It Could Happen Here Weekly 8

have said that already. I don't know, like I said, too many motherfucking podcasts, but this is the last school week episode. Um and and with me actually in the office right now. Maskless is a protest against the mask man Garrison David's it's fine, it's fine, Garrison. I understand that that you don't believe in health mandates. We have to respect each other's differences. I have magic to protect myself. That's right, That's that's fine. You use chaos magic to

protect yourself from COVID? What do you got for me? We're doing we're doing the first it could happen here daily book episode excellent, um sexy and so I Irotic. We were looking for for spooky content for Spooky Week and around Halloween, and I wanted to find a book written by an unhinged like Christian writer about what they think Halloween is. And I found I found one with very very little browsing. It took It was very quick. It took me like five minutes. It used to be

you were too wrong. Well, no, because you did grow up in the cold, but you were tooting to remember this being a super mainstream I mean, I wasn't like we had no Halloween when I was a kid. We couldn't got treating. We had like we had, like we had like a we had like a harvest party. The church put off, but like we had we had, I couldn't. I didn't. The first time I went tricker treating was when I was like twelve and I moved to Portland. No, I was like thirteen, was the first time I went

trick or treating? Yeah, it's um. I mean it used to be like it used to be something that got more mainstream play. The like anti Halloween thing, um kind of tied in with a satanic panic. I remember the early nineties. That's what this book is going to be about. Angry about it, but man, it just is like it's it's it almost feels like homey and comforting. Thinking back to that as this book has been oddly comforting because it just reminds me people with childhood. Was like, that's

just all the same stuff. Yeah, I want you, I want you to read the title and the author of this amazing book. Okay, so this is wow. The cover is honestly just looks like a normal jack. It looks like a regular a bat into a Jack Lanard, but it's got like spooky white smoke coming out of it. The title is Helloween Satan's New Year by Dr Billy Dimily. It's not a real name. Is not a real name, Billy Billy like it's I swear to God listeners, b I L L y E. That is not a name.

And the last it is certainly not Billy, that's Billy. But the last nay, it was just as bad. Dimily. Yeah d y M A L L y dim ally ally don't know nonsense. So we have Whenever you find a Christian book written by someone with doctor and from their first name, you know it. You know it's gonna be good. You gotta figure out what kind of doctor.

Guess what? Guess what kind of doctor. So, first of all, for the maybe so, Billy dim Ley, the author earned earned a theological doctorate of ministry in the mid eighties at the Honolulu extension of the of the Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary headquartered in Portland, Oregon. So that's fine. The Honolulu one headquarters. The branch was in Hollelululu, but the headquarters was apparently Importland, Oregon in the eighties, And

that makes sense much if it's still here. But you know, sister cities Portland and Honolulu. She wrote at least fifteen original manuscripts her word manuscript UM, on a wide range of biblical doctrines. And so he is a lady, I believe, So I mean, has she her pronounces I gotta, I gotta, can't continue. I'm gonna look this up. So yeah, but Billy, So then the book that we're looking at is is one one of her fifteen manuscripts UM self published by

Infinity Publishing. Um. Yeah, this was in the publish in two thousand six. That gives that's a lady. And if that's her actual picture on the front, she just kind of looks like a looks like a white lady like

a white lady. So yeah. So one of my favorite parts of the book so far is right when you opened up to the title page, it says, you know, Halloween, satans know you're a the titled the book, and then as a as a brief description of what the book is, it says, a systematic compilation and narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Oh whoa, No, that is not her on the cover because she is not a white lady, is she not?

So that's her? Oh? She she's like a black conservative bath Yeah, just like she looks like kind of like a judge. She does look a lot like a strong judge, does Judge Jennery? Yeah? Okay, well I do. I do love the systematic compilation narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures, not actual Bibles. Not actual Bible scriptures. Wow, Garrison, Uh, you want to guess what she has as her as her place of employment on Facebook? Well, let me thank I don't know. I'm gonna read it verbatim. Works at in

and this is all caps now the service of God. Alright, she works at in the service of She who doesn't work at in the service of God? Am I right fucking incredible. Based on this book, I'm guessing she got real, real into Q and on. But that's just based on what I read. I think she may have died. Oh really well, her last post is in February. I wonder what happened around in February. Maybe she's just not super into Facebook but just posting quite a lot. No, she's not.

She's actually not super He's a decent chance COVID got her. Yeah, maybe she just doesn't use a lot of social media. That's fine. Con So, yeah, I do like that. She describes the book as paraphrase Bible scriptures, not actual par paraphrase, and and Bible paraphrase Bible scriptures on the doctrines of good and evil, including an expose on the practice of witchcraft, magic, occultism, divination, and Satan worship. So that that is how she describes

the book. Now, the book is like almost the book is two pages long, and it is mostly the same sentence rewritten in like twelve ways. Um, it's all saying about how good Jesus is and how evil Satan is and how people using magic our servants of Satan. Basically, it's just that for for two hundred pages, and she includes like a lot of a lot of like again paraphrase Bible scriptures about you know, basically like really classic evangelical kind of conservative Baptist Christianity type stuff. Um, so

that's how most of the book is. There's there's not much Halloween content in this Halloween book that doesn't sup rise. That's often the case with these weird like yeah, it's just it's they've got some bizarre theological grife that's only potentially related to the culture ward stuff on, like like they have like stuff on like Zionism and the Holy Spirit. Yeah, I bet she's got great takes on sacred books, Baptism. Like, it's a whole bunch of the whole bunch of just

like regular kind of conservative Christian stuff. Except there is one chapter that is pure gold. It's called the Witch of Endor and it is this is this is the explos day on witchcraft and Halloween. I'm very excited. It's it is. It is the best part of the book. And I'm hand it's it's like at least like thirty pages. I'm not gonna we can't read the whole thing because honestly, again,

it is mostly the same kind of sentences. But I have highlighted a few a few key passages from the witches of endor Um to to distill out to us. So first the first thing, That first thing for when when a billy billy billy so, and in the section called what is a witch? Uh is a question says which is a sorcerer? Which is a Satanist? Which is

worship ancient false gods and practice magic. Magic is the divinely forbidden black heart of bringing about the results beyond the human power by use of evil spirits and including the devil and his demons. Magic always brings Satan's diabolical power into play. So it's it's it's really good, um. She She goes on. She goes on to to describe the practice of witchcraft using like a cult, formulations, incantations,

magical mutterings, peeping and chirping. Now it says, it says chirping, parenthesis, criminal hypnosis, parenthesis. Oh okay, that's chirping. That's what I'm glad, she clar up. That's what makes a good writer is when you you you anticipate the questions chirping, criminal hypnosis. Yeah, that great writer would have further explained, is that hypnosis that is itself criminal? It is that is hypnosis on a criminal as it nosis that makes you criminal, not

it does not give you any indication real mystery. Yeah, so uh she she she basically rounds up all all different types of of kind of magic and hildism into this, into this banner of witchcraft. Um. She said that there's there's no distinction to be made between witchcraft and sorcery, despite the erroneous claims that sorcery is diabolical and witchcraft

is creative art. Both are diabolical and devilish. Yeah, I mean, I guess I I do agree with her that I don't feel like there's a meaningful distinction between craft and sorcery um, and that they're both things from from from your books that you read as a kid. But so the first thing she gets into in witchcraft, I think is this. It is a weird intro, but I guess it makes sense from like her perspective is demon possession. So this is the first the first like technique that

she gets into. Demon demon possession is a result of which is of witchcraft. Incantation in diabolical whichcraft the which voluntarily invites the devil and his and his demon spirits, who are sometimes referred to as the goddess or god or the host of a particular names of a particular deity for each society, However, there's a difference between demon possession through deliberate invocation than demon possession by demonic internal

attack up on helpless and often unsuspecting suspects. Possession is often a common aftermath of certain illness, of certain forms of certain illnesses, such as strokes. So she says that the most that one of the easiest ways to figure out if you're possessed if you have a stroke, also if you have if you have epilepsy or coma. This is really you know, my my, my, my grandpa was pretty hard into demonology. There at the end, I's man.

And one of the fun things about this book though, is that she really tries to hammer down in all of like the biblical examples of witchcraft, which there is like a few. Ye, it's the Bible. There's lots of wacky magic. She really tries to convince like her Christian readers, that witchcraft is a current problem to be worried with um because she is, she's kind of upset that people view it as like a fake thing. She's like, no, it's real. It's in the Bible. You have to be

scared of it. Um, the God's word authenticates the reality. Witchcraft therefore is not mere superstition. So a lot of a lot of this is her trying to her trying to scare people into believing that witchcraft is actually is a is an ongoing problem. Yeah. She says that the familiar spirits of witches spoken of in the Bible are referred to in folk history as dwarfs, fairies, trolls. I don't know where this one is. What what's was this

was this? I don't Well, they're usually like a cr one or less little monster, a little bit of reptilian things often found in dungeons. If you've got a low level party you want to bring them up against. I mean, Cobalds are one of the things that you could have them go up against. Personally. I have not encountered them weird games. Yeah, they're they're little little little little lizard tye type goblin things. Yeah. So those guys, dwarves, fairies, trolls,

and other small spirits of Northern folklore. They can be friendly mischievous or malignant. In folklore, they were purported as nature spirits. This is the other thing she really hammers down on is that if you like nature, that means that you're actually a Satanist. That that does remind me of my explore Nature, Hail Satan shirt, which is my favorite shirt. Yeah, that is mean that that you do.

That is a very good shirt. It's pretty good. So she she traces back the origin of magic to the fall of man at the beginning of human history, as as said in the book, is that where we got magic. That's what she says. Um, she says so bracically. The way she explains it is that you know magic and this is something actual kind of a group. It's like magic is the idea of like that you are kind

of on your way to become God in some way. Um, this is this, Wait, you believe that, all right, we don't need to get in terms of like in terms of like in terms of like chaos. Magic it's like you're trying to like increase your own ability to have power over you, like your own life and that of the idea. So what she says is that basically in the fall of in Genesis, when Eve tried to eat the try to eat the fruit fruit of the knowledge

of the of good and evil. This was her attach like, this was her attemption to like gain god like power. God can see good and evil. At the time, man could only see good. So when Eve ate the fruit, she was trying to become like God. She was taking agency over her existence and her fact eating the fruit to gave her the magic power to see good and evil, right, which is what which we have now. So this is how, this is how she tricks back the origin of magic.

She's a biblical she's obviously because you know she's a conservative Baptist. She has a biblical literalist. She reads The Garden of Bean as a literal historical tale, not as like a piece of poetry or art meant to like symbolize things and culture, like it was obviously written as Um okay, I mean, there's a lot of a lot of misogyny in this book. Um sorry, Dr Billy Sorry,

there is a lot. She rails against feminism later on, and there's a lot of hatred because like Eve was the one that ate the fruit, so the woman's fault, like the woman is like the tempter of man. It's always their fault. That's that's very well tread evangelical ground. Although it is extra fun when it's a woman who is hating on ye. And it's easier because this whole chapter is about witches and which is a typically feminine um. But she she does say that there's like wizards and warlocks,

but she just kind of ropes them all together. They searched a second ago and I couldn't find any evidence that she wrote books about Harry Potter. M This was written to us in six so from what I've read, I have not seen Harry Potter mentioned in this. So far fascinating, is boy? That piste off a lot of people who are otherwise very similar to Yeah, it sure did. Yeah, So yeah, let's see she is. She she is very concerned that that satanism and witchcraft is basically a re

re in vention of paganism um. And she finds this to be incredibly disturbing and tied into a whole bunch of like all like the woo woo spiritual stuff of

the nineties. Is also very concerned about She says millions are now involved in some manner of ancient magical practice and rights ranging from walking on hot coals with no ill effect, to booking knives through flesh without creating wounds, to reading from blind eye sockets or from sighted eyes which have been masks, to magically filling the cade teeth with gold, which I don't know is that is that just dentistry? What is she referring to? Yeah, seem like

I have parents who have like gold filings. A lot of people that doesn't, Um, that's witchcraft. I don't think that is witchcraft. Well in a way that it it makes money disappear. Also, it's I would I would compare most dentistry to more like armed robbery. But sure, I haven't had great dentist experiences. Yeah, I mean I'm not a big dentist. Dentists or bastards would be my contention. So yeah, she she She says that basically, the sign of the of the new uptick magic around this is

a round to us, and six this is random. Panic was the sign of the end times. Magic is the colossal revolt against God, whose satanic purpose is to instill in fallen man the desire to be a god. Try to say, cool, that sounds rash, Yeah, I mean that is that's also the Mormon faith more or less. I'm sure she has opinions about more. We're gonna at her opinions on the Irish Lader so good, oh good, oh fantastic. Yeah, she has a lot of that. She's real, real punchy

towards the Papists. So she does break down the difference that she she sees between black magic, white magic, and what she calls a neutral magic. Um. She says that the term black magic refers to the direct league with Satan himself, often involving an actual blood pact of allegiance, so that she she thinks that the black magic is when you directly involve Satan, okay, and white magic is merely black magic in a in a in a mask.

It may it may deceptively employ the names of Jesus, Christ, the Father, and the Holy Spirit magically, along with other Bible phrases and the Christian terminology, but this facade is covering its demonic character, so she thinks that even though they may use so this is interesting. Like she she complains here that white magic uses the names of God and Jesus and in its magic, but later on in in the book she complains that no magic uses God's name.

So that's the fun thing that we'll talk about, um. And then and then for neutral magic UM, she says, the devil shrouds himself with nature. He is referred to he is. Oh boy, he's that. That's that's her take on Wicca. Huh, he is. He has revered as Mother Nature and worship in the door by which is under this deluding guy's neutral magic. Satan just stresses up as leaves and that's how Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, Wicca only gets one mention in this actually, Yeah, but she's

clearly like that's what she's talking about. I mean, she talks about a lot of like she she uses these terms very loose. She's got a lot of gradients. Yeah, a lot of gradients. Yeah. Uh. She has a small section on magical ceremonies and symbolism and kind of actually lays out kind of how magic works in terms of like using like like like this, like symbolic objects and incantation and like calling upon powers, which is a more

like traditional magic. UM. I find it more fun to call on fake characters because it's very silly, which is more of a more of a chaos magic thing, UM, because the more silly again, I think the more fun it is. Then she does have a nice section on initiation, rites and rituals, which gets into the really good Satanic

panic stuff. So she she she describes the you know, a covid of of which is coming together to have sex with the devil um usually maybe in like symbolically with like a male leader of a cult or something. But then she says, when the initiation has been completed, the devil worship takes part in a parody of the sacrament, many times bringing in the bodies of children who the who whom they have murdered. Good. Yeah, that's the good ship. That's the good ship. In America alone, there are over

one million missing children at any time. Many of these children who are never found or seen again are victims of satanically controlled perverts who do the grossest forms of evil. Of many more are the victims of witchcraft and incantations and other rights. Oh that's great. These children who are being stolen at an astonishingly at an astonishing rate each day, may be stolen from unbelievers homes or they maybe children can see by the witches themselves at regularly held sexual orgies.

