um. The anonymous communicate this time was short and to the point, quote we burnt two bulldozers in the South Atlanta forest. No coups city, no Hollywood dystopia, defend the Atlanta Forest on top of the more publicly advertised

encampment at Entrenchmant Creek Park. Around the second week of action, a small cluster force defenders set up a secondary, more secretive encampment on a stretch of woods in the old Atlanta prison Farm. Again quoting the crimes article quote, a few dozen people pitched tents, erected harps and makeshift kitchens, hung banners, and constructed a bonafid protest camp in the woods. Establishing a semi permanent presence in the forest was a way to gather information on an ongoing basis and to

provide an immediate deterrent to developers. So I was involved in the original occupation of the forest. There was a group of individuals who many of whom we're housing and secure, and we're like, we need fucking housing, and like there's this struggle and we believe in it and a fight in it, and so we moved to the fucking woods and we've lived in these woods. Official time is six weeks that we were in the woods, and we had a higher quality of life, been like many people who

lived in houses and apartments. We had the nicest kitchen of anyone we knew we had. Yeah, we had armchairs and couches and fire pits and we you know, we had more food than we knew what to do with. And so we just started feeding people, and like we created a social space that allowed the movement to drow simply because we're like, well, we need these needs man in our lives. Don't we go do that? And that

like evolved over time. A little over a month after the more secretive encampment was established, about a dozen protesters, some bearing witch hats, marched to the gate of Black Hole Studios on Constitution Road and blocked the main entrance. A communicate posted online read quote iconic spells for destruction were loudly chanted at black Halls general direction as the witch block held hands, cackled and skipped the sun wise direction,

blocking Black Hole studios main entrance. Smoke torches were lit. Approximately one hour post which block antics, the Cab County Police responded to a call made by Black Hole Studios saying that they quote followed the protesters into the woods and deduced an encampment they came upon must belong to the apparent witches unquote, which is quite the sentence. Shortly after, a large contingent of police raided the forest, evicting the

protest camp established there. There was at one point and help a demonstration outside of Black Holes outside of black Holes site and they express the discontent. Yeah, an entirely like peaceful protests at Black Hall Studios. That was like just kind of standing in like the front gate where employees leave and enter UM and generally doing stuff like bringing American flags, holding signs like um and just like taking up space and making the actual interns and leaving

of the facility like less doable. And their response was for a Black Hall to lie and so like the camp and Cammon wasn't trespassing on their property which was actually in place in of like a public park, Um and orchestrated with the police to evict Um. And they orchestraed with the police to do like a pretty like intense eviction for like. But it was essentially we were, what a moment to a homeless camp living there, and they had two helicopters circling more police that I could count.

They were throwing our ship into dump trucks and like actively like pursuing people through the woods. It was like an absolutely I mean it was like like very like visible show of force against us. Quoting the crime Thing article again quote at the urging of Black Hall, the cab County Police entered the forest on mass mobilizing police cruisers and the parking lot officers on foot, helicopters and drones overhead, and unmarked vehicles in the streets. The officers

were likely intimidated by the low visibility to rain. In any event, all of the force defenders based in the encampment escaped without being detained. This was the first time a concerted effort was made by law enforcement to engage protesters in the South River Forest. And to be honest, it was a fucking pain in the ass and it

was a traumatizing event. And that is all true. But it's also even we learned from and like we got a pretty good idea of like ap d s and like they have counties, uh like capabilities, and like how they are like surveilling things protests and how they're surveilling camps and like how they figured out where we were, and like what triggered them to act against us, and like that's allowed us to move in far more confident

ways that are also far more subversive. It's really interesting that you know, just like when they make it, you know, illegal to do n v d AH, whenever they attack like that and do these really violent raids that put people in like awful positions and like traumatize the ship out of people. They are teaching us how to fight back.

They are showing us their weaknesses, and in a really ironic way, the next time they come in and they suck it up because people know it to a spects, it will be a monster of their own making, because like for every one step of aggression that they take, that's two steps further we can take towards them with everything that we learned from the struggle. And obviously this forest is really beautiful and the more time I spend here, the more I feel connected to it and driven to

like protect it. But also a big part of it for a lot of us is for me is like, um, you know, they are doing this for their own morale, and so my goal is to make sure they are unhappy. And so yeah, even if I uh yeah, even if they win, as long as we come back and you learn from that and we keep pushing back, you know, it is a way of attrition, and um, it is about their morale. And like, it doesn't matter if they

build the police facility. What matters is that every single time that the police and moved to recuperate that their losses, which they just took a big one, they are faced with just unyielding hostility. Um And I think that, like that's something that's really important, is that we don't expect to not take a lot of owls. Like in the

forest occupation. We understand the nature of this thing where an ecstatic position complice moving around us, but like it's a it's about making them fight for every inch the best we can. The encampment was just one part of a large ongoing fight. Over the course of those six weeks, hundreds of people were able to circulate through this camp, enjoying meals and performances, making arts together, and spending time around campfires, building and sharing a life in the woods.

After the camp was attacked and structures were destroyed by the Cab County Police, land offenders and Atlanta residents mobilized quickly to recover camp supplies and belongings and continued on

with efforts to defend the forest. A great thing about these types of free autonomous zones is that they can directly demonstrate to people what a free life outside the confines of regular society can look like and what it can feel like it's not just like we want to save the Words and we want to go back to our regular ass lives. A lot of us are realizing that we're living in the apocalypse and we're just gonna

we want to keep living like this. It's not just this Words, it's not just this police facility, and we would want them to not have any more space or platform to organize this police, but we might. A lot of us want to be free, mean want other people that like during the idea of like whatever the funk it is, hitchhiking, train happening, living in the woods, the fact that it's a fucking crime or considered crazy to

be the people living in the Words is insane. And that's kind of the vivally out from the moscogy for access today. They're like our whole world, like we're here trying to reclaim our culture because there's a lot of hope for saving the land from like an indigenous perspective,

if people would effects them. And the whole point is the US government doesn't actually want them and doesn't actually respect them, and reservations are literally have prisoner of war numbers because they're hoping by blood quantum if they kill these people off, they can take their land back. So the whole land back idea of fucking freaks and not anyway. We want to save this forest, but it's not just

about this forest. Were kind of endangered species. We've talked about ourselves feeling like deer Like how deer like they'll be chilling. They'll be like all around being a deer and mating food and they're like, I was on guard, you know, to do something else if there's an enemy around. It kind of feels that way. I like, it will be chilling. Nothing's going on. Also there's cops. But the whole point is if it can happen here, ha ha did it, it can happen somewhere else. And we help

to spread the vibe that people not like occupied. What a horrible name for a movement, but it's cool that that happened at the time that we had made sense. We all have nobody knew any better. We know better now, that's good, But get the vibe. We're getting this vib to like continue this kind of stuff. And obviously there's people in all kinds of places, square buildings and do

all sorts of ship. But the more territory that we occupy and control and can help remay trade back to indigenous grassroots comrades, not IRA and reorganization, active government sanctioned indigenous groups right if they can't not everyone's our ally. These have to be ally ships. That makes sense. The Muscogee commrades that we're close to, obviously not all of them.

That some romanticized, generalized bullshit. They said the same ship that when we talk to them, they're like even our own people betrays sometimes because we're not all the same. It's some homogeneous bullshit, and I've seen that play out poorly in other places. And like would give the land back to the natives and like which natives like people were all on the spectrum of conversation and deconization, and sad least one of us are further along the lines

and others. And it's very much on the colonizer's fault for doing that. But where we're at is the people, the people that feel the called the anarchy, the people that feel to call to some kind of radical left orientation. They can find it in their hearts and in their patients to tolerate each other. And we need to band together to come up with better plans because we're all we got and it doesn't get better, it's getting worse. So hopefully this can be an inspiration for people to

do other ship. I'm inspired. I'm not from anyway freaking near here, but I've been here for a year now and i don't want to leave because I'm tired of the same old tactics. And I have been a part of stuff that has been successful before and I had nothing to do with non valid direct action, and I have to do time for it, and I know people would have done time for it also. And if there's any message I can give to the young generation is

there's no future and it's worth it. And like if your future is just like working at nine to five and like watching the earth, so they're like shriveling to nothingness, I would argue, it's not really a life. Might as all well might as well be dead. So I'll hope you live. I hope you choose to live. I think it's a to the like interesting thing the psychological aspects of this, because the first time you do the way we're scurcialized in the society is to be obedient and fearful,

and the first time you do something illegals. The first time you do something that you know is against the rope, the first time you steal some food, the first time you smash the window, the first time you do any of that, you're scared. But then you get away with it. You realize that this is a thing you can do, and I think that the state can't stop you from doing and you realize, oh, I can do so much more.

