It Could Happen Here Weekly 6

what it was? I know lots of they could have been here, and openings have become bastards. Openings now just kind of opening. Robert doesn't have more than one type of opening. There's two. There's there's grunting and then yelling something weird that is that's basically the same learning how to do your job is cut shit. Also, to be honest, most of the time, doesn't know which podcast he's doing. Are all what is this are we doing? Is this the daily zeitgeist? Is this is Jack O'Brien, this is

this is it could happen here. So we're talking today about the different things that are it um here being the States this time. UM, but we're talking about basically, over the course of the past few months, we have covered a few different topics on the show, UM, some of which have already kind of had some results of had updates to what we've already covered. So we're I'm gonna I'm gonna go through a list of like a three different things that we've covered and talk about kind

of the updates in these stories. UM. You know, most of what we've covered around these topics have been like a mix of original reporting and interviews. So now there's been further further work down on this and this we're not kind of update people. If you know, they're not as termally online as us, maybe they have not heard that there's been changes to these stories. And I wanted to kind of put together a nice, little concise thing

talking about updates to all the things we've covered. UM. So the first thing that we're gonna be talking a bit about is the cops City in Atlanta, and they defend the Atlanta Forest Coalision. So I think like a day after our episode dropped on that, UM, Atlanta City Council voted UH ten to four in favor of getting the militarized police training facility greenlit Um, nicknamed Cops City. There was seventeen hours of public testimony. We're seven seventy

of the callers spilk out against the facility. Yeah, I mean that we had that happen in Portland. It doesn't. Yeah, it never matters. It doesn't matter what the vast majority, especially when there's especially when this money involved. Do not do not ever be deceived into thinking that you live in a democracy and that you actually want to matter. Is in any way, shape or form, this is just

not This is empirically not true. Like like sixty percent of Texans periods support vaccine mandates in some instances, but the governor just made it illegal to do them. Ever. Um, Like it's it's it's that way across the board, across the nation. Um. People ask sometimes because like you know, when you get into anarchists discussions of politics, there's a lot of criticism of democracy. I don't I think democracy is a lovely idea. I would like to try it something.

It would be nice to get it ago, it would be nice to experience. So Yeah, this city council voted to least the acres of city owned forest land to the Atlanta Police Foundation UM, at least eighty five acres of which is going to be slated to become the police training facility. UM. The facility is going to cost around ninety million dollars. Jesus Christ, I could train cops much cheaper than that, although training is the wrong word. Yeah, that is the wrong word for that. UM. So yeah, no,

nine million dollars. It's gonna include. It's gonna include a state of the art explosive testing facility, firing ranges, emergency vehicle operations course, a classroom space UM, and an emergency and an emergency proper space. So we'll probably learn to read, right, I'm sure it's for teaching people to do bad things. UM. There's going to be an emergency helicopter pad and an

entire like mock town. It is good that they have the emergency helicopter pad because cops shoot each other with live ammunition all the time, and that that does happen. It does happen a lot. So yeah. The main backup for this project UM is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a political advocacy group that you know, has a lot of funding from corporations and they try to you know sway the political power of the city into giving

more power to the police. Um uh huh. So the interesting thing about this though, is like the vote was supposed to happen in AUGUSTUM, but it was rescheduled for early September after there was a lot of public backlash around this proposal. Um. Then the vote that was supposed to happen ont got pushed back the whole day because there was too many callers saying that they didn't want the facility. So the vote got pushed back a day

in September, but it stays still voted for it. Yeah, so thirty million dollars is going to be footed by taxpayers and the other sixty million is going to get paid for by the Police Foundation, which has a lot of different like corporate donors. So that's that's that's that's that um. And of course it's on you know, on this forest land, which is like some of the biggest forest land in any major American city. So you know, they're tearing down all this forest to build this concrete

city to train cops in. We should also mentioned that at the end of her interview with some of the people resisting this, they basically said like, if the vote goes through, resists is going to continue, so we will continue. There's probably gonna be efforts to like actually try to physically prevent the construction of this. But the next thing we're gonna be talking about is stop line three um, which mean there was also you know, physical efforts to

prevent that. But the type of efforts that people usually do in you know, modern green activism usually are a lot more performative or they're specifically to pressure to create means that will try to convince politicians to veto the process. So it's not you know, it's it's it's different from the nineties when it was easier to like actually physically

stop the prevention of things. Now a lot of the people who you know are trying to do this, it is they're not convinced that, you know, doing a lock box is going to actually physically prevent it. What it's gonna do is create media coverage that truck that is going to hopefully convince politicians to be like, hey, maybe we shouldn't do this, and that's a hard bargain, right, That's not there's no saying that that's actually going to do the thing. You know, in the in the case

of stop Line three that did not stop Line three. Um. There was a really good uh um critique of the stop Line three protests posted in It's Going Down by an indigenous anarchist who lives on that land who was like younger, um, and they're you know, watching all of these you know, older indigenous anarchists, you know, keep on

getting arrested and brutalized. Like, but we're not actually doing anything in the methods that we're doing that the methods that we're trying to like, you know, gain public support, this isn't working in this specific context. Maybe we should reevaluate what we're actually doing. I know It's going down faced a bit of backlash for posting that critique, but I think that I think the critique is actually worth reading.

Any any other thoughts on the Atlanta thing before we move on to the stop line three stuff, um, No, no other than to note that I think the best brisket I've ever had came from Atlanta. Okay, well, I'll probably I'll probably visiting Atlanta in the near future, maybe there with you, um, in which case I'll get some more motherfucking brisket. Yeah, it was actually the fun story.

We were road tripping through town, me and in another friend in another car, and we were talking over radios and a trucker got on like the channel we were on because we were talking about where to get barbecue, and he told us where to go. Um, it was neat. It was like an actual nice like like moment of CB radio connection. Like this guy was just scanning the waves and found us and I was like, oh, I can tell you where to go anyway, continue Garrison. That

was completely unrelated to stopping line three. So the next thing is earlier, I think in September, maybe August if it's been a while. H we we we posted two episodes about me visiting the top Plane three protests and the Earth First camp, and a lot of stuff has happened since then. Um, so you know, the main you know thing is that the pipe planet has been finished now um and is basically getting is ready to be operated,

or it probably already has some operation. It's unclear how much is being used right now, but it is done construction. It doubles the capacity of the original pipeline. It's gonna be doing like a seven hundred and sixty thousand barrels of oil a day, so in the e carves outland through through wet lands where people grow wild rice and

do hunting. Um So, overall the past few months police arrested over nine hundred people, and it's there's been a lot of like felony charges specifically for locking down, which is pretty new because they're using felony theft charges for people just locking down to equipment. Yeah, that is an

unfortunate escalation. Yeah. Um So by the time we posted our top line three episodes, we kind of already figured this was going to be the result that That's kind of how he ended the episode saying there's been all this resistance, but probably it's going to get built, and you know, there's other things that we can learn from this movement going on into the future. Um But the new developments that have happened, um I. I did mention in the episodes how much Enbridge was directly paying cops.

That was something we already knew that what was happening, But there was an article by The Guardian that really gave a lot of new information around how much police involvement there is with like with Enbridge, Like they are actually coordinating a lot. So overall, Uh, Enbridge has reimbursed US police almost two and a half million dollars for arresting and surveying protesters. UM, also paying for like food,

lodging gas. It's like it's they're not not just not not just paying wages, they're paying like for extra stuff as well. So at least at least two and a half million dollars that's been paid from the Canadian oil company um, you know, including that includes officer officer training, UH, police patrol routes, surveillance, all this kind of stuff. UM. The one one interesting thing that was noted in the article is that the company at Enbridge meets daily with

police officers to discuss intelligence gathering and patrols um. And when and when Enbridge wants protesters removed, it directly calls or sends letters to police, so they they actually like coordinate when to actually get police involved during protests, and

they have at least daily information meetings. The one other interesting thing besides just directly paying them for food for you know, training, equipment and the coordination between end Bridge and people being on the ground, is um how much that the Enbridge paid for uh like proactive safety patrols and specific like specific officer surveillance following alleged activists like home, so they would like trail specific cars for a long time and try to like do like in person surveillance

on specific people they thought were activists. And all of this time was paid for by end Bridge and was being coordinated with Bridge. So it's not just you know, paying for training, it's not just for paying for equipment. It's specific surveillance of certain people. And that is I don't know, that's something that we weren't We did not really know the depths of that for sure, but it's

pretty it's pretty messed up. I know. We we suspected some of this coordination before, like when we talked about police showing up to the Stop Line three camp and

blocking off access to the road. Um, this was at the same day that drilling under the river was just being finished, and we so we suspected like, yeah, there's like Embridges obviously talking with police to prevent people from leaving so that they can they can finish up this specific drilling project that was that was pretty obvious to us at the scene. Um, And now we have you know, extra confirmation that yeah, they do like meet daily to

coordinate these types of things. Um, so it's good to have that extrame confirmation of the stuff we already like suspected and stuff we already kind of like put together through experience. But now we have like, you know, court documents and records showing the extent of the coordination. All right, well we'll talk about terrorism, but you know who else

is a terrorist? Oh boy? The products and services that support this podcast are all right in a good way, you know, like um, you know, like uh like a kind of alright, well, it's it's complicated, all right, Do ads just run ads stuff? Oh so it will probably funnier if you bleep out the name of the terrorist organization. This is how we this is how we pick up

from the ad brancast. You say that. So, um, Garrison, we got some some critiques that came in to the old news line, by which I mean people deemed me on redditch. Yeah. I never respond, Um, I almost never respond. It's nothing against people. I just don't like being communicated with. Um. But too many, too many people ask me to send messages to you and like, yeah, Garrison, you're not I'm not like, that's not what I'm ricks And welcome to the last three years of my life. Uh yeah, anyway, Yeah,

I mean, but that's funny, Sophie. Ah. Um. There were people who were like, hey, I don't know if you know this, but Earth First has a problematic history with like eco fascism and that sort of stuff. Just like that too. Yeah, and it's it's one of those things. They definitely are an organization that has said things in

the past that I don't agree with. There's been specific people who do organizing with them that don't have great beliefs specifically around like you know, a lot of like in the old Green movements has been you know, a lot of like transphobia, some like racism. Um. It's it's not because they're the green movements. Like all left spaces deal with versions of variety stuff, you know, not like respecting like indigenous people. Um. You know that that's been

that's been a thing. Um. But the specific term eco fascism I believe is incorrect um because they don't advocate for the genocide of a specific group um. And they don't have like far right populist policies. So like you can have bad opinions and bad ideas and you can actually be racist without actually being fascist, especially eco fascist. Um. So I feel like people throw that word around a lot and they don't actually know what it means. Um,

But what were you specifically referring to, Robert Um. I'm trying to find the message here. But because I got a message saying that Earth First is bad because they're anti natalists, that means they're fascist, which isn't definitely got that, which isn't actually like I'm just going to disagree with that because I don't think anti natalism equits fascism, especially

antien natalism. For like, antenatalism is basically saying, don't don't make people, maybe we should maybe we should stop having more kids right now because you have a lot of problems to deal with and maybe we shouldn't be having like, you know, three kids, which is it's not a take.

I'm not an anti natalist. I don't actually disagree with that take though, but I think it's more in the line of, like, the most fundamental of all human desires for the majority of the population is to make more people, which is kind of why I like anti natalism, because it has that thing that's opposite to one of a lot of humans natural reaction and like, no one's forcing anti natalists, don't want to force you to be anti natalist. Bring up this as an idea, Yeah, and I think

it's a valuable idea to discuss. And I don't think it's I don't think you're I don't think you're embracing like the massacre of human beings or Genesis. The way by saying like, I think it'd be best if we didn't make anymore not planning a arguable point. I'm not planning to have any kids because I don't see why it, especially when there's so many like children that can be adopted. Garrison, we talked about you having kids so we could experiment

with making them blue. This is a separate conversation that we're not talking about involving. We are not talking about this on the plot. Will just include that tantalizing hint. I also just think in general, when we talk about a group that's had a long history and a specific thing they're doing in the present, yeah, this has happened in another situation, whe people like, well, you know they did this or some one of them said this. And

there's a couple of things I feel about that. For one thing, it's it's like it's entirely possible that the people doing the thing in the present day have nothing to do with the people twenty years ago. Yeah, like most of the people out there First Gathering Gathering were like in their twenties and around my age, Like they weren't in the they weren't in Earth First Night, Like that's not like so I feel like silly about kind of making them be held accountable for something somebody else

said under a similar banner decades ago. And on the podcast, I talked about how like people on the Earth First Earth First Gathering like talked about this stuff, like the people talked about Earth First like history and how they

haven't handled some issues very well. There was a lot there was a massive effort for this gathering to like um to like uplift and make sure everyone focuses on indigenous voices, like they invited over multiple indigenous groups to give talks on green resistance and like land back like that.

That was a big focus of like making sure that this actually is something that has hurt because people know, like this is, yeah, this is something important, this is something that actually should be done, and there are I think in general, and we talk about like holding organizations and individuals accountable for their past. Um, what matters is like a mix of what they did and what they're doing.

So obviously, if Earth First had been saying twenty years ago, we need to wipe out all the Jews, I would be like, I wouldn't care what they were saying. Now, you know, it would be like, yeah, you can't really come back from that. If you want to do a completely different thing, it needs to be a new organization.

But they weren't. And I'm not saying that where I'm just making an example, but like, as a rule, I think we should embrace the fact that organizations and people can change throughout time and be better than they were in the past, um and and learn from mistakes and flaws. And I feel pretty unwilling to condemn individuals or organizations for the mistakes of their past, although that is dependent

upon the kind of mistake and the harm that it cost. Yeah, and like and how they address it in the futures, like a lot of these Yeah, because like it wasn't like the First as an overall organization of specific people they were affiliated with, like you know, specifically UM like UM Edward Abbey has said some not great things around different different different social issues, and his books were extremely

influential on the beginning of green resistance. But that's something people talk about now, Like that's something that is like discussed and debated. Um and he was and he was like even in the eighties and nineties, he was like kicked out of Earth First gatherings for kind of being a loser, like for for having these bad views. Were like, yeah, we probably shouldn't have you here anymore. Leave go away. So like that was something that was even talked about

back like back then as well. That is that isn't just a modern thing. Yeah, and I think in general, number there's a couple of things. Number One, whenever we talk about like an organization in a specific context they're doing this, that doesn't mean we're embracing everything they've done. And number two, whenever we talk about the history of of of of a movement or a group, I hope nobody ever takes that as like, here is the authoritative stance on the history of this thing. Like it's when

we talked about the Black Panthers. There's a bunch of stuff we left out that's very important. Um My hope with those episodes, and I hope with anything we do is that it like inspires people to want to learn more and read more, and we're giving them a basis of understanding that they can use to expand their knowledge on an important topic. So please, we are we are.