Witches are that that's an old one, that witches are having orgy babies and like not reporting them to Yeah, the children are often offered up a sacrifice to the devil, and some ceremonies that which has may boil the children's bodies, mix them with lobes and substances, or then they consume the children's bodies in the blood ritual parody of the

Lord's supper. So that's fun. And I do like that this idea never went anywhere and is not and as not an important part of the USS politics now No, no, no, of course not nope. Um, yeah, you love to hear it. That's pretty good. That is that is that is fun. She she does have a small section on a pagan music. Magic, religion, and sorcery are some of the means used by the devil for the purpose of luring men away from the Christian truth. The heavy metal, punk, hip hop and other

such abuse of confining the Western European world. Okay, yeah, no, no, yeah, I remember it actually gets quite more racist and not it's counterpart of the hypnotic traits inducing inducing drum rhythms employed throughout the whole world by the African nations through the millions, which the insidious and evil MSR the devil and setting them to sexual lust in Satan worship. It is incredible that in two thousand six she's doing the people music is the Devil and she is also like

black which is very safe. That's incredible. Yeah, it's uh yeah, unfortunate would be a word for it. Yeah, well I is it? Is it time for an AD break? I'm not looking at the close. Yeah, it's probably about time for an ad break. Speaking of oh oh boy, yeah, speaking of millions of missing children. Maybe some of them are in these ads. We're back putting more children in

the cauldron. Oh we're recording. Sorry, anyway, back to back to reading this magnificent two hundred page book by dr I've read the first hundred pages because after that it's just the same words rewritten again and again in different in different combinations. Like it's just it's just the same stuff. Um. So the next section is this is this is again I'm skipping over a lot of stuff, but this is like the rough this is the most fun sections of her stuff on magic and which is um. Now we

have her section called Halloween Satan's New Year. Um. She she starts by explanning, which is, celebrate eight major festivals or sabbats each year. Halloween is the primary annual festival commemorating Satan's new year. Yeah. She then goes on to explain that the Sabbat is a parody of the holy Sabbath of God. Now, this is actually really interesting kind

of historical tidbits. So, yes, the words Sabbat in terms of which is does come from does come from like the Sabbath, This actually probably comes from, uh, the persecution of which is being heavily tied to anti Semitism in the Middle Ages. The first witch hunting book was called The Hammer of the Witches Um and it is Yeah, and it is large port large portions of which are plagiarized from a previous book called Hammer of the Jews.

Entire sections are copying paste. But they just change the word Jews to which And you really had to put the effort into plagiarism back because your hand hand. No,

you're doing the whole thing yourself. This is also where like a lot of like the pointy hat, which stuff a lot of like the big nose with like like like a really big nose, green oily skin like all the stuff kind of comes from anti Semitic tropes because the persecution of Jews and the Semitism was heavily tied to the persecusion of which is often one of the same things. So when they would so then when they would do Sabbath, uh, they would they would say, like

they're doing like a sabot. They're going to They're going to basically do like blood libel with children and with the devil, which is which is which is what a lot of witches are about, like finding children and stuff, because it actually is tied to all the stuff. Now, I'm not saying we have to cancel witchcraft, which if is totally fine, you can do all this stuff. It is really cool. But the a lot of the origins

of which hunting is tied to these antis anti Semitic tropes. UM. So anyway, she she goes to describe different like pagan like festivals throughout the years, um with like like le and all this kind of stuff, Midsummer blah blah blah blah blah. And the last one the eighth one. It's October three one or Halloween, because she calls the the unholy Satanic New Year. UM. She says that the rights and ceremonies and which Halloween was originally observed had their

origin among the Druids. In the course of time, there were added to them some of the rights, particular to the Roman festival of Panama, which is which presided over the harvests. November first among the Druids was the beginning of the year and the festival of the Sun God. They lighted fires in honor of their false god. They believe that October thirty one, to the end of the old year, the Lord of Death, which she puts in

apprentices the devil. Oh good, I'm really, I'm really again very appreciative of how of how clear her writing is. So the Lord of Death gather gathered together all the souls of the dead who had been allowed to enter the body of another human being. The belief is that the root this belief is the root of the false belief and reincarnation. Now I did not fact fact check any of this, so I have no idea how how accurate these these claims are for what she views as

the origin of Halloween. But I think they're pretty funny. Um, I know, like there is Halloween like Halloween kind of traditions are are there is like stuff around this time throughout a lot of like old pagan stuff. Like the modern notion of Halloween is pretty pretty modern, like the

whole like tricker treating thing and all. Like the way we modernly think of Halloween is pretty it's pretty new, because I mean there was of course, like All Hallow's Day or like All Saints Day and the Eva which other people would do Shenanigans, which is what we currently have as Halloween. That's the day before All Saints Day. All Saints Day is November one. Um, Like, you know, the modern notion of Halloween is not it's not super old. So I'm not quite sure how tied these old harvest

festivals really are to our modern Halloween. That's something I could look into later, But I just picked up this book and I'm reading right from it because that's easier. So yeah, so she views Halloween now as like a as a pagan the pagan holiday. Um, this pagan festival, Halloween is it broadly celebrated throughout the Christian nations as

a major holiday. In America, Halloween has become a kind of saturnalia for children, a night in which the rules are suspended and children venture out to demand streets and certain reprisals against the dingy. Yeah, okay, I mean that is a cooler way of looking at Halloween. If it were literally the saturnality a children would actually take the role of the parents and make decisions for the family and demand Yeah, I mean parents would have to go

to school, kids would have to go to work. That would actually be an incredible that would be that would so many people would die in plane crash, but it would be especially if you enforced it, Like you don't have a choice. You're you are piloting the plane today, a bunch of other kids are getting on it to go on work. The kids on air traffic ConTroll they

don't know what they're doing either. Forcing all of the soldiers out of the various countries we put them in and and having like the children of Special Forces guys conduct raids in the Midia, It is pretty easy for a kids to use an AK so it is a rs even easier. Yeah, it would be funny. Yeah, a lot of people are not going to have very successful heart surgeries that, but it will be very funny in like

a cosmic sense. Increasingly and alarmingly, this celebration is assuming dreadful expressions of evil and harmful acts are perpetuated against the children themselves. In serious proportions. The treats are increasingly found to contain drugs, poisons, razor blades, needles, ground grass, and many other harms. Oh I I didn't. I didn't

even think of that, because that's like needles and grass. Yeah, oh no, grass, So yeah, she she, she does seem really, really really thrilled with this idea that the people are giving out free drugs, which, man, what a dream I wish. Um. Halloween, like Christmas, is also highly commercialized and it's part of a major money making event for the merchants. Okay, breaking in at the present time second only to Christmas in

that vein. Halloween is the Satanic New Year, and as a celebration of the devil and is he's using the world today to gain greater acceptance of the perversity as he continues to prol mate his doctrine of demons. So that that is fun um. Then she has a very small section on old world Halloween traditions, which I'm not going to read tons of because again, I don't know

how verified these things are. But I am going to read like and she she goes on to talk about like how like the laws against witchcraft and like the six hundreds and stuff. Um she was, she was, but I do I will read just the first sentence of the Old World Halloween Traditions section Irish Traditions Devilition. Yeah, here that Irish We're coming for you. Bring it on, devil origin, various methods of finding the future and Halloween

we're accepted as tradition. So that that's really all I'm gonna say, because I just love the line Irish traditions devilition in Richards. Yeah, I mean that's I think every Irish person I know would agree with that. That's really all you gotta say. Yeah, oh man, it is it is. Wow, what a what a book. It just keeps going on. So she talks about like the basically like the people's different Honestly, this there's not even tons about Halloween and

more about different people's belief in witchcraft. So like she goes through like all the laws against witchcraft in Britain, she goes against, like she goes she she talks around the witch trials in America, um, saying that there were witches but she doesn't talk about all the like, come on, you coward. Yeah. Uh, it's it's pretty she she has. It's a little bit of I okay, I'm actually gonna

read some of the stuff on on on America. Belief in witchcraft was common to the early settlers in America, but which is, were charged with making wex and images of their victims and causing their illnesses by sticking pins in the image or making by sticking pins in the image, or making them waste away by melting the images before the fire. This belief is held by the peoples of Africa, as well as other pagan people in a and widely

varieting in widely varying civilizations and localities. The early settlers do not initiate this belief in America, but found it already to be belief in the American Indians who populated this country. So that that's her little section on that, which is I don't know, hashtag problematic, Yeah, I would, I would call that slightly problemat I would call it slightly problems. You know what's not problematic? Garrison the products

and services that are gonna hopefully sell candy kids. We we guarantee that less than a third of them are responsible for the disappearance of a million children, million children. That's the behind the bastards guaranteed less than a third of our sponsors who are undocumented too, well, yeah, but which is making them so much more. It's likely much more. But anyway, here's the ads, here's the ads. Ah, we're back, we are all right. Bring it home, Garrison, bring it home.

So yeah, she she does mention that the devil likes to withhold the fact of existence of witchcraft, like the devil likes to height. So most people kind of live in the dark. Um, she says. Although the imps which frolic on Halloween and now are small children raping on doors and gleefully seeving treats, wrapping on doors, wrapping on doors, not raping on doors. That's a very different, very different holiday. Well, who knows, that might be Canadian things. That's Canadian Halloween.

The night which was formally accepted as the time when witches met and demons in the form of ghosts and ghoules who are likely to wander about, has come to be regarded that's a time of merrymaking and frolic. The majority of people are so engaged and are unaware if they satanic consultation of the magic oracles and the Covin's and groves on this night. I say, cons that's not how you say it, Well, that's how I say it.

You just you just got COVID on the brain. COVID is what you call a coven that meets during COVID because they're not properly socially distancing. All right, right, there we go. But basically she thinks that basically these all of the witches and magic doors are meeting, all these ghouls and Halloween and people are unaware of this, very extremely concerned that children might like walk in on a

ceremony and it didn't get murdered. Very funny when you realize like how isolated these people are from the real world because they've never just like stepped outside during Halloween, not really like especially I mean Halloween and two that's in six I was eighteen then, So maybe I'm wrong, but I think there was. It wasn't huge then, like it's gotten kind of smaller every year. The biggest fear back then was like traffic accidents. Yeah, that's always the biggest.

That's like the number one thing. Every year. Thinking back on it, my parents shouldn't have let me be a ninja as often as they, But I made it through. Yeah, it's like we're saying so many the same words. Again, that's the most of the book is. But Halloween Satan's New Year. Halloween has a long and dark history of devilish traditions, which has survived both Christianity and the science for two thousand years. Is to be considered the chief festival for the worship of the devil which begins his

new year. Halloweena witchcraft for the means by which the devil seems to reintroduce the worship of old false gods by a synthesis of polytheism and feminism. Yeah, that's what halloweenas. Polyphism and feminism, two sides of the same devil coin. I love to worship multiple gods and respect women. Just really, that is my That's my way to spend a night with my ghoul friends. Incredible, there's also a real here's a real here's a real. Good quote. Um, there is

no question of the existence of modern witchcraft. It has been admitted. It has been admitted of by thousands upon thousands worldwide, and growing rapidly in the Western countries, particularly America. The word of God makes it undeniably clear that witchcraft is real. It has existed at least six thousand years, and it still exists today. Oh good, yeah, that's good. Six thousand years going good. Good for happy six thousands.

Just like that, she add so that it's a little been around for all these six happy six thousands, six six thousand years witchcraft on. I'm guessing because it's the new year, this is also the birthday of witchcraft. I

mean also just the birthday of the world. Because if the world as we know was, if the world as we know it was when Eve ate the fruit and was Adam and Eve went into the greater world, if that's like the birth of Dawn, which has been here since the very beginning, well since the beginning of like the fallen world, because you have to assume that they

had a hundred years or so beforehand. It's real unclear this it depends on what It depends on what denomination you're in and what kind of theological viewpoint you have on whether there were people outside the garden there as people who believe that some people just don't um that

is up for debate among different congregations. Yeah, so and and and the other thing that she's really concerned with is that witchcraft is making more people have sex, because she she thinks that most of witchcraft is practicing sexual orgies on quote every continent of the world. Um. And that's what that's what, that's that's what black masses to her, So she is she's very concerned. I mean, there's are and sometimes in black masses sexual elements to them, I hope.

So that is that it does sound much better, but she she thinks that that's another one of the main catalysts of her being fearful of of paganism and witchcraft is that is making more people have sex. Um. And again she reiterates that this is just a new form of paganism, saying that Satan's current day revival of paganism it's a sure sign of Christ's second coming and it's it's pretty good. Oh. This this is the section where she where she complains that magic doesn't use the Bible,

even though previously she said that white magic does. Because some magic some which is drawn other false religions such as the Kabbala, uh Sufism, or various Eastern religions, but never the Holy Bible, the Word of God, or is employed in their beliefs or practices, except in a paradoxical counterfeit imaginative magic, rites and rituals performed in the in the Covin's in the initiation of the converts and their celebrations of Halloween and other Satanic sabots. So that's that's

that's that's what she thinks I mean. But honestly, I'm pretty sure it's like the Shabbas, it's the Sabbath, it's I've I've heard Covin and Saba in the stuff, right, So alright, alright, let's have let's have a debate everyone, everyone at no, don't don't do that. Um. She also claims that this is this is this is very exciting. Several universities in America offer a bachelor's degree in magic. I was unaware. Oh I would love a bat unaware of because this will read now, well, this will make

me consider going to college. Now a bachelor's degree? Is that a a b A or is that a BS? Like? Is that like? Is it a Bachelor of Arts or of science? And really that's a that's a key question. About how the school match magic is both in our science. So yeah, well that's why I'm wondering. And she doesn't say, she doesn't say what university she claims does this. I mean, I've always wanted to open a witchcraft store, so I made to get a b a in or a bs in witchcraft along with my m f A. What's the

business thing? What they don't I don't want to fill it in with the acronym from the is a misdegree. Whatever you get, I don't know we I've dropped out of college. Garrison hasn't gone. Yeah, I went to I went to film school. That doesn't count though it doesn't it absolutely does not. Um. Yeah. And then in this last section she really ties modern witchcraft to the rise of feminism UM, specifically starting in the sixties. She says the pre eminence of the goddess and witchcraft hasn't made

an attractive to some feminists. In nineteen sixty eight, which the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, funded as a great acronym, AMAZING was founded as a political protist group who who purport who purportedly justified their name as mere jest ah it is what a what a good name, which women international. Quite an exciting um, quite an exciting back when we could have fun and activism. That does

sound amazing. Many of the members of this feminist movement are unaware of the cultural movement within the political and many are are more, and many more are entirely unaware of the spiritualist movement within the cultural moment. So a whole bunch of weird stuff around. How whiches are using political feminism to inject cultural feminism, to inject cultural witchcraft into the mainstream. This is all what the goal of feminism is. Um so yeah, and she has this whole

whole pair of feminist feminist witches. Feminist witchcraft is at present the most rapidly growing segment in the Witchcraft revival. And it is from the spiritual core at the heart of the feminist movement that the political and philosophical women's rights tenants as a whole emerge. To name what to name one such tenant the rights to abortion, or more correctly phrased, the might the rights to murder children not yet born. This this coincides with the which is present

ritual practice of murdering children already born. So she thinks that abortion is just a way for which is to to speed up the ritual process. Yeah, that that is what that is her that that's her main bomb at the That sounds that sounds accurate. Um, she doesn't just have a great section describing the different tools which is used. Um and and uh. An athlete. A phallic penis symbol of the liberated, unbridled, auto lawful sex represents the power

of self will. It's pretty pretty good. Sexual symbols are common in witchcraft and which is, are unrepressed by God's mortal law in their sexuality. Their use of sex symbols is rooted in paganism. So again, she's very scary that people are having sex and enjoying it, specifically women. She's very scared that women are having sex and enjoying it. Sounds right. I hate it when the people pushing this line are themselves women, But it does. I mean, that's

a huge part of the evangelical propaganda movement. Yeah, see a bunch of ship, Margaret Atwood wrote. You know, now she gets to describe some some of the coolest parts here.