And once you get over that initial fear, once you smashed that window, and you've gotten home and you're like, oh, I didn't go to jail for this. But when when you like get home and you're like, I have all this food now that I didn't have to pay for it, you start to realize maybe I don't need to work a job. Maybe I don't need to work nine to five or you know, five to midnight every day to get a job and payper You realize, wait, maybe I can just steal the food. Yeah. I've been wanting to

talk about that for a while. For I want to make another Hyper Objects episode UM and talk about the anarchist properties of client bottles. UM and I described this type of freedom is like it's like how a client bottle works, or like a fourth dimensional object. It's like you need to in order for there's like this extra degree or extra dimension of movement that we usually don't think it's possible, but it is actually there if you

know how to interact with it. UM. And Yeah, it's like we're domesticated in so many ways to view here's what's possible, here's what's impossible. I have to exist within this framework, UM and only doing these things which are seen as correct. And there's actually more degrees of freedom than that. We just don't often like acknowledge them. But you can totally phase through things and you can totally find that extra degree of freedom, and once you do,

that's a super interesting feeling. UM. As opposed to like waiting for gay luxury space communism, you can instead do like fourth dimensional like hyper anarchism, which gives you so much more freedom right now instead of just waiting for the communism that will never come and the relationship you build. The relationships you build that are based on a trust that is, I trust you to have my back, I trust you to work with me and do this thing is so much deeper than the trust of I guess

I trust my coworker. But like I really trust them not to snitch my boss. Like the trust that comes from a relationship where you're like, yeah, let's like we need food, that's going to steal it together. That kind of trust is not something that can be incuperated. And that kind of like relationship where it's like our relationship is built on the fundamental we will do that we have to to survive. It creates an intimacy that you

can't find anywhere else, and a criminal intimacy. You might say, um, yeah, and that that was the point as somebody else think, yeah, yeah, just to double down not too like I think it's um it's cool too because uh, when you also come to a space like this, like you can live like that on your on your own or with your friends, but then there's something wild when you come to this space. Um, and then all of a sudden, it's like when you start attacking something that a lot of other people want

to see attacked. All of a sudden, all you have to do is attack that thing and foods there. Yeah, and like you know like that and and like yeah, and like you have all these resources and you can focus on that and so like it's like yes, I'm like it's like a joke to some degree, but like if you want to be a lifestyle ran because like if you want to actually be an anarchist right now and do anarchist ship, you can come to Atlanta and

do and like it's not easy. It's fucking scary, it's sketchy, it's hard, there's freaky as bugs, but like, yeah, you don't have to wait, and like, yeah, it I think that that's something that like, for me, is really magic.

Is that like actually the more you attack and the more you like position yourself to be antagonistic towards the world, the more of it's like fourth dimensional like winning shoot on you know, like which I don't need really understand, like starts to kind of like self actualize and yeah, I think it's cool it And then like it freaks me out to think that there's not people who are probably probably pretty cool like waiting for some opportunity like waiting,

just teachers waiting, and we don't have that much time. Yeah, you can live anarchy now. You don't need to wait for the collapse TM because turns out that party it's already happening, and that already happened. We're just waiting in the liminal space until the climate change catches up with the admissions are already there. We're already living in it. We just don't realize it yet, or some of us are in denial of it yet. But the collapses like now, we it's already the thing. We don't need to wait

for the one big collapse, because that's a myth. But you can live anarchy and do stuff. You don't need to wait for the next communist president who's going to run and fail. There's no coming social there's no coming collapse. There's nothing to wait for to keep on waiting his madness aside. I think a really interesting aspect of this movement. We are attacking up popular target, and how like in attacking a popular target, we've built this like thing is

we are. We're not just here and attacking this thing that doesn't exist in isolation. We're here and we've built a movement and we've built uh, we've through attack, we've built a built this like popular idea that like actually, you know, like if you want something to not be there, instead of like talking to a politician, you can send it on vote harder, vote harder, just just just just one more vote. I swear I'm sorry. Now I like

to talk more about tactics. Since the City Council voute, on the ground tactics have gained a much more integral role and grown past the basic sabotage and house visits, although both of those still are crucial aspects in keeping the movement going. Different ways of preventing physical construction, surveying of land and destruction of the forest made up most of the on the ground direct action efforts inside the forest.

I think a really interesting aspect of the struggle has happened here is that because it's so decentralized, there are

people and no one really knows who. There are people who will just to show up and like, you know, it's like there were people who are like getting the crops called on them in the woods and ships, and then like a bunch of anonymous people have showed up and like propable the camera powers and people stopped getting the crops called on them in the woods for a long time, and like that kind of decentralized thing, especially where it's like, you know, regardless of even like if

the people in the woods were like you know, like into doing ship, it's like it's really useful when people who have more skills and people have more knowledge and more ability to do things and more ability to take risks. It's really awesome when those kinds of people can come and make things safe for a larger mass of people. And I feel like that is like a strategy and like the interactionary space that can be truly like expanded on, where people who know their ship can make things safe

for large groups of people. To generalize revolt, Yeah, I regret like a lot of that hard of struggle and struggle has been framed from the very beginning as like there was no call to action do x y Z. There was a bunch of people pursuing their own individual desires and what they saw as a forward facing like a reprojection of their own ideas into the future and

made that happen. And it was underneath this framework where there was no limit, there were no boundaries um, and there was no idea of like us all having to be on the same page about that. Yeah, you don't need to like attend a march to be to like do effective things. In fact, it turns out doing things that are not attending a march can often be way more materially effective and to double down on that, Like, um, so many times there's just like a script that the

people follow, this is how we do it. And then there's there's like this action that's applied to everything that people don't like, and holy ship, that's a crazy book. It was a wildfire. Um um think about that. But yeah, but there's these like things that applied to everything, and this struggle very much has no script, which is really exciting. And but but what's even cooler about that is that

it's not it's also not reinventing the wheel. And so there's people who are taking from you know, like kind of like classic insurrectionary anarchists like approaches. There's people looking at ego defense stuff from all over the world thinking about um, there's people looking at some successful like non

violent direct action. There's people looking at alf struggles and like how like those campaigns, target campaigns, secondary targeting, how things like that worth The contracting and subcontracting companies hired by the Atlanta Police Foundation made up the new targets of the pressure campaigns and direct confrontation methods that threatened physical and social capital bringing back the house mis It's

mentioned the previous episode. In late December, banners that read Reeves Young out of the Atlanta Forest were hung in the backyard of the private residence of Dean Reeves in Suani, Georgia. Dean Raeves serves as the chairman of Reeves Young Construction and was among the board members present at the November action, and he personally allegedly shoved and assaulted protesters inside the brawl.