There's like one thing, uh collectively that that Garrison and I have any kind of expertise on, and uh, outside of that, you should not take anything we say as like, here's the comprehensive history of of this because it's I I understand one thing, and it's it's how the internet makes people shitty. Yeah, so yeah, um yeah, I mean that that was something that this whole It was something I thought about when writing these episodes is how much

to include of this stuff? And I did not feel like it was super important to discuss this stuff because it wasn't relevant to the topic of stop lines. I think you didn't something relevant to the topic of like the current ongoing green resistance. If we want to do like a history of green activism, then yes, this is something that that would be that. Yeah, and I think like at some point we probably should do absolutely about

just like mirror and like all of that ship. But like that there's a kind of stuff we want to talk about that we haven't yet because it's a daily show and my God, give us some fucking time. People speaking of Edward Abbey, you know what, huh sells quality monkey wrenches. Okay, alright, that's fine. The maybe one of our sponsors. It's I hope so as hardware. It's hardware. As hardware sponsoring us, they do sell. You can get some good monkey wrenches from Ace Hardware quality for fixing

your faucet, for fixing your faucet. So go get wrench pilled and then listen to the rest of the show. Well we're back. We just had a good discussion about what we're gonna talk about, and we realized that it wasn't after the ad break, So here we are. Um. In in early September, we had an episodes about both California's climate and the ongoing recall election against Gavin Newsom. So a few days after our episodes dropped, the things like the day the day the second one dropped was

was election day. Um we we we got the results in faster than what I was expecting. Um and Uh Newsome did handily beat uh Larry Elder with like yeah, so people people voted sixty one no and liket yes. Uh so he Knewsome did a decent job and pushing off elder Um. So this, this, this whole recall processed costed California taxpayers two hundred and seventy six million dollars. It's not like we needed the money for anything else. Garrison. Come on, Yeah, so you know a few takeaways. We're

going to spend it on fighters literally anything else. Water giving California needs water and firefighters. Garrison coming giving houses to people who need houses. I don't know. Um. Yeah, so takeaways from this, The recall process still should absolutely be invented. Yeah, it should require should require more than twelve signatures at the last voter turnout. Um. And the government should be requiring to get to if you're if you're gonna be elected in the government, you should be

required to get a majority of votes. Um. Not not not just a plurality of a specific you know sect. So there's the whole we we we we talked about the specific reasons why it was bad in those episodes. Those are still those are still like, those are still valid, those are still relevant because there's still the same issues. Yeah, and none of the fact that this turned out well had anything to do with the Democratic Party who very nearly bungled it. And it and it doesn't it doesn't

really impact. It doesn't impact you know, the Californias climate issues so much. And like just because new Sims in office doesn't mean they're going to get much better. You know, there's still things that he needs to be pushed on to to you know, make the climate a little bit more habitable. In the meantime, it it means that we

will continue stumbling towards a cliff. Rather than speak so generally what voting for Democrats means, I will say, it's interesting to me that it doesn't seem like you can get the vote was rigged thing to work unless the election is like kind of this is the next thing I was going to talk about. Um, Yeah, because because like in the week before the election, the Fox News Republican Party and Larry Elder and even Trump, We're really starting to ramp up this idea that if Elder loses,

that means the election was rigged. Uh. This was like they were really pushing this hard and you know, spreading like they were giving links to a website like before he lost even to be like, if you know, when I lose, use this website. I was like, okay, that's okay, that's weird. Um. But on the night of the election, Elders seems to kind of claim climb down from the inflammatory like rhetoric around the election. In his concession speech,

he told supporters, let's be gracious and defeat um. So he once the actual results were in, he really climbed that down. So we can read into that. The other thing I want us to read into here is that could this could this rhetoric around if we lose, that means it was rigged? Could that disenfranchise Republican voters from even showing up if they believe that all elections will be stolen from them? Well that being that they'll be less Republican turn out if there's just if they think

that it doesn't matter. So that's the other side of things, Like I'm not sure if if if the other side

effects that this that this rhetoric could have. Yeah, there's an interesting So during during the last election like national election cycle, there is one trement to use people who weren't voting in Florida, And I thought it was really interesting because there were there were several people they talked to who we're like, yeah, I don't vote because last time I voted was two thousands and they stole the election, which was literally which which yeah, and and you know

i'd say that, yeah, Like I think it is slightly different when like two thousands, when actually like literally but there was there was the bricks like there there there Roger er Stone, Yeah, Roger Stone led a riot to stop like the votes from being counted, like whatever, weird Bush. I think people people got like like a bunch of people with like vaguely black names got like their names

struck off the like the voting roles. Like there was a lot of yeah, but yeah, And I don't I don't know if it'll if it if the effect can work that strongly when it's like completely bullshit which was, I think it's yeah, interesting, I don't know. It's it's hard to say because it's it's it's unclear whether the voter turnout on the because like you know, there were times where they were pulling like fifty fifty between between

between newsm an Elder, and it's unclear. I think definitely the big advertising push that corporate donors gave to Newsom in the month before the election did help get Democratic voter turnout, you know, like people voting for new getting people scared about the governor. That not was not ineffective,

that that very much works. That did increase turn out there, But I don't know because like with the whole election being stolen rhetoric, that could both increase Republican voter turnout and there's also the side effect now where maybe it could decrease it because they're just disenfranchised about this concept. But this is kind of just speculation at this point. I don't have actual data backing up this claim right now.

This is just something that I thought about while running this right up, I'm like, huh, I wonder if this could be a contributing factor in the future. People really I feel like they're always gonna lose. Maybe they just not not even are going to bother um. But it's hard to say. It's like, you know, the main reason

why Elder lost wasn't due to newsome strength. That was because Elder is like, it's completely like he it was like it was the most yeah, like widely unqualified and like one of the more extreme candidates like running and yes, he did get a lot of support among Republicans, but among moderates and people you know, left of center in terms of like an American spectrum. Uh, they're like, yeah, no, this is gonna be a disaster if he gets elected. And that's the main reason why he didn't. Um, it's

not due to Newsom being great. But I mean, Sophie did mention a few things that Newsom has done since then. Um so do do do do you want to say the specific details just so I don't have to look famously a big Newsome fans So yeah, not come on. Uh so not to give news some credit because this is like an obvious right thing to do situation. But um, at the beginning of October, the Senate Bill seven was

signed into law. It was an unanimous vote and Newsom signed off on it to give back Bruce's speech, which was owned by a black family, Willa and Charles Bruce, back in their land was illegally taken away from them. It's a beach front plot in Manhattan Beach. And I signed into a lot of give it back. Uh that is I mean, yeah, yeah, more of that should be done. I mean that it is kind of the basis of like, you know, that is one side of land back, is

just giving land back to people who used to have it. Yeah, of course this is this isn't tied to indigenous stuff. But you know, I've seen people make that same comparison for like, yeah, we should just be doing this more in general to a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah, that's a I'm glad that that was done. It's also now illegal to remove a condom without consett in California, which is wait what Yeah, you're going to have to change

a lot of things about how you have sex with Californians. Yeah, during intercourse, that's the it's the first state to do that, first of all. Huh. Yeah, and it's wild because under any reasonable definition, that's rape. Yeah yeah, it's just rap. Yeah, it's absolutely rape. California also now requires menstral products in public schools, so that's a bare minimum. And that I

didn't realize that it happened. Yea. And I want to be clear here, I'm not giving you some credit for this, but if he had lost the recall ellection, none of this would be happening. No, it's nice that he I'm sure some of this was him. Kind of providing a sop to the people who lined up to stop the recall, and those are good things that were done. Yeah, And I think I think that's sort of an important thing

to understand about when politicians occasionally do good things. It's like they don't do good things because they want to do them. They they they do things that benefit from you because they're either in some ways scared of you, or it's because they need to buy they buy you off, and and that that is, you know, that is that

is a legitimate way that good things happen. Like, I've got a couple other Uh, there's been a lot signed in recently, So I got a couple of other ones that I that I think are relevant to our show. California will not streamline extend assisted death law, So that's that's good. That reduces the time until terminal patients can

choose to be given fatal drugs. So starting January one, the waiting period required time a patient makes separate oral request for medication would drop to forty down from the current minimum fifteen days. That is pretty rad Yeah, I mean, there's just there's there's a I mean, we'll see if it's it's hard a lot, there's a lot. It's it's hard, it's hard to be like worse than Larry Elder. Yeah, that's this one definitely would not get get through for California.

California Acts, a lot of strip badges from bad officers, like very vaguely written, is very vague. But yeah, well we'll see what happens to Like, No, none of the stuff would have happened under a larial thing. And I am surprised at like surprised that some of those things actually got through because I'm I'm surprised that democratic politicians would actually vote for those things we put office. That's

why I was like basicallyasically like the condom thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And I was not expecting that to go through some science legislation to extend to go cocktails. Wait, all right, that's sure, Okay, more where am I to cocktail heads? Sorry? Alright, So at least larryl there's not in office. There's still a lot of climate issues and maybe this rhetoric around stealing the elections not gonna work every single time they

do it. Um, that's kind of the main that's the main things that I was going to talk about, and it is it is. I mean, one of the things that people are talking about in a lot of the spaces I generally agree with is like the foolishness of voting as harm reduction. And there's been a lot of if you want to believe that it isn't, there's been a lot of information coming up from the Biden in

a the Ministry ation that will support that belief. Um. But what we're saying right now in California's group that can be like the these are not none of this is going to fundamentally change the major problems that are confronting us. But but a bunch of those things are going to, Like life's going to be easier for some little girls whose families don't have much money. You know, life got easier for that one family who got their

land back. Um, you know, potentially it's going to be easier to get bad police officer or to get particularly bad police officers off the street. And that's not that's not nothing like when we say voting can be and I'm not saying that it usually is, but when we

it can reduce harm, that's what it means. It means that like oh, some bad things that that would be worse are not as bad because of this, not that everything is better, A lot of stuff will be the same and is the same in California, like ecologically, nothing logically fundically fundamentally changed, but some ships a little easier for certain groups of people as some stuff and specific specifically, I think the getting getting more like contraceptive products and

menstrual products inside public schools is one of the literally the best things we can do, like like for the whole country. It is like something that if that was required in every public school, that would make so many people's lives better a ridiculous degree significantly reduces harm in a specific way. And I think that just because like, yeah, I mean, it's not going to stop us all from burning up, um, but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.

So those those are the three stories that I wanted to give some updates for, um because I know, you know, there were changes happened, you know, very soon after posting those episodes. UM. I still think the California ones are worth listening to because they do lay out a lot of stuff around around California's climate, UM and the specific weird stuff that it has with its specific weird things that has with its election process. Um, I think the line three episodes are going to be pretty good to

go back to as well. Um, and then uh, I at the the specific Cop City thing in Atlanta, that is the stuff that I am. It's gonna be the most like ongoing thing stills because that's going to be an ongoing project. So I'm sure we'll come back to the Cops City at different points throughout the next few months. So that that that that that's the updates. Um. Any any any closing notes from either Christopher, Robert or Sophie. Yeah,

just just I do well excuse me, okay, sorright Sophie. Sorry, just I just just remind him we've said this earlier in the episode that like we're just giving you brief brief sniffets about this stuff. There's a lot there's a lot of really good articles online that go go deep into these things, and we'll post our sources on the website. Yep, yeah, yeah, we we we we do. We do a good job I think most of the time. Yes, yes, but we

were great. Yeah, we're we're the only heroes. That's fair to say, absolutely, But do you do not have a podcast be the only source of information absolutely lot of things like don't listen to if you think more of a of a left perspective, that is that that goes in some directions we don't. It's going down. Is a lovely place to check out Margaret Killjoy's um uh live Like the World Is Dying. St Andrew's YouTube channel. Um he does some some really incredible stuff. Um. You know,

there's all sorts of good people out there. And then also like history books more than anything, like history books, history books for the thing that radicalized me. Yeah, if you want to read more about the new sub notable laws signed recently, the k c r A and Sacramento did A did a really good breakdown article. Oh sorry, so it it's okay. And and as a note, we will be doing more episodes like this over time, as like stories that we cover have additional things happen to them.

This is like we don't want to just be like dropping a story and then ignore whatever happens next. Um. Sometimes that don't mean following up with people that we're talking to on the ground, but you know, we are trying to like keep you updated on the things that we think are important, you know, even when they end uh in a in a broadly positive sense or whatever. And uh, lastly, what was the name of that brisket place in Atlantic, because I'm sure people are gonna ask

about it. Oh, I don't remember. It was some shitty little place in the middle of South Atlanta. Um and like a fucking strip mall that was really helpful. I don't remember. So if it was like eleven years ago, what do you I don't remember the best brisket you've ever had, and it was but the best. Like if you know anything about good barbecue, the best barbecue you ever have is either cooked by like your uncle or is cooked in some shitty little place with a diastern

that wouldn't pass a code inspection. That is true that the more the more codes it violates, the better than bisket. Um. Anyway, if you see the chef actively ship on the grill, that means just going to be incredible. Jesus Christ, Twitter and Instagram, what happened here? Poticles out media? Subscribe to the feed and leave a five star review. That's it. Don't don't don't shoot on your brisket grill on everything? Alrighty Garrison, is that good? Is that the show? No?

Just keep going? Though Okay, well it could happen. Here is the show that A tonal noise is my introduction this week because I'm a hack in a fraud. Who isn't a hack in a fraud? Is is our guest this week. St Andrew. St Andrew, you are a solar punk anarchist from Trinidad. Um. You have a YouTube channel, UM where you talk about solar punk. Um you talked about stuff like seed bombing. Yeah. I'm just very excited to have you on the show because I'm a big

fan of YouTube channel. Thank you, glad to be here, big fan of your work as well, Andrew. I kind of wanted to start with why this Why solar punk is important? Because, um, I think it's easy for folks who just kind of skim it to see it. It's just like, oh, it's an aesthetic. It's maybe an art style or a fiction style. UM. Maybe something that's neat, but not something that has like a lot of inherent value to people trying to change the world. And obviously

you disagree with that. I disagree with it to UM. A quote I keep coming back to again and again is one from Werner Herzog in the nineteen seventies and it was something along the lines of I think that without better myths, were destined to go the way of

the dinosaurs. Um. Actually of I forget his name right now, But there's this excellent, excellent book called The Truth About Stories, and I think what it really emphasizes is throwing the book is the importance of stories, on how stories impact how we navigate the woot, which is why I sort of embraced the punk you know, as a story that

we can work with green forward. Yeah, I think, Um, I think it's incredibly important to have better stories, better myths because for one thing, I think where the Left falls down a lot is not having is accurately diagnosing the problems without providing a better look at at the at the future, you know. Um. And when the problems are when the people who do kind of propose solutions, it's often um not in a way people can feel.

One of the benefits that that that the right has, that fascism has, is that they they're very good at providing people with myths and providing people with kind of a fictional look at at their idealized world that draws people in. You know, you can laugh at the right you know, they have lot of people that work on

like meta narratives and that's very, very core to their ideology. Um, So, I guess where I'd like to start with you, Andrew, because this is kind of the first time I think we've really talked about solar punk on on this show, even though from the beginning before any of these episodes dropped, this was always a central part of our discussion about what the show was was going to be. Um, would you kind of provide an introduction to to what solar

punk is for our listeners? Sure? Sure, So I would say that solar punk is a vision of the future that places emphasis on the existing world and how we get to that future from where we are now. So it emphasizes the need for environmental sustainability, for self governance, and for a toronomy and social justice. It emphasizes the need for you know, human and ecocentric ends to really be in sync, and it aims to really heal the

current rift between humanity and Nietzsche. It also recognizes, of course, that there isn't this binary between climate change happens and climate change doesn't happen. Rather, it understands that how we navigate it, we Uh, have a variety of consequences and some of the positive, some of the negative, but it's up to us to really shape that. Yeah, and it's UM. I want to drill into a couple of facets of that.

But I want to quickly plug one of your YouTube videos for folks who kind of want a more involved um explanation and background. You have a video called what is solar Punk on your channel Saint Andrewism like Andrew I s m UM that I think is a fantastic introduction not just to like the aesthetics of solar punk, but some of the practical some of the practical kind

of expressions of it. And and two of the ones you lists like examples of here's here's what this is is like actual practis you know, and not just an

aesthetic is seed bombing um. And then you talk about this this very interesting kind of like terra Cotta air conditioning, which I think is I think it's neat because it's it's one of the problems that I think with kind of some versions of of of particularly kind of on the more liberal end of of of solar punk imagining is just sort of like ways of replacing um, ways of gaining the same kind of consumptive benefits that exist, I guess not even not even like greenwashing, right, greenwashing.

Like here, let's get the same consumptive benefits we get scrapers, yes, skyscrapers, the same level of consumerism, same level of you know, destructive extractive practices. But we have some flowers and some trees. So yeah, and that's not enough. But at the same time, there are things that aren't. Like air conditioning is contributes massively to climate change. It's also not a luxury. Like if you live in a place where it's a hundred and twenty degrees a lot of the summer, that's not

a luxury. Yeah, this is going from someone in a tropical country. Yeah, definitely a necessity. Yeah, So I wonder if you could talk about kind of those two, I mean, or if you have different ones you'd like to pick, but just kind of what you see is sort of the practice expressions of solar punk, sort of beyond the aesthetic, although we're going to drill into the aesthetics some too, because I also think that's important. Right, So, I think some of my favorite manifestations of the punk in a

practical context, things like um, gorilla gardening. Grilla gardening is probably the biggest one because it's one that someone could literally pick up and do today or tomorrow, you know, as soon as they hear about it, doing about it. Just get some clay, get some seeds, you know, and put those things together. Then as you're walking home or walk into the store, just toss them wherever there some

free dude. UM. So that's a fun one. There's also, of course things like little bit one involved, like community gardening and particularly forest gardening, because that will provide a level of food autonomy and agency for people who have been healing it for a long time from the process of food production. UM. They're also practices like compassing or corpach ng and it's like a way to produce lumber without chopping down a whole set of trees, so you are able to get the wood from the trees, but

the tree remains alive. UM. There's also things like, of course solar powered technology, whether it be algae based UM windows that you know extract energy from the sun, or solar sales or solar ovens uh or like the terra cotta deconditioning, which, by the way, I learned recently contrary

work in a human environment. Yeah, but yeah, there are a lot of difference opportunities there also there are things like you know, tool shares and make up spaces and seed libraries, all different ways to sort of bring it into fruition that is. Yeah, and I uh, I think

a lot of that's really valuable. UM. I'm interested in in parts sort of your your attitude on UM what let me think about how to phrase this, UM, what do you think are kind of the things as we talk about sort of the things that can be at least potentially replaced UM with with less extract of less consumptive methods. Is sort of an example of solar punk

practice is replacing those things. There's also things that we're not going to be able to have if we actually want to live in a more sustainable UM future that that doesn't contribute to some of the nightmares that we're all going to be increasingly facing. UM. You're you know, and again, I think it's it's telling that so much of kind of the future fantasies of that are written by people who come from you know, my part of

the world. United States focus on like kind of post scarcity methods of of guaranteeing the continuation of consumption just through in some cases like fantastic methods um you know, magical three D printers and the like. Um, you come from a very different part of the world, very different perspective, what do you see as the things that like, we're