A typical which is Sabbath celebration will have a sky i clad parenthesis, nude pentis, which is gathered in an isolated place a grove of trees, if possible, around an altar which holds an icon or statuary of a false goddess and or God's, and candles for fire, a child's for water or wine, a container of salt and a container for earth rather than the bread, and a sword or a wand which sounds amazing to just have a whole bunch of naked which is in the forest around

a ritual altar fire. This sounds like the best best time ever. It does sound like a good Saturday night. This does sound like a good who knows we can? We can, we can get wild? So yeah. She She goes in to describe what she thinks magical rituals are and different things that she could do again. She is

very concerned. Ritual sex is engaged in to intensify the magical power raised in the cone of power combined wheels of the coffin Witches is symbolized with a code shaped hats see the typical pictures of which is in literature. Are you fucking at me? Because nobody wearing one of those hats has ever gotten fucked? I feel confident say I wear that hat. All right, let's let's move forward, Garrison. That's not fair, allegedly, let's move forward. The Cone of Power.

Mm hmm, Yeah, the Cone of Power is is incredible after raising, and it is phallic, so it must be for fucking After the raising and release of the Cone of Power, a ritual covid communication with cakes and wine which the priestess or priest has consecrated by dipping into the chalice and touching the cakes with other unholy tools, are passed on from a kiss from the priestess to the priest. Um. Basically, this just sounds like a fun time. Um. Yeah, but I do love the Cone of Power, which I've

not read in any other magic book. No, I have not ever heard of. I've read a decent amount, and I've never heard of the Cone of Power. Yeah. That feels like pure her. That feels like somebody who's deeply sexually frustrated seeing so happy it's kind of shape like a dick, and being like, that's got to be poor lady. And then she she has a small section on Satanism, particularly like the iron Rand version of Satanism, So I'm

not even gonna get into that. I find that boring and it doesn't matter, and and and and she even says that these Satanists don't believe in an actual devil, just a little the evil. So I'm not even gonna bother with this section because it's just talking about the dumb, iron rand version of Satanism. And I don't care about that. Um, if you like it, I mean whatever. It has an anarchistic stuff kind of but it's also very randy and and it has it has a lot of like, not

great stuff either. I don't I it's fine and all it all is more effort than I want to put into thinking about the universe. And then I think, I think this this could be. I think this is our last, our last paragraph favorite. This section is called titled the End of the Witches, Witches, our children of the Devil, The end of the witches, sorry, the end of the witches.

Already before their idolterous altars, that they're depraved spots where they eat and drink and play their gross music and sing and dance, naked and shameless and corrupt and defile themselves and desecrate God's holy Sabbath, shall surely be accomplished by God, who will put them, who'll put them to death and cut off their souls forever among his children.

So that's that's the end of the Witches. Everybody, We're gonna be dancing naked, shamelessly, like having like an undeniably good time, being able to dance naked and shame listening to gross music and singing, what a time. Sounds like the ideal weekend. And then and then God will put us to death. And it does sound a little bit like our last weekend. But it was very cold, so people were wearing Yeah, that is that is that is most of that is most of the good parts of

the book. Again, it gets two pages. Yeah, it's a nice easy read. Grab it, you know this weekend. It's only ten bucks on Amazon. What a deal, what a steal? Yeah, And it is fun that she she does, Um, there is one there is one section where she like outlines what all she thinks like magic is like all like all of like the different groups. Um, she puts them into a really nice little package. But I don't think I can find that because again there's two hundred pages

and I did not mark off that section. But I think I think we decently got the gist of the main main parts of this book. Um, again, most of it is just her talking about Jesus and and and and the Christian soul. Um. But the one which which is of indoor section is pretty good and honestly worth the read. So that is my first book report of her.

It could happen here. All of you Satan's New Year beloved children, enjoyed this this this book and are are properly warned about the dangers of witchcraft which is coming to make your children have a pretty red time. You're gonna dance in the woods listening to gross music. So I hope everyone on this Halloween danced in the woods listening to gross music. I hope those of you who

climactically could did so naked. Um. I hope none of you got hit by cars while dressed as Ninja's and I I also hope that most of you weren't out trick or treating, because I think the average age of our listeners is sometime in the mid twenties. That would be a little bit of a little awkward, a little bit weird, but hey, whatever, it's your life, your thing. Do you think, hello, everyone, Garrison here just going to be adding in one quick correction for our Halloween Satan's

New Year episode. So towards the end we made some assumptions about the the Code of Power which were apparently incorrect. So the Code of Power does actually seem to be a thing inside ritual magic um, but particularly Wika. So I'm not super familiar with Wika. This is not this is not my system of choice, so I was unaware that this is actually a thing, but apparently apparently it is. It is. It is a method for centering or directing

or like raising energy. Um, well it is. It is less tied to the which is had those so that part is is more um made up. I cannot find much tying the Cone of Power directly to like the cone shape, which is hats. This is mainly an invention of of of Doctor Billy from at least from from what I can tell. But apologies for assuming that the Cone of Power was completely made up and when in fact it is a part of Worker. So sorry, sorry to the Wickens and the more proper witches for that,

for that, for that gross assumption on mine and Robert's part. Anyway, this wraps up our spooky week of content. I hope you had a good Halloween. This episode should be releasing on Halloween itself, so I I hope you are having or had a good time, and hopefully you were able to celebrate Halloween Satan style just like it was designed to. So goodbye everybody, see you on the other side and hopefully we can do Spooky Week again next year. Goodbye.

Oh welcome to it could happen here a podcast about well mostly it's about how things are bad, but it is also sometimes about what you can do about it. And today we have two people who are in fact doing things about it. So with me we have a Bra and Shanine, who are part of the Common Humanity Collective, which is a mutual a group out of California, um clogen and Club Bra. How how are how are you doing today? Doing well? Thank you? Doing pretty good? Thank you.

So yeah, we wanted to have you too on to talk about basically your mutual aid work and then also the sort of political aspect of that because I know about something YouTube and wanting to talk about that. I've read the media coverage of it in it does not ever make it into the interview. So yeah, I guess I guess to start. So you two started doing mutual aid stuff with with this group, specifically around the beginning

of the pandemic. As I understand you know what, can you walk us through how it started and what you guys are up to? Absolutely, and I think it's interesting to trace out the different stages of this work because it's very much BEND, a kind of evolution. So let me go back to the very very early days, and this is really the first day of lockdown UM in the Bay Area where we live. I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley and UM. As COVID was spreading from the East coast to the west, we knew that things

would quickly get shut down in California UM. And there was someone in my lab, a good friend named Yvonne, and she and I just quickly realized that this pandemic was going to hit UM. Given the sort of crumbling public health infrastructure, the poorest among us, the elderly dispossessed UM, these people would be vulnerable and as PPE just completely

disappeared from store shelves. These people UM, especially those living in cramped housing conditions, those with essential work UH, those in nursing homes just would not have access to UM the tools they needed to protect themselves from this disease. UM. And in the very early days, when we thought that the stuff was transmitted via surfaces, UM, all of the attention was focused on hand washing hand sanitizer. The problem

was you couldn't even find hand sanitizer anywhere. So here we were in our labs and UM, you know, our few moths weren't being used and everyone was getting sent home. UM and UH, we realized that we could pull ethanol from the scientific re agent supply chains and stir up some hand sanitizer ourselves in lab and distribute it UM just to homeless shelters, to people who needed it in the city, etcetera. UM. So this began as a very sort of low key, quiet under the cover UM effort.

And UM, you know, we didn't have a name. We didn't even know what mutual Aid was. I think we were just following our basic instincts UM. And fast forward a week or two, and suddenly a whole lot of people got involved. UM. We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure

which started sort of self assembling. UM. Lots of people came to find ways of getting the sanitizer to everyone who needed it in the meantime, we realized that as the demand was enormous, we need to come up with ways of procuring the supplies UM and mixing it at scales that we didn't have to turn anyone down. So we called upon lots of different labs on campus and asked them if they could do this, if they could shift some of their discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals UM.

And you know again, within a few weeks after that, we were mixing hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer and delivering it to absolutely everyone who needed it. My phone was just getting UH called NonStop from the moment I woke up to when I went to sleep, I was forgetting to eat. I was barely sleeping. UM. Just responding to these cries for help from all over the Bay area. UM. And in that time we met so many people UM and we figured out how to do this work efficiently

and effectively. But also UM, as the attention shifted from surface transmission to aerosol transmission UM, everyone started realizing that, in fact, masks were probably the primary way in which we protect ourselves from the coronavirus UM. And that's when a good friend of ours Chris, who was a PhD student that he's now a post a brilliant, brilliant creative guy, came up with ways of that actually making sub micron masks out of just UH supply chains that weren't getting

tapped UM. So initially these were shop towels, and then he started looking at NANI fiber material UM and he found ways of for around sixty cents making a mass that was basically the quality of an N ninety five mass that could be made in just a few minutes

at home UM. And so we suddenly just integrated that whole effort into our own and started just recruiting volunteers, sharing all of our resources, and UM this large assembly network of these little pods situated all across the Bay Area, each of them with a team lead with a little army, a battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers were just making thousands of these mass every week, which we were then distributing through the the distribution infrastructure that we had

UH sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic. And so we found ourselves and this was still very much in a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks or surgical masks and shops, we found ourselves astonishingly being the primary source of this essential ppe for tens and tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area.

And as we were covered in the early days by the Chronicle in the l A Times, loads of people started joining the volunteer network, we started getting donations and uh, that was the earlier stage of what we did, and I'll pass it on to Jinine to talk about what we did next. Yeah, So, kind of as UM Common Humanity Collective was working on this project up Bar, myself and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a Democratic Socialists of America or East by d S A

side of what was happening UM. And through this project our intent was to UM have a little bit more political education and think really critically about how we could make this true mutual aid, which A Row and I

have learned is really really difficult to do, especially under capitalism. UM. And so because we started this project around December, so kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to make it accessible for people who were really COVID cautious UM, and so we would assemble kits of masks in a park with a couple of folks outside, and then we would drive these kits to people's homes and get on zoom UM and we would have a breakout room for

people to learn how to make masks. UM. People oftentimes people who had only come to the build a couple of times started teaching new folks how to build these masks. And in the other room we were doing readings. UM. We were reading you know, Panna Cook and Jane mciwy b side by side talking about you know, trade unions and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing. UM a bar. Do you want to talk about Rosa Luxemburg a little bit? Yeah, I mean it was an amazing thing.

We were trying to sort of expand our own political consciousness, and we did things like host to three part series just discussing, examining, analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxembourg UM. And we had huge participation. And this was at a time where in our d SA chapter UM and many of the different committees people were panicking because no one was showing up UM, and yet we found an enormous number of people joining our effort in these discussions were

so energetic and so enthusiastic. Um. And you know, this was a lonely time. It was a difficult time, and people seemed to find something and what we were doing. What do you think about that, Jennie, Yeah, and I think you know, not only were people coming and participating, right, we had high school students. We had people who had dedicated the pandemic to reading political theory, right, and so you have this huge breath of knowledge. We have more

liberal people joining. We have like anarchists and communists right, like, all in this space that are actually talking together. And what was so empowering to me was everyone felt like they could speak. We had people that were really introverted, um then in the beginning didn't talk at all, slowly start to open up. We had high schoolers asking really incredible questions, right like is revolution even possible right now? Um?

And kind of getting into some of this. And I think one of the most impactful things was that we had these calls from seven to nine at night, and after that we had what we called late night, where folks would stay on till like twelve at night and

talk to each other. And in this time of like isolation and depression, I don't think anyone that I know at least was having a good time in December, January, February, right, people were coming together on Zoom and actually staying on Zoom after what we were doing to feel some type of camaraderie, to feel like they were part of a community. Um. And we were able to actually create that space. And I think that that was something that to me was

really incredible. UM. And I think, you know, framing this also from the George Floyd protests that happened over the summer and thinking you know, more about abolition, right, thinking

more about community building. I don't think you can truly or I can't imagine the future without the prison industrial complex that doesn't involve communities of care, that doesn't involve giving people both the resources and the like love that they need to be able to not be pushed into situations where they have to commit crimes, and also having accountability amongst each other. Um. Not to mention, right, this

work is really really hard. People burn out, like we are exhausted to be able to create a space where everyone cares for each other or we're checking in with each other where you know, in the beginning of this virtual mask builds, I think, you know, a bar, myself and a couple other folks were doing the majority of the work and by the end we were doing none

of it. We had like been able to reallocate those tasks, we had been able to develop leaders, and we had essentially organized ourselves out of a job, which to me is like the organizer's dream, right, Like that's what you really want to see happen, UM. And so that's kind of what was happening on the production side of the

Mask builds. On the distribution side, again, we're thinking, how can we act really make this true mutual aid UM, and so we started to partner with Tank Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, which is one of the main tenant groups in the Bay Area UM and working with them to go to food banks right places where people are generally low income, where they might not be able to have the resources to get masks, and we're distributing masks asking

them are you having trouble with your rent or your landlord? Right? The goal in this is to give people the tools to organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent to them, especially with an impending fiction moratorium. Right, and

so UM, we learned a lot through this. We went to a lot of different food banks we found, um, you know, some of them were places where people primarily spoke Cantonese and Mandarin, and so we you know, used our networks again that we had created through this project, these relationships of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin and we're willing to come out, um and talk with folks. Um. We found people that spoke Spanish that we're willing to

come out and talk with folks. And we started to develop relationships at these food banks where we are able to distribute masks to people, talk to them, understand what issues they were having, UM, and invite them to come to meetings where they could actually get their resources to try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing. Abrought you have more to add on the MASS project, Yeah, I think it's worth saying that. UM, we're all very busy.

I'm a PhD student. While we were doing this work, UM, you know, in d s A, I was teaching a class and I was doing research, and Janine is a

extremely busy union organizer. UM, And normally, you know, we'd come home after work and be absolutely exhausted, UM, and this was very tiring, but we felt somehow energized, We felt driven to do this, and we found that lots of the other people who participated were also busy with their jobs and yet would make time to do this and UM in terms of our actual practice, in terms of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution aspect of our mutual aid, there was a constant interplay

between what we were reading and what we were practicing. So as we began working with this radical tenant organizing group tank that Jinin mentioned, whose aim is to give tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions in order to use tools such as rent strikes to

rebalance power between themselves and their landlords and real estate companies, etcetera. UM. During that time, during our mask builds, we would then go and read articles in newspaper clippings from you know, early twentieth century, when there were examples of twenty year old factory girls in Lower Manhattan organizing groups of apartment buildings to go on rent strike, you know, ten thousand

families in one case, to go on rent strike. These incredible, deeply inspiring stories, UM where people uh suddenly became UH

subjects of history and not merely objects. And I think part of what's stained our own work in this group was some UH similar feeling and UM At the same time, when we were trying to imagine future beyond capitalism, we were looking at moments when that future seemed within reach, and so we were studying, for example, Paris in ninety, which is a moment within many people's living memory, all although not our own, UM and studying how it was

that these protests began with the student movement and then spilled out into these massive strikes and all the sort of self activity that emerged from that. And there was such a wide, wide breath of people who came to these builds. There were people as young as high schoolers, were also much older, people in their seventies and eighties.