After the backyard banners were hung, an anonymous online statement read quote, we hope this action gives but a miniscule dose of what the creatures in the South Atlanta forest you want to bulldoz might feel unsafe in the place they call home. A month later, on January, Reeves Young Construction and representatives of the Atlanta Police Foundation entered the forest with a bulldozer. They started knocking down trees to complete more surveying work and determine the construction supplies needed

for a laying of building Foundation force. Destruction was halted when approximately a dozen protesters approached the workers in Atlanta Police Foundation representative Alan Williams and demanded that they leave. Workers were safely escorted out of the woods and the bulldozer was left at the scene and was subsequently taken out of commission. In my interviews with some force defenders, I believe one of them referred to this as the

bulldozer tripping and falling, So that's fun. The day after autonomous groups of people finished construction of multiple well built treehouses up in the canopy near the site of the previous day's confrontation, people climbed up into treehouses and announced their intention to remain there in order to delay further construction,

ripping off the old tree sit and bipod tactics. From October one to this point in the struggle, which just like mid January, work was consistently able to be stopped by small, dedicated groups of people without resorting to force. Throughout the next week, attempts at land surveying in the area of the old Atlanta Prison Farm continued, but now with workers being accompanied by the Atlanta Police Foundation, Atlanta

Police officers, and a cab County police. With the backing of cops, workers were able to accomplish more of their tasks, including tree felling and soil boring per Crime Thing quote. In some instances, only handful of activists were on the scene behind makeshift barricades. Reinforcements cannot arrive rapidly enough to assist those on the ground. Unquote. Reportedly, undercover cops surrounded the forest, intimidating those who would park nearby. As such,

some outside support did show up, but not in mass. Meanwhile, in the forest, it was a game of cat mouse between the workers, forest offenders, and cops. Police went so far as to start chasing people on forest trails while writing on a t v s. Barricades and the tactical removal of land survey markers did slow down work on some days, but ultimately efforts were unsuccessful in halting the destruction process entirely. This week of land destruction and caton

mouse culminated on January. Around sixty people, the largest crowd in months, gathered to march into the south of a forest and on to the old Atlanta Prison farm to directly confront construction workers who were boring holes in the ground doing soil sample collection. The cab County police attacked the protesters, tackling multiple people and arresting four, the first arrests inside the forest within the context of the movement.

Quoting crime thing again quote, police attacked the march, tackling several people. The other demonstrators did not mount a proportional response to this aggression, despite outnumbering the police. Perhaps some of the tactics popular during the rebellion, such as the mass use of umbrellas or makeshift shields, could have equipped the participants to feel more capable of decisive action. Ellen Williams of the Atlanta Police Foundation was filling protesters, looking

a little anxious as he did so. A statement on the Defend the Forest scenes dot no blogs dot org site concluded their report back with this sentiment quote, at this point, we are in need of two main things. More people to help support tree sets and defend the force from destruction, and legal attempts to delay construction. Yeah. Always, you want more people to be on the ground in the woods, in the city. Cass We ned casts like the cast like that. You want to wear out the

enemy and a lot of different ways. And the enemy is a lot of different people of the enemies, and enemies are subcontractors and enemy as a police enemy. Garge Parker Power owns quote unquote the power that divides both entrenchman Creek and sorry, there's a lot of different people. So if there's a lot of and we also have a lot of different people involved, a lot of different ways living in the words, people living in town, so

people already knowing it's already happening. We should be visiting the offices, We should be visiting at the damn church, we should be visiting there in the forest, there should be there should be no peace. And I believe that's how we can win, because we need to make it unpopular and unsavory and hopefully next year impossible for them to make these choices. Even this as a small part of the forest, they're just going to continue on to

the next thing. I want to briefly go into some details about a method of protests that combines pressure to both physical and social capital in hopes of resulting material changes from businesses, corporations, or people in power. It features many of the actual tactics we've in fact already discussed. Will refer to it as the Shack method for reasons that will be shortly explained. House visits, targeted vandalism, phone calls, and hanging banners and backyards all have a place in

this method oology. It's a focused drive to dissolve that safe political or corporate astral space that I talked about in the last episode. The cred of the article contains a really good summary of the Shack method. So instead of just like regurgitating their explainer, I'm gonna I'm just gonna narrate certain sections of it because that will make my job easier and I'm I'm a hacking of fraud

blah blah blah blah blah quote. The goal is to hold those responsible for these projects personally liable for their decisions and the decisions of the companies they own, because the entire system of rules and norms we live under dictates that exploiters, warlords, mass murderers, and those that destroy ecosystems must not face pressure at home as a consequence of the decisions that they make. It work, this strategy

is bound to be controversial. It rejects the entire logic of limited liability that forms the basis of corporate rule in our society. At the beginning of the twenty first century, animal rights activists in the UK and the US set out to take down the biggest animal testing corporation on the planet, Huntington's Life Sciences. The campaign to stop Huntington's Life Sciences was called Stop Huntington's Animal Cruelty or SHACK. It formally disbanded, and it's best known for its period

of ambitious international participation in the early two thousands. The methodology of this movement, which encompassed direct actions, symbolic protests, cultural events, sabotage pranks, and more, included many features that have been since used in a wide range of campaigns. The overall strategy of SHACK involved mobilizing a few hundred people to maximize their effectiveness against a major enterprise by

focusing only on their ability to function economically. The SHACK model is centered around tertiary targeting I isolating service providers from third party contracts in order to limit their ability to provide services to the client, which is the actual target. A Right now, I'm just gonna pause here because if that sounds confusing, let me let me briefly provide an example. So the actual target here would be the Atlanta Police Foundation, since they're the ones with plans to build a cops city.

The Police Foundation has contracted a few companies of Brassfield and Gory for one and Reeves Young. So these companies are the service provider. The shack model attempts to isolate the service provider, so reeves Young from all of their third party clients and contracts, which will in the end go back to hurt the actual target, which is the Atlanta Police Foundation back to crime think the service provider, so in this case, heves Young Uh. The service provider

depends on many third parties. Third parties provide the service provider with insurance, materials, equipment, security, catering, cleaning, mail, service, data, maintenance, and more. All of those third parties can be pressured to drop the service provider. Furthermore, the service provider is likely a company with more than one client, and those other clients can also be pressured to drop the provider.

Any company or contractor that is able to move their money away from the service provider because they have other economic opportunities can be pressured to do so. Essentially, this strategy does not directly challenge the bottom line of any of the third party companies. It only isolates and demoralizes the service provider and therefore the end target. Today, it still remains unclear who is the service provider for the Black Hall Studios development, although that information will come out

sooner than later. In considering the limits of the shack strategy in actions outside of the forest, it might be more difficult for activists to maintain a sense of urgency. Targeting individuals at their offices and homes will chiefly bring out those who are excited about such confrontational methods, rather than those who prefer to maintain welcoming spaces of encounter, to build treehouses to or to clean campsites, to cook for others, to cultivate the kind of collective imagining that

is needed to transform society. Also, if people fail to do proper research or mapping, activists could waste their time targeting minor institutions and companies that are unwilling or unable to drop their contracts. They could spend months facing down insignificant companies with many possible replacement subcontractors. Oh sorry, that was a lot. That was a big info dump, but

I think it is useful information. So the goal isn't to sway companies with moralizing arguments, but to frame their association with militarized policing or ecological destruction as a bad look that could hurt their reputation and ability to secure

future clients. Combined with economic consentives inflicted on the service provider like access sabotage, The resulting targeted campaign attacking physical and social capital can lead to pressure on third parties to influence the decision of this of its provider on whether or not to stay on the project. Methodologies can put to the test through practice and be judged by

the outcome. The proposal to employ the shock strategy to defend the Forest is just built on the simple hypothesis that if Reeves Young is forced to drop the contract with Atlanta Police Foundation, the Atlanta Police Foundation investors will then lose the confidence that's required to find an adequate replacement and the project could stumble or fail. The same

goes for the Black Hall project. If activists defeat Reeves Young by means of direct action and self organization, even if the project of finds a new contractor, sophistication and confidence in the movement will have developed in the process

will likely help it evolve once again. Also, one thing that people have figured out because like for the first to after the first two arsons, you could literally just walk up to during daylight, up to the area of Michelle Opona Park and touch take pictures of like uh have sex around like make out with the construction equipment that I've been burned, and you could see the stickers of where they had rented these like construction equipment, UM

destruction equipment, and like after the first one it changed, there was no longer rented from the same company, and

after the second one it changed again. And there is reason to believe that with every arson or attack that they are changing construction equipment companies, because rental companies tend to not like it whenever their equipment is destroyed to cost them a lot of money, and oftentimes they cannot afford hundreds of thousands of dollars going down the drain be to support a pot project that is highly unpopular.