going to have to give up? Coming from a country that is actually reliant on oil and natural gas production, we have to get rid of cause we definitely absolutely have to get rid of cause um free to ships as well, and really the whole way that you know, global supply chains are structured right now. Not to say that they won't be any sort of global um sharing of resources in the future, but the way that it's

happening right now, it can't continue to go on. We can't continue to structure our cities and our lives around cause you know, and other methods of gas guzzlin transportation because we're literally going to run out. And we've known this for a long time, but it's nearing. The day is nearing, CLUSI and clusa, and yeah, we we have to find a way to do without it. Yeah, and it's it's I think tell like, there's a couple of

things that are important. One of them is you can't just say we have to stop global trade because in global travel, because the people have have sought and done that for as long as there have been people in one form or another. It's it's a fundamentally human thing. But there are aspects of it, like you know, expecting that every kind of fruit and vegetable will be available year round, which is certainly thing that we in the United States expect. Um. That doesn't that that's not part

of a realistic future. Um. And if it's part of the future, then it's only going to be part of the future for an ever shrinking chunk of of the country. And you can see that in sort of um or of the of the West, and you can see that in kind of um the like what we're dealing with right now with like the supply line shortages and failures, and like one of the I think the symbols of how far we have to go in my country is the degree to which people are freaking out by the

fact that Christmas presents might be late. Um. Let alone being like, yeah, you might not be able to buy coffee, um um ever, or all the time you know, you might not be able to get tomatoes in December. Um, which UM, I think one benefits too for the gattening. And that's what's in my inset is as you learn

to so you also learn to reap. Right. So a lot of people who get into grilla gardening also end up getting into foraging, and they are absent stuff you could download that allow you to, you know, learn how to identify plants in your area. And we surprise the number of plants in your area that are you know, useful for tease or for salads or for whatever purposes that can be used as replacements. I'm not sure if they could replace coffee, but they could be beneficial, um,

in recognizing how we have to live with our local ecosystems. Basically, yeah, and a big you know, when you talk about living learning how to live with our ecosystem stuff like planting um forest gardens and the like or food forest I

think is the term. UM. I think something that has to be discussed is the matter of indigenous sovereignty, especially when we're talking about you know, it's not just you know, North America, a lot of chunks of the globe indigenous people had spent you know, in some cases thousands of

generations setting forests up in order to sustainably produce food. Um. And when when colonialism arrived, that was often just seen as like, oh, this is this is these are wild places for us to for us to extract or tear

down and replace with monoc cultures, you know, single crops. Um. And so a big part of actually building back that capacity, the capacity of us to to survive off of the food that can sustainably grow where we live is is looking back to those indigenous methods and and also um, you know, giving back land in a lot of cases, um. And yeah, that's something you talk about in your videos that I think is really important to um to to

to to explain to people. Yeah, I mean there's there really is no way to separate the violance and oppressive institution of clunealism with the equosido Nietzsche of modern states. You know, those two are deeply intertwined, deeply married together. And so you can't fight climate change without addressing the issue of severeignty of indigenous sergnity and land back. Yeah. It's um, it's really interesting. I've been I've been up hunting on mountain Hood with a friend who is who

went to school for like forestry management. And as we were driving way to drive through a chunk of the reservation in order to get to the BLM land where we're able to hunt, and he pointed it out, and once he did, it was immediately obvious just how different the land under indigenous control looked from the land, you know, just feed away that was being managed by the federal government in terms of like how much better the forest management was, how much how much smarter it was it

was managed in order to reduce the chances of like a ladder fire that that actually kills you know, the trees and whatnot. There's this whole thing blowing up on Twitter right now where you've got a chunk of Marxists tour are trying to frame land back as uh, just like shifting ownership of resources, which I think is really missing the point. But I find interesting about Twitter is the exact same discourses are repeated over and over and

over again. So I remember this exact conversation happening around this time last year, around April last year, um earlier this year as well. It's just the same discourses get recycled over and over again, and it's reach a point for me I realized that these people don't want to learn about land back or what it really means because they are invested in the structure as it exists and they don't want to have to interrogate that. So, Yeah, this will out to be an interesting thing of knowing. Yeah,

and it's UM, it's it's it's frustrating. UM. I guess that that acts as like a general uh description of

Twitter discourse, but certainly does. Yeah. I think it's I think it's telling the degree to which people, even on the left treat it as a fantasy as opposed to dogged lye pragmatic um and and proven so like proven by like like you know, like you can read you in reports that will that will essentially say land back in the space of a five page you know, study on how indigenous land management functions a great deal better than UM than a lot of the stuff that's like

centralized by the federal government, where we're like, our federal government is terrible at land management. UM, And it's part of the it's part of the problem. I think one of the things that that excites me about solar punk as anesthetic and idea is getting back to this relationship with the land as opposed to talking about just preserving it um as talking about managing it. Because because none of our none of the land that people live on is like wild in the sense that people mean it

as it's been cultivated. And that's that's the thing, right. The whole philosophy of you know, um land preservation as was taken up by the US government with the whole um you know, you can stop forest fires kind of thing ended up leading to more forest fires downline, because they we have a rule in the ecosystem not just there to stand back from a far and to observe it.

So we don't do our part to manage the underbrush and whatnots and clear to we and exercise you know, controlled fires, but we end up in the situation we're in today, you know, cultivation not just sterile preservation. Now. One of the things that you talk about well because because one of the more frustrating discourses this is not just a Twitter thing, this has been going on for years,

is the discourse around GMO crops. And usually I would say, like the two most commonly heard sides are GMOs are bad because you know, monsanto cancer whatever, or GMOs are good. Um end end thought. Um. And the thing that you point out, which is I think the accurate take is GMOs. The preponderance of evidence says that, like, there's nothing inherently dangerous about genetically modified crops, but the way in which they're often used in order to create these massive mono

cultures is really toxic. So there's a lot of promise um for GMOs in terms of keeping our our existence on this planet sustainable. But what's not sustainable is the kind of industrialized agriculture where you have ten thousand acres of one thing which just doesn't happen in nature exactly exactly.

And if you look at how genetic modification and to please prior to you know, all advanced funds in genetic modification technology, um, I'm not so how many people are familiar with the dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds of varieties of just corn that were present in the Americas prior to colonization. A lot of those varieties were wiped out or was suppressed in fear of these mono cultures.

But if we're able to culturally diversity of these crops and really bring some of them back through jestic modification, that would really help us with, you know, food resilience in a world with an increasingly unpredictable climate. Yeah, yeah, I think that. I mean, I think you said it perfectly. I want to move back to kind of what I introduced the episode with, which is talking about the value of of fiction and myth making in a in a

very pragmatic sense. I guess I'll start by saying, I think one of the clearest signs of the danger that we're in and how toxic our society has gotten. Um And I am speaking from a primarily US centric standpoint here, but I don't think it's unique to the United States. Is the extent to which trust me um as as the saying is when the US sneeze, So anytime there's some phenomenon happening in the US, there are the coffee cuts.

And I do think this is pretty global. I mean, you see it in like South Korean films and all over. What you're going to say, yeah, the obsession with apocalypse and when we when we go to the future, it's always a dystopia. Um. There's a degree to which we've almost forgotten how to imagine utopia, or even not just utopia, just a way of living that is an improvement in

a lot of ways of future that's better. We've forgotten to do both utopian fiction and any just kind of like positive fiction in a lot of ways, because yeah, it's understandable because the world is kind of terrible right now in a lot of in a lot of ways. But there's also that's been utopie being fiction inside other terrible worlds as well. I think just the modern interconnected media sphere has really rewarded this type of like dystopian

and collapse based apocalypse fiction. Yeah, and I'm sure that's that's worth interrogating. Why but it is a problem that needs to be solved. Yeah, and it is. And and you're I think it's important. It's not entirely based in how fucked up things are, because like when the first Star Trek came out, we were at like the height of the Cold War. Things were terrible. There was a

lot of utopian fiction during World War Two. During World War two, UM, I will always be impressed by the fact that Gene Roddenberry saw it as incredibly important both to be like, Okay, well in the future, like in the middle of the civil rights movement, in the future, we will have overcome like racism, but not just that, but like I'm gonna I'm gonna stick a Russian on the bridge too, because nations are going to end as a concept and like this stuff won't matter, um, and

that just that kind of utopian fiction, at least at this at the scale of popularity that you know, Star Trek wasn't its time just isn't present anymore. And I that's tremendously worrying to me. And I see a lot of hope in in Solar Punk for that, um. And I guess for starters, I'm interested in in your thoughts on this, and you're interested in Andrew, what you think is like the pragmatic value of of of positive a

fiction that that that imagines a better world. Yes, so I've done probably I think I've done like two videos on Sola Punk soufar Um, two major videos on Sula Punk, as well as a smaller video two other smaller videos. Um. And what I've seen in the comments and in the general social media reaction again and again is sol the Punk saved my life. You know, Sola Punk has given

me hoop. You know, I was slipping into the spare, but this video really give me a jump start to try something new and to start a fresh and to pursue action as opposed to justest lying down and taking whatever comes next, and that that is it for me. You know, I think the fact that sulapunk offers like an energizing vision. It's not just a vision, it's an energizing vision because in every step with the way, it

shows what you can do. You know, when you show when you look at sula punk art or um, you look at the small but growing genre of sulapunk literary media, or you know, you look at but there's don't have many silopunk video games right now, but hopefully there will

be in the future. When you look at the various forms of silopunk media that are coming out and people's responses to them, you see that it's not like as all mentioning like Star Trek, where it's all this far out technology that we can only aspire to for now. You know, sol the punk is something that you can literally put in your backyard or your balcony or your home,

or your school or your community. You know, you could put these things in place like from now, you know, and you can incorporate it into your politics as you know, as they are, and they could also help to push your politics forward, you know, because through solar punk, we can open up discussions about Okay, so how do we ensure that people live comfortably within the parameters of you know,

the Earth's carrying capacity? You know, you open up a discussions about indigenous sovereignty, you discussions about, um, the relationship between the google North and the global South, and responsibility with regard to our response to climate change. Well, you open up a lot of different discussions through the realm of sulla punk. It energizes people, as I said, and yeah, I think that is its progmatic purpose. It doesn't stand alone,

of course, but it is a driving force. Yeah. Would you kind of give out a list of if people are you know, if this is someone's first introduction to the concept of solar punk, what is some reading you want to draw people towards. What are some fiction like I know you mentioned The Dispossessed by Laguin, right, um, which often gets cited. Um. Yeah, I'm interested in kind of other other recommendations you might have for our listeners. Are that right? So? Um, I'm still getting into the

genre myself. So I don't have too many UM recommendations. There are some UM decent short story collections UM like sun Vaults by a couple of different authors. They as well so multi species Cities, so the punk urban futures UM. And the one I read most recently was Ecotopia, which

is quite as much older than all the others. It's actually a book that was published in the UM and not all aspects of its politics things I agree with, but I think for a first UM it was one of the really the first of its kind in that sort of eco utopian genre that really laid out what

the society would look like. UM. The book is structured in a series of novel entries and notebook reports by a journalist from the United States who has gone to this country called Ecotopia, which is sort of where the Pacific Northwest States are, and he's basically breaking down he's going to different parts of the country and breaking down how they have lived and how they have decided structure

their lives. UM. And even though not every aspect of it is one that I would want to see implemented, I still think that it really sparks the imagination, really gets you thinking, well, maybe I wouldn't do it this week, but how else could this be done? And I think the capacity for sulpunk stories suggest generate that thought and generate one's imagination is very useful in a world where we don't really get to use our imagination as much,

not really since childhood, you know. And um, yeah, I I think it's often understated the degree to which using your imagination is vitally necessary part of actual a radical politics. Um. And I think there's a lot of people who consider themselves radicals, you know, some of these some of these not to you know, slam every Marxist Leninist on the planet, but certainly some of the ones who were coming up

with these bad faith criticisms of land back. It's like, you're not a radical, You're a conservative who wants to go back to a different kind of problematic thing. Um. It is more the fact that the Soviet Union poisoned like the largest body of water in Europe. You know, all the different things that the Soviet Union did that

were horrible for the environment and extractive. And it's interesting that, you know, these people who call themselves radicals, but the very foost um encounter with a radical idea, their fuost instinct is to shut down. The whost instinct is to just pushed back against it, whereas not to my own

corn or anything. But you know, when I see an idea that I haven't encountered before that may seem strange to me, that challenges my precontinutions, my first reaction is not to shout about how this goes against everything then and said, you know, my first reaction is to investigated and to open space for it in my mind, to really, you know, tune it around and imagine what it might look like and how it might fit with what I have learned about before. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, I mean I

think that's that's that's great advice for radical politics. It's also just good life advice, Yeah, especially for engaging with ideas that you are less keen on at the moment or or or just unaware of. H I mean, my whole thing is if I have like a strong gut reaction to something, it might be because it may be hitting a pot of me that might be benefiting from

that system, you know. I mean, I don't benefit from the system in a lot of respects, you know, as a black guy from the Caribbean, but as a man as in as a c SIS headman, you know, I do have privileges that I must be aware of, and I can't just like be so quick to shut down

you know, something that might even a bit uncomfortable. You know, yeah, I think that's such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially as a a more or less SIS white guy like a you know, a significant number of people listening are if you're uncomfortable by a new idea? Is it?

Is it because the idea is bad? Or is because it strikes at an area in which you may not even have, like thought about being privileged, Like I'm I'm uncomfortable I have even though there's no I have no intellectual argument against it, with the idea of of INDI our use of cars as they exist, because I love

I love to drive. But that's also heavily rooted in in in tremendous privilege on my behalf, um a culture, and so yeah, and um, you know, we we we we did talk about that a bit and the opening episodes of season two, the idea that like a more you know, when we we kind of had our little utopian ending, the idea that like, well, maybe you'd have a car that's communally owned and used for certain tasks. But you know, the idea of of of car culture as the center of a city is um is death.

It's just death. When we talked about getting past cars, is not to say that like people will never use vehicles that move again, Like obviously we will. They're necessary for something and all going back to horse drawn buggies. I think one of the last things on like solar punk and kind of tying into the whole kind of nature of the shows, I really liked enter your point on like how solar punk is like an energizing force and I feel like we have very few of those

on the left and especially on the anarchist left. Um, Like i've i've, i've, i've, I've had my decent stint of like anarcho nihilism. And the problem, like the problem with that is like it's very easy, Like anarcho nihilism is one of the easiest ideologies to grasp onto because it solidifies all of your bad feelings. Um. But it also it's most the people who I know who are like real into anarch nihilism, they're generally not very happy people because it's kind of it's kind of miserable all

the time. Um, and sure they like scoff at like solar punk is like some like greenwashed yogurt commercial, like you know, like utopian thing, but also like it's actually lots of solar punk that we've talked about. It's like actually about doing specific things, Like it's actually like actually going to do something rather than just being an insurrecto kid um or just just you know, talking about nihilist

znes and books on Twitter for all day. And I think one of one of your one of my favorite videos of yours is your video on the psychology of collapse UM, because I think that's one of my favorites as well. It's it's, it's, it's it's it's really just like a masterpiece. And how deep you get into every

different type of collapse thinking. It's not just on the rights, not not not not on the left, it's not just whether you're you know more you know, anarchist, more authoritarian, it's like you get into every specific type of thinking

that plays into this idea around collapse. And I think if I recommend everyone check out your channel, especially watching your solar punk videos, but specifically on the topic of collapse you know, part of our show we were trying to kind of be a little bit like anti collapse UM. And I think your your video really shows the depth of that topic, UM and how to approach this, because collapse is a feeling, like it's a feeling we all have,

and it needs to be interrogated. And I think your video is just a magnificent job interrogating that feeling, right, thank you. I can't over emphasize how important that is, because I I one of the major failings. There were a number of victories for kind of anarchist thought, particularly within the United States during the the insurrection last year, one of its tremendous defeats is that it has become characterized in a huge number of people's eyes as breaking

windows and and starting fires um. And yeah, that's a lot of that is because the media is trash, um, and it's trash it reporting on on all of this stuff. But some of it is because a lot of people have let that be their primary praxis UM. And that again, I don't care about people breaking windows, I don't care

about people lighting dumpster fires. But if that's what you're presenting to the world as your practice, that doesn't appeal to people, and you have to um, because yeah, anarchism is not just destructive, it is also construct Yeah, the constructive part we need to be boosting more than And there were some, you know, from the context of Portland's, some really strong examples of that last year. The incredible amount of mutual aid that was was put together afraid

of time. Yeah, during the fire relief was was incredible. UM. And the Red House, the the eviction defense occupation was a really good repost to you know, the disaster that was the Chaz in Seattle. That this was like, this was an area that was temporarily autonomous from the police, that did not collapse into violence, that succeeded in its goal, and that cleaned up after itself and presented an option for people like this is how it can look when we try to evict people. You know, this is what

can happen. UM. So I think they're I don't want to like be too negative, but I think that a lot of folks because of for a variety of reasons, you know, the there's been so much focus on kind of the insurrection, not even that because I think that building can be insurrectionist. I think that can be can be profoundly insurrectionists. It's like, destruction has an immediate result of making you feel better, right, it has an immediate of endorphins and hormones. It makes you happy when you

do it. It's it's it is, it is an exhilarating act, and you feel like you're accomplishing something. What's harder is to like have that same feeling by doing seed bombing, right, but by actually like improving your community slowly through these types of like so the park ideas, they don't have the same immediate emotional reactions. So a lot of people like when they you know, think about what insurrection is, they can a default to this destructive tendency, which destruction

has its time and place. Um, but if that's your only practice, we're not gonna improve the world at all, Like right, that's that's not going to do anything helping through you know, giving out food, helping through giving out socks and clothes, helping through all of these solar punk ways. These are things that actually like are going to improve things on a tangible level, and they and they're gonna make more people be like, oh hey, what what are

these anarchists doing? That's actually interesting versus Oh, what are these anarchists are doing? This is stupid? Ignore everything they say. Yeah, people have to remember as well that, Um, you know, there's seeds a sort of funk in Kirp Hootkins writ things you know, from the conquest of bread to mutual aid, and those are sort of things that should be just as emphasized as the destructive, exhilerating aspects of anarchism. Yeah.