And when we were having this discussion, someone who lived through the sixties and witnessed these things very up close came to talk about Paris in n and shared the wealth of his own experience. And again, all of this was driving what we were actually doing with our hands, what we were doing on the streets, what we were doing at these food bank lines, UM and so it was very critical that everything we were reading was somehow

feeding into our practice. Yeah, and I think, you know, we had over a hundred people participate in these masks builds. And I think one of the things that I really took away from this is again, people were craving that community, They were craving relationships, and people came back because they felt that in this group, UM. And that translated also as we transitioned, right, we had built a culture of friendship and of caring for each other that people wanted

to continue working on this. They wanted to continue to be a part of this project. As we transitioned UM to building air purifiers, right as the um you know, vaccines became more prevalent, masks were still being worn, but to a lesser degree. UM, and we started turning to

fire season UM. As these disasters right continue to strike, especially with climate change only getting worse and worse, one of the things that I think is really powerful about mutual aid, and is really powerful about communities is that these disasters have been happening and continue to happen at a greater and greater frequency. And I think what I've learned from looking at you know, the heat waves that

recently took many lives across the Pacific Northwest. The UM really really freezing temperatures that happened in Texas about a year ago, and especially COVID is that you know, the government, local or federal is not stepping in to help people. Billionaires are not really stepping in to help people. It's really only communities and networks of relationships that are keeping people alive. And the only way you know that we're going to get through this is through having those relationships,

through understanding where people need support. And we started to do this with the distribution of masks, right is build relationships with community members in you know, fruit Vale in Oakland, which is not a large, not a place that many people from d SA or from TANK are living currently, right, and starting to build relationships with people that do need these resources in times of crisis UM, so that we know where we can plug in and also build relationships

amongst our fellow organizers so that we can support each other through these disasters. UM. And so as we transitioned to the air purifiers, we started, you know, thinking about everything we have learned from the Mass project and kind of making that even bigger and better, and how can we you know, continue to take what we've learned and change it and turn it into something really really incredible.

And UM we you know Chris who Abar mentioned before, who came up with the masks, came up with a really incredible way to make air purifiers that like ridiculously efficient. UM is really really useful, especially for wildfire smoke, but also for just people with asthma. There's a lot of environmental pollution in the Bay area, right these things can

be used UM year round. And we began to build these air purifiers out of you know, box fans and help a filters UM with a shroud with weather stripping right to make the air like only go through the fan to make it extremely efficient. And UM started to think about how can we make this like community aspect even bigger at least this is what I was thinking of, because I started to realize, right, I think the only thing that we can rely on is each other right now,

especially UM. And so we started bringing in a bunch of different groups to come to these builds. So we have you know, East Bay d s A. We started working really closely with Sunrise and developed a level of trust and reciprocity in that relationship that has you know, continued to be really beneficial to us UM and really helpful.

We met amazing people that came out. You know, they've helped fundraise for US as our funding has gotten really really low because these air purifiers are not cheap those they are much cheaper than commercially available, but we're you know, giving them to folks for free because we want this to be mutual aid UM and so working with Sunrise, we're working with Asians for Black Lives UM, Berkeley Mutual Aid MASK Oakland UM who both came out to our

builds but also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno and to places that had you know a qu i s of five hundred right when fire season was so bad, when the smoke there was just like unlivable. UM. We were able to work with them to distribute these air purifiers where people really needed them most. UM we were able to you know, continue to work with tank UM.

Some folks from the i w W came out. We were able to distribute these air purifiers to the Sagorata Land Trust, which is UM a land trust that is run by Indigenous women UM and is working on essentially giving um indigenous land back to Indigenous people. We were able to distribute with Critical Resistance and amazing abolitionist groups started by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela dave Us in Oakland.

We were able to distribute UM to s r oh UM, a group that is working with UM low income Chinese immigrants in San Francisco who are generally living in single family homes right with really bad air quality UM and work with like all of these different groups, you know, Berkeley Mutual Aid. We're pulling in people from just countless

networks to come and build air purifiers together. UM. And we had you know, an ex black panther talking to someone from Sunrise from San Francisco, right Like these just wild connections, UM that are happening at these builds of people who are deeply political and people who are barely understanding um you know what socialism means, but are wanting

to come out and do something for their community. UM. And through these relationships and networks again, like we're able to hang out after the builds, people are able to enjoy themselves. Everyone said they were having a really fun time even though we were like literally doing work this satur Day. People were still like, this is so fun. We had you know, people baking bread and like fruit tarts and cheesecakes and bringing it. We had so we

had music. It was like a very fun atmosphere and environment. And despite the fact that you know, it was physical labor and it was taxing and a lot of times it was on hot days. Um, people stayed for you know, four hours to help do this and to do this work because they cared, because they wanted to see, um, you know, what they could be able to do. And they also I think started to build relationships. Um. I know, you know, countless people talked to a Bra and I

and had no idea. You know, we've known each other for less than a year now, um, and they thought we'd known each other our whole lives. And I think that that really speaks, right. I think that speaks so much to the relationships that we've been able to build through this. And you know, I think a Bra and I have met countless people and have developed like an incredible community through this work. Um. That definitely helps me

keep going. I would definitely be able to continue to do this work if I couldn't, you know, call Librara, but nine pm and we talked for three hours, and we complain, but we also talked through like what are we doing and how can it be better? And how can we you know, get through this roadblock UM And I saw that in countless places UM as we moved to our own distribution, So we're partnering with these organizations, but we're also doing our own distribution UM, which I

think is like a huge experiment. And how to actually do mutual aid which UM is something that you know, when we talked to the organizers in our circles, we weren't finding answers too, and so we kind of realized like we just have to kind of try and figure this out. But we would go out and do these distributions and afterwards, you know, have lunch with people and talk to each other like what could we do better?

What are we doing wrong? Is this mutual aid? Like these are questions we're having right after we've been standing in the sun talking to people for three hours. Like the dedication of the people involved in this, like of our said, most of us are working forty fifty sixty hour weeks and yet we're dedicating constant time during the week and at least one day every weekend to either distribution or a build. UM is incredible. I feel like incredibly honored to be able to work with the people

that we've been working with UM. But in our distribution, we started thinking about, you know, how can we invite some of these people to come to our builds. Maybe that's the reciprocity. I think true mutual aid is really about believing that the people that were distributing to can also give back to us, rather than seeing them as

like helpless UM. And so we continue to do some of our distributions with tank UM and actually we were able to do some of these distributions in a way that helped new buildings who were just starting to form tenant councils. UM. You know, use the air purifiers as a way to open up conversation with some of these

people and say, hey, you're building is being organized. Remember how the fire season was last year, right, Like, this is something that you can use, and let's talk more about other tools that we can use coming together to really fight for changes that we can't necessarily make on our own. UM. So that was happening, and then we also decided to look at data around where in Oakland or asthma rates really high, where in Oakland is air pollution really bad, and where in Oakland is it primarily

lower income folks? Right? We want to be giving these air purifiers to people who can't generally afford a hundred to two hundred dollar air purifier. UM. And so East

Oakland was one of those places. And again through this network that we had built through the Mask build, we had a connection in East Oakland someone that had UM that is part of East Bay ds A right, that had done a lot of community organizing, and someone that was actually able to, you know, send out an email to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air purifiers.

And so we had people posting up at her house. UM. So you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that was not our own, which in some ways UM you know, there's a lot of complications to that, UM, but we were also able to do it at someone's house that

we knew UM. And our goal in this was to get people to come to our builds to make air purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends, so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods, right, so that they can then start to own that distribution

and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it. Um. And so we also kind of door knocked around the neighborhood talking to people about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke, about coming out to a build, you know, about why this is really important, um, why we need people to engage in this project. Um. And we distributed almost a hundred air purifiers that day, I think folks in that community.

And after that that week UM, so we distributed on Sunday and then um a week later on Saturday, we would have a build. So within that week, right, we're calling everyone that we distributed to saying, hey, how is your air porifier working? Can you come out to a build. It's really really valuable that you come out to a build so that you can make sure that your community

has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season. UM. And through these calls, right, I talked to someone who lived in East Oakland for an hour, UM, and this person just started opening up and was so touched that we had done this and basically said, you know, no

one has ever cared for my community like this. No one has ever even thought about us, right, And you see, like there are nonprofits right California was giving out air purifiers to certain people, like there's a semblance of the structure.

And yet we were actually interfacing with these people who seemed to have no idea that any of this was happening right there, saying, you know, no one else has been able to do this, UM, and we're starting to form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make people feel cared for and follow up UM. And despite all of this work, right, no one shows up to our bill that week UM, And I think Obra and I both felt pretty defeated, right, Like is mutually possible?

What are we're doing wrong? Clearly? Like class and racial barriers are really hard to overcome in this UM. And you know, we're talking to our ex black panther friend that has continued to be a huge part of this project, and he was like, you're you know, you have to

keep trying. You're doing the right things. And so we went to West Oakland again where we had a connection from our Mass project that helped us set up in front of this corner next to UM, a vegan cafe that serves trans poc for free UM and has really wonderful food. We're able to talk with them give them air purifier as they allowed us to. UM kind of set up shop in front of their store. And there's also like a liquor store on this corner. It's like a very busy corner in West Oakland. UM and kind

of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers, talking to people about the build, talking to people about UM you know why this is important. And we're also door knocking in the neighborhood, talking to folks UM at their homes, UM asking people, you know, who needs an air purifier? Right, Like, these communities generally know each other really well, and we're able to talk to people who are like, oh my gosh, you know, like my aunt lives over there and her kid has asthma, and like

you should go talk with her. UM. And so we start to develop these connections and kind of map out the neighborhood and UM you know, again we're following up. We're talking to these people on the phone, we're asking them to come out to the build. And we went out to this neighborhood again. So the second time we

went out. Um. I started to recognize people, right, and I started to be able to talk with people, and um, through I was kind of like door knocking, um, while people were posted up by the liquor store and this beacon cafe and uh, there was like a church service going on and I recognized one of the people there, and he recognized me, and we were able to talk and he was really grateful for the work that we

were doing. And he started calling his friends over and be like, hey, you know, do you all need an air purifier? Remember how a bad fire season was last year, And also like we should all go to this build next time. Um, you know we should actually be showing up and helping out um. And words spread so quickly, like these communities are so deeply connected, um, at least from what I like witnessed. And um that week again, right,

we called everyone. We said, like, you know, we really think it's valuable for you all to come out to a build. We want to give you like ownership and autonomy over this in a world where I think so often you feel so little autonomy, um, and so little power when everything feels like it's crumbling. Right to have

some semblance of ownership and autonomy. To be able to um do something that is immediately like visible and real UM feels really powerful, right when sometimes you know, uh, talking to elected officials is moving too slowly because disasters are happening so quickly. There is a need to balance immediate need and system change, right, and I think you

have to constantly hold both. Um. But you know, we're talking to these folks, were asking them to come to the build and UM, we actually had a couple of people come out to our build from our distribution, people that had a really amazing time, People that you know said that they enjoyed being there um and took air purifiers back and gave them out to their friends and family. UM. And we're able to say, you know, I made this right, like this is something valuable, but also I understand how

it works. And I talked to one of these people. Our next build is actually on his birthday, and he was like, I really want to come out on my birthday. I really want to come out and help people and do this thing that has been enjoyable um and is

also like helping people. And that to me was someone right, like that someone wants to come on their birthday to like build air purifiers on a Saturday, when most of these people are you know, working forty two however many hours a week that they're willing to continue to even work on a Saturday, I think is a huge feat UM, and it's something that's definitely felt really really powerful in

this Yeah. I think something that Janine brings out is really important, which is that UM, at every stage we've been sort of interrogating and examining the work we're doing and asking whether we are truly drawing out the full political potential of our work. So in the earlier days when we were just stirring up that sanitizer and getting out these masks, you know, we did a lot, and you know, this network of volunteers comprised well over two hundred people, and it was sort of consuming all of

our time. But eventually we realized that to a large degree, we were basically just acting as a stopgap measure for government austerity, for the big gaps left behind by this extremely problematic nonprofit industrial complex, and the work we were doing then we realized, was sort of susceptible to co optation UM, and it didn't necessarily represent too much of

a threat to capitalist hegemony and um. At that point, you know, we shifted into d s A and we started bringing in a very sort of explicit political education component and started associating with an organization like Tank, which is already been doing um, really incredible radical organizing in the Bay Area, but eventually ran up against the limits

of that as well. And you know, d Essay is an organization where a lot of us initially learned our politics, but you know, and its current sort of stage, it's characterized by a strong degree in our chapter of sort of democratic centralism, and most of the effort is being put toward electoral work and reform work, and everything that we were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme limits of that form of organizing and how these forms

of organizing in fact represented sometimes the more reactionary elements of the left in earlier moments in history, and we wanted to go beyond that. And so we realized that we were spending a lot of time having to just sort of defend the work that we were doing. So eventually we just decided to uh sort of reassert our autonomy. And as we shifted into the air Purifier chapter of our work, that's what we were doing, and um our

inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading about these earlier moments in history, something which UM had an extraordinary effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish Revolution in six and suddenly I was reading about this moment in history that's been more or less erased from most of our textbooks are presented UM in a very

kind of dishonest form UM. And what these workers and peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was create on an enormous scale UM the perhaps the most egalitarian society that I've ever read about, which truly represented UM a sort of liberatory, radical, early form of anti authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much uglier forms of so called so acitialism that we've seen

appear in the twentieth century. And what I noticed was that this society in Spain in n six was absolutely replete with mutual aid, and these kind of anarchist tendencies had UM sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of the workers and peasants in Spain, you know, sixty years before the revolution, after UM Bakunin in the first International sent out an emissary to start spreading these ideas, and they took whole like wildfire and spread across the country.

I think, I think one of one of the most incredible things about that story is the the guy they gets sent from Italy, like from as as the representative now, because yeah, he doesn't speak Spanish, right, he only speaks Italian, and he he he should stove at this place, right, and he's he's he's such a sort of brilliant order and and the sort of like the power of the ideas that he has is so strong that you know it it breaks through the language here, and it's it's

this sort of I think it's just this incredible moments that you know, I think, I think comes into a lot of a lot of WHI the two were running into with, you know, I mean, we still live in a place that's you know, incredibly defined by language bears, and just the the ability to break through that becomes

it gives you this just incredible potential of power and organization. Yeah, Chase, you don't know how much it means to me to hear someone who's as familiar with this as most of the time when I talked about it, just total blank faces,

even among my friends and comrades on the left. And unfortunately, but yeah, I mean reading about Finelli, who didn't speak a word of Spanish and he just went and with his wild gesticulations and his passionate rhetoric was able to basically inspire people with the radical politics that he came there to represent. And it somehow then took on a life of its own. Is kind of an extraordinary thing.