And the other thing what we're talking about with the modified like a policing modifying itself as it's interesting because where at this point where policing is highly unpopular and so it's kind of hedging its bets, and it's doing two things. First, it's calling itself like the Social Peace and Justice cute Bunny Rabbits center for your racist if

you don't like us or whatever. And then it's also just like mask off doubling down buying mad guns like like yet just becoming increasingly more militarized, increasingly more violent and like moving mask off like an occupying force. So there's this split where there's no and people are well aware of this. There's there's no like public chance of convincing UM a lot of companies that this is wrong. Right, there's it's it's it's well, it's very divided. So the

people who are committed are very committed. There are fucking enemies and where their enemies and that's it. But then there's other people who are doing this for economic reasons and kind of understand that policing is not shoot right, and then it's at least unpopular, going out of fashion to some degree, and can make money in other ways.

So yeah, it's this interesting thing where like being able to like fight battles for public opinion maybe doesn't super work, and all you have to do is um kind of trying to cut away the people who are supporting people who are ideologically committed to our destruction and we are,

you know, feel reciprocal. If you look at the photos of what was happening with Michelle Obama Park the land swap site, they were trying to build on You can tell that heavy yellow Equipment LLC of Marietta, Georgia stopped providing them equipment after like the first or the second time that their machines got lit on fire. And now it's alf A l I f of I don't know

where Georgia. So you know, these are photos that you can see, like you can look at these communicates and just tell like like like if there's a photo attached, like there is a traceable like trend of companies are dropping the funk out because they, for whatever reason, just

cannot take the heat. On June twelve, while fully in the throes of nationwide revolts against police after the murder of George Floyd, two Atlanta police officers killed Ray Schard Brooks, a black man who had been sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a Wendy's. Not long after, the restaurant was burnt to the ground by determined crowds.

In the time period between June to the end of the year, more than two hundred Atlanta police officers left their jobs, including the a chief of police, local sheriff's deputies, state patrolmen, and transit cops. Also resigned during the year of the uprising at a higher than average rate. As the entire system of policing and capitalism faced a crisis

of legitimacy. Corporations, business owners, landlords, business associations, and international real estate companies demand a public pacification and a reassurance of a future with stable consumerism. Profit incentive and police need each other in a symbia like relationship. I'll do one of my last crime thing quotes here. Quote. Forces in local and federal government, business associations, police departments, and our militias have continuously worked to make sure a popular

uprising does not reoccur. A large part of the institutional reaction to the popular uprising has focused on managing public perception. Industrial interests and private investment companies have conducted influence campaigns using local news outlets which are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a right wing news organization between Sinclair, Next Star, Gray, Tega, and Tribune. This coordinated reframing of events has damaged the way that many sectors of the television viewing public perceive

revolt and its consequences. In the wake of the uprising, a false narrative circulated to the effect that police, while demoralized and underfunded, cannot control the crime waves currently sweeping the country. This orchestrated narrative has shaped the imaginations of

suburban whites, small business owners, and many urban progressives. The crime wave framework implied that police departments around the country had in fact been defunded or had their powers curtailed, and were consequently unable to assure social peace or free enterprise. In reality, the vast majority of police departments received an

annual increase in their budgets as they normally do. If anything, they accrued more power following the events of So it's no coincidence that the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Atlanta Police Department are pushing to build a militarized urban warfare

training center in the wake of the uprisings. By lever ing that crime wave narrative and the fears of future social unrest, they want to have the tools to bring down the inevitable upcoming revolts for racial, environmental and economic justice,

and now more than ever, including reproductive justice. Cops cities leading the charge is a part of a new effort to adapt American policing strategies to our new era of societal decay and the ever crumbling that will define this century as we face the escalating consequences of industrialization and

climate change. I think another really important thing to look at this is like when you look at the Gurge Floyd uprising in the Crisis of Pride and policing and they realize that, oh, holy sh it, people are so angry about this that they will pose a threat to the sovereagety of the state, which is the first time that has happened in an extremely long time. When that finally happened, the state, the morale of police departments around the country was broken. Cops everywhere, we're like, it was

a demoralizing thing. And when you think about cops as an occupying force, as an occupying military force, it thinking about the fact that we broke their morale is really important. And then thinking about this place as they intend to build a training facility to increase morale, which is a classic military tactic of create cool and interesting ways to train your soldiers to do a murder, is like, that

is a classic military tactic. And when you think begin to think about this as social or when you begin to think about this as not just a struggle against cops city that like as a struggle for like disabling and destroying the police. When you think about this as a material struggle against the occupying forces that are the police, this becomes like way more contextual In fact, I feel like that is the best way to contextualize this movement.

So one interesting thing is that after Rachard Brooks is murdered and the UM two cops involved were UM this substanquently charged UM what was it, six hundred tops went on seconut hundreds of hundreds UM, and their morale is broken. A land police has always been understaffed for like as long as I've known UM and not understaffed by any media propaganda spend standard there standards, but like every single day they're facing backlogs in every zone where they cannot

answer calls. And it's a good thing. This is a war pattriction where their current training facilities have broken. Torrespneky pipes have have like have undeniably miserable conditions. Their cars are out, their cars are like continually on their last legs, and we that's that is a path to abolition, is making it so it is so undesirable to be a cop in this city or any city that no one

would dare do it. It is crucial that police are not the only ones that seek to evolve their tactics for a new era and moving beyond the kind of non violent action that's become so common during protests during the Trump era and the post Green Scare, and even like post occupy, there is this looking for a new form of anarchist or radical resistance. Really emphasized the learning things here is that this struggle took all the different rulebooks, tore them up, set them on fire, and use the

ashes for their shutter. Like everyone here is learning things. People who have been who have been doing things along fucking time are here and learning new things. We're we're not just like tearing up and like destroying the rule books. We're like we're like larges out of the were weird. Yeah, yeah, like put them like like tore all of them up and make allogious out of them, and is trying to create this like weird paper machee mesh of a experimental

path into the future. And and like we wouldn't when we say we are experimenting with new forms of revolt, new new tactics, new strategies, we truly mean, there aren't existing models to do what we're doing. We are writing the book as we could do it, and yeah, we sunk up sometimes, but we've also got some really cool ship happening. Ship that hasn't happened in twenty years is happening, and ship that hasn't happened ever is happening here. And I think that's like a really it's a really important

thing to touch on. Is that, like much of the you know, much of the like Eco defensship that's happened in North America that for quite a while has like not done, you know, or at least not released, communicates about like ship that happens here seemingly every couple of weeks. Now, like the ship here is crazy and wild under dreams. It's also scary and hard and dramatizing, and it's beautiful

and terrifying and like, yeah, that sounds great, you should come. Yeah, this's is such a way from us actually evolving out of a I look at this as like a huge step in what land defense looks like after we have, after we have faced green Scare repression, and now we are moving past the post green Scare repression movements and figuring out how to move forward and regardless of it. For this like uh lands and are really repressive like

boot sounded throats like situation. I don't think anyone should ever stop experimenting. I don't think people should go back to the old ways. I don't think that we should be resigned to not experiment. I think that everyone, like we are in a situation where there is nor future. They're like the collapses now, we're probably not going to avoid one point five degrees warming. Our police are only further mailitarizing, and the like reality of resistance is that

we that we best, that we need experimentation. Yeah, if there was a winning strategy that was proven to be effective, then it would have it would have been effective in therapy, we would have a winning strategy. There's a popular name in the forest which is the arena instead of are you, are you experiencing the joy of attacks on um? And I think that is an important line the same way Cops City is a part of the new evolution of