There's a line in a Frank Turner song, a couple of lines actually in a song called nineteen thirty three that I go back to a lot, But one of them is you can't fix the world of all you have is a hammer. And that's I guess what I see is like the primary practical benefit of solar punk, just as an aesthetic as a piece of fiction, is getting people to expand their toolbox. Yeah, get yourself a trowel,

you know, some some screwdrivas, you know. Yeah, keep the hammer, you need that sometimes too, But what's grab some other tools? Expand the toolbox thing isn't really great metaphor type of thing. Yeah, yeah, Um, I think that's most of what we're going to get into today. Um, there's a couple of pieces of things

I would want to read. One of them Isn't. This isn't directly I think it predates the solar punk, but it it I think feeds into some of what I think it emotionally feeds into a lot of we're talking about here. It's an essay from David Graber called The Shock of Victory UM, which I think is really useful to me. Yeah. Um, And I would also recommend um. Corey doctor O's new fiction novel walk Away Um, which I think is a really wonderful piece, was a wonderful,

wonderful book. I should have included my recommendations. It was really great. Yeah. I read it recently and it made me Um. It made me feel the way like as a fiction writer that a good piece of fiction should, which is like I felt bad, Uh, felt bad about

some of the things that I had written. Because there's there's there's such there's so much more courage because I wrote a piece of fiction that has some solar punk elements, has some quasi utopian elements in the dystopia, but I didn't have the courage to kind of go as far as as Corey did and to imagine a kind of passivism that he he has the courage to kind of put into the into the hands of his his protagonists. Like I, I I really respect that about the book.

I mean, the book goes in something very interesting eye directions as well, but it's it's got some great ship um. And I always enjoy Corey's Corey's leve of burning man um of what it could be as kind of what the what what some of it's turned into. But yeah, um, Andrew, is there anything else you wanted to get into before we we close this out? I just want to remind people to check on your friends. M you know, um, we're all going through various stages of collapse. As I

outlined in my video. You know, we shift between them from time to time, so try not to go through it alone. You know, there's no there's no eye in Sula Punk. Yeah yeah, um check out st Andrew on YouTube at st andrews Um. Um, Andrew, is there any anything else you wanted to kind of plug from your own your own personal work. Yeah? So, um, other than the you know, the Sula Punk videos and the collapse videos, I want to remind sorry, rather I want to shout

out my video on black anarchism. I think that is a pretty essential look into, uh the history of black anarchism in the United States and in the world. I also want to recommend um my video on the psychology the authoritarianism. I know a lot of people have family members who are conservative or on the right, it will may be leaning fascist, and I think that can be helpful for you know, helping them to or rather helping

you to understand where they mindset sade m hm. And also, you know, check out my video on puma let sing. I think that was a pretty fun one as well. It breaks down a lot of it break breaks down how you can go about implementing food forests or puma culture gardens wherever you find yourself. Awesome, Um, thank you very much for being on the show. Andrew, thank you all for listening. We'll be back tomorrow or if this comes out Friday, we'll be back, you know, another day.

We'll be back at some point. You know, you know how this works. You understand podcasts ahcast. All right, Chris, you go, so welcome, Welcome to it could happen here a podcast that I think for the first time is just me and Robert. This is this is the very first time that this is happening. You're you're all here at a moment of legendary significance and historic importance. So try to try to face it with the requisite all that's all I ask, yes, And another thing that, man,

this is a terrible transition. Something else we're facing with requisite awe is weird shortages of goods and price increases. M So it's fucking rad. I was just at the Asian market today, um, and they did not have the snack chips that I most prefer now officially a calamity. Um, we've entered crisis of historic proportion. Yeah, I think I

don't think we're going to live through this one. Nope, we're doing We can't look at that without the action snack chips Like it's the ones that are like they're like pieces of seaweed, but that have been tempered, fried and temper a batter's completely out tragic, absolutely tragifying. I think there's a couple of things. I mean, you've got a script, so I'll probably just let you do that

in the not too distant future. But one of the things that's frustrating to me, although maybe it shouldn't be, because I'm probably partly responsible for this, is that this is being um this is often kind of being talked about with by people online, is like, oh, it's a sign that like society is crumbling. And what they mean by that is that like, oh, well, we just don't have stuff, like we're we're not able to like keep up with with demand and like the ability to produce

these things is crumbling. And it's actually much more complex than that and a lot less rooted in a lack of specific resources and more decisions made under capitalism about how the supply chain would work. And it's I don't know, I think it's important because it is you can say it still is like a situation where this is an example of the system falling apart. But it's not falling apart because we don't have the paper to make toilet

paper with. It's falling apart because decisions were made in order to increase the stock prices of companies by reducing the amount of products that they kept on hand. And that's led to an incredibly fragile system that that did nothing well but maximize profits. And I think, well, okay, I think there's there's there's a couple of things with

that that we should talk about. Yeah, because there's a lot of different explanations they're floating around for why is happening, and I think some of them are good, but I think a lot of them are missing part of the story.

And I think it's important because Okay, so, like like my grandma like called me yesterday, like like called our family to like talk about the supply chain problem because someone had like she'd been like fed a conspiracy theory that like the shortages were because American dock workers like

didn't want to open containers from China. Uh yeah, it's like yeah, like I mean this is not that's not right, But it's not like if that had happened, it would be like, well, okay, that does scan like yeah, and I think yeah, and like I think this is this is a moment where yeah, you know, okay, think think things are not working how they're supposed to you. And there's a lot of sort of competing stories about it,

one which because on which are bad. And I think most of the conventional accounts and whereber it was talking about this, uh you know, even the really good ones, they start with sort of the eighties Wall Street takeover of corporate America and the transformation of sort of all corporate management into an attempt to like raise short term stock prices. And you know, part of this is lead in production and this is true, and this is sort

of true, but dismisses about half of the story. And and the part of the story that it misses that's really important, I think is the sort of it's it's the broader like frame in which all of this is happening in is essentially the worry of how the working class essentially loses the class war in the six season seventies. And weirdly, it's also a story about the Cose boomerang. Yeah yeah, Dan Long, throw in, throw in, the music clip that we've all decided is going to be the

one we put in whenever someone talks about food. Cose boomerang, which is probably just going to be another time machine noise. So real quick, the Cose credit to Cody. Um, Okay, continue brief refresher on what that is. So basically the free cost boomerang is that Okay, if if you if if if a government does something like repressive like technology, repressive technique or passive technology like in a colony, like in a war somewhere. Eventually it will come back and

be used against like the citizens of that country. And yeah, a great example would be fingerprinting was invented for the British like policing um insurgents in Malaysia, and is now has them back to every you know, colonizing nation now uses finger printing, which is also deeply flawed as a technology. But anyway, yeah, yeah, and you know, and I think most people tend to think about this is our armored

personnel carriers. But we will eventually get to this. The boomerang technology here is actually shipping containers hell yeah, which have done like irreparable damage to the mankind. Alright, alright, I'm ready for this. I don't know much about this. Hit me, all right, I bear with you with this because we're we're we're we're gonna talk about two threads. They're going to seem like they have nothing to do with supply chains, and then they're all going to tie together.

It turns out is literally all supply chains. So in the cities and seventies you have, you know, in very very broad general strokes, you have two kinds of class war. The first kind is what I'm sort of very broadly calling the war and the factories and this is this is an enormous series that sort of strikes outright uprising a stretched from sort of Detroit to tur into Tokyo.

And you know, the most famous of these is the student sort of worker uprising in May sixty eight in France and they you know, they're they're they're close enough taking the country that like French President Charles de Gaul like flees in a helicopter to in secret, and like flees to Germany in secret, and you know, and that that that that's like a big event, but it's sort of it sort of fades. What doesn't fade is May

sixty eight in Italy. And you know that it doesn't fade there because Italy, Italy has been in the middle of a strike wave since two sixty four. It's the whole sixties that basically just strik waves there and you know, they have their own sixty and unlike in France where peters out, in Italy you get the just incredibly named hot, hot autumn of sixty nine, which is my bet was a hot autumn. Yeah, it's it's great. And so basically what happens is you get hundreds of thousands of workers

go on strike, they start seizing control their factories. Um, and most of most of this is playing out in in the Fiat factories. Yeah, it's a giant car factories in Italy's industrial triangle, and you know, I mean they're there for like, they're there for a long time. They're

into like seventy and eventually they lose. But you know, Italy is just sort of rocked by conflict and sort of class war stuff, and all of this reculminates in yet another enormous uprising in en seventies seven, this one driven like in large part by people who were basically just like, funk this, I'm not working in the factory anymore.

It's awful, which which I think is something that like, you know, if if you're looking at the modern political landscape, you have a bunch of people who are going like, funk this, I'm not going to go like die in these factories anymore. And those people all have in a

lot of cases, safer employing situations than many people today. Yeah. Yeah, like it's starting to get worse than which is why people are are frustrated but likes yeah, yeah, you know, and and this this it's sort of interesting because there there's a kind of like Vicky Uster while I've had

on here. It calls it, it calls it like the Monkeys Paul thing, where it's like people in the seventies and Italy wanted like autonomy and like freedom from work, and so what what capitalism gave them was like, oh, we'll give you autonomy. We'll just make you all contract workers. And now like, yeah, you don't you don't have to like wake up every morning and like go to a job in the factory and leave it five or whatever.

But now you just you know, you're you're a contract worker, so you just have no stability whatsoever, and that that's your autonomy. But you know this, this is this is

really bad for the Italian ruling class. Like they almost lose control of Italy three times in ten years, and after not seventy seven, they're just like fuck this and they, I mean, they started to start doing mass arrest they imprison like tens of thousands of people, a torture a bunch of people, and you know, but it becomes clear that like pure repression is like not going to be enough to like just destroy the section of the working class movements that you know, God help you thinks that

you should like run production for themselves, and so they start looking elsewhere for answers. And the place they find these answers, weirdly enough, is in the second set of wars that are going on in this period, which are the sort of national liberation wars. And you know, these are the national liberation wars. Are these these are full scale, like these aren't sort of class warm metaphors. These are you know, this is this is giddy be Saw, this

is Algeria. And you know, importantly, for for our purposes, the US fights two of them, which is Korean Vietnam. Now Korean Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the US to fight wars, like they're on the other side of the world, which you know, it makes it more difficult to do war crimes because you know, if you're fire bombing of village, right, you have to be able to move fire bombs, jet fighters and like oil and

rations to the other side of the world. And this is hard about a lot easier when they can commit war crimes. And like, I don't know, duloof, yeah, yeah, well, like even even like you know, you got to commit a war crime in Mexico. It's like, okay, you just sign a bunch of people over the border. It would be so easy to commit war crimes in Mexico. Yeah, and and really really up our war crime quoti. Well, I would say, we do do a lot of war crimes in Mexico. It's just that like they're done based

on by proxies. That's true. But I mean we've killed like, we've killed like a million people there in the last like twenty years. And the war on drugs. But yeah, you know, so the US, you know, the U s okay, So it has this logistics problem, and logistics problem is that it can't do war crimes enough, and so it comes up with a couple of solutions to them. One of them is essentially they rebuild the whole Japanese economy in order to just use Japan's industrial base to fight

the war in Korea. And then after the war in Korea, and they rebuild the South Korean economy in order to you know, fight the war in Vietnam. And this works, but it doesn't solve the problem that you know, okay, even even even if you're you know, you're you have of an industrial based in Japan, right, you still need to be able to efficiently move things by sea to Korea, and you know, you still need to still supplies you need to move from the US, And so the solution

for this is containery shipping and continerary shipping. This is the pivot point upon which the entire history of the twentieth century and everything that's happening in the twenty one century hinges on like this, this is the pivot And you know, like I'm not even this isn't even really an exaggeration, because it turns out that like the ability to have uniform boxes that you can stack on top of each other like legos and put on a ship is like like it's like comparable to the nuclear bomb

in terms of how important it is, which is really really used to the only way to get things from A to B was a big wooden ship filled with dubloons like pilet bags and stuff. Yeah, yeah, I know, how did we, like global commerce work before shipping containers?

What did we what did we literally like you just like sometimes sometimes you would just like physically people would just pick up the items and put them on the ship, or they would like sometimes they put them in boxes or like you would like strap them to like the top of the ship. And so with the trains a lot they would just like strap like machinery like onto a train car. And this was like not, this is

like really inefficient. It's really so yeah, and so the US in order to like do war crimes in Korea, and then you know, it's just like, oh, hey, what if we just make metal boxes and then they get they progressively get better and better at it because you know, they have to go do more war crimes in in Vietnam. And but by the time you're getting to the end, Yeah, yeah, you know, look lots of war crimes that do you need? You need good logistics networks to do all of these

war crimes. I mean, it makes sense that that's where we got shipping containers, but I didn't realize. I had just assumed it would have come out of the shipping industry as opposed to like we got to get more missiles over to these places. Yeah, well, this is the

interesting thing. We'll get to this in a bit. But basically, like a lot of the logistics revolution stuff either comes out of the military or is developed by X fascists and and and a lot of the reason for this is Okay, I mean this is you know, this is the seventies. They're still are in d happening like this still actual research and developments, but the military is doing just an enormous amount of the research development for all of global capitalism. And you know, and and and the

other thing, Yes, what's happening here? And you know this this is the sort of boomerang thing is that you know, so the container are shipping logistics, stuff that had been used to just like obliterate the global South suddenly starts spreading into capital like you know, just into like broader shipping because people look at this and they're like, oh, this is efficient. And then the contracting companies the US

is using. This turns into the solution to both sort of the war and the factories are talking about in in in Europe and the US and in Japan itself, and then also to the solution of the national liberation movements and sort of like communism in East Asia because you know, okay, so you have this question, right, the US, like we kind of fight to a draw in Korea, like we kill a norm's number of people, but the

North Korea. Yeah, and like yeah, but we don't really win, right, like we we we can't actually defeat the Chinese army or yeah, and and you know, and we lose Vietnam, and so the question is, okay, so like how how are we going to stop communism? And the answer, it turns out, is to just integrate integrate the communist countries into the capitalist supply chain. And I mean there's a lot of examples of this, like market Thatcher, for example,

is like very good buddies with Nikolai chessqu Ah. That's nice. It's they could be friends despite their the fact that they well I guess they weren't really that different as people, No, not really, Like basically the difference is that ky lost and thus got like murdered on state television on a state funeral treatment. That's my official stance. They should have for stuff we will talk about in a bit. But yes, but you know, the archetypal example of this is actually China.

And you know, there's a lot of various sort of skilled diplomatic work by Kissinger and also the US like throughout the seventies, just like they're just like sending entire factories to China like like the like they'll they'll they'll take an entire factory, break it down, put it in boxes and then just like ship at the China great at the time, and yes, so yeah they're they're they're

just like sending to knowlogy of China. And the end result of this is that you know, China goes from like fighting American troops with like like doing bannit charges

like through the yeah yeah against the Yeah. I was just like yeah to to you know, being an American ally and like invading Vietnam as a way to like stick it to the Soviets basically, and so you know, so the uses sensely just integrates China to the global supply chain, and they eventually do the same thing to Vietnam, which again is another country that they couldn't defeat militarily. But what they you know what they actually beat them

with it's a shipping container. And before the shipping container, this would have been impossible, right, like basically it was too inefficient and too expensive, like the cost of shipping was too high to have all of this production. You know, like some half your parts made in China, some of them made India's on them made in like Japan's one of the maid in Korean and then shipped them all around the world, which is how the modern system works.

But with with container I shipping, suddenly shipping is really cheap and it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs it is to pay labor costs. And this is the solution to to the sort of war and the factories.