And what I would do to take a time machine back and just see what this guy, you know, stuck on rains and basically lived as a tramp as he went from village to village, spreading the word what what this looked like? What was he doing? Um? And yet these ideas took hold in a only deep way. And UM, these notions of solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation, free association existed by the time of the Spanish Revolution in nineteen thirty six. So these sort of dual power counter institutions were more

or less in place. And these are the things which, um were the basis the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian social revolution that then unfolded, which was unfortunately destroyed by force. UM. But this was the sort of society that I imagined I might actually want to live. Um and and uh and and what you see is that there is a deep element to UM, a sort of shared consciousness that

existed at that time. And it was quite an effort for people to bring that consciousness from sort of the countryside where it took hold more nash naturally into sort of the industrial um centers, the metropolitan areas where people working in factories were um, you know, found it a lot more difficult to sort of exercise these UM values because these things are effectively bled out of them as a work on the factory floor. And UM. That brought a whole different meaning to the work that we were

doing now. And we wondered, what can we do to uh inculcate, to nurture this kind of consciousness among the people with whom we're interacting as we do our mutual aid, as we do our distributions, as we hold these builds that you know, even though we had trouble getting initially a few of the people from our distributions to show up, there were still you know, sixty seventy people showing up

every other weekend. And now we finally started having the people that were distributing extraordinarily surprising and exciting and yeah, this has been It could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview, where we'll go more in death in the political side Common Humanity Collectives work. Meanwhile, you can find us on Twitter That Happened Here pod and also on Instagram in the same place, and you can find the rest of her worker cools and media

in the same places. Welcome it could Happen Here podcast about things falling apart and about how we can put them back together in a way better than they originally were. And today we're going to continue our interview with Janina Abrar from the Common Humanity Collective. We've been talking about their work. We've been talking about the origin of the mutual aid products. We've been talking specifically about the political aspect of their work and how they're reading this sort

of anarchists. The history of anarchists Ruckle in Spain and particularly bbitual agere in the Spanish Civil War helped impact and shape the politics and work that they've been doing. One thing I wanted, I wanted to sort of circle back all the way too from the beginning was the stuff you got you were doing at the very beginning

of the pandemic. Because I think that this is I've talked about this before on here, but you know, the difference between a country like the US where what seven hundreds and undifty people are dead and places where that

didn't happen was the degree your community mobilization. And I talked about this with the Chinese example, is that like, yeah, I mean like that the reason that China that the pandemic sort of got contained there, it wasn't because the state stepped in and was like, we're going to do this. It was because hundreds of thousands of ordinary people just took to the streets and we're like, okay, we're doing

a lockdown now. And you know, and it takes a different form in China because you know, there's there's a lot of different sort of things going on there, but that kind of mass community mobilization in the beginning of it's just like it. It didn't happen that much in the US. And I think, like, you know, the the world where we don't all die in the pandemic, right is the one where the things that you all were

doing happen. I mean, one the way the things. I remember my sister is a bios grad student, and she was telling me about how, you know, so so the you know, one of one of the things, one of the bottlenecks beginning of a pandemic, and it's still kind of a bottleneck, was it was about being able to being able to do COVID tests. And you know, bio grad students can do PCR tests like it's easy. This is you know, this is one of the first things they teach you. And that capacity just was never used.

It just it was just sort of left and like sat there and rotted, and it sat there and rotted because you know, the actual pandemic response was run by a state that just didn't care. Any bureaucracy that even when it did care, was sort of you know, I didn't have this capacity to mobilize. You know, it's it's its entire existence is about making sure that sort of

the capacity for a tonics mobibilization never happens. And I think that that was one of the most interesting and powerful parts of what y'all were doing, was that you just did it and it just it kept spreading. Yeah, No, I think it's a that's a really good and important

point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before we started doing any of the stuff with PPE, I was actually you know, as word as as as the um uh, the fear of the pandemic started spreading, and we finally had a picture of what the US would

soon look like. I remember going to a union meeting among my Spellow grad student workers and talking some people afterwards and saying like, hey, um, I don't think that we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff, Like why don't we just is there any way that we can just take pc art machines and set up these little guerrilla operators and start testing people for free?

And unfortunately, one of the things I noticed was that people, you know, we're just very confused by this idea. They had much more faith in the state's ability to um assemble these infrastructures, and I just realized that was not the way in which I was going to be able to help out. And so it's it's unfortunate, but a lot of people have even though they have these instincts for sort of mutual aid and for this kind of autonomous organized. This stuff lies just below the surface. Often

they don't feel actually capable of it. And I think more than anything, what we've done with this project is we've created a context and atmosphere in which things which people typically feel like they cannot do they suddenly realize they can do again. It's just to come back to that idea that most of us, you know, we live our lives, We sell our labor for wages. A few people who own the means of production, you know, accumulate profits and use them to manipulate the state for their

own purposes. Um. And this has an effect on us. I mean, this has an effect on dulling our consciousness um And it's an extraordinary transfer asian in our social relations, in our sense of our own individuality when we do realize in these moments that we can be um subjects. And so unfortunately my initial to try to stimulate some of this activity around testing didn't work out. Um But uh yeah, it just presents this recurring problem, which is that people are not used to doing this kind of work.

And Janine and I have found many many times that you know, people are willing to come and use their hands and build something for a few hours. But then what we try to do is get them involved. We say, come to the meetings. You have decision making power. You can determine the trajectory of this work. And that's always a very very difficult thing to be doing now, given the way that sort of people have been conditioned, um

right now. And I think that's something which is concerning because these uh traits of subservience and sort of submission and I think are incompatible. If there were a moment of revolutionary rupture, I'm not sure that that would necessarily lead to any better sort of society. So I think this stuff is deeply, deeply important to get people involved

in this kind of work. I just want to go back to one of the things you said, Like you mentioned the community aspect and like those relationships, and I think that I know I've said this so many times, both in my organizing space and even on this podcast today, but I truly have felt like building community is one

of the most powerful ways to organize. And I think so many people in leftist spaces right now see organizing as like a place where you just do work, um, And I actually think that that's a really terrible way to organize. I don't think that you're gonna have people come back, right, Like I don't think that UM, anyone

is going to feel empowered. And you know, kind of through talking to a bra I've started reading this book on the Free Women of Spain and like thinking more about this also right and thinking about how they're talking about community building and how they're talking about like community is believing in each other and like helping each other realize their full potential UM and as a way to actually find equity and equality through like horizontalist structures, through

allowing people to reach their full potential UM And I think, you know, these are some of the politics that have informed what we're doing, that have informed how we're trying

to allow people to grow. And so many people have come to us and said, you know, these mass builds or these air purifier builds are like the highlight of my week or the highlight of my month, UM or I'm thinking about the like the way that you're structuring UM your distributions and thinking about how I can implement that into the work that we're doing UM And I think that those things are so powerful when you're able to create these spaces again where people care for each other,

and like you're saying, that goes a long way towards being able to mobilize um when there are disasters, to being able to mobilize around protests, to being able to mobilize around these ruptures because you have solid air that's built through relationships and that is allowing you to build power.

One of the things that that YouTube sort of getting it is that you know, there's it's hard in a lot of ways because yeah, I mean, the US has and you baked into just to every single part of your life is there's going to be someone who is above you, who can order you and tell you what to do. And that's you know, that's that's that's that's

the defining characteristic of life in the United States. And the second defining characteristic is if you don't do what they tell you, a person with the gun shows up and either beats you or haulds you away and slaves you.

And you know that that that has these enormous sort of psychological consequences that you know, create creates this culture where people you know, I mean, and that this goes along with there's there's this whole skilling process that that's been a sort of part of the broad arch of

capitalism that you all trying to reverse. But even even yeah, you know, it's like about even the people who have the skills just don't sort of they don't believe in our own autonomy in a way, and that that that becomes this incredibly powerful, you know, tool of of keeping people in line. But when that breaks and when when people start to see it, it can take time. But yeah, you know that the the kinds of power in the depth of the sort of organization that you build isn't

from that is incredible. And I think this is only everything is about the Spanish example that people tend to forget, which is that you know, okay, so that the c NT which is the sort of giant c n T. F Ayes, the giants sort of anacaust the union that's that's running a lot of this stuff. You know, they're almost completely destroyed at the dream, like over the course of the spanis civil war, and they're you know, distruber

the Stalus, disruber the Fascist at the end. By the end of the war, you know that the Fascist control Spain for about forty years. But even that, you know, I mean, they kill hundreds of thousands of people. They like, there's massacres is you know, it turns into literally a fascist police state. But the moment that, the moment the fascist a tatorship collapses, the CNT reappears. And they even even in you know, in seventies Spain, in a place that is in a lot of ways industrialized, they still

almost overthrow the government one more time. And you know, I mean they're they're still around the sort of much reduced form to this day. But I mean, once, once you build that kind of power, right, even you know, even forty years of fascist dictatorship was not enough to completely destroy it. It was you know, it was it was still there, sort of waiting underground, and then the

moment there was a rupture reappears. This is a really important thing that you're bringing up, Chris, because I think it has um a lot to do with how we just measure and talk about success on the left. Um, what you're describing, which you know, Spain is typically by many people on the left described as kind of a failed experiment. Oh it was nice, but it ultimately failed. So let's look at Russia, you know, Um, but uh, some people have argued and I think very correctly that

you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once something like this happens, it's there that energies are there, they are not forgotten, they're not lost. And there's you know, a very vigorous sort of left wing radical anarchist movement that's resonant um uh and very sort of consistent with with the earlier movement during the thirties. And UM, I think that's that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about.

We tend to measure these projects in these very sort of linear sort of status terms, and we discovered, especially when we were doing work in d say, that a lot of people were trying to frame our own project in that way. You know, what are the demands that you're making, what are the what pressure are you exerting

on the state? Um? And so there's these criteria that people use to evaluate kind of the efficacy or success of projects like these, And the Spanish example tells you, UM that the way that these things work is in

fact much more complicated and much more interesting UM. And that by assembling these structures, these organizations, even if at sometime or another they don't necessarily exist anymore, all of those people who participated in them are transformed, and the people that they interact with might then also be transformed. And so something like the c n T, which is, you know, an extraordinary organization, the f AI is what you know, really gave it the kind of anarchosymbical list

content that defined the quality of that revolution. Um, that never got lost, that never went away, even when it seems to have disappeared. UM. And so I think we have to learn to think about success in failure um, you know, as we very simplistically use these terms very very um differently, and this is something which informs our own work when we're asking was this successful? Was this not successful? Um? I think that's a much more difficult

and complicated question than we often make it out to be. Yeah, and I think there's something very specific about you know, I think we can go into sort of d s A factional politics for a little bit, but like I think like in some ways you see this shallowness of a lot of the approaches that was happening in the d s A where you know, like if if you if you look at a lot of how the sort of medicare for all stuff went or a lot of

how the sort of Bernie campaigning stuff went. Right, it was okay, you know, you have these you have these organizations that are like a mile wide and inch deep, and it's like, okay, they're they're capable of mobilizing people to vote one time, but you know, then they lose the election, and then what right, so that they don't they don't don't they don't have you know, there's they're supposed to be this whole thing of like Bernie being an organizer in chief and this whole sort of plan

to use the sort of lists de developers and organize anything. And it's never happened. And you know, it didn't happen in a lot of ways because it was just sort of they treated the whole process of building power as essentially a bureacratic exercise. Right, it's how many people are on this list, how many people are showing up to state like you know, and like how how many how

many how many doors have we knocked on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's just you know, and that's the that's the other thing you're talking about with the fact that organizing spaces have to be more than just another just another place you go to work, right is if you know, if if all you're doing is just replicating these sort of beercrarect things, you're you're going to watch them fail

exactly the same way the burocracies do. Except you know, you're you're you're not the American State, you're not a Democratic party. You don't have an infinite amount of money or the ability to sort of you know, you don't you don't have the ability to call an arm to enforce what you need to do, right, You don't. You don't have you do you don't have the fallback of

bad methods of organizing, which is violence. And when that happens, you know, and and suddenly and you can't confront your own failures because you're stuck in this, things just start to sort of implode, and you start to lose people, and you start to sort of, you know, you see this sort of stagnation and decline that I think, you know, talking about, Yeah, without getting exactly too much into what's going on in East Bay, like that's that that, that's

been everything I've seen out of it. Yeah, And I think to go kind of off of what a bro was talking about to kind of put this into terms of the work that we've been doing right, you know, through the Mask builds UM. As they were winding down, weren't quite sure what our next project was, and you know, we talked a lot about like how do we keep this energy going, like we don't want to just lose this.

And I also felt, you know, a certain amount of social obligation to you know, keep this community together that had formed during the pandemic. And so we started a book group kind of in the interim reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, and you know, had around thirty people show up to that UM And I think, as you know, you're talking about the importance of once you know, these relationships are formed, once these ideologies start

to percolate, that they don't just go away, right. These people that we you know, brought into D s A and a lot of ways these by D s A came to join this book group and later came to

join the Air Purifier project. Despite the fact that it was more outside of D s A. A lot of these people because of you know, what we had built and what we had created, continued to be such a huge part take on incredible leadership Roles um and you know, facilitate this project in a way that it would not at all look like what it does without you know, these people dedicating so much of their time and energy to this project kind of throughout the process. Yeah, and Chris,

I'm going back to what you're saying earlier. I think, um M, I've seen a very interesting, um a kind of reflection come out of some of these organizations, and you see these different splits and sort of uh wings developing. But yeah, I mean, I Janine is a very sort of organic, radical and revolutionary who I've learned an enormous amount from. But I think my own trajectory was much more characteristic of what you described earlier, which is that you know, I put all my eggs in this basket.

I thought, Okay, Bernie Sanders, like, that's that is, that is the that is the beginning of how we undergo a sort of democratic social transformation. And then, you know, in a few snaps of the finger, even though I had spent just like hundreds of hours just knocking doors and promising all these things to people who might you know, vote for him at their door, and and all this stuff that and and and just sort of regurgitating all these slogans and and talking, you know, rapturously about these

welfare programs. UM. I saw all that dissolved in a moment, and I realized that I didn't leave anything behind. And there was, you know, in D s A and our chapter, you saw that there was a large group of people who just wanted to keep that flame burning and just say we'll do better next time, you know, we'll do

more work at the local level to elect representatives. But then there was another group of people, it was much more disillusioned UM and really started wondering is this what we should be doing, or at least is this all that we should be doing? UM. And you see the same thing coming out of a group like Sunrise, which whose primary sort of mandate is to just put pressure onto Congress UM to urge the necessity of a green

new Deal or whatever. And nevertheless, out of Sunrise, we've met people who, after the George Floyd protests, after the dissolution of the Bernie campaign, have been led down the same radical path as as some of us UM found ourselves traveling UM in in East by D s A. And they're the ones who have now come to help our project, and you know, using whatever autonomy they have at the sort of UM hub level in Sunrise, because even though it's an organization with sort of paid staff

and something of this bureaucracy right now in this moment, the individual little local hubs actually have a surprising amount of autonomy, and I really hope they're going to fight

for protect that autonomy. So they've been able to use that autonomy to actually put a lot of effort towards raise money thousands of dollars our work at c HC and come to our organizer meetings, become a part of the effort, and urge upon their own UM friends and co organizers and people they know in Sunrise to shift the direction of their work of their branches towards doing

more work like this. So there are these kind of interesting different uh splinterings that you see happening, which give me some hope that we're not just going to keep running the same tape over and over again. So one of the other interviews we did on this show was with a bunch of people who were working with the basically this giant effort in Atlanta to stop this like just atrocious sort of destruct this destruction of a bunch of forests to create this like weird teaching cops, how

did you counter terrorism? Enormous academy thing that's being funded by a bunch of the adalytic corporations in Atlanta, And they were describing you know, they didn't talk about sort of the exacting process of solution, but you know, you saw they were like, you know, one of the people with the hair was from Sunrise, and they were also

talking about how they pulled together. That's just like enormous coalition of a bunch of community groups that was you know, and like the their their initial goal was just they're trying to pressure the city council into stopping the into you know, not approving and that doesn't work. But you know, you know some of some of the other groups that were that were involved in this, you're talking about like okay, well you know that they're they're planning is like if

this fails, we're gonna go stop it ourselves. And I think that pivot right is one of the most crucial things that is happening right now, because you know, okay, if if you if you you know, if if you, if you you you pull out your like Polly, your policy like policy space diagrams, right, like it's it's the United States. The policy that's enacted is the one that

is the policy decided aby the sixtieth senator. And it's like, okay, so you know, even even if if even if you're gonna try to do an electoral thing, right, you need six, you need sixty votes in the Senate, there is one arguably socialist senator and we've never elected another one, so you know, and you're just looking at this right and it's like okay, like you know, we we elect like to maybe three socialists in in the House every year, and if you know, if you continue at the same rate,

they'll be like what like like two hundred years before we have a majority there. And it's like yeah, you know, and at a certain points like yeah, I mean, we're like we're not gonna be around because we'll be dead, but like most of most most of the stuff on earth will also not be around because it would have been obliteral black climate change there, and you know, and at some point you have to get to we're gonna have to do it ourselves because no one, no one

else is going to do it for us. And I think the work you two have been doing is just incredible, is just an incredible example of how that can actually happen and what what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah.