American policing. Defend the Atlanta Forest can be seen as kind of trailblazing for future movements, a look at how they might develop post the George Floyd protests for my last final cry think quote quote. This campaign represents a crucial effort to chart new paths forward in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, linking the defense of the

land that sustains us with the struggle against police. The movement opposed these developments, mobilizing around the watchwords defend the Forest and stop coops City, have passed through several phases of experimentation, using a wide array of tactics and strategies to keep pace with the current course of events. It represents an important effort to revitalize eco defense and police

abolition strategies in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion. So, considering the possible wide ranging impacts of both the evolution of policing and the evolution of resistance tactics that defend the Atlanta Force movement is extremely relevant to all people who want to improve the world, whether or not they live in Atlanta. Atlanta as a testing ground floor new surveillance tech and like in like experimenting with new forms

of struggle. Here in Atlanta, there are things that not only are we in many ways on the front lines of experimenting with new tactics and integrating new strategies and

how they work. But we're also on the front lines of like different kinds of both like like in person and digital forms of oppression that don't have to be worried about other places, and like it also provides approving ground for ways to struggle specifically against those forms of surveillance and understanding the different ways that sometimes the most effective thing in protecting yourself from oppression isn't some super

high tech ship. It's a ski mask of paragloves and not bringing your phone, and like people don't seem to

like think about that that I don't need to. But yeah, um, so speaking of surveillance, we actually have like not we I don't claim that, um, the police here and the state here has like the video Video Integration System, which I believe is like one of our re integrations video integration center where they take where businesses and homeowners of like ring cameras can volunteer their video surveillance equipment to be plugged into a network UM that can be monitored

and pulled up at any time by the police UM in a downtown location and they and that is like one of the largest surveillance network systems in the world, I believe, um and it is actually reading the charge in like new forms of surveillance, and other cities are looking at this as a model of how to sure how to better surveillan own cities, which obviously makes one police defination trying to create their own little mini city a very interesting prospect in terms of like establishing new

you know this this is mentioned before, which was like establishing new ideas and how to take policing forward into thirties after we've had these wave of social justice like uprising and uprisings for Black Lives Matter, um with you know. I mean not many places actually got defunded, but the propaganda has to be different, and like the way the police optics work definitely needs to be changed from their

perspective or they're trying to have them be changed. One of the strongest things I feel like came out of this movement really pass ahead was our ability to have their game on, like the narrative and then never being able to recuperate that narrative because their plan was this answerstude for centual justice. There's a new way of training police to quote be better or like not murder people

as much and like more refined. Um, And I don't want more refined like police that like murder quote the right people, or the right people, or cage the right people. That's not my desire. I went into police, and yeah, I think that there's a lot of projects happening in the forest. And you know, I also just want to emphasize, like I'm not from Atlanta, but I feel like it's

really important for me to be here. You know, I think a lot of people who felt inspired by the George Floyd uprising, like, um, this is an attempt to recuperate. Like I've said this a million times, it's a time for the police to recuperate from that. I'm trying to finish what we started. I also think that we need

to understand that this isn't just about Atlanta. Like one of the buildings that they're trying to build, and like one of the points of this training facility is that it is like a hub in the same way Atlanta with a with a movie theater, the same way they're

trying to make Atlanta this hub. Right, It's there's an infrastructure for being a hub from shipping and stuff like that, and so now they're trying to make it this this economic habital or white collar way, and so they're trying to make it a hub for police in Atlanta, but also to train police to do fucked ship and to mutate like nationally. And I know that the police from the you know, whatever city I live in are probably going to come here and go back and funk that up.

So I'm trying to make sure that they can't come here, and that you know, police are demoralized in every city and they're having trouble on every city. And this isn't just about the A p D. If you live pretty much anywhere on the East Coast, there's a high chance that your police are going to come here and then go back to your house and funk you up. So

come here and make sure they can't. And the other thing I want to say is like, um, yeah, they want to make this a training facility for police right now, it is a training facility for anarchists. If you come here, I promise you you will leave with more courage and with more skills and knowing a lot of fucking people who are really fucking down all over the country. Um, and I think it's worth I wanted to jump in

and say, like, this is about you. Um. An hour or two hours south of here is the School of the America's you might have heard of it. It's here in Georgia. It's where a lot of awful fucking dictators and their henchmen learned how to do really awful ship

a bunch of war crimes. And here in the city of Atlanta, a local school, the largest, the largest university in the state, Georgia State University, hears something called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange or GILLY, which is where they and the i DF get together to train local police forces here in Atlanta and around the country. And if you don't think that Cops City is going to play a huge role in your police department learning from the i d F how to beat you up, you

have another thing coming. You should come here to Atlanta. What's going on because this is about everyone here, like it's about the whole country. They're coming to Atlanta to learn how to brutalize people, and it's going to stop it. A funny thing about this project is that there's these sort of dual intersections and dual microcosms. On one side, there is the intersection of policing, gentrification, racism, ecological destruction,

and climate change. And on the other side there's the intersection between the tactics of urban city protest and rule eco defense. But there's also this dual microcosm. On the side of the state, they're trying to construct this police facility with a mock city to train in microcosm for protest suppression and practice urban combat against people who live

in American cities. And on the people's side, there's this microcosm not only for how resistance movements can evolve post but more importantly for the people involve been the struggle, a microcosm for how you can live a life free of the oppressive societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose.

I think another really interesting thing about this being like such an ungovernable space is that because it's ungefinitable, because it's impossible to control, it allows us to create these new ways of relating to the trouble there that can't

happen in other places. Like where else are like people and their everyday lives just gonna be able to walk around as gender funded as they want, and like it's fine, Like you know, if they're a clear basher comes into these fucking woods, like, it's gonna be a bad time

because literally everyone here is queer, like we don't. That's the thing is like, when we exist in these spaces in this ungovernable way, we like our like create many versions of Yeah, this thing I want to talk to about, something I wanted to talk about in terms of like the microcos the macrocosm idea of after uprising, looking for new paths forward, the depending on a forest thing can be viewed as this microcost, like this micro causum of

how we can approach different struggles going into going into twenties and stuff um, because yeah, like it is like this small version of what we want. There's also the whole idea of like what I've seen here in the forest more closely resembles like an actual temporary autonomous zone than like the chads ever did in terms of like people actually like actually living free, actually living like not relying on like city water, like not like not living

in like the downtown metro area. It's like it's an actual free space where people can be queer and be all of the things and climb trees and talk with the deer and like that's people are actually allowed to do that, Like there's there's not all of the stigma that even I think like Chazz had like so many problems, right like extremely extremely hashtag problematic in terms of how that resulted. Um, And yeah, this is such a microcosm of like like an autonomous area where people are able

to do those things. I also kind of want to talk about like the like idea our ideas of safety and security don't reside and like the ideas of say a safety or security for us, it doesn't really resides in our trust in ourselves and each other. It resides and like we actually keep each other safe. We have each other's backs, we will fight for each other, and any threat to any one of us is like taken seriously.

We have this like intimacy, criminal intimacy like allows us to build more chin win relationships with high highs and low lows than anything ever could. And like the deadening that society puts on us, this like chemically induced regulated median of gray and terrible is that's not what we live. Yes, some days here it sucks to wake up and everything you own use wet and you gotta go ship in

a hole that it's flitted. But also some days things here are fucking awesome, and I get to wake up to the birds calling and go like have a party with my friends. I don't like exist here in a way that is like comprehensible or legible to like a wider like society. I don't exist in a way that people look at this and be like, ah, that's what you need. But I have never been happier than when I've been in the woods with people I trust and

care about and don't have my back. People people don't have to worry about working to pay their water bill because you can go just get the things you need from places you don't have to pay for it, And like you don't have to worry about all of these things, all of these societal pressures. There's not this constant threat of oh I lose my job. Oh all those things, all those things, all these mental constructs that control us

aren't there anymore. Because we've built a world it doesn't it doesn't rely on that in the slightest, And I think that's like a really powerful thing that like we've already met our own needs and so we can fight back in these beautiful and fiery ways. Pun intended that like allow us to just experience things that like have been stolen from us generations. Yeah, I was going to say, we're not safe, but we're free. And I think that anyone who makes that decision is an active decision to

not be safe, but to be free. I may not light, but by definition ILL ride for them. Because we're now nearing the end of the episode, but before I finish, I need to go back to talking about tactics for

a bit and end with some actual good news. From January to present time of recording, there's been an increase in solidarity attacks in cities across the country, some targeting Reeves Young and Long engineering equipment in other states a third party service providers of contracted construction companies or locations and offices of corporate sponsors of the Atlanta Police Foundation.