You know, if if workers start making too much noise about pay or like again a god forbids start talking about like taking control of factories and running the democratically like some kind of anarchist monsters, corporation can just move the factories overseas, and this becomes an incredibly effective way to just destroy the labor movement because anytime, you know, organized labor starts making demands, you can be like, well, okay, sorry, we're just gonna pack up and we're gonna you know,

we're gonna go to China, We're gonna go to somewhere else. And this coincides with, you know, the thing, the thing that gets talked about a lot in the conventional accounts,

which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover. Well, the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which is something I think that sounds really weird to us now, But you know, the whole the whole story here is really interesting and extremely long, and if if you want to like have a very detailed accounts of how this all played out, the book Liquidated by Karen Hoe is just incredible,

like ethnography and history of Wall Street. She like she's a Karen has an athropologist, and she like went and worked on Wall Street and like did ethnography there for a bit and it's very interesting stuff, but it's kind of outside of our scope. So the very very very short version is that the Wall Street bankers basically figure out a way to just like buy out corporations to raise a bunch of money and just entirely buy out corporations. And then once they have the corporation, right, what what

what what the you know? This is corporate rating, So they're they're they they loot all the assets, they sell it off, and they try to sell off their stock at a higher price. The parcels of this is sort of complicated, but the net result of this is that Wall Street completely takes over the corporate world in the

way they hadn't before. Like the wall streets. The wall street like finance people are now, you know, they're there are the people making off the decisions, and you know, and and they're their only goal is to raise the stock price, like that's that's the only thing they care about. That they don't they don't even care about making money, right if if you lose money and your stock price

still rises, like you don't care. And those guys start looking at a lot of the things that had existed in corporations before that, things like pensions, uh, particularly things like research and development. They look at it and go, Okay, why are we spending money on R and D? Like this this doesn't this doesn't raise our stock price, This

doesn't have any immediate shorter and value. So they cut it, right, They start cutting pensions, They start just destroying the unions, and you know, and and because because this is happening at the same time as corporations really like get the ability to outsource for the first time, you know, they lean into it and they start essentially, we're just just slashing the amount of people who work for the company, right and so you know, and so and instead of

having direct employees, they start working with contractors and they start moving to the contractors overseas, and you know, and and this is this is where we get to sort of this whole outsourcing wave because you know, something I don't think I talked about enough withoutsourcing is why actually are the labor costs lower in the countries that these people are are moving their factories to h And part of it is, you know, people talk about development like

they're moving to undeveloped countries, and you know, part of part of part of development is just you know, how much technological capacity their manufacturing system has, right, and that you know. But but the other part of it is that if you move your production to say Columbia, right or like you know, you're investing in sort of like cocoa bean farming in Columbia and people try to do

you need organizing, you can hire des squads to murder them. Yeah, and yeah, yeah, it's like you can basically just sort of like you can you can outsource the violence and you can you can you know, the corporate term for it is reducing labor costs, but really what you're doing is just like murdering people with death squads and terrorizing them, and you know that that does lower labor costs, right, But you know, and I think there's there's another example of this, Like this is a lot of what like

the killing at Tienamen was really about. It was you know, not so much in Tianna Square itself. I've talked about this elsewere but like the workers that they kill outside of the square, like a lot of the reason they're doing very little about Tinaman Square other than like protesters China government bad. The guy stands up the tank and

then yeah, yeah, yeah, I've talked about this elsewhere. More like the very short version is, so there's a bunch of students in the square, right, and the students in the square itself like basically they kind of went democracy and mostly they want like market reforms to go faster. But then outside of the square, you know, bijings like whole working class shows up and there's these enormous demonstrations.

They basically start like like barricading like blocks and blocks and blocks, and like this radius outside of the street.

You get this sort of like mini commune thing ing, and those guys are like you know, like they're they're they're advocating for democracy and the factory like they're you know, they're they're talking about things like like they're they're like that, you know, they they they they they have their like marks out and they're talking about how like they're they're they're calculating their rate of surplus value that's being extracted

from them by the capitalists. And those are the people, like almost everyone who dies at Chana man Is is from those guys. Like those are the people that they just get massacred. And you know, and and the reason that happens is that the CCP is looking at this and it's like, okay, this, this is this is like this this is sort of this is the return of organized labor, and we need to destroy it before it like gets anywhere. And so they do, and organized labor

and China just implode. I mean it was already pretty weak because you have a lot of stake cantual unions, but I mean now it's just nothing. And you know, and and and there, I mean there there have been attempts to labor organizing and China sort of recently and like yeah, the to be just rest everyone, right, and so you know this, this this is how this is, this is the price of cheap labor. Right, It's just

incredible state repression. But this is also you know, and this is this is a sort of like macro scale thing of why the supply chains suck because everyone talks about like the efficiency of the supply chaine, but the

supply chains aren't efficient. They make no sense, right if if if if what you're trying to do is move something quickly from points A to point B. They make no sense because you know, these supply chain are spread all over the world, like in individual parts are being made in six countries, right you have like people will like for tax dodge purposes, like they'll have one part of a component's built in one country, and then they'll move it from another country to have another part of it,

and then they'll ship all of it to Mexico and they'll ship it across the border and they'll have the whole thing be assembled in the USC they can say it was made in the US. Like there's all of these things that are just just nonsense right there. They're not They're not efficient at all. It's it's completely ridiculous. It's it's this just you know, it's just completely absurd web And and the reason why it is designed like this is as as a giant sort of kind of

unsurgency thing. Like the reason the reason supply chains are are just bad is because there, you know, they they they're not designed to move things. That they're designed as an instrument to just like solve the problem of of of of class power right there there there. They're designed destroy unions. Are designed to make sure that nobody ever sort of like gets any ideas about widges, to make sure nobody gets an ideas about like taking anything. And so you know, but this this, this can work for

a while. The problem is again, like they're not efficient. It's it's just it just it is not efficient to like move have everything made in like six countries and then you have to send them somewhere else. Yeah, And so you know, it's efficient in the sense that it efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock by bags and stuff. And generally what is meant by like efficiency in that sense is like what makes the seventy people who actually own this company the most money.

That's the efficient thing. But it's horribly inefficient in every practical sense of the work. And and and that this is kind of an interesting change because I mean, you know this this isn't to say that like the supply chains that worked before this were like better, because they also sucked in a lot of their own ways. But all of the like efficiency stuff that we're about to talk about just just in time production, etcetera, etcetera, Like you know what isn't produced just in time? Sorry, but

it isn't add right time. Yeah, they're they're they're they're not produced just in time anymore because the supply chains falling apart. That's that's what that is. Our promise about our sponsors is that, uh, they're they're not at all in time. Who knows when they'll get your products to you. There's no way to tell. It's impossible to know. We're back, Yeah, we're back to talk about how, you know, having having developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that

just absolutely suck and don't make any sense. Uh, people tried to make them efficient. And this this is where we go back to Japan, because Japan, you know, I guess this is this is this is the other Forks boomerang, which is that you know, okay, so we we we industrialized Japan in order to like fighter colonial wars, right, But then you know, this turns into this huge like Pikachu face moment when Japan suddenly starts like industrializing more

efficiently than the US does. It's very funny. And then and writes a bunch of books that are the premise of all of them, is Japan scary? Yeah, it's very funny. Yeah, you know, like this is interesting. Is this is an interesting thing here, which is that like all of the panic around China, there was exactly the same panic like around Japan in the in like the seventies, and it's exactly same, like right down to like a bunch of socialists going like, hey, look this this is a model

for anti capitalism. Like people people said that about the Japanese model, and it's like it's it's all, it's all the same thing. It's just it's just happening again. But you know what what what type what what Japan did, and specifically, what Toyota does is create this thing called the Toyota production system, which eventually becomes known as justin

time production. And this if you've read anything about sort of the modern supply chain problems, you've almost certainly heard of just in time production or or lean production, and just in time and lean production are technically difference, but the differences don't matter for us. So yeah, and and this this stuff is derived from what Toyota was sort

of doing in the post war era. And basically the goal of it is, you're you're never supposed to have any inventory that's just sitting there, so that the whole distant supposed to be constantly the whole system is supposed to be constantly in motion. So you have parts come in, they get put into their immediately get put into the production line, and the finished products immediately shipped out to

the stores. And you know, the theory is that the stores are only going to carry exactly enough product to meet demands. And it's supposed to be quote unquote flexible, which means that it can react to shifts in consumer taste and demand by like increasing or decreasing production, and

it can't do this. This is what we've been seeing for the entirety of COVID, which is that you know that this is this is why every time there's a run of toilet paper, everyone runs out of toilet paper, because it turns out that these systems can't even a ten percent increase just completely obliterates this entire system and it just collapses and can't produce enough toilet paper. Yeah, and again just because it's expensive to store things. It's pricey.

This is a big part of like why actually the John Deer strike, which has the potential to disrupt the status quote movement more than any strike in recent history, um is so potent because John Deer tractors are kind of a necessary part of the agriculture industry, not just their ability to sell new tractors, but their ability to

repair the extant tractors. Like if harvest season comes around owned and there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break, like food doesn't get harvested, it's a significant issue John Deere.

We'll talk more about this in another date. But like, not only did the most that they could do to squeeze their employees to suck out pensions, to cut you know, expenditures on wages, but they they set up their factories in such a way that there was no extra space, so they could not scale up any of these factories to increase demand when they needed to. So that now that John Deere is going on strike, if they lose

a month of productivity, they can't ever catch up. It's impossible because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of their factories. And because the strike is hitting, they didn't have any extra spare parts lying around, So if ship gets broken, they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep tractors functioning in a lot of American farms because they didn't store anything, because that was not the most efficient thing for the economic bottom line of the CEO who

gets a hundred and sixty million dollars a year. And anyway, this is this is the funny part about this whole thing, which is that you know, okay, so this whole supply chain system was based around just like destroying destroying the organized working class, right, But it's like they were so successful at it that they've like turned around and fucked themselves with it because like you know this this is this is the thing about about the John Deer strike. Right.

It used to be you know, back back back if you look at like like how how the unions were broken in the eighties, or like if you look at like the giant like auto strikes you'd have in the seventies, right, and companies still do this to this day, but like there worst at it. The thing they would do is

so okay. So you you you know, if you're a company, you know roughly when a strike is gonna happen, right, And the reason you know when a strike is gonna happen is because in the US, like the way labor law works is that like you can you can basically only strike like when a contract is up. I mean,

you can do wildcats, but it's illegal. But you know, okay, so they knew that the audio unions, for example, we're about to go we're going to go on strike when when the contract like what was coming up, and you know, they'd have spies, and you can get a sense of like, you know, okay, so are are how likely are they to do this strike? And you know so so that that that lets you do things like build up an

enormous sort of inventorio spare parts. It lets you build up an inventory of supplies, and it lets you build up you know it basically it lets you build up the capacity you need to outlast a strike. But the problem with just in times, they can't do that anymore because yeah, they they've they've you know, they've they've completely fucked themselves by by then the John deer situation because they hadn't strike. The workers hadn't had gone on strike

since eighties six. They've been putting funds into their strike survival fund for years, but the company had nothing like

has Um. It's rather and this is you know, this, this is the other part of of of why everything like good that's happening right now is happening is that they they they you know, they everything has circled back around and suddenly all of these companies are you know, we are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah, as you're talking about the just in time production thing, it only works if if everything actually comes in on time, all right, Like if if if any if any individual

part is late, the whole system starts to fall apart. And then and then you can't repair it. And you know, and there's there's a lot of ways that that this this this can be very bad. Um. You know, we've talked about the john do you We talked about the labor stuff. The other big thing that's happening is COVID, which has happened and continues to happen and has killed off just enormous parts of the working class. I mean,

it's like four million dead worldwide or something. And again that that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct. Guess that's not like, yeah, it's probably like twice that it's I mean, we're looking at a minimum of seven in the US. And again that's probably a million undercounted

at least. Yeah, it's it's a horror show, right, And and the people they killed with that, you know, like especially in the initial phases, like it was just it was just they took a chain chainsaw to the working class. And those are a bunch of people who you know that they're they're not replaceable, they're they're very highly skilled and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck.

And now you know, and one of one of the places that this this has caused a bunch of problems is in the ports, because ever, the other thing that this entire supply gamb relies on is being able to very quickly and cheaply moved parts from you know, China to the US, from China to Mexico from like Bangladesh too, like symbolia, you have, you have, you have you have to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around in in Yeah, you have to continuously keep moving ships around,

and you also have to be able to load noneload them. And we you know, we we we saw like there there was the that when that ship got stuck in the Suez, there is that whole yeah that you know that that that was sex We're when people couldn't get sex asses because the world's supply of sex asses for months was on that one ship. Um, it was a real crisis for the sex ass community. Those are plastic

assis that you have sex with if you're curious. Yeah, it's the world appears as an immense collection of commodities, some of which are sex asses. Yeah, most of which, in terms of the ones that matter, are sex asses. Yes, sex ass industrial complex is really the lynchpin of global capital.

But please continue. Yeah, well you know, but the sex assi indictial complex falls apart, and you know, and it's not just the ship being stuck in the Sis like made everything way worse, right, But it was very funny, Yeah, it was. It was extutally funny, but it was extremely funny. The part the thing is like not very funny is that like, Okay, so in order to getting this to work right, you have to have a bunch of longshoremen.

You have to unload all of the ship mhm. And you know, one of one of the problems with that is that is happening in the sort of global supply chain right now, is that the ships can't be unloaded

fast enough. And part of this is like this job sucks, and people just a lot of people don't want to do it, and a lot of people died and in the and it's causing this huge problem, and and there's and then there's there's another you know, if you want to take like the macrospective about this, it's that this whole system is relying on logistics workers and so it

also needs you know, you need truck drivers. And we're coming back and you know in the US, is that there's yeah, you know, there's there's a sort of a truck drivers now because again their job sucks and they've been like just absolutely screwing these people over for decades and decades and decades now and turn into the subcontractors just not paying them, and you know, and and this and when you know, when the when the ports shut down, like not even shut up, like when when the ports

are behind unloading stuff and when the trucks like that are supposed to be moving this stuff, they aren't off of them, and like the cost of that increases, it throws off the whole system. And that's that's another big part of like why this whole thing is is sort of imploding. And and it's interesting because I remember this. There was like a decade where like every other article we'll be talking about how they were going to like

automate like truck driving. It was like, the truck drivers are all going to go out of business because they're going to automated. It just never happened at all. And say the same thing with with their you know, there's I mean there's been some port automization, but like not on the scale that you know, actually does anything. And part of the reason for that is, you know, I was talking about people not investing in research developments. Yeah, so the biggest people who aren't doing that are the

shipping companies. And that's a good time because the shipping cup basically like container shipping, has been taken over by was essentially just like a monopoly of two companies. And those two companies make just an indescribable amount of money. They have like a thousand percent profits and they just pay it all out as dividends. And so they're not they're not investing in any port infrastructure, they're not investing automation.

They're just pocketing the money. And that means that, you know, we have all that and they're they're spending in in the case of John Deere, which I keep going back to, a bunch of money lobbying to make it illegal for farmers to repair uh their tractors. Yeah, yeah, they're there. You know, they they figured they figured out that like the the easiest way to make money is just get the state to shake people down for you. It's like fun like investing in in making anything that we have better.

Let's just you know, like let's just turn the state into a det collector. And and it's interesting because so this this is the part of of the supply chain crisis that like Biden has been focusing on. But Biden's plan, Biden's plans great. Biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen work harder. So his plan is here, we go, there, we go, there, we building back better. Baby. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna make We're gonna keep the ports open

twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week and like make people work weekends now, and then he also got FedEx Walmart and ups to do twenty four hour or seven day a week shipping. So yeah, the solution is literally just like feed more workers into a grinder and make them work longer, which is which is great and and you know will not in any way backfire. No, it's fine. I don't even think we should be talking

about it. No, it's great, it's gonna it's it's yeah, it's you know, but I get like this is the thing, Like this won't work, and it can't and the reason it won't work is that, like part of the reason there's a shortage is that you know, it's it's not it's not just about the like the fact that people aren't paying enough. It's about the fact that these jobs

are just awful. Like you have people, you have people working like twelve hours shifts that start at like six am and then they have to wake another twelve hour shift in hours later, and that these people have them can do this over and over and over again and it's well, and they don't like the way that these shifts are usually put on them is that like you'll find out when you come in that instead of working six am to four pm or whatever, they're actually gonna

need you to stay until eight and then they're gonna need you to come in. By the way, you're gonna need to come in like two hours early tomorrow. So you're realized that like in between your two shifts, you have a total of eight hours to get home and sleep. And if you say no, uh uh, well, the idea is that if you say no, like you won't have

the job. It's required. Now. The reality is that most of these companies are also pretty desperate to have these workers, and a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms, it takes time to train people up and then they quit a couple of weeks in because the work is miserable and the schedule is fucking miserable. Um, and it's yeah, it's all, it's it's it's it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman,

but also is leading to a situation. There's a reason why there's so many strikes on right now is that there is opportunity because in sort of the chasing of short term profits, a lot of these fucking oligarchs have

exposed themselves in a in a pretty vulnerable position. Yeah, and I think you know this this is coming back to a sort of the other way that when when there was a crisis in in the senties, the other way they saw this was just authoritarianism, right it was you know, is this is the pinos a solution, right like, oh, like workers are using control comprom minds, Okay, we'll just shoot them, right and yeah and yeah, and this is you know, they're they're they're finally running into a point

where you know, this is this is the solution they've been trying to do now with with with this crisis, is you know, the the they're relying on the fact that just the workplace is just indescribably authoritarian. I mean it's it's like it's it's it's a dictatorship on a scale that is like like even to like the most

despotic absolute monarch is just like unimaginable. Like your boss gets to control like when you ship, like they get a control, when you eat, they get a control exactly what you're doing, like at all times, they get control when you do it, they get a control like when the next time you're going to do it is they don't even have to tell you when it's going to be untel like you show up and you know, for the this is this is this has been the gamble

for for you know, capitalism, the entire existence, which is that like you just have to take this and eat ship or they get to take away your ability to eat, get medical care and have a place to leave to live. But that's not true anymore. Like you can just say no, you can tell them to funk off. You can, you know you can, you can, you can organize a union. You can just fucking just leave your job, like just leave it, fucking walk out. And this is why we focus.