I think that it is so important, and I think that that's one of the reasons that to me, it was also so important to get all of these groups at these air purifier pips because I think oftentimes organizing is so siloed and it really frustrates me, and people seem very like loyal at least I've found this in East by d s A to like their particular organization, any other organization they don't even really want to talk

about or they don't even know still exist. UM. And to me, like, if we can give people the tools to organize, I don't care who their organizing, UM, but if we can also like have these groups communicate with each other, right, Like different groups are doing exactly the

same thing. Right. We have the Ecosocialist group UM in d s A, Right, you have Sunrise, you have the I w W, and then you have the Labor Committee of d s A. And it's like sometimes there is cross communication, right, But to me, it never feels like it's quite enough. It never feels like we're really all working on this or we're really all in it together, and I think we really should be, because, like you're saying,

like there's kind of a ticking clock. We only have a certain amount of time to actually make the changes that we want to see, and when we're not willing to actually work with each other and communicate with each other, things are not going to happen as quickly. UM. And so being able to have, like, you know, a table of people assembling purifiers from d S a Sunrise tank right and they're all talking about the organizing work that they're doing and sharing stories and strategies, so that we're

not all constantly reinventing the wheel. That actually working together on this I think is so so valuable. And this is something that we've seen. You know, one of our friends who's helping lead one of the tank locals has come to a number of our events and was telling us how he's actually tried to bring things that he's seen that we're doing into his own local and we've

heard this in other contexts as well. So things spread and that's I think a really important thing that um, you know, especially because of Janine's Um, you know, just just uh attempts to try to get all these groups together into one place to communicate, to build relationships. Um, we're now seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere. And we're also learning a lot from all these different people in groups who come to our builds and then

become organizers in the effort. And you know, to mention someone like you know, Gerald Jennine referred to earlier, who is this uh wonderful UM Cantanker is uh ex black panther, you know, who has such an enormous history of experience.

For him to give us that historical perspective for everything that we're doing, um has been an enormous boost of confidence, and it's allowed us to focus and you know, just to reiterate what she said earlier, we were really depressed when we went out and we were talking to people in West Oakland and East Oakland and everyone was telling us we're gonna come, Yeah, we'll show up, we'll be there. And then, you know, while many other people showed up from Sunrise, D, S, A, C, HD elsewhere, none of

those people showed up. And we said, Gerald, they're not coming, what's going on? And he said, you know, keep going, keep trying, keep doing it, do not give up. Do not judge from that one experience. This is really hard work. And these people have had the door shot on them over and over and over again, and they're tired, and it's the weekend. But you keep doing it and they

will come. And then the next time they came, we may not have gone there again had it not been for Gerald bringing in this enormous um breath of experience to share with us. You know, at the end of our previous bill, there's this there's this quote that I remember from Frey who was it was one of the one of the people who've been heavily involved in the

Egyptian Revolution. She Dousan eleven had this quote and she's talking about, you know, I should be doing this for decades, right, And she's like, yeah, because you have a protest and if if a hundred people show up, you're happy, and if a hundred people show up, you're depressed. And then one day, eight hundred thousand people show up and you kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah, I mean that that is something that you know, Yeah, like

organizing is not easy. There you're you're gonna spend a lot of time like not winning. You're gonna spent a lot of time feeling like you're barely treading water. There's gonna be a lot of time where you know, nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart. But you know, if you keep pushing, people show up and you know, and suddenly the regime is like taking like you know, trying trying to catch planes out of the country. And yeah, and you know, and you get to that that CLR.

James line about how the ruling classes not defeeding until it's ruling until it's running for its lives. But you know they do run for their lives. This is the thing that happens. Yeah, and you know, if if we do this together, we can get there totally. And I think,

you know, what a bar saying is so true. And we also, you know, in doing these distributions, talk to people and I literally would say, like what, we'll get people to show up, right, there's kind of like honesty in these conversations of like, you know, this is what we're trying to do, Like there's a reciprocal relationship here again, like help us understand Also, like what we need to do in order to make sure that the reciprocal relationship

is actually realized and actually happening. UM And I think that that was kind of an exciting moment of like having people have some autonomy and like say and like, you know, they know this community better than we do, right, they know like how people are going to show up and how maybe they won't. But Chris, Uh, just to bring it back to what you were saying, I think describing the kind of nonlinear trajectory of uh popular movements in history is something that we try to keep always

in our minds. Um, things may begin small, things may seem small, even when you study the examples in Spain of sort of the groups of people who formed sort of the early f AI who were just sort of discussing these ideas around the fire before they tried to sort of infiltrate the CNT, and then this became the sort of predominant UM mood and sort of ideology that that that that characterized the CNT, which then you know, spread out and sort of characterized the Spanish Revolution at

large and massive numbers millions of people, you know. Um And and just seeing what happened with the George Floyd protests and studying the examples of you know, Paris in where it at first just seems like small groups of students and then you know, just a few days and weeks later, you know there's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of workers, um, you know, who are out literally just pulling out cobblestones from the street, you know,

up against the police. And and the way that these things happen is very unpredictable. And I think that's also a very important thing to keep in mind as we're trying to evaluate, you know, what we're doing in a given moment. Yeah, I think, I think I think that's that's that's a very good note to end on. It's you know, every the struggle we have embarked in is an incredibly difficult one, and we're not going to know

how it ends for a long long time. But that doesn't yeah, you know, that doesn't necessarily means it ends badly. And the kind of resiliency we can build is incredibly deep and incredibly powerful. Okay, plugs time, Where do you too want people to go? What do you want people to know? And yeah, we can we can link stuff if you want to send it to us in the in the in the chat chat, we can we can, we can link stuff. We can we can we can link stuff. In the description of this episode, this is

why we have editors. Yeah, UM, I think definitely like our social media UM so Twitter and Instagram is see Humanity, see UM for folks to be able to donate UM, to visit our website, to be able to plug in. If they are in the Bay area and want to get involved, they can find ways to do that through those social media channels. You know, they can message us UM and then our fundraiser a bar. I don't know if we should just send the link or what the

best way to do at it. If you go to a Common Humanity collective dot org, there's a donate button which leads to the fundraisers. You can find it also, so if you if you go there, you can see how they You can see instructions are how to make the fans and they are so cool, like they're awesome, it's it's sweet, it's so go do go do that too because it's sick. And there's also instructions for how you can make them as well. And we hope people

do this elsewhere please reach out to us. We want to not be the only ones doing and so this is why we've tried to just put everything online that others can replicate this model. And this is why we're coming on a show like this and going into so much detail into our history just that uh, you know,

we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. I think, you know, a bar and I have learned so much from this project, UM, and a lot of it really did feel like reinventing the wheel, which is unfortunate because I know that you know, mutually it has been done elsewhere. But with the organizers that we were talking to, a lot of the things that we were doing, we were

having to kind of start from scratch. And at least my goal is like we're both very accessible people, like if there are questions, you know, to be able to reach out so that we can you know, explain our experience to other folks, UM and talk through you know.

Our relationship with Sunrise started because they heard about the mutual aid work that we were doing and they said, we want to do that also, and we're like great, and you know a bra are co organizer Joe and I and this woman from Sunrise met in a park and eat dinner and just talked about mutulateing, you know, the pitfalls that had happened and what went well and

how we could do it in the future. And then like this beautiful collaboration began like a bar was talking about so um, I think, you know, we're really happy to talk about where things have gone awry and what we've learned from this project and thankfully at this point to like what successes we've had. So yeah, go go everyone, go go go go find them, go out of your communities, go do this theirselves, and yeah, go go go get us another Spanish revolution. We need another one. Yeah, thank you,

thank thank you to much for joining us. I s agread Chris. This has been such an huge pleasure for talking to you. We've we've been covered by a lot of places, but never quite like just thank you so much for doing this, and thank you. Such an honor to be here and so much fun to talk with you both. Thank you so much for having us and yeah, so this this has been it could happen here pod. You can find us at Happened Here Pod, on Twitter, Instagram, and at cool Zone. For just the rest of the

stuff that we do. Alright, bye, everyone, whats critical my race theories? UM? Well, all right, that's not a great introduction, but it's not a great time in America. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen here with me tonight as often but not always is is Garrison Davis UH and our good friend Christopher Wong. Uh. We're here to talk about,

um a bunch of stuff. Largely, we're talking about the increasing and escalating attacks on school boards and attempts to take over and dominate school boards by far right activists. And a lot of this is centered around critical race theory, a lot of it centered around vaccine mandates. It all kind of blends together like a good gumbo UM or like fascist syncretism UM. One of the things that I would say, that's that's kind of most relevant right now

as we're recording this. I don't think the race has been officially called, but it's become an increasingly obvious that UH Terry mccauliffe has lost his re election bid and the uh new governor of Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, as like homist and based a huge amount of his campaign on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books and ship from being taught in

Virginia schools. Um and this is all the result of a pretty far reaching, um and and complex and honestly pretty pretty scary campaign. And we're gonna talk about that tonight, Garrison. Do you wanna do you wanna take it from here? Yeah? Yeah, I'll do a little bit then we can move over to telegram. But yeah, you like the getty lee of this,

So so this is your drum solo time. Yeah, we we decided we needed to do an episode on this sinn and later when a few weeks ago a large number of of of of anti Vacts and anti mask protesters took over a school board meeting in uh Portland. And the reason why that is special in it of itself because this has been happening across the country for

a long time. But that but the fact that they were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school board meeting with hundreds of people, like invading this building then shutting this down with just the essurement of like power that the people had there was it was It's notable because it's like it's it's a liberal ish city, right, It's that's generally how people view it as. And you know, we're used to this happening, you know, more like southern

states and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative. But when like a Portland school board me to get shut down, people were like, oh wow, this is like extra important because this is showing that it's not this isn't isolated to like quote unquote red states, right, this can this can spread out everywhere now, you know. With Portland it was it was a mix of like hippie types who are like anti vax but there was a good deal

of like actual proud boys there as well. Yes, and it was partly organized through an organization run by the Bundies UM, and there were some direct ties and they helped to advertise it. So it's there's a lot of UM. I mean, one of the things that was so unsettling is that a lot of these people were not Portland's resident but they were showing up and we're able to effectively like take over and dominate at Portland's school board meeting.

UM in part because law enforcement is never ever willing to do anything against There's there's a there's a lot of a lot of points here, so like, yeah, one of it being is like these like these big mobs are definitely able to benefit from being you know, white, mostly middle class like parents and stuff, or maybe not

maybe not not even parents. They're gonna be white middle class um, which means they can like storm buildings and shut stuff down without any real consequence because police aren't police and security aren't really going to get involved that much, and the like the libs are not gonna like really be pushing back on this in any kind of me They'll just make fun of these people if they misspell

something on a sign. Yeah. So, like basically the idea for this episode as we want to talk about why and how school boards have become kind of the new front lines for pushing far right stuff into the culturals like guyst because they've really become the new, the new, the new like space that people on the right are able to push things that are that are more that are more extreme, and push things that are gonna you know, hurt you know, kids mostly m So looking for this,

we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing chats for how basically the right is talking about these

things and how they're trying to organize it. UM. And one really interesting kind of thing of not which will come up later in the telegram stuff, is that in I think it was when was it It was late September, UM, the National school Boards Associations like that, the National school Board Union UM put in a request for federal assistance to stop ongoing threats and acts of violence against UH school boards like meeting members and people president at school

boards because this has been ramping up. You know this that this was happening the last last school season as well, but really the past few months, the the prevalence and the number of these types of like mobs based overtaking these school boards has become so much more common, UM that the school Board Union put in like sent like a letter directly to the president saying, hey, we kind

of need help here. UM. So it's it's not just it's this is this is a problem that's recognized widely even among people like on school boards, because yeah, they're getting like carasped, they're getting death threats. UM. This is becoming like unsafe to hold school board meetings. UM. And whether or not you like our modern school system or not, the resulting effect to this is that it's gonna be

hurting like kids. Like, like, it's a good whether it be through like COVID, whether it be through teaching them racist like curriculums, or whether it be to you know, making trans kids have make their lives a whole lot harder. Right, all of this kind of stuff is gonna be worse by this happening. So it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah, it's worth caring about all. Like, it's clearly an attempt in order to to to arrest the kind of progressive

tilt that that society has gone through. All of this is a reaction both too. I mean, the religious right was initially, more than anything, a reaction to desegregation and the women's liberation movement UM. And what we're seeing now is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people have made in the last like twenty years, including the

legalization of gay marriage UM. And so the ultimate goal of all of this is to stop progress towards racial justice, to roll back gay rights, UM, to enshrine white supremacy using violence. And that's why that's why all of these different school board meetings, like the the threat of violence from these people is a constant factor. Um, there's regular discussion of it. There's like, I mean, that's why the Proud Boys are showing up is to be a of like is to be a death squad. Um, you know,

a little precursor death squad. They're not quite willing to start start pulling triggers yet, but they want people to know that it's possible. They want to scare people away from getting involved in local politics unless they adhere to a very specific far right political ideas. It's working because a lot of these school boards are getting these school meanings are just getting shut down, like they just can't have them in person or sometimes not at all because

they'll just they'll like zoom bom. Like it's not like they're just shutting down so they cannot take place or at school by members are afraid to go out in public because these people are are going to hurt them. Um. And this is like a lot of people involved in this are maybe not themselves like Proud Boys, like they they're they're they're they're not super like they're individually are

more kind of regular Republicans in these states. But the reason why it gets so extreme and accelerate so quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place, and also because of stuff like Fox News and news Max and Ona and o An like pushing people further right in the past few years, but like specifically the method of organized zing on apps like Telegram and Facebook groups.