This past March, six machines owned by Reeves Young, including two large excavators and a bulldozer, were destroyed in Flowery Branch, Georgia. The online communicate reads, quote, so long as you continue to contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation for the destruction of the South Atlanta Forest and the construction of a Cops City in its place. Know that your equipment is not safe, your offices are not safe, your homes are

not safe. Unless your company chooses to pull out of the Atlanta Police Foundation's Cop City project of its own volition, we will undermine your profits so severely that you'll have no choice but to drop the contract unquote. Subsequent solidarity attacks have happened in Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis,

and Highland, Michigan, to name a few. Many of these attacks were targeted at Atlas Technical consultants, who own many smaller companies such as Long Engineering, which has done work with Reeves Young and brass Field and Gory for the Cops City project. In the vein of shack style methods. This past April, on the ninth, a website called stop

Reeves Young dot Com launched onto the interwebs. The listed some of the various third party clients and subcontractors under Reeves Young Construction and ways to contact them to voice concern about their relation to the deforestation and this urban warfare construction project, as well as including the names and addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their affiliates on the day I was set to leave Atlanta and say goodbye to the forest for the time being,

activists got word that Reeves Young Construction might be dropping out of the project. This would obviously be a big, big win and an indication of the possible effectiveness of the shack method combined with sabotage and the forest encampment tactics. At a stakeholders meeting for the Copsity of project the next day, it was publicly confirmed that Reeves Young will

not continue work on the new police training center. In the public statement addressing Reeves Young's lack of future involvement, the Atlanta Police Foundation tried to frame the situation as Reeves Young simply have quote finished their role in the project. This is a laughable deception, as Reeves Young is one of Atlanta's major construction firms and has even built massive quote unquote public safety facilities in the past. They do

not merely do preliminary sub contracting survey work. They work on projects from start to finish, taking lead contracting roles. It was speculated that Reeves Young itself may have been the main subcontractor hired to do complete construction of Cops City by brass Field and Gory, who have more established

ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting from the Stop for Reeves Young website quote, the Atlanta Police Foundation would have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do nothing more than hire a bulldozer and walk alongside long engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes

and did some soil testing. Police and their corporate backers don't want to let it be known that a focused group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the Cops City construction, while the Atlanta Police Foundation tries to say face, we are celebrating a major victory pressuring a main contractor out of the project. We are pleased that the movement has built up so much momentum and that the Cops City development continues to face setbacks because of

the intelligent actions of regular people. However, the struggle continues. Brass Field and Gory, another large general contractor, remains with the project. A Georgia Open records request from April confirmed via Paper Trail that the Atlanta Police Foundation has been working on the Cop City project with brass Field and Gory, another major general contractor in the Southeast region of the

United States. Brass Field and Gory is an LLC and a multibillion dollar general contractor, ranked as a top contractor in the Southeast by Engineering News Record. Based on recent Atlanta Police Foundation emails required through public records, we can now assume that brass Field and Gory act as the soul contractor for Cops Said, quoting again from the Stop Reeves Young website quote, Brassfield and Gory are dependent on

subcontractors to complete their projects. Now they must hire a new entire set of subcontractors in order to build a Cops City. We believe it is in their best interests for brass Field and Gory to follow the lead of Reeves Young and drop Atlanta Police Foundation as a client, rather than remaining complicit in the destruction of the forest. It is up to all of us to make that clear to them. We can pressure brass Field and Gory out of Cops City by complicating their ability to do business.

This does not have to be limited to the Cops City project. Their various construction projects and third party service providers are numerous. If brass Field and Gory begin to feel like they must choose between all of their contracts and their Cops City contract. We are confident that they

will choose the former. By working to convince the subcontractors, consulting firms, surveyors, architects, etcetera around the country that brass Field and Gory are not a good business investment, we can make it easier for the construction company to do the right thing and dump the Atlanta Police Foundation for good. This has been an incredible period of momentum and research, but nothing is over yet. Now that we have made a decisive victory, it is important to remain more focused

than ever. In the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue pressuring all of the contractors associated with the project to create economic consentives for them to simply move their time and resources to other endeavors. The Stop Reeves Young website will continue to serve as an educational hub for this ongoing campaign. End quote. On top of confirming that Reeves Young was dropping out of the project, a few other interesting pieces of information came out at

the recent stakeholders meeting held on April. Allegedly, there will be a bid for the next contractors or subcontractors UH in the coming weeks, and that will be publicly announced. It was also announced during the meeting that the cops city planners will keep construction timelines secret and may surround the construction site and future facility with an unwanted fence.

In response to the quote law breaking protesters, Atlanta Assistant Police Chief and Site Security Chief Darren sheer Bomb said quote, we are working with decav County to address any criminal acts related to trespassing and vandalism unquote. He also stated that police were also concerned with protesters targeting those who

work on the project at other locations. Here's an interesting note from our force defender pals on how the Atlanta Police Department function and are allowed to operate while inside the old Atlanta prison farm and Entrenchment Creek Park. This is something that's true police departments in Channel. But as soon as the copies out of streets and things like that,

that cop is uncomfortable. And like, cops here are carrying in twenty pounds of gear on them at all times, and not only are they hearing that much gear, but they spend most all day sitting running around and sitting in a car, and like you know, that cop not only doesn't want to chase you through the woods, but they have so probably aren't capable of it. And aside from the hobbyists, like you know, their infrastructure issues then being away from their cars, not being on the streets

having all of their gear. We're also not in the City of Atlanta in this forest. We're an unincorporated the Cab County, which means Atlanta Police Department doesn't have legal jurisdiction as police here. They only have legal jurisdiction as agents of the City of Atlanta because the City of Atlanta owns this property which is outside of the city. So in any time when they're conducting and arrest they have to have the Cab County Police Department officers present

with them. There. There can be an Atlanta Police Department and has been major like one of their huge like high ranks who has no legal authority here except to represent the city. And that relationship is kind of like tenuous at best. They hate each pals. They hate each other and you know, so if you're if you're headed in the town, like bear in minds, that is a huge place to drive a wedge because they fucking hate

each other. Yeah, I know, there's like, um, there's like one thing one time where like a Lamp police officers were inside the forest um with like a specific goal in mind in the Cab County Police cruisers. Not only did the Cab police not want to gather cruisers and go into the forest because they have they didn't care, they didn't want to do this. So the Atlanta Police, Uh, We're screaming into their radio saying, get this person. They're walking out of the forest. Get this person they're walking

out there. It would just be like five or ten minutes before the Cab Police like cruisers to just roll down the road and like you know, they're like people who like ran into the woods and like ran from the riche Cat police. Like like, I'm not going in this word these words, and I'm also not calling to let the Lamp police to let them know that this person just ran from me into the woods, because then

they'll have to actually go in after them. Also, during the April stakeholder meeting, Security Chief shear Bomb announced that the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agreed to an assistance request in mid April from Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant and will be assigned to the site while

attempting to work with neighborhood watch groups. He noted that quote, we look forward to working with those agencies to ensure that this is a safe project that is occurring here and addressing any criminal acts that may be occurring on site to try to stop the project from proceeding unquote.

The co chair of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee, Sharon Williams, invoked the term echo terrorism as relating to the forced defense, marking the first time that word has been used by the government officials to refer to this batch of protests. She also thanked the cop City planners for quote transparency in explaining why they cannot be transparent on the construction timeline.

Emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta, obtained via public records requests do give a possible look into the future of the development. In a January two email, Police Foundation representative Allen Williams said that we quote plan on enabling work possibly in the May and June time frame. Our project will last until the last quarter, and our contractors are currently working on an overall site logistics and

safety plan unquote. Although at the time their contractors all included Reeves Young so there's no telling how accurate that timeline is. Now. Other emails detailed plans for Homeland Security to obtain ring camera subscriptions to monitor quote criminal activity

at the New Academy footprint unquote. In general, when involved in any level of protest, no matter of the alleged legality, security culture considerations should always be among people's top priorities, especially with more eyes being directed to the defend the Atlanta Forced Project. Each person should be responsible for themselves, and I think that that type of action you're interested in taking should severely inform the type of personal security

precautions that that you're taking. Um. I think that's that's been a recurring theme as the movement builds. There are folks that come in movement not having heard the term security culture or whatever you want to follow, and so that be really jarring for folks that are just first trying to get involved, But people pick it up surprisingly quick once you have built as a community like norms and customs around is they say phones on our phones

off meeting? Are we talking about this on signal? Is the call for this action going out on social media? Are we just sharing this amongst friends? Where that hadn't really been a thing, and where frankly, a lot of people face significant repression here in Atlanta during the uprisings because of security culture decisions that were made. I think that a security culture is being built here that where it didn't really exist before, or at least wasn't widespread before.

He is going to survive long past this movement, I think. I think one of the biggest aspects of these things is like the social aspects of it, and like like the generalizing of the norm of if someone answers you vaguely and seems uninterested in to meet and continuing the conversation, she's understanding that they have your best interests in heart when they don't want you to know, And like, quite frankly,

you just can't accidentally share information you don't have. And so like, you know, when we sit here in these woods and people say, you know, like you say, like, so you know you're where have you been? Blah blah blah, and I'm just like, oh, you know our places or something like that. I just don't ask questions. And I understand that I don't just not only do I not need to know, but I probably don't want to know.

And like you know, when it comes to like more like material technical things, those are important, but like the social aspects of security culture are so so much more

important than the technical aspects. It's like I don't know as everybody talks about security culture as like take your phone out of the room, but like, you know, if you take the phone out of the room and talk about doing crazy ship with complete strangers, you don't you know and have a reason to trust them, And like coming here to Atlanta, like if you want to do crazy shit, don't you know if you want to do if you're coming to Atlanta, let me rephrase that you're

If you're coming to Atlanta and you want to do crazy ship, like you to think about like how to do that in a safe way or in safely possible, you know, don't don't come to us and be like, hey, I haven't met you before, but like do you want to go do some federal felonies? Because no, I don't, And I don't want to know that you're doing that either, Like we have do you want to do crazy ship?

That's cool, just like I don't want to know you did it, And like if you're like coming here with the intention of creating like with the intention of like doing ship because it's like cool and fun. If you're coming here with the intention of, like, I want to gain social capital because I did crazy things, Like maybe you rethink that like if you if you want to do crazy ship and you do want to come here, find your closest friends playing a road trip and don't

help anyone. In a recent interview, Atlanta Police Foundation President and CEO Dave Wilkinson estimates that defend the forest quote unquote group members have done hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to utility equipment and has brought up plans to add defense around the entirety of the site as construction begins, saying, and anyone on the site will be arrested, and as we move forward, the enforcement will become stricter and stricter unquote. Also stated in an interview is that quote.

The Police Foundation also hopes to build separate museums on site dedicated to police officers and the labor prison that was once located there. So that's that's what the kids call maskoff moment of building a dedicated museum two cops

and the labor prison a k A. Slave labor prison. Anyway, the first phase of the project had the initial ninety million price tag attached, with expair is being forced to pay thirty million dollars of that, and it's still unclear what the final cost of the facility is slated to be, or what the estimated operating costs are, or really how

many phases of construction they really plan on doing. The past few weeks, the site of Cops in the Woods has become a more and more common occurrence, whether to do scouting or just apparently detonating explosives for funzies at their current makeshift shooting range, like they did a few days ago. One morning when I was there, I woke up to people yelling Cops in the Woods, which by the way, is a very effective substitute for caffeine in terms of making you very awake and alert quite early

in the morning. Um. And then while running through the forest, I saw a beautiful deer and a hopping rabbit. So nice clash of of feelings and sensations there. In terms of closing sentiments based on conversations and observations I had from my brief time in the woods, it's this play to your strengths, don't play by the enemy's rules, utilize the intersection of urban city based tactics and resources, while

taking inspiration from classic forest based eco defense. Attacking from the cover of the woods and ensuring that the terrain is as unwelcoming as possible to vehicular machinery can help by time for rapid response popular mobilization from people living in the city, if and when that time comes, I'll be careful coming down a key road. They throwing bottles at the police, and the bottles at smoke ball, so be careful. They in the woods um throwing at the

police cars and stuff like that, so appreciate it. Yeah, And despite the defensive nature of defending the forest, there still is a large amount of making sure that as often as possible you can do the prep work to set the terms of engagement so that they're fighting on your terms. You're not always complying to theirs, which is

can be useful for defensive stuff. Obviously, the whole aspect of defending a forest like this that you I think the offenders can have this almost like spectral quality of like cops don't know where people are, what they've built, what's in the forest, what's in the woods, and it's like spooky, like you like you don't know who's who's up in a treehouse, you don't know who's behind what's tree, you don't know what things are in the woods, And

that spectral quality of the forest offense is a really interesting aspect of it that you don't see. And you don't see that. And then like pipeline protests as much, you don't really see that for like Protestant a city, um, because the city very much as like a more of like a cops terrain, UM. So I really do like that aspect of like cops are kind of scared to

go in the woods because they're spooky. They have open They testified like in court testimony that said that when this forest defender was arrested, the police officer that gave his statement to the judge was shaking, physically shaking because he was so afraid from being yelled at, Like that was all that had happened, is a bunch of protesters were yelling at them and he was shaking. The police are really dependent on their infrastructure. They are dependent on

all of that kid that they carry around. They are not mobile. They are meant to be attached to that squad car, and every further step they take away from that, they are more and more uncomfortable. And when they look around they realized they were in the middle of the fucking woods. That's terrifying for them and that needs to

be like taking advantage of. And it is wo'ds that like they that their drones and their police helicopters have problem even with their thermal tracking of seeing through the canopy woods that like, and I want to say, like, it was really funny to me that in that it was said bad the purposes were screaming, we know where you live, we know where you live. We're coming, We're coming, which is the whole, the whole post thing um, because I mean, I mean in terms of in terms of

thermal stuff. I brought a thermal camera of mine here, and the woods are very hard to see through With my thermal camera. I cannot see more than twenty ft away. I've I've tested it on people. It's that's the super

interesting aspect. And yeah, like it's the whole like Fern Gully, Princess Princess Mononoke thing of like when people come out of the woods wearing ski basks Like that's freaking like it's like we are you, Like you can be the thing that goes boo in the night like that, Actually that is you, um, and that's something that should be taken advantage of when there's people invading the forest and

trying to destroy it. I think this is really for a lot of us, like us have been like the dark and the night and the woods as this verything. This is where I feel the most safe. This is if you give me a bunch of camel and like send me off into the woods, There's nowhere I'm going to feel more safe and more capable both of safety and attack. When I'm out here, I feel like I

can do anything. You give me a bunch of woods, a bunch of hills, Like, there's so much we can do because we're not in this position of you know, entering hostile territory to you know, do things. This is territory that we control, and this is territory that we are using to fight back. And we're weaponizing not just you know, the cops fear, but we're weaponizing the terrain itself.