I mean, this is number one why within the context of unions, strike funds are so important, but also why mutual aid is so important. Is it? It? It potentially when organized well enough provides people with the option to like, well, how are you going to feed yourself? Well, there's people in my community who want to make sure that I'm fed because they believe in what I'm striking for. Um,

that's the promise of all of that. That's the practical behind the kind of high minded you know, anarchists of just you know whatever. Theorizing is the ability that like, well, this actually is a weapon too. Yeah, and I think you know what else is a weapon? Chris are product. I hope we're not being sponsored some I hope we are. Chris. Look, I've I've said before for weapons. I'll read any ad for a weapons manufacturer as long as they send me

some weapons. So come on, guys, get on it. You could uh, you could be you could be in the middle of this conversation. Raypheon, you know, send me a couple of missile guidance chips Lockheed Martin. You know you want to give me an F thirty five, we'll we'll plug you. You know. That's what's that's that's the deal. That's how it works. Baby. All right, we're back. Hopefully hopefully you have now heard the advertisement for knife missile to knife missile harder now with like five knives, a

thing that I and not making up. It actually exists. Yeah, people keep being surprised that the R nine X is a real thing. But there's another one. There's there's there's one with more knives. They put more knives. We do you You're not gonna look again, you can't. It's like with Apple products, right, planned obsolescence is a critical you have to You can't just rest on your laurels. You're gonna run out of money. So you've gotta make another knife missile with a couple of more knives. Yeah, just

keep keep adding knives. Nothing can ever go wrong. Do not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles. Send me one and like a drone or three. I swear to God, I'll use it for legal purposes. Yeah. So, I guess the last thing that I that's that's really interesting about this moment that doesn't usually happen is that you know, okay, so if you, if you, if you,

if you, you read your very basic marks, right. One of the things Marks talks about is that there's this thing called the Reserve Army of Labor, which is it's just like, you know, there's a bunch of people who are just always unemployed and they get along by doing sort of like odd jobs, like you know, like my, my, My quintessential person for this is like if you ever go on a subway, there's you know, it's it's the

guy selling candy bars in the subway. Yeah, right, it's people who quasi legal you know, sometimes they just kind of like doing whatever. You know, we call them. In the West Coast, you have a lot of those, like, yeah, people who tream marijuana for a couple of months and then just kind of like crashing you know, camp sites the rest of the year or whatever. Like, yeah, there's

a bunch of those folks, for sure. Yeah. And you know, and like the the the number of these people who have been just like kicked out of like the formal labor system has been increasing for a long time. But what's interesting about this moment is that you know, every every strike you see has a second strike behind it, and that strike is the informal general strike, which is

just again people just quitting their jobs and leaving. And you have this weird moment where where normally the sort of reserve army of labor is this thing that like capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way to sort of solve its problems because it's like, oh, well, all right, if if you're not gonna do this job, we can bring another person. But you know this, this is a weird moment where like the reserve army of

labor is like fighting on our side. M h. And the fact that all of these people are just like you know, they're seeing the just incredible authoritarianism of these workplaces. That's just horrific abuse. The fact that you know they're they're being in a lot of cases just asked to show up and die and they're saying no is a

really sort of is a really incredibly powerful thing. And when when when you add that to the fact that you know, all these companies have completely screwed themselves with how they designed the supply chains or it's it's all, it's all come back around and suddenly all all the supply chain stuff that they carefully laid out over decades and decades decades is way to like break the union

movement and make sure nobody ever asked more wages. You know, it's it's it's it's it's been revealed to be incredibly fragile and you know, week to our attack, and that leads us, I think, to this other tension in Biden's plan to sort of like revive the economy, which is that so the US technically speaking has this like very large central planning capability, but it only has it to

like build weapons. So you know, like the army has this incredible ability like that there there's a lot of bullets you know it, despite the huge stress on the bullets supply chain, it really has scaled. You know, the prices have increased, but we're we're still still still getting bullets. America is great at making bullets. Yeah, it's less great

at keeping tractors working, but be a problem. Yeah, then you're like even if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, it was like the US just couldn't produce masks, like we said, we we never we never like did that right, like that, like the government never at any point was like We're just gonna make mass given the people. They just never did it. And so you know, our

mass supplies. All those suppli chains suck. And the only way that like the States can intervene and get the supply chains to work is by doing one of two things. It's by either doing a thing Biden was doing, which is just go to a bunch of companies and tell them to make all of their workers work harder, which is the thing that like, you know, totally won't backfire

or explode in his face. And then the second thing is for Biden basically to like do all this saber rattling about how we have to have like medical supply chains in the US because national defense or something. And

that's the second thing he's trying to do. But you know that just that just makes the problem worse, right because once you once you lose the ability to outsource, you, you lose the hammer even beating the unions with And so you know, all all of the sort of all of the tendencies that are you know, making things like bad and scary right now are also weirdly making this. You know, the fact that prices are rising, right, the

fact that there's all these shortages. It's it's it's making this like the best moment two you know, it's it's it's it's making this the best moment that and that anyone's had in ages to actually try to make something better. Yeah, and and and the important thing is we're starting to see it happen. And yeah, and we're we're we're we're gonna talk more about sch October and sort of the strike wave in the coming you know, weeks and months.

But yeah, we're gonna we're gonna be hitting this pretty hard, even just next week. Um, we have a lot of stuff in the pipeline. Kind of wish we've gotten to it earlier. But there's a lot of stuff to talk about in the world happening that that's within our milieu. It turns out when you're when you're specific focus is things falling up a uh, you're always behind uncovering all

the things that are on the mark. But I think it is a good time to to to drive this to a close, to drag this episode out behind the farm the barn, and and and shoot it and bury it in a shallow grave and and break its bones with the hammers that the police can't identify it. Chris, Um, thank you for putting this together. I got anything anything

else to say? Uh, quit your job, you or you and or unionize your workplace and or take it over and run it yourselves, because Lord knows the people who are telling you what to do, just literally do not care if you die. Yeah, And I mean with with that, no, no, no, no, I was just gonna uh, I don't know what I was gonna do, Chris, I don't know what I was gonna do. Do do Go go do something. You know you're you're listening to things, Go do something. Yeah, and and yeah, and if you want to live and to

us do more things. We are allegedly allegedly we we we are at cool Zone media on on the Twitter and and the you can't prove that in court, it's true. Good luck, good luck to them and trying to prove that we did this. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker's all right. Uh uh excellent, Chris, that's good. That's good. That's the kind of a tonal grunting that people have come to express respect from the introductions of my podcast. I was hoping it wouldn't be that, but then it was so

bad that it was great thrill. That's our brand. Now it can't be anything else. We've we've established it. Look, no body else is doing that. The Cometown guys, I assume aren't a totally grunting to start their podcast. I don't know, actually, but I assume not. I guess this is just how we start It could happen here is a podcast. You don't sound like you believe it enthusiastically, Chris with feeling. This is a podcasting happening here. That yeah, excellent,

that's how we do it. Okay, what are we talking

about today? Well, one of the things that is happening here, as we have discussed briefly in previous episodes is a bunch of strikes, And with us today to talk about one of these stripes, specifically the Collogue strike is Mel Buwer, an independent researcher, educator, and freelance journalists based in Omaha, Nebraska, where this particular strike is taking place, who has done done a lot of journalism previously on the local Protestant Uprising Street and is also researching writing a book on

alternative media. Hi, Hello, we'll welcome to the show. Than strikes, strikes apparently is what's up? It is? It is Strictober. We're doing strikes, strike wave baby. Ye. So this this specific strike, Um, why don't can you can you walk us through a bit about how we got to the point where this Kellogg factory is on strike? Um? Well, first off, it's four plants. It's all for American Kellogg

cereal plants have gone on strike. Um. The workers and these plants are represented by the bakery, confectionery tobacco workers in grain Miller's International Union. I do love that bakeries and tobacco workers are in the same union. Yeah that's rat yeah yeah. So um, their contract was up for renegotiation in actually UM and UM due to a series of weird things happening, they pushed the negotiations to UM.

They renegotiate their contract every five years UM and at stake this year, UM was a sort of pushing back against a recently introduced to tier employment system that they company sort of strong armed the union into, which essentially is not it's not a good deal for anyone UM. In they pushed in this sort of two tier system where one tier is a lower transitional tier and one tier is a legacy or full time employee tier. UM. And what it is is that you know, it amounts

to a difference of twelve bucks an hour and less benefits. UM. Yes, yes, UM. Dan Osborne recently did an interview with Ax Salvarez at Working People podcast and he really kind of talked about exactly what was going on there UM. And you know, there's four people who work in four plants. There's about four employees at the Omaha plant, which has been around for decades and UM. Essentially what this tier system does

is it's capped at their union workforce. And the whole idea is as these full time employees retire or quit, then these transitional employees will sort of be funneled into the full time tier. Right over the last five years, that hasn't really happened really at all. Um. It was a bad deal from the start according to many of the workers who sort of felt like they, you know, they were backed into a wall because Kellogg's was threatening to close the Memphis plant if they didn't ratify this

negotiated contract. So rather than experience, you know, five hundred layoffs in Memphis, they just agreed to it. So they you going to the negotiating table in that they were going to try and sort of walk that back because these workers all work in the same plant, same days

for a second third shift. Transitional workers are working side by side with these full time employees, working the same hours, which can amount to seven days a week twelve the sixteen hours a day on mandatory over time, and they are making twelve dollars an hour less and they are not getting the benefits that these full time employees are getting. So really, these full time employees are kind of going

to bat for the transitional employees. UM, Kelloggs wants to remove the cap which the union negotiated, which is attent of their workforce. They want to to do that, do away with that so that they can continue hiring more transitional workers, and they want to funk with the insurance benefits. So, uh, the union tried to negotiate this. I think according to the local union president, Kellogg's negotiators were at the negotiating table for ten hours and they negotiated eight hours a day,

five days a week for two weeks. Ten hours there at the table. So they weren't interested in negotiating a contract. They had laid out their their terms and they essentially told the union to go kick rocks. And so the union said, you know, we have we have until October five and then our contract is up, and if we haven't ratified a new contract, then we're going out on strike. And that's ultimately what happened. So they've been on strike

for this will be their fourteenth day today. I think the fight against the two tier system, I think is an interesting part of this because that's been a huge part of a lot of the different strikes you've been seeing since the John Deer strikes, is part of the Kaiser strikes. And Yeah, I'm wondering what you think specifically about the fact that this is like this is the moment that people have decided to like push back against against two or even three tier systems they were introduced

in the last really like ten or fifteen years. For the most part, well, I think it's just, you know, it's a divide and conquer strategy for Kellogg's or for these other companies. And ultimately, what it looks like is it uh destabilizes well established unions, especially at Kellogg's. UM and UM, it pits workers against each other, you know, UM, particularly at Kellogg's. If they're able to remove this cap on this tier system, UM, what they're essentially doing is

they're creating a more precarious workplace for these workers. UM. The turnover rate and the lower tier at the Omaha plant is right around UM. And you know, prior to you didn't really see a whole lot of people leaving the Kellogg's plant. You know, these were These are workers who are spending their entire careers at this plant. Their

parents work, their their grandparents work there. You know. UM, they because they're all getting paid around the same amount of money, there isn't this tension on the line, so they're they're working with each other, they're helping each other, right UM. And with this tier system, what they're doing is they're throwing these newer workers into uh pretty uh insane factory conditions, UM and making it really difficult for them to uh I feel like they have any reason

to stay there. Right. A lot of these people will, you know put in. Some of these workers were transitional workers who weren't officially hired by the company. You know, there aren't full time employees. They aren't receiving benefits like the full time employees are for five years. They work this every day, seven days a week, three months on end. Right. Uh. They have this really you know punitive attendance based points system that discourages you calling in sick. There's injuries that

happened in the factory all the time. You know. I went out to the line and wrote a piece for the Real News about this, and pretty much every person I talked to showed me scars from accidents that happened, injuries in the plant. UM. The union president himself got his hand stuck in a m like a mill and broke all the fingers in his hand. He had to

have ten surgeries on his hand, you know. UM, there was an accident at the plant two or three weeks ago wherein a transitional employee got both arms stuck in a conveyor belt. You know. Um, the thing is is these folks super proud of the work that they do, like absolutely take this work extremely seriously. You know, they're not even asking for changes to their overtime. They are not asking for you know, anything that you know, from me on the outside, i'd be fighting for more humane

working conditions. But to them, you know, it's it's not like it's a point of pride, but they feld that they have put blood, sweat, tears, uh, you know, fractured relationships, time that they could be spending with their children into this factory and Kelloggs is essentially fucking them over. Yea.

You know, they see, as we have sacrificed for this company for years and years and years, um, and we are asking for equal pay for all and for everyone to have the same health care so that we can do this job, you know, and Kelloggs is saying no, absolutely. You know. I think the union president said that some of the negotiators called those demands outlandish during negotiations, which

I think is just incredible, you know, just corporate greed. Yeah, I think the other part of the story is that, like I mean, it's kind of a weird consequence of it, but like one of the things, one of those consequences is sort of like rising like staple commodity price, staple grain prices and stuff, is that Kelloggs like they're doing They have like record they have record off its right now and they're still just doing this ship because yeah,

they made record profits during the pandemic. They gave their CEO pretty huffy raise bonus. Um, there was a stock buy back program that helped happened among the c suite folks last year. They made a lot of money, a

lot of money. And UM, you know, these workers worked every day through the pandemic, UM continually understaffed, you know, UM, doing their best because again, they they take this job very seriously and they are proud that they are feeding the American people, you know, UM, and they are proud to work at Kellogg's. And uh, they feel that this

contract is just shit, it's just ship. And you know the only sensible thing to do is to to walk out on strike because you know, they've been backed into a corner and negotiations have stagnated completely, you know, UM, and Um, they don't want to They don't want to back down from this, you know. Um, they and I agree. I feel what they're what they're asking for is fair. It's very fair. I mean, I think it's I think asking for a lot more would be fair, but not

my place to be doing. One of the things that strikes me about this you talk about this tier system that Kellogg's introduced, which I can't help but think of what happened at John Deere where they I think in nineties six cut pensions by two thirds and then like last year eliminated them entirely. And this kind of bid

to pitt chunks of the workforced against each other. Um, where you have like you know, different groups making different amounts and sort of like, I don't know, it seems kind of like the strategy that you see in the broader economy, like written within within the space of a company, where you've got like some people who are getting pretty well taken care of in their jobs and other newer people who are who are getting more screwed over in kind of this this attempt to create division within the

workforce so that this this kind of organizing doesn't happen. M M. I would agree. And you also have to think, you know, if they are able to remove this cap on the transitional tier, but that means that this is they'll be able to instead of say, say a full time employee retires, they leave that space empty, but they still need an extra space, an extra person, right, so they can just hire a transitional worker instead of funneling

one of those transitional workers into that full time space. Ah, what ends up happening is suddenly you have instead of sevent full time to transitional, the it starts tipping, right, it becomes a more precarious workforce. Then say, for example, to do that in the next five years. You know, now they have seventy percent of these transitional workers who

don't think the union is offering anything for them. They can essentially just offer a better deal to these transitional workers and kick the union out of the company at some point. You know. Um, and these folks on the line understand that and know that that's kind of Kellogg's plan, right, they know that the Kelloggs, what Kelloggs is trying to do is essentially destabilize the power of the union inside

the plants. And everyone on the line that I've spoken with know exactly what's happening, you know, and these full time employees are out there every day making sure that their transitional and you know, colleagues know that that's why they're out there because they want to not allow this to be something that divides their workforce. It remains to be seen what's going to happen, you know what I mean. They've brought in scabs to get the plant up and

running again, and most recently, uh, yesterday this morning. Yesterday, the Building and Construction Trades Council union and met with the union president in Omaha because they have about a hundred third party iron workers, carpenters, electricians, and skilled trades people that are union trades people that have contracts at Kellogg's, and they came to what Dan Osborne, the union president, decided called was a tough decision that those union workers

are going to cross the picket line to honor those contracts. So Kelloggs is forcing the unions in the city in like into a bind really because they're they're you know, uh going to lose their own contracts at Kellogg's. So that's kind of been like the most recent development here is that rather than just temps coming in. We have now skilled union trades people from various Omaha unions who are also crossing the picket line two honor their contracts

at Kellogg's, you know, um, past these striking workers. So it's a bit of a mess a little bit, you know. Yeah, there's so much going on right now. I'm kind of wondering what you think are the because we've got a number of strikes kind of all coming to ahead at the same time, I'm wondering, specifically from the Kellogg strike, what do you think are kind of the lessons that should be taken from what's happened so far for the broader labor movement. UM. I think the biggest thing that's

kind of impacted me as I've gone to the line. UM, I've stood on the picket line, I've covered these you know, this strike, I've talked to people, UM, is that when these types of actions happen, they really only can be

sustained because the community comes together to support them. You know. UM, these strike funds that are going around and folks showing up to stand on the picket line who are not part of the union are really sort of become you know, they are helping support these workers who can only hold

out so long with finite resources. Right. So the big thing to me is that past these news cycles of excitement of strike Ober of you know, these people just walked out today, well they may be you know, they may be on the line for months and months on end, and the news cycle is going to move on, and these communities are still going to have to try and and and back up these labor actions, right Um. You really can't have true you know, you can't have a

labor movement without you know, support, right um. And that's kind of been the biggest thing that has impacted me particularly. You know this Almaha used to be a really formidable union, tim you know, back in the eighties, it was really really something to see that the business unions in in the various locals here really had some of these union leaders had more political power than the mayor, right um. And that has gone downhill over the last forty years.