This this is, this is the thing common on the Internet, but like it rewards accelerationism, it rewards the most extreme, takes those the ones to get shared the most. So even if you know this is just some mom in her forties who's not a proud boy by any means she's she still poses a threat in this in this way because she's poo boosting this same rhetoric and as part of these same organizing channels that are full of

like actual fascists. Uh, there's a decent amount of very popular posts from very popular channels I pulled that talks about the Jews in the school boards and we'll we'll get to that kind of stuff shortly. Um, So there, Robert, do you wanna start on the telegram with the whole the whole school board telegram channel that is popped up by no means the most popular to Telegram channel for organizing,

but it is specifically dedicated to school boards. And because of how Telegram works, this channel gets it around a lot in other much bigger channels. Yeah, and and just so you know, So the way Telegram works. If you're a decent person um and you don't live in a country where Telegram is a legitimately good choice for you, there some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network, but for the most part, in the United States it's

used by fascists and weirdos um. So if you're fortunate enough to not use Telegram, the way it works is you have open groups and closed groups. Open groups are anyone can view them. Uh, you don't expose yourself by looking at them, and people largely just kind of post images, memes, videos and then can comment on them. And a lot of what's posted in any given Telegram channel is shared

from another Telegram channel. So for people like Garrison and I who research extremism, one of the uses of telegram is that by looking at what's being shared in one group from other groups, you can actually start to build networks and see, oh, there's affinity between these two groups. Because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives.

They're sharing all of this all of this content from this far right you know Pepe group that's also sharing a lot of neo Nazi content, and you can see there's a lot of affinity between the other thing that happens is that these channels that are getting big and being you and you're being used for this kind of like right wing organizing who present themselves as more just like regular conservative channels. If you I've been in this channel for like years at this point, and this channel

used to be a like proud Boy channel. They just changed their name. Like It's like that happens all the time, where a lot of the big organizing channels used to be like openly violent organizing, like for different mobs to go beat up people, and now they've rebranded to make them appeal more to like just regular Trump voters. That

is the other thing that happens all the time. And one of the main channels that we're talking about today is one of these one of these channels that used to be a Proud Boy thing and is now just kind of right wing organizing in general. Yeah, and it's um, I don't know, I'm just gonna get into it. So actually, you know what I'm to get into before I start talking about fascists on telegram trying to destroy the concept of democracy. You know what else is trying to destroy

the concept of democracy. That's right, Chris, products and services, that's right. Oh my god, we are just having a great time here. So let's talk about stand for Students, which is a telegram channel that Garrison pointed out to me, and I spent more time than I really wanted to. Yeah, that's never, never, never a good idea. So the stuff in here, this is number one, on the surface, a

much more moderate group. These people are not ranting about like Jews destroying civilization or the need to like execute black people or something like that. Um, the stuff in here runs the gamut from like one of the first things I found was a clip from Jesse Ventura, wrestler, predator star and former governor once had a conspiracy TV show. There's a popular clip in anti vaccine Circle is from it where he's talking with Alex Jones about the Builderberg

group and stuff. So I found that in there, which is like pretty garden variety, like early two thousands conspiracy nonsense. Definitely like, oh yeah, these are like older people like I don't think what mostly boomers, but definitely gen X and stuff like folks who were in like their forties and fifties. Um, this is the kind of ship that they would have been like exposed to in their late

twenties and whatnot. Um. One of the posters I found commenting on that video said, quote aired onto TV in two, that's a nine about a plan for depopulation through a virus and injections. Too much of a coincidence, and another responded to this. I was never a huge Alex Jones fan, but he was right all along. My kids were born in the early eighties and I refused their vaxes way back then. Unfortunately, one of them is now a late thirties CNN jabbed zombie and has infected my grandkids with

this inspiric experimental treatment. I'm done, um, which is silly, but it also keeps you in like the are it's it's what you see a lot with Q and on right. It's these folks who are getting brought in onto telegraph. Yeah, it's great. It's terrible that this person, this lady who has to be what in her fifties sixties, My parents age the boomer um is on Telegram, which two years ago even was the only Americans you were would find were like extremely online nazi weirdos. Um. Yeah, I remember

doing like old training. It's like, yeah, I was like over over two years ago, and Telegram was nowhere near this prevallem for like regular organizing. And this is a result of of the d platforming of folks in the

wake of the capital attack. But anyway, we don't need to get too much into that right now, So I want to talk a little bit more about some of the things folks are sharing in this in this channel, which is again kind of like I'm gonna guess everyone here is kind of late thirties to maybe sixties, fifties, sixties.

There's one local story that it was actually very popular among a lot of like lefty folks on Twitter of this like group of dads who showed up to stop there's like an epidemic of fighting in their school or something, and they showed up to do like a community policing or a community self defense sort of thing. It was celebrated by a lot of folks because it was like, oh, hey, this is you know, a way that communities can protect themselves without cops YadA YadA, YadA, which is a nice

thing to see. It was also celebrated um by these people, um, by by people in this channel, and specifically the clip of the news story covering this I found was from the Pepe Lives Matter channel, which is, um, you know,

an alt right channel like it. Again, as we were talking about earlier, the Pepe Lives isn't all like the way full Nazi pilled stuff, um, but it shares a lot of stuff from the channels that are straight up Nazis, and so you can you can see already this like lady in her sixties who's probably was some pretty normal boomer three years ago, is now two steps away from Adam often type motherfucker's that's just the way telegram works, um, and all kind of bonding over again, this is not

a bad story what these local dads did, but it very much ties into this idea of like we gotta get all these parents together and take action in the real world, like and that's gonna that's gonna go towards taking action against the people you don't want showing up in your school, meaning like black children and like children, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, community self defense is great, but also it really depends

on what community is defending itself from what. UM. So that's uh, we'll probably we'll have to talk about that more at some point in the future. But Yeah, Another thing I found on that channel was video this. This I dug into a bit. So there was this video that was claimed to be an ad. It was, in fact an ad that Comcast had refused to air. UM and the video this, this unaired ad claimed that it

was about. It was telling the story of a thirteen year old girl, Maddie de Garay Um, who was vaccinated. She was part of a FASER trial and had she claims, like a disastrously bad reaction. UM an ad about her situation was rejected by Comcast. UM and this girl like has done the whole right wing in her I'm I'm guessing her parents are the driver's done the whole right wing media kind of circuit at this point. UM. The fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people

in this telegram channel were yelling about. UM. And I want to actually quote from the an article about why Comcast rejected it, because it makes clear what's actually happening here. Comcast is said to have told the ads buyer it was rejected because it needed substantiation at all. Graphic images

needed to be removed. Documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included the girl's complete medical records, which are said to have outlined symptoms such as erratic blood pressure and pulse, muscle spasms, muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing up words, and the

inability to walk and cough. Um. So you've got this case where number one there's graphic images, um, and number two there's documentations that this girl has symptoms, but there's not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine, Like it's just one these The comcast is being careful to not spread unsubstantiated shit about vaccine reactions and stuff. Um. But within the telegram channel, the focus is entirely on like how this is evidence of this conspiracy there suppressing

the information, suppressing information. UM. One response was, why in Heaven's name don't these parents do their research before having their kids vaccinated? My heart goes out to the precious child and family. What a lesson to learn for so many parents. Never too late to educate yourselves people. UM. Also I want to point it just that the spelling and the area incredible. There's an upsetting amount of emojis that Yeah, honestly I couldn't never never two with one

oh late to educate your space selves. Uh, it's just again and now I'm doing the doing the thing. I'm doing the thing I tried not to. I did try to give it a straight read through. You can be challenging with it. It's like a very content it's it's

very funny. Yeah, but but but I think you know this, this is this goes back to the whole point about how this pradicalization works, right, which is you know you have, especially with anti vax stuff that has this sort of larger base from just like regular peer like hard right Nazi stuff. You get to see people who you know, otherwise probably would be a vaguely normal person, very very quickly get all this stuff and very quickly just go

off the deep end. They're not like, yeah, it's these it is it's hard to like say like these are all extremists because like they themselves aren't extremists. There's surrounded by so much content that is made by extremists that it's making them do these things, which is how which

is how extremism works, right. But it's it's challenging because like when you try to explain this to someone, you're like, no, this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something, right, And it's hard to explain to them how fast this thing can move to the point where they're showing up at a school board with their grand killed children yelling at like teachers and stuff. Yeah, and it's not that

this lady is a Nazi. It's that this lady can be, through the process you just outlined, convinced to stand up next to a Nazi and like, uh, defend his his

right to do violence to people. She has been convinced are president a threat to the lives of her, her grandchildren, which is people may say like the whole like, oh, it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing next to a Nazi or a Nazi, but like I would argue, no, what's actually the logistics of what is happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got

radicalized into national socialism. Anyway. Another meme I found it was a screen grab from fucking um Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman and I don't know whatever. One of the white dudes in that movie in prison jumpsuits sitting next to each other, and it's the text on it is

what are you in for? I spoke of at a school board meeting, which you she see a lot of stuff like this, this idea that they're going to jail, they're going to get rated by the FBI because they're like showing up at school boards to pro test vaccine

mandates and mask mandates. Um. And then like in the middle of all this stuff, mostly talking about like anti vaction, there's also this post talking about how this post that's a video of a woman at a school board talking about how a book needed to be banned, and she's reading. The book she's reading is a queer memoir. Um. And I'll talk about I'll talk about this more at the end, but you can definitely mention it here because it gets

up a lot. It's it's a gay it's a gay coming of age story, right, And as a result, there's a couple of semi graphic scenes in it. And she like gets up in front of the school board and reads this and argues that it's basically like pornography. The children. They think it's child pornography. Yeah, that's what they're marching mistaken what child pornography is. They're trying to they're trying to get all the people at the school board either

killed or arrested over this. That is that is their goal. And I'll talk about this specific instance later because it keeps coming up with all of these channels, and it's one of the main things that links someone from like a sodden red channel to a channel like this. This is like one of the main things they've been using the past few weeks, like this is the current, this is like the past, and and this is this though

has been going on for a while. You've seen a lot of like the libertarian right wing, a lot of like kill your local pedophile shirts because who's gonna Most people don't think, like, who's going to defend a pedophile pedophiles? Yeah, the proud boy at the Portland school Board who was standing and ready to fight, the ready to fight security guards and stuff, he was wearing a kill your local pedophile. Uh, it's this is this is the thing. This is the

thing the right wing figured out. And if they figured this out a long time ago, which is that Okay, if you want to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal to do like absolutely horrible violence, the way you do it is to tell them that they're threatening kids and it doesn't matter what you went on works so well yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and you know, and this once and once you've convinced you know, like this, this is this is just a very I think a

very important thing about media messaging in general is that the literally the instant someone says think of the children, you need to stop and you need to disregard everything they're about to say after that with a stick. Yeah, Like of the time that person is like about to try to convince you that like you need to like we need to murder the gauge or something like that.

Like That's that. That's the thing that follows from I feel confident saying no one has ever advocated thinking of the children and meant anything, but I want to kill this specific group of people. Um just like I that's not even really hyperbole. It's it's a a trite and

true organizing tactic for these people. And it's part of the reason why, like the famous white nationalist catchphrase is focused around we need to secure a future for white children, right, Like, that's what they're always talking about with all of this ship and it's it's about being able to demonize a group in a way that they can't be defended. It's about ending any sort of debate or conversation, and it's about justifying thoughtless violence because it's you're protecting children. Um,

you know who else protects children? Robert definitely not the advertisers of this show, um, because we are sponsored by raytheon brand. School bus seeking missiles the only missiles that only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank, at a at a technical at a at a terrorist training camp. They go right for school buses no matter where you aim them. So in that way, they are a fire and forget kind of weapon as long as you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school

bus with a with a missile. Okay, here's here's some check it out. All right, Well we're back still talking about this. Uh yeah, so last segment for this episode. As we as we as I was talking about that, there's a post that In the post is a video of a woman from a different school board meeting reading out a graphics, graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir, and ranting about how it's it's child pornography. Comments include

fucking monsters running these schools, satanic and disgusting an elementary school. Unreal. Why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing pornography to minors? It's not even reading, they could, It's just available from some other library. It's like, because you can request a lot of books at libraries in all caps. Where's the sheriffs, where are the city, county, state and federal task forces? And uh yeah, it's I'll talk about

this more in the next episode. Tied to just the overarching anti anti queer, anti trans, anti gay school board side of things, and of course other things I found. There's like video of them celebrating Capital rioters, celebrating Josh Holly for defending Capital rioters. Um. I went into some other channels that were adjacent that I saw shared, you know, in this channel. One of them was Oscar's midnight writer Patriot Post channel, which actually has thousands and thousands of followers.

Average post would get two to three thousand views. Um, here's one. I'm considered a domestic terrorist if I tell a school board that I don't want my eight year old daughter watching sex videos in her third grade classroom. Um, And that post was right above this post. The Constitution actually says you can legally overthrow your government if they

are tyrannical. And that post was right above this post, which was a screen which was a screen grab from a Twitter account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard's seventeen seventy six The FBI didn't rate Epstein Island or protect hundreds of young female gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years, but they'll raid your PTA meetings when you question the curriculum and on scientific mask mandates and their indoctrination camps, I mean public schools. And of course

this from Twitter user named Emerald Robinson. And again this is all shared in that channel. It's like a screen grab from Twitter. When the FBI starts arresting parents at school board meetings, just remember the GOP senators who made it happen by confirming Merritt Gardland as Attorney General. And then it's a list of Republican u Emerald Emerald Robinson is the White House correspondent for news Max. Oh right, Oh my god. Yeah, you're right. Uh huh great great.

So I don't know, that's probably all I should get into. Well, no, there's a wen one more things. So Oscar's Midnight Writer, which was shared in in that uh that school board channel took me to the Western Chauvinist school Board channel, which took me to a post which with a video UM with a link to a video. The text with the video was woman at school board meeting calls out Jewish power by name um and it's a woman ranting about how the Jews are behind all of the critical

race theory in schools. Um. So again not hard to get to this kind of ship. Another post was it was in the Western Chauvinist Telegram. It was sharing a post from the Murder the Media Telegram, who were part of the Capital riot. UM. That post from Murder the Media was National school Board Association apology letter for calling

you domestic terrorist. It was we'll talk about this later, but the comment in the Western Chauvinist was like, we don't apologize for being like for being domestic terror rists. Like we're yeah, we we think it's rad that they

called us domestic terrorists. Because in this channel by the Way has over fifty subscribers UM and used to be a Proud Boy channel, which is now just a general kind of farther right wing organizing channel that it's probably it's one of the most shared Telegram channels in this

whole network. UM and they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals to Trump voters while slipping in a lot of accelerationist talking points UM to slowly lead people on that redcrumb trail to make them be okay with mass violence. There was a comment in there, forwarded from another from the telegram account of a guy named Eric Striker, UM and this was a post Striker made commenting on a video of a father being dragged out of a quote woke school board meeting. UM for uh complaining of

complaining about this kind of ship UM. The post from Eric Striker I think is worth reading, and I'm going to read it now. For now, all we can do is impotently watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting. We must build our political organization to the point where we can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations, sent him free legal support and make people realize that the time of fucking with whites is over. We need

our own media, civil society groups and activists. We need money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything in the conservative movement. It never will be. We need to build it from scratch. We are well underway National Justice Party. We must quietly and patiently build. Eventually we will have the capacity to come on the scene when they least expect it and will be and we will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where we

should end for today. Yep, that's a good part on good sad intro into the current problem of schoolbar meetings. We'll get into a lot more like accelerating rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind where the stuff originated from and the other other side of things beyond, just like the CRT and UH and and mask stuff, because it branches out into a lot of other kind of adjacent cultural war bullshit issues. Um. Anyway, Yeah, we'll

do that tomorrow. Um. You can follow the show on Twitter and Instagram, it happen here, pod and cool zone Media if you want to be on those apps, which I don't know why you would. Yeah, don't be on those apps. Get you know, I just found out they'll deliver skinned gators to your door. Get into cooking gators. That's what I plan to do. Getting off Twitter and I'm Gator is the new social network. So ga gator?