Were weaponizing the trees, were weaponized in the hills. We're recognizing the ruins, and we're recognizing everything here has like literally a thing to use to attack the state. If you give me a ridgeline, I can hide from the cops better than any fucking you know, high tech thermal scattering tilly suit is ever gonna give me. You know, out here, you don't need a bunch of fancy ship to like engage in conflict with the state. You don't

need thermal cameras and all that. You can walk into a military surplus store and buy, you know, for fifty bucks. You can buy everything you need to like do just about whatever you want out here. And that's like, that's like a really important and beautiful thing. Is It's not it's not hard to do what we're doing. You just have to break down the mental barriers and do it. Um. Yeah, we we do our best to protect the trees, and the trees protected us too. And it's it's cool living here.

And it's like obviously something ever on most people probably think about is yet how important wild spaces are. But it's cool to really fucking feel it, and it's like like, yeah, this this place is super important because of how it interacts with the ecosystem and how it filters the water and that it's a safe haven for a lot of

really beautiful animals and plants. But also this place is important because wild spaces are sucking uncontrollable, and I want to live in an uncontrollable way, and like you need those things, and um, it is it's really cool if this is a wild space, it's also a forest in a city, which is cool. It's fucking weird, Like there's there's city people who come here who are fucking weird

and do weird ship and it's sick. Um and like it is an uncontrolled space and like sometimes that means that there's like fucking ship chemicals that are like fucking plants up. But also sometimes that means there's people who like are doing things that are free and doing things they couldn't do in the city. And um, and it doesn't matter if I like it or not. It makes me, Yeah, it makes me happy. They just know that those people can act on their desires. Um. And yeah, it's not

always fucking convenient or good. And sometimes I intend to antagonistic relationships with that because it conflicts with my desire. But there's no mediation, and there's there's there's no one getting in between. And yeah, it's just it's really important. And I think like the the slogan that people say of not what is there, not one tree, not one blade of grass, like is like an inspirational thing, but it's also like a strategy, Like it's like a tactical

assertion that is important for us. Like, yeah, like this forest and these wild spaces are essential, not just for us to physically stop the police, but like essential to be an anarchist. Like if there are not wild spaces, spaces that they can't put security cameras up here because they there's no electricity and the trees are two dens for solar panels and they get smashed anyway, you know,

Like it's important to have those things. If there's not places like that, there's not places where you you know, like and and so that for itself is cool. And the other thing is just living here with the fucking animals, Like, um, it's cool the deer. If you want to find a get hiding spot in the forest, pay attention to where the fucking deer sleep. They sleep in different places most nights. You won't suck them up as long as you don't pick the exact same when they're sleeping and they're really

fucking hard to find. Same thing with the coyotes, Like, same thing with the snakes, and like it's just very cool to get to observe and live with all these animals. Know, there's an owl screaming five o'clock. It's like a nice little marker, and that's that's better than you know, looking

at my watch. That's pretty cool. This leads us up to our present day and the upcoming Week of Action in Atlanta, Georgia, happening from Sunday, May eight to Sunday May If you are anywhere near the Atlanta area, you have no reason to not check it out. It's a week's worth of events spanning from early in the morning too late into the evening every day for seven days. You can find the calendar of events on Defend the

Atlanta Force dot com. And if you are not near Atlanta, I would still recommend you make your way there post taste if you are able to, whether that's during the Week of Action or later on down the line. More

boots on the ground is almost always a plus. Here's the more info on the upcoming Week of Action from May eight through May fift so generally the past the past few week of actions have been like really above ground, really like giving people comfortable forest, getting people into a forest, like the community events are like UM and just like public gatherings, inform nights, UH skill shares, other stuff like that. And I believe that this one, like well, like we

had a lot about those events. But I also believe that, like due to the nature of what's going on UM, that it's much more urgent that people UH come and create their doing, their own ideas, being known in science, their own desires. And yeah, we can imagine it's odd. It's gonna be weird, it's gonna be crazy, it's gonna be odd of things. I think there's gonna be family family where black hacking trees kind of ship, and I'm

excited for that. And I think there's gonna do something like what the fund is going on in the woods kind of shares a bunch of cops kind of ship. Obviously we don't know what's really going to happen, but anyone that has been reading stuff like, oh man, don't want to go throw down with the crazies, you should come and do that. And we have some stuff to share and hopefully there will be so many people here that don't know how to deal with it. The problem

going here is the Atlanta Police Force. Um, they there is a lot of them, but honestly they're also they're stressed out and they are run um what's that run dry? Respect? Then they really they don't know how to deal with all this wood ship from ship that we've heard them talking about. They don't know what to do. They're not totally prepared. I think it's gonna be a really fun and crazy ship show and we want you all to

come to our ship show in a good way. And they know you shouldn't use those words, but in reality, nobody actually knows what's going to happen. We know what we're gonna do. We have plans that people can plug into, some stuff you can bring your kids to, and some stuff you should not bring your kids to, and there

will be more. To be honest with, you really got to just be there in person because there's something You can't put everything on Instagram by doing your best to like communicate to folks what's going on, there's just some things you gotta cam two whatever the weekend action. But this is like we're helping people get returned out for this weekend. Actually, and maybe we all just become a roving nomadic war machine together. That would be the dream.

So you have a thing in your hometown, in your territory, and we nomadic war machine over years back, and we just keep doing that. A few resources that some of the force defenders wanted people to know about is first, obviously, Defend the Atlanta Forest dot com, which has the Week of Action calendar to keep up on news regarding the movement. You can follow them on Twitter and Instagram at Defend

the Atlanta Forest or Defend a t L Forest. There is the Forest Justice Defense Fund at Open Collective dot com slash Forest Hyphen Justice Hyphened Defense hyphen Fund, where people can donate to support the work of the broad Coalition dedicated to saving the forest. There's of course stop Reeves Young dot com, which has information on subcontractors and third party service providers relating to the cops city construction.

Very useful even just for simple calling campaigns. The website scenes dot no blogs dot org hosts other news relating to the movement, anonymous community case and stuff like maps of the area and random other useful information resources for info and guides relating to direct action. There's a website titled warrior up dot no blogs dot org and people can go there or to a warrior up dot no

blogs dot org slash guides for various interesting information. I'll say, um, and that last one is really best viewed on tour with via the tour browser just as a heads up. Also probably with like a VPN. And I don't know anyway, be be careful with that last one. But all of these, all of these sites will be linked in the show notes. The future lies in your hands. You have more freedom than you know if you can find the unconventional ways

of expressing it. See you on the other side. And I'll end with a word from our forced defender friend, there's no future. That's nomadic war machine as well. Right, Yeah, hopefully we're gonna stop the police training facility. I think we really are looking forward to people, hopefully some people sticking around there for the week of action, because we're hoping that it doesn't die down too much to the point where a smaller and achieve them that was here

for a week of action gets attacked. We love it, and some of valid stay stay around exactly that if it can happen here, I wasn't thinking abouts, it can happen where you live. And maybe we can just keep the idea. As we're sharing of skills we make ourselves. Absolutely no one should be integral enough to the movement that you can't die off a leave and it can't continue. People should be reading manuals, sharing skills, telling stories, howling

at the moons. We're doing all this stuff to make each other just a weird of the different things that are possible for us to run because maybe we don't have all the you know, the guns and the steel and the gold, but if we have enough people like being creative and doing some guerrilla ship, we can get a lot done. And at the end of the day, if you you can do you have to be careful about how many hats to ring. If you don't know about the r n C eight that's a long time ago.

Now look that up. They're wearing. They are really great community organizers, but they were wearing too many hats. It was the first time that Patriot Act kind of new laws after not eleven was like you lized on people

and a lot of it didn't stick. But if you what we really need is more faceless saboteurs, because honestly, if they that's what we need, we need to be There's just in reality, there's not enough people willing to do nightwhere that looks like there's up behavior, which is great, be safe, be smart at the actors a little, and that's that's what we need, more than saying there's a lot of people that um are willing to do above

ground staff. There's a lot of people that want to be known, and that's great, but we have enough for that. We need something else. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at

cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat Death of the Universe.