And it's really cool to see, ah, the level of solidarity that's happening amongst the community, you know, um, in the ways in which people are kind of coming out to talk to and and be a part of this strike and to remind these Kellogg's workers that they're not operating in a bubble, you know, and that the rest of the community really hopes that the strike will end quickly and peacefully and with a really good resolution for

these workers. You know. Whatever thing I wanted to ask about in in terms of sort of this this kind of research in to the union movements, and in in in terms of sort of communities support is the level of violence that there's been against like against the strikes. I've seen a lot of like stuff about people canna hit by buses and like, and I don't I don't know if I think I think I'm getting my strikes. I don't don't know if they've they have been direct

car attacks on this specific picket line. But that's when I think that it's been happening a lot and a couple of documented cases. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I was wondering what you think about that, and like what actually can be done about the fact that, like, you know that, you know, like this just the fact that we're just seeing auto attacks on picket lines regularly, Now, I mean, is it that's you know, it's a it's a shitty development.

You know. Um, I was out on the picket line last Thursday, and um, they were attempting to bring in buses at shift change past the the picketers who walk slowly. You know, they don't want to stop in front of the bus. It's illegal to stop and and you know make it, you know, so that they can't pass through the gates, but they slow them down for a little bit. And um, one gentleman was trying, you know, was standing

there and this bus just bumped right into them. You know, there's videos that have been shared through local news of buses knocking down workers as they're trying to cross the picket line. UM. And I you know there are also personal vehicles that go through and it could be the private security that's been hired, it could be managers. UM. But you know they're running through these lines really quickly, dangerously. It's unfortunate, and you know, I don't have an answer

for what the best UH solution for that is. You know, but vehicle tax have become sort of more uh, I don't want to say commonplace, but you see them happening a lot both at protests last year, and you know, I think Warrior met Cole had some bosses running through the lines and being reckless with their vehicles. You know. Um, the problem is is on the on the back end, and the police don't step in when they see these instances,

you know. Um. And in fact, last Thursday, when we had a hundred plus motorcyclists from various mc s show up to support the strike, Um, the police were the ones who protected the scabs and made sure that they made it through the picket line. So you know, UM, the answer to that not sure, you know, yeah, I

mean that's a time honored police tradition. Yeah, they historically don't don't exist to protect laborers, with the notable exception of of the sheriff and what was it, Mattawan and uh during the um the coal miner strike in West Virginia. M Well yeah they shot him so well yeah, but it shot some people first, yeah, Um, sid Hatfield that was the name. Yeah, I don't know. Um, I've gotten to know some of these folks the line of the

last two weeks, and they're just fantastic human beings, you know. Um, they are accommodating and hard working, and they come from all age brackets and they bring their families out and you know they're getting they're getting a raw deal from Kellogg's and UM, so far, the community support has been overwhelmingly positive. Um, there hasn't really been like at the John Deer strike. They're not getting eggs thrown out them,

you know. Um, they get a lot more honking and messages of support than they do people driving by to yell at them for uh, you know, being a strike. So that's been nice to see, you know. UM. And actually this weekend on Saturday, UM, there's gonna be a like cool vintage car show cruise around Kellogg's event that they've got planned the fire departments bringing rigs and um, teamsters fire department is yeah, and the Teamsters are bringing cars, and that there's a bunch of vintage car clubs that

are going to be coming out. So you know, those types of things have like really kind of like fired up these people to keep them out on the line as long as they need to be, you know, so

communities there for him. One of the things I'm continuing to wonder about is what it takes to close the gap between understanding that you and your colleagues are getting screwed over by this system and understanding that you and all of the other people striking at the same time, and perhaps even a bunch of people not striking are

all kind of fighting the same fight. And then maybe there's grander things to achieve than the negotiation of a single contract, because that seems like the big leap that is going to be the real struggle to clear. Uh yeah, you know. Um. I will say that some of the workers are fully aware that this is not just about a single contract negotiation and is actually, you know, more about struggles of the working class against corporate greed and the ways in which the working class gets their asses

handed to them all the time, um um. And they know that they know that at some point, perhaps at some point in the future, someone else is going to look at their example and be inspired by it. Right. Um. As far as like maybe I don't know, ideologically speaking or politically speaking, for these folks, it's uh doesn't fit into any sort of ideology leftist or conservative or whatever. Everyone's got their own personal politics. But they don't really talk about it on the line. What they talk about

is working class versus ruling class. Um that you know, that's their sense. It's corporate greed, it's um asshole. CEO is making eleven point six million dollars a year while they're struggling to pay their own bills, you know, UM, and and you know that conversation is more common than UM.

Trying to fit this into a larger political movement or revolutionary movement, if that makes sense, you know yeah, um, But I would say that the vast majority of the workers, regardless of their own personal politics, have a very clear sense of where they sit in terms of class consciousness and understand that this is one of one of the most effective tactics to try and force the hand of these assholes, you know, UM is to withhold work and

withhold their labor. So well, this has been great. I mean that's everything I had to ask Chris anything else that I have? So there is there a call to action we could have for our listeners or pages people should be following strike fund Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a go fund me and there's a PayPal set up for the Omaha strikers. I believe the b C t g M International page has like a page of each of the strike funds for each of the four plants. So that might be something that you might want to share

with your listeners. I can send you an email with that um, because it's probably going to be easier to do. Um. But yeah, as far as I know, bct GM isn't called for an official boycott of Kellogg's products. However, they wouldn't be mad if you just didn't buy any right now. There was some talk last week that some of the picketers might you know, be flying outside of grocery stores to try and educate the community on what's going on

with this strike. But beyond that, they also are concerned about the quality of the food being produced by scabs, So it probably would be healthy for you to not by the food, you know, because I think it wasn't what two thousand eighteen during the works a lockout in Memphis, the same company that they brought in then that they're bringing in now, uh piste in the cereal on the line, and it didn't release video of that for two years after the incident, so it ended up in someone's um,

you know, gross yikes, yikes, Yeah, I guess, but yeah, that's pretty fun right. Um. So yeah, you know, uh, support your local strike fund and if you are in a city where Kellogg's plant is striking, I'm sure those workers would love love to to hear from you fill your support. So where and where can our listeners follow you? I am on Twitter primarily at cold Brood Tool. I don't know why I picked that name, but I like it. Yeah, yeah, I got it. I haven't changed that handle since I

got into Twitter, so um. But yeah, that's usually where I'm at. Otherwise, you know, I teach locally and had to have a podcast that I'm developing and do a bunch of different projects. So Twitter is the best way to get a hold of me if you have questions. Awesome, all right, thanks for having me on folks, Thanks to us, Thanks for thanks for joining us. I'll be back at the picket line, you know, talking to these folks, and I'm going to do my best to keep this ship

in the new cycles so that they aren't forgotten. So awesome. We've got a link to the strike Fund and some other ways to help me in the description. So yeah, this has been it could Happen Here pod. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram at Happened Here pod, and at cools on media for all the rest of our shows. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here your favorite podcast. Are also legally the only podcaster that that people are allowed to enjoy on the internet here to introduce a really exciting episode of

it could happen here. So for the last bit of time, I've been in and out of touch with a number of members of the Puget Sound John Brown Club. They have provided armed self defense groups for a couple of different protests in the Washington area over the last year and change, UM, and we wanted to sit down and talk to them about the ideas behind community self defense, how to do it responsibly, how to do it irresponsibly. We also had some discussions with them about the disasters

that happened at the Chop Slash Chaz last year. They were not involved with that as an organization UM, but they have some insights on the matter. UM. That's going to be coming at you in a separate episode or maybe even a couple of episodes in the near future. Today we're just kind of talking about the concepts of armed community self defense. You know, what's responsible, what's irresponsible, how people should think about it. I think you'll enjoy

the conversation here. It is a decent chunk of the folks listening, especially the Portlanders, will have experience with UH and that that Garrison and I have certainly had experienced with it is people at protests declaring themselves security, sometimes even wearing shirts that say security and uh, picking up a variety of what fense, often paintball guns and mace, and using them, often irresponsibly on other protesters, on on bystanders,

in the name of of of keeping things safe. And UM, I think we're pretty clear, and I think most reasonable people can see that that's not community self defense. But often those people certainly claim that what they're doing is community self defense. UM. And I'm specifically wanting to start by getting a kind of a range of definitions from folks, as you are, all people who have engaged in community

self defense, UM, and particularly armed community self defense. What do you see as the actual role of community self defense and and how should it look as opposed to, you know, a guy with a paintball gun yelling at kids for tagging a window. Ray you wanna you want to kick us off with an answer there, I do. Community defense should be part of the a broad health and safety infrastructure set up for or a protest movement

or a community. Being deliberately vague here, but specifically, armed community defense deals with mitigating lethal and egregious harm to members of a community. The goal is forced and foremost prevention, mitigation and control of those threats. In my mind, ideally community defense would involve no one doing anything, carrying around a bunch of really heavy ship and nothing happening, but

deterring those from harming others. In the absolute worst case, it means you have to actually do something that can get messy pretty quickly. I want to circle back to a couple of things. Actually, I do have one one quick follow up question for you before we move on

to the next people. Ray. When you say like carrying heavy things and whatnot, I'm wondering, what do you think I'm interested in you and I'll probably ask other people to follow up when it when it comes to carrying and bringing a firearm to either a protest situation some other community self defense situation. What it is going through your head when you do determine what to bring, Because I've seen people carry a variety of different guns from like shotguns and in one case is of mos and

negot to a r S or handguns. Um, what do you think is kind of the the logic train I guess that you would take, Like, what is the appropriate tool to bring like in this situation, So that depends entirely on what the anticipated threat is and how one plans to mitigate the anticipated threat. There's no correct answer for that. Sometimes the answer to mitigate lethal or regious

bodily harm is not a firearm at all. Indeed, firearms are applicable in an extraordinarily narrow range of scenarios, but those range of scenarios are catastrophic and need extreme measures to be mitigated. So it depends on what if you are considering bringing firem what is the firearm good at And then you get into the minutia of what firearm is good for what thing, which depends on your legal

context and particular threat. But I think one has to start with the question is is the thing I'm bringing able to mitigate the type of harm I might see happen to my community? And to get a little bit less vague, there are people who think that bringing a shotgun is a good way to stop a car speeding into a crowd, when it clearly isn't right. So one has to make sure that the tool, whatever they have is you is appropriate for the task at hand and

the threat you anticipate. That was great. Thank you, Ray, Um Katie you want to you want to give us your answer next. I agree with everything that Race said, and the only addition that I'd make is that, UM, it's specifically in our in our cases generally doesn't mean standing between protesters and police, but more guiding protesters, you know, our activists or participants away from potential situations of harm. It's like, we can't stand in front of police and

stop cops from doing their job. Like that just gets you arrested and uh or worse or worse, and that's not what we're here for. So yeah, that's all I wanted to could you, because I have chatted with a couple of your number about this, about um kind of the role that that an armed contingent at a protest can play in kind of allowing an avenue of retreat,

you know, especially during confrontations with non state actors. UM, I'm interested in kind of what you um, you know, you're not You're not to kind of as you did, kind of kind of clarify this conception. You don't see your role as standing in front of the protesters between them and the cops and like presenting a threat to the cops. What is the utility and kind of an active protest situation that you've seen of of of what

y'all do. So that's a good question. And um, if we're doing our job well, then most people think we don't do anything at all. Um. A lot of what we do is we're watching external potential threats to my

try to come in. The most common factor these days is a car um but generally we're looking for folks that might cause trouble and finding ensuring that we're not putting ourselves in a position where we're gonna get cornered or trapped and and really you know, just trying to help facilitate and work with the facilitators and organizers to

keep things, you know, progressing in a safe way. So as far as what we're protecting against threat wise, that that ranges from everything from like angry people who are just angry and trying to go home and getting blocked by a protest too, people who are who are actively looking to do harm to a movement that happens to be involved in the protests, or you know, maybe it's something as as as specific as a person who's looking

to specifically do harm to uh, organizers. So most of the time it's we're focused outward and and just making sure that our exits are are covered and that we have way to get people away from potential bad situations. Um, that was great, Thank you, Katie Shannon you want to give your answer, No, absolutely, thanks. I would add there's a really critical element to community defense that begins and

ends with the word community. Obviously, there's a big difference between proclaiming yourself security and showing up someplace and being there as an intentional community support where the community plays a role in you being there and also has some influence on that question of what are you carrying and

what is the response. I think it's just really important that you keep the community aspect at the forefront, and that's a huge part of our collective work is making sure that when we're providing community defense, we're aligning ourselves with the desires of the community group that has asked us to be there, also filtering it through our judgment as to what's safe and appropriate under the circumstances, using some of those filters that Ray mentioned when they were

answering and UM, what do you see as like like this is something that that I kind of gets to both what what is an issue with me? And kind of the folks who declare themselves a security, which is that they're often kind of separating themselves from the rest of the movement, specifically in a cop like way to say like, well, it's my job to keep you saving, even though that means or it's my job to keep things order leaven if that means attacking some other people

at this protest. One of the things that Scott Crowe in is uh in Setting Sights, which is a really good book on community self defense, does is set out that, um, a key aspect of community self defense, as you said,

is that you're like a member of the community. And I think, I guess the question I have is because guns are what they are and have the kind of cultural weight that they have, it's you people are always people who accept being armed as an aspect of their personality are always going to be kind of fighting having that dominate their personality. And it wouldn't. It's clearly something

that a lot of people have an issue with. The thing that is important is to be a member of the community who happens to be armed, as opposed to an armed activist whose whose role is being armed right, Like I I mean, do you agree with what I'm saying or kind of like I'm wondering how you think about it, because this is something that I'm kind of going around in my head about as well, because it's it's it's clearly where a lot of the problems happen,

right that the gun becomes central to the identity of the people who bring it, which is something that happens to the cops. Yes, and also the mentality of separating yourself from the community and not being part of the

purpose of being there. And so I'll defer to my my comrades here to go a little bit further with it, but I would just say that there's a significant difference between armed community defense and having an intentional presence of armed community defense at an event or protest and being

a person who shows up with a gun. Those are two really different things, and so I think that's the that's one of the benefits of being part of an organization that does this collectively, with accountability, with training, with a known role in the community, so that there is um consistency among what we do and why we do it, and history of folks understanding that if we're present somewhere, it's because we've been asked to be there, and that

what we're doing there is aligned with and approved of by the people who are organizing the event. And then I'll let somebody else who's more eloquent than I am uh answered that further if they feel like they can. Yeah, I think NOVA is up now. If you wanted to give your answer and kind of also comment on what we've been chatting about, what Channon and I were just

chatting about, Nova, Hi, thank you so much. UM. I would say that folks like Ray and Katie and of course Shannon really put it very sustinctly, very well together and answered a lot of the things that I was gonna already provided things that I was going to add

to it. But um, the specifically the part about the gun becoming the driving factor in somebody's presence at the protest, or the gun being a part of the personality of somebody who's going to appoint themselves as a guardian towards a bunch of people, I would I would say that with any responsible community community defense role within a protest context, that the act of being a body in between a threat and your community has to come first, and that

the that the firearm has to be secondary. Um. Uh, there there was an incident on the night of protest where uh many of us were at risk of being harmed by a vehicle attack, and uh, in retrospect, a firearm would not have mitigated that threat terribly well, but the idea of being in between a threat such as that and somebody else who is possibly more vulnerable than you are bore a lot more of a significance on that.