What second? My part of this episode on right wing attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups. And also it rode democratic institutions from the ground. Uh statue title, Yeah, yeah, that'll that'll click. Well. Ah, I'm so glad we don't have to worry about clicking and titles. And that took up a lot of my mind back in the day, Garrison, back when, back when the internet

was different. Now we don't have to worry about that anymore. But we do have to worry about our mobs of fascists attacking school board meetings. It happens every week, keeps happening more often. Boards are calling for assistance. That they seem pretty, they seem pretty, not thrilled. Yeah, they seem not psyched about. So where we're where? When we left off, I was talking about some things I found on the gram telegram. Uh, Garrison. What's next. I'll go into my

preliminary research on Telegram and particularly response. Basically, I looked through every single Telegram post and all of the main fascist channels I lurk on that mentioned school boards from like the past two weeks. Um, so like yeah, this

is like current current stuff on ongoing. UM. I got to a lot of the channels I was already familiar with, like you know, the Western Chavenist channel, which is uh subs um, the Standard Students channel, which was a when I was less familiar with, specifically dedicated to this school board issue. Um. One of one of the posts we have on there is UH says your enemy isn't some far off ship whole country. Your enemy is just down the street at your local school board meeting, teaching your

kids to hate their ancestors, you and themselves. So like again, that is a very much white supremacist dog whistle just right there, um talking about producing Hollywood movies writing they're

basically it's basically just a whistle. Um. So yeah. They then they, you know, the same post talks about you know, masks and shutting down businesses and the vaccines and stuff, and saying the fight is here and the fight is now so just in terms of like, yeah, they're really wanting to hype people up for doing this thing at school boards. They're trying to really hammer down the school board points. So like I found this, I found this post.

This is this is a post from the Standford Students channel. Um and I saw this one re shared in a lot of different channels. One of the other first ones that I saw pop off was from Ron Watkins channel like Code monkey Z. He is one of the one of the architects or one of the you know people who really pushed Q and on stuff into He's the guy who ran like the physical infrastructure of Chan chan in eight Coon for years. Yeah. He and he's trying to pivot into being like having his just his face

be like a kind of alternative right wing figure right now. Uh, he's gonna be running for office in Arizona, I believe. Anyway, he has a very popular telegram channel, um and he made he made this post that had over a thousand, over a thousand comments on it, which is a lot for telegram. A thousand comments on telegram post, especially telegram

post of of code mackeyzs size. I ever see how how many subs doesn't so Ron just as context, Ron Watkins has four hundred and thirty two thousand subscribers on his on his telegram channel. So yeah, anyway, Uh, CRT is being rebranded as s e L a social emotional learning. If you are attending school board meetings as you should be, do what you can to make sure you stop both s e L and CRT and keep them and make

sure that they are banned in your school districts. So again, just direct calls to action for getting people to show up to these school boards. And also, social emotional learning is not CRT, and of course SCRT is not even taught in schools. I think everyone who listens to this podcast knows that sr T, actually critical ray theory isn't taught in schools. This isn't an actual thing. It's it is like a legal theory. We'll get into more of how this got like pushed towards the end. I think

Chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's again these none of these things are actually real. It's a complex legal theory. What they're really mad about is their people are teaching that racism is like an issue that's built into a lot of American institutions, and it's an ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past. That's what they're actually mad about, and they just call that crt. Some some of the comments from the Ron

Watkins post, stuff like these snowflakes are so annoying. I'm about to start cutting power to any school in my community that teaches this. Um so yeah, more Again, that's just a direct, direct threat of doing terrorism. Should like, I mean, less of a threat and more of a promise. Yeah, does that? No? Sure it doesn't. Alright, Well I don't

understand things the same way you zoomers do. Please continue. Yeah, a lot of a lot of posts being a shipped around from channel to channel, including this full Nazi channels were like trying to trying to of course, like lots of Nazis are actually you know, I thought it was pretty funny that the that the school board union put in a call to assistance to the federal government to deal with this issue. They of course they thought that

was funny. But they're going to use this to like spread networks to be like, hey, the government wants to stop you. They're calling you a terrorist. You like regular folk are being called terrorist because you're showing up the school boards, right, that's the kind of message that they're going to shoot out. So they a lot of Nazi channels crafted a lot of posts like that that got

shared around a lot. Yeah, in trying to basically all time critical race theory and if you approached against critical race theory, they're calling you a domestic terrorist. That that type of thing. And this got this got shared in the school boards channel, and a whole bunch of whole bunch of other stuff being being talking about how if you if you stand up, you're gonna be a domestic terrorist. You have to be brave and do this. A few days after the school board Uh, not a few days,

I guess this. This was this was in like in October um, the school Association retracted some of the some of the words that they used in their letter because of this backlash that was created. And this was also shared in shared in uh lots of fascist channels. The main one who is shared in that I saw was the Honk Pills channel UM, which is just another type of Peppe meme Um, one of the other one of the other big big kind of groups active in this.

In this whole sphere. And this this has been a group going on for a while and we haven't talked about on the pod, but we probably should do something eventually. Is this group called White Rose, So this is a White Rose is a COVID conspiracy group that has been very uh successful in creating on the ground organizers who are regular people. They do a lot of like sticker bombs and lots of neighborhoods. If you have if you ever seen anti like COVID or COVID conspiracy stickers in

your neighborhood, it was probably a White Rose sticker. UM. These are all over the States and basically every time. As a quick heads up, the original White Rose was a student protest organization that existed in Nazi Germany UM and protested illegally and its organizers were executed by the Nazis. And I think it was the mid forty I mean it would be like like forty three, maybe maybe forty four. UM.

Sophie Shoal was the person most associated with them. So they they're they're they've taken the names of these these heroes, UM in order to it's just disgusting, it's very gross. There's there's a decent amount of decent amount of researchers in this field. Thinks that there's like actual bad people behind White Rose of course, with like like bad people because they're spending COVID stuff, but like like wait, like like more like bad actors use basically astroturfing this thing,

but at White rosterserves its own piece later. But because they have such a big following on telegram, they are of course using using this to using the school board thing to gain more support, and they have about fifty subscribers to their specific telegram channel. They showed a post a few weeks ago saying thank you to all the brave parents going out to their school boards and standing

up for the children. Um. And they try that, you know, get people to do sticker bombs and stuff, but the fact that there's like specifically calling out people in school boards is like an extra step of like beyond just putting stickers up in your neighborhood. Um. Another another another White Right Rose post. They shared a shared a video UM that was captioned as concerned parent absolutely destroys school board with facts. The school boards are the battlefield of

our time. This is how it's done. And just the increasing rhetoric around like battlefields. This is where like the fight is at all that kind of stuff. Um. There was another another, Uh, the White White Chauvinist Channel shared a video from Fox News UM and they they the Western Chauvinist Channel, which is again it's one of the most shared ones in this whole network. They captioned this saying parents and Virginia are trying to fight back against

the school board that is anti white. Um. Every every school district in America needs to have an anti mandate pro right parents running for the school board. So that's just the It's this type of stuff all over and this this this post was got it has like an eleven eleven thousand, eleven thousand views. Um. So these things are spreading to a lot of a lot of these specific networks. And I mean, I I have so many of this kind of stuff. I'm not going to go

through every single one in detail. There's ones that are way more like openly anti Semitic, uh, you know saying, you know the Jews that run you know, ex school board, um are trying to force vaccinations on every student over twelve. Um. Other another Uh, there's this fake this is this this fake Clint Eastwood channel on Telegram. That's pretty popular. Someone

who's pretending to be Clint Eastwood that spreads far right stuff. Um. He had a post that was shared a lot that started by saying, start taking over school boards, start taking over city council, start taking over city boards. Um, start to start being poll watchers, start being poll workers, start taking over sheriff's departments. It's not enough just to vote. So this, this is the other thing that we're going to see a lot more of, is rhetoric around voting.

Isn't enough. You need to start doing more things. Um, there is one of it. Yeah, here, here's here's one. This is gonna this is referencing some of the trans stuff. I'll discussing a bit, but I just want to tie it in now. A post from the Western Chauvinist Channel saying there is no political solution, which is a direct Nazi,

a direct Nazi lie. I mean that, That's what I did an article early this year on Riley Williams, the Nazi who stole Pelosi's laptop during the Capitol riot, and then like the video that we were able to identify her as a sig hiling Nazi and That's how she opened her quote. There is no political solution. It's a very common catchphrase among like the the fast right. Yeah, So there's been a lot of stuff around harassing like

specific school board members, harassing specific teachers. There was this teacher in I think in California that was trying to like introduced like like anti fascist type rhetoric and talking

about how fascism is a modern thing. They got absolutely bashed um and like docs um, and they got it I think fired because there was like hundreds of of parents organizing on on apps like telegram to harass this one teacher at school board's that you know, they took over massive goool board meetings and just talked about this

one teacher endlessly um. And it was even It's interesting because like all the parents were like, yeah, Mike, my I got worried because my student actually really like liked the teacher and said that they were doing like giving really interesting points about like systemic issues. And the parents were like and they like brought their kids to the

school board meetings. There's the kids are standing in the back as their parents are ranting about this and talking about how the kids actually like I thought they were learning things about systemic issues and then that got people mad. So you know what else gets people mad? Uh? This is advertisements. Yeah, and we're bad. We're gonna we're gonna touch on the uh, the specifics, like all the stuff

we've been talking about. Most of the modern most most of the current organizing is a lot of it's around like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Um, Like all of this stuff called like you know, the the school board channel. All of this kind of stuff is usually around vaccine, vaccines and masks stuff. Uh. Of course there's critical Royce theory was the way more popular thing a few months ago.

Right now is the vaccine thing. The other kind of like ever present thing is being upset that trans kids exist and being very fearful that that there are trans kids around your kids. Uh. This is a thing that's been, you know, a thing for years that people have been fighting against, and since the school board thing is becoming more popular, people are are starting to uh bring lastly,

do these kind of flash mobs specifically around trans issues. Um. One of like the more like astro turf type things was people getting mad that there were like two specific books available in certain high school and some middle school libraries. UM that one of it was like a like one of it was the memoir that Robert mentioned. The other one was like a graphic novel memorial about someone realizing their gender queer. So these are books that are not

in curriculums. These are just books that are available at the library. UM. And basically there was people who just who found these out and got turned it into like like a meme on telegram essentially, like people like sharing information about this, then you like look it up, see if it's in your library. So then we have all of these like coordinated attacks on school boards by these

models of people all about these same two books. UM. And the goals to not only just get the books like banned, but they're also trying to like fire or arrest the teachers and school remembers for allowing these books to happen. There has been school members who have like stepped down because of just how much harassment is about these things. Quote from the Western Chapnist channel, Jesus Christ

straight up pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again, the Jewish school boar member gets mad and trying to shut them down. How can you not connect the dots here.

There's no political solution. Voting will not remove these people. Um. There was the mayor of Houston, uh So, in the mayor of Houston, Ohio heard about this, and he went to a school board meeting and instructed all of them, all of the board members to resign um quoting the quoting the Proud Boy right wing organizing channel Western Chavenista. This comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the system called educators, instructed kids to describe a sex scene

that they wouldn't show their mom. Of course this didn't happen. This is this is they these these things are not are not These books are not used in any kind of curriculum anyway. So even even if they were that that we not even we're not even in that reality. Um. So, the mayor of this town basically got these instructed these instructed all of these people to resign. Um. Earlier, I think in mark No. In August of this year, pride flags were banned at a at a school school district

inside south west Oregon. Um I think around I think around Newburgh. The Newberg school district banned but banded pride flags. So all this kind of stuff and and of course that is in a lot of states. But the yeah, the fact that it's in like Oregon, a blue state is people got made. Like you know, there's like you know, NBC articles about it because it's it's Oregon. It's not it's it's it's not it's it's not a red state.

So it's all big, it's all Portland, it's all Antifa, right yeah, yeah, so again the stuff is not not not like contained to one thing. And like yeah, if you google the stuff around these books, if you google like gender Queer Book, uh school boards, you'll find this

in so many school districts. You'll see just mobs of people lined up yelling and screaming um and like like printing out giant, like giant cardboard prints of of this comic book showing like like with like you know, there's like a dick on it, Like there's like a drawn a drawn dick, because that's what human bodies look like. Like you can look at like a lot of like yeah, like what are you gonna band the statue of David because he has his dick out too, like like come on.

And also these are the same people who talk about like oh they're you know, banning books, burning books, you know, right, there was that. There was that tweet from like James Woods about like these are the books that people want banned. That means they're the most important ones. But these people love. These people love like burning books. These people love banning books.

They love cancel culture. That the cultures that I was that I was in as a kid, they would have like massive like book and like c D and DVD burnings for like unlike unholy and sinful media that you would like bring in and like throw like your sinful music onto this giant fight. Like these people love love burning books, they love they love banning stuff, they love cancel culture. Um, but they just laugh about it. Yeah, So that was that was most of my stuff around

the kind of the ongoing queer and trans stuff. Of course, they know this ties into like bathroom stuff as well, with the people showing up to school board meetings to scream about you know, kids going ship in the bathroom that they want to and feel comfortable in. Um, you know, and again like it doesn't it's not gonna stop with trans people either. Right as soon as they banned trans people, the next thing is going to be oh, gay students. Right,

this is it never it's never stops, it always keeps going. Um, and it's just an ever present problem that it's gonna require a lot more a lot more dealing with. And again with all of these flash mobs, like no one, no one's gonna stop them because they're like the people in power, they're the people that have all of the privilege. There's no really effective counter organizing for these school board meetings right now. Um, the cops aren't gonna do ship.

Security guards aren't gonna do ship. Uh And regular libs and regular regular people aren't gonna do sh it either. And it's hard to figure out how to actually combat this because there's a lot of times that the people in school boards really like, no, we don't want this to turn into a giant like fist fights, Like, don't

don't come in mass to start fistfighting them. But there needs to be something to combat, whether that be you know, running running for school boards, just showing up outside school boards, having just more people there in, having more presence there, uh, so that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob

of two hundred anti mask people showing up. Right. There needs to be some type of thing happening because no one else needs to be countered, And yeah, you know what, they might need to get the ship kicked out of them. I'm sorry, but like I don't like, I don't think that would actually help in this instance. Probably, but like they needs to be fucking something like they they are. The level of boldness that they have is evidence that they feel they are confident that there is no counter

to what there is going to be done. And perhaps if they were being met by a wall of people in the community who were willing, if they tried to force their way into fucking throw down, you know, to say, you're not entering this building without a goddamn mask, you're not shutting down this meeting. Um, I don't know, maybe that would do something. I don't actually know what would do something. If it was people just as regular people, I think that would be. Yeah, it's certainly not going

to help of its antifa. Um, for the love of God, don't show up in fucking black block at a school board meeting. Um, Like what would work is a bunch of other middle aged parents showing up and being willing to confront these people, and like everything that is worth mentioning