So the firearm being there to respond to a threat and perhaps mitigate an active, ongoing, deadly threat to your community is one thing, But I think the imary thing is going to be just putting yourself in harm's way so that you can spare that responsibility from somebody possibly more vulnerable than you. If that makes sense, that should

be the primary responsibility. And um, how do you avoid letting that turn people doing that into feeling like a separate and even elevated chunk of the community, Because that again, that's what happens with police. You know, this idea that it starts as like, well, we're here to serve and protect um, and that that through a variety of toxic alchemies turns into this idea of the thin blue line.

What is the way you push back on that? How do you actually stop it from going from I'm someone who is accepting personal responsibility for the well being of the people around me um and putting my body in between them on harm's way if necessary, uh, to I it's my job to protect people, to it's my job to you know, from turning that into kind of this idea of I think stewardship in some ways that like some people in law enforcement have where like you're there,

they they get to tell you what to do because that's their responsibility to keep you safe. Like, how do you how do you stop that attitude from evolving? Because I've seen it happen to people fairly quickly when they put themselves in some of these situations sometimes and it's certainly not like most people, but it is. It doesn't take a long time for somebody to like especially if

they're vulnerable, to get in that position. So how do you, especially if you're approaching it from an organizational standpoint, right, you're an organization made up of people who come to do this, how do you fight back against that? Like?

What is the active kind of counter programming, if you will, I'd see I don't have an easy answer for that question, to be completely honest with you, but I say that the closest thing uh to an answer to that would be that and almost you know, monastic devotion to the task that was acts asked of you by the group

that asked you there. Um. So if somebody asked us to be a part of a march and to simply look outward for external threats and to be willing to respond to those threats that need be again putting our bodies in harm's way, but also be willing to respond to lethal force and kind should the worst case scenario arise. Um, I'd say that the ultimate accountability rest with the people who asked you to be there. Uh. And there's no easy answer as to what that mechanism of accountability looks like.

But you know, in several layers, that would start with your teammates, the people who are part of your organization that asked you to be that is asked to be there. So other members of of j B g C are you know, definitely going to try and keep each other accountable. But it's also the larger the the the the the larger contingent of the action that you're a part of. Uh, to be ultimately willing to back down from whatever you're

doing if a concern is voiced by that community. And I wish I had a better way to word that, uh, But just the the the the constant vigilance within oneself against overstepping the boundaries that were clearly set by people who invited you into a space. UM. That's really the best answer I can get for that at the moment

without further percolating. Well, I mean, yeah, for for one thing, I think this is the reason we're having this conversation, and I'm getting ahead of us a little, is because this is still very much a developing thing on the left and and I don't think anybody has all the answers on how to do it well, although I think an increasing number of folks except the necessity. UM. So I think that's part of the reason for the conversation, is this like continuing exploration of how to actually do

this responsibly. UM. But I do think you hit on something important there when you talked about the that you're there at the invitation of a community, as opposed to you are there too to police or to maintain order. Like the idea of approaching it as if you were to guest strikes me as a really good idea, UM, in order to keep yourself on a certain behavioral um standpoint, like I'm I'm I'm here at the request of this community as their guest, as opposed to I am here

to protect this community. You know, absolutely, that's a that's a That's a perfect way to summarize what I was trying to go for with that one. I think that the ultimately to be averse to being put in a position of power or authority is the best way to check against that um and to simply be a servant to the community that is again inviting you into that space and putting yourself in a m servile is not

the right word. I'm looking for a different word for that, but a a position of service, a true position like like yes, what what what community defense should be is ultimately a service and a burden rather than a reward of responsibility and power over your fellow community members. Okay, yeah, great, I think next was Ray again, Um, you had something to say there. Yeah, I'll finish that thought in my notes under the section of what happens when things go right.

I think one thing that can go right is normalizing that firearms are just a thing that can be around and they don't have to be your entire ass personality, nor do they have to be a differentiating factor. Indeed, I think one of the successes there are not many, but of community defense in the Chop was normalizing the idea that people can have firearms and they're not an

inherent threat. UM. Thinking of people who are armed often and we're pointed out routinely, and it was like, Nah, he's still he's He's a cool dude, you know, just a guy, just like the things like, you know, do you really think the black guy is going to shoot up the top? I don't know that. He's totally fine.

I know him. His jokes are great. Um a goat an overhearing of these kind of conversations, it helps, you know, firearms become like part of the tapestry of life, not this differentiating factor, not a beauty item, not something of rape your personality around. It's just like they're there and that they can be good, bad, right, wrong, or different.

And I think that normalizing effect is one of the successes community can have and I'm happy to talk about other things the community defense can normalize, but I wanted to emphasize the you just have a firearm. You're not talking about it, you're not touching it, you're not thinking

about it. You know, people have that. It's just around And it became pretty chill, and there was kind of the Chop specifically, there's an area where firearms just kind of were around and nothing happened really and that was kind of wonderful in my mind. So, um, from my experience with with the club, Uh, it's basically the even though we are the John Brown Gun Club, the guns are like the last thing that we even consider. Like it would technically if we were to actually rename the club,

it would be the John Brown de Escalation Club. Um, we would like most of the time any um, any anything that's gone on. Even when I did visit the Chop and there were some weird stuff going on, like Brother Matthew being Brother Matthew, people were um using their skills to um to to d escalate situation, to calm the calm out, calm down individuals to make sure that that whatever hostility they have would be abated through just verbal verbal communications talked about that in a little more detail,

because I don't know who. I mean, I was at the Chazz briefly, but I don't know who brother Matthew was, or like what incident you're talking about. Something is a guy who shows up up here all around the Seattle area. And also I think he's even shut up in Portland as well. Um got preacher guy, gets in everybody's faces, usually not liked by everybody, super afraid of snakes, thanks Jerry. Um. But yeah, he like like he's he's a person who drives off a confrontation and uses the Bible as as

his mode of of operation. But um, I remember distinctly at at the chop Um he was getting it, getting into it with people. But everybody who was around tried to talk him down. They tried to chill make him chill out, even though he was continually screaming for attention and just being weird. But um, but in the end, um like that's just like that happens more often with protests situations or marked situations or direct action situations where we're asked to be a part of it by the organizers.

And and as um Ray had mentioned, and Nova had mentioned um. We like we're asked to be there and we're not just asked and then we suddenly show up, Like we get involved with the people who are organizing any of the partners that they that they that they get that they bring into it. We try to learn as much about what's going on with them, who are the threats, where, where the event is, how the event

is um going to be thought of. We ask a lot of questions about it, Like we plan and plan and plan and plan to make sure that everything is super safe or as safe as possible based on all known variables and uh, and then the stuff that's unknown, we do our best to mitigate that somehow. Yes we are armed, but that's like the last thing that we ever even think of, and that's even in our planning, Like we say flat out de escalate first. Um. If

things start to ratch it up, respond in kind. So like if someone you know, like tries to like I don't know, like starts to fist fight, We're not going to pull out a gun on someone who wants to box somebody on the street. We're going to do our best to stop so uh, stop them through other means, like whether if it's just to block a punch or whatever.

But the first things and foremost is d escal Asian calm, calm that person down and tell them to go away or just to chill out or whatever the whatever is necessary. I mean de escalation. All of the best community self defense that I've personally watched has been de escalation. Um. You know, they're They're not the only situations I've seen.

I've seen force used a couple of times in situations that were necessary, but by far, de escalation is the thing I've seen, um actually protect people in dicey situations the most. Um, And generally that's that's going to be the case. Yeah. I know for myself, like my attitude is we all go home. Everybody who shows up there goes home, not to the hospital, not to jail, or not to the morgue. We all go home. Yeah, I think that's definitely seems like the best way to look

at it. So into the specific question of how not to become a cop in this position and on the gun, the only way I've been able to do anything in that regard has been to not have that be my primary thing that I fulfilled. I'm part of a community and I'm a mechanical person this community. I try to have my mission be not that other skill set or that other access to being of an aid to a community, be my actual purpose in the community, if that makes

any sense. M Yeah, that makes complete sense. Um and Yeah, I think is the healthiest way to to deal with it. So something I've been wondering about as so I'm like nott armed at all. So I guess I'm on like the other the other side of defense, of the sort of community self defense. I think that people show up

to protests, um. And So something I was wondering about is is the relationship between this stuff and you know, between the sort of hot mentality development and the difficulty of sort of integrating to the community, of having organizations that are basically independent security groups and not for example, like taking like I don't know, take like an historical example, like there was a thing in China you'd see a lot in like the nine hundreds where you know, you'd

have armed pickets, right, and so you you you have an armed force there, but the armed force is like you know, this is this is like a branch of the union, right, and that's that's how they sort of like like that that was the sort of solution to how do you stop cops syndrome is that you know they're they're they're basically like a part of another community organization.

And so I'm I'm curious what you all think about what the sort of I guess that the strengths and weaknesses of being an independent or having having sort of independent security organizations versus having I guess, subsections of other organizations that are armed. Yeah, I feel like I can offer a unique perspective here as someone who's been privy to multiple angles of this, including separate organizations, ones integrated with others, and ones that are sort of just parts

of the community. I don't think there's any like inherent sort of best answer here. I do think being part of a separate organization makes it harder to be in the community versus of the community, meaning you came from the community and now you're sort of kind of separate but not really UM like JB in particular has a perpetual problem with people saying, oh, you know, John Brown will do X. And this is something that has been

discussed and often this is to people's immense fire. I don't want to speak for everyone here, but it does seem to be that, so seldom does one wish to be said, oh, hello, It's kind of like saying, oh, the Union will solve this, and it's like, turns out you're the Union buddy, um right, and never referred to

be union in the first person. So I do think being embedded into other groups or being sort of this loose diffuse group can make it easier to be part of the community because of the structural forces that make that, um, it is easier to get there. A separate organization can help focus and codify certain procedures training, you know, make sure that people have some sort of unified goals and values, at the expense of making it a bit harder to

integrate into one's community. I think given the era we're in, I'm not surprised we see many many approaches to community

defense with varying effectiveness at different times, including JBS perspective. Yeah, and um, I guess I'm interested as we are as we move on here, and like, one of the one of the questions I see is how do you the difficulty and kind of you don't want to have a situation where there's absolutely no where the community self defense contention is anyone who shows up with a gun, because then anyone can show up with a gun, and you as someone else who's showing up with a weapin or

potentially like if that person uh makes a bad decision, that's going to I mean as it as it has in the past, that has significant repercussions on everybody else. And I that is one of the thorny or points because I I do one of the things I see is valuable. Someone mentioned earlier, like the nice thing about it just in not being firearms being normalized, not as a like gun culture thing, but as this is just

a thing that is present in the community. And I saw that a lot in Rojaba, right that everybody was armed, or at least the significant chunk of the populace had access to arms, but nobody was showing off with them. They were not like anybody's like like piece of identity. They were just one of the tools like a like a like a spade or a shovel that we're present in the community. Um okay, I think I've skipped over a couple of people. I wanted to give Thud a

chance to talk. That's actually very much short of in line with But the point I was going to make, which is, for me, a huge part of community defense is making sure that the aspect that is defending the community is not alienated from the community because it isn't concentrated in just a few people. Because I think one of the other things that we emphasize the lots with outside of direct protest actions is you try to teach people how to safely operate firearms, but also to give

firearms the respect that they deserve. That farms are not there so that you are badass. Firearms are not there because you know you're going to get into a gunfight. And it's well, the first rule, I mean, one of the one of the things that we stress sort of beyond the basic four rules of gun safety is the first rule of gunpipe is don't get into a gunpipe. That it's you know, you want to exhaust every possible

option that you have. And when the community at large is engaged, and like Pray was saying that, it sort of it becomes normalized that oh, we're not relying on these several people to keep us safe, but that in fact, as an entire collective, we're keeping a safe and that gives recognition the fact that some people it's not it's not the right choice for them to carry again for

one reason or another. And the at the same time, the power that is present in that particular tool is dispersed to the point where it doesn't you know, you don't have people getting self aggrandizing thoughts because of the fact that they're possessing firearps. And I think that's something that we, you know, work really hard to instill end evil in a variety of context, and I think is

really critical to this question. So the question trying to summarize, UM, what the question was earlier, What the strengths or weaknesses of having an organized armed response are UM. One of the things that that I wanted to bring up is the historical context of armed response, specifically community armed response

in Seattle. UM. I did some digging and found in a book called History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Volume two, which I started pouring through and found that there was in eighteen seventy four there was a group called the Seattle Amateur Rifle Association which least land for a range on current present day Capitol Hill, UM, like right where the train station is. If you're familiar with the yet so like right where

protests always happened these days. Later on, there's record record in eight seventy seven of the Seattle Rifle Team organizing

and shooting contests. And then later on in eight six, which is a number that probably rings the bell, the Chinese Riots, as they called them at the time, happened, which was sort of the start of the labor movement, where everyone decided that Chinese immigrants were the cause of all of our woes, that the low wages being paid to Chinese immigrants were because of Chinese immigrants and not racism. So they decided to run every person who looked Chinese

out of town. Literally. They referred to this as the Tacoma method, and that's what they did in Takemma exactly. It started there and there was a February seventh of eight six, this massive, angry racist mob tried to push all of the Chinese folks out of Seattle or anyone they thought might look like Chinese is and they tried to push them onto a steamboat, but there weren't there wasn't enough room for them all there. Um cops got involved. A bunch of other stuff happened they decided no, give

them time in court. But in the process of making this decision, you know, the racist got a mob together and we're basically just going to try and put a stop to this before the legal proceedings could to go forward.

So they reached out to local allies and arms. They had the Home Guards, which I'm not exactly sure exactly what the Home Guards were, but I assume there's something related to National Guard later on, or maybe just an extension of military, but the Home Guards and the Seattle Rifles as well as the University Cadets, which I'm assuming are of course soldiers in training, and pulled them all out and made a community self defense group out of them.

They put a rifle line and held the mob back and enabled those folks to get you know, safely, to have their day in court, um, and then to protect them for a while afterward. They actually organized a sort of a watch because they didn't have enough police to to manage the mob. They use folks from the Seattle Rifles and these other groups to uh to sort of bolster the police forces and keep peace in the town.

So the sort of thing that we do is a longstanding historical presence but I think there's a lot of things you can look at the history of and sort of take lessons from so um as as very mentioned, a unified response is of course a huge benefit of having a huge strength of having an organized armed group. Uh. And it's it's literally if someone reaches out and says we need help, help is available. Um. But there are

a lot of weaknesses. Businesses and clubs can be held liable legally, and this is an endemic problem within gun law as it stands. The laws are written such that they effectively there that it comes down to situational context to determine how a gun law should be enforced. And the law will never be on the side of a

group trying to abolish parts of the law. So you have to be very careful about how you how especially an organized or formally organized armed group has to be very cheerful about how they put their their worked in play with that in mind. Yeah, that was great. I was unaware, actually I was aware of the of the riots. I was unaware of that part of the history, which is fascinating, UM and I think very important. Yeah, Ray, did you want to explain the threat onion? Yeah, the

integrated threat onion. So this is kind of a a well known meme in certain circles slash at tool thing, and it's designed to help you understand how to like mitigate threat and sorry, integrated survivability onion mitigate threats. Right. So the teel deer is, you know, do you want to try to preserve life by having body armor and hoping a bullet hits you in the body armor or do you want to preserve life by I don't know, not showing the funk up to something where you might

get shot. And the idea is it's it's a meme because so often, you know, people are like, oh, they want to get in there and get and get engaged with conflict and be the hero. And the answer is, you know, you could just like not go there, right, and it would probably be a lot easier to do that.

But there's some real weight to the survivability onion, which is like, there are many many ways to mitigate threats to yourself in your community, and very often the most boring and mundane answer is probably the one that's going to actually result in the biggest impact, and the heroic answer is probably the absolute worst answer, and only what you rely on if everything I'll has gone to hell.

So that's someone I think it was thund spoken to alluded to the threat onion and ways to mitigate harm to oneself in one's community, and I had to repeat it because it's this this meme that's been coming up forever. Yeah, and it is like the basic idea of the threat onion is that you have like this again you you think of it in layers. That's why they call it

an onion. Um of like things that protect you, and the things that provide the most protection are stuff like not being seen or present when somebody wants to harm you, um, not or being behind cover when somebody wants to harm you. And the thing that offers the least protection is having body armor. You know. It's this the idea that like, um, the things that people buy and and focus on because they look cool, UM are all things that offer less

protection than situational awareness and good judgment. UM is kind of the actual like lesson I think to take out of the threat onion. That to be my opinion on the matter. This has been it could happen here. That's all for this week. Find us at Happen Here pod on Instagram. And Twitter, and find the rest of our shows at cool zone Media in the same places. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could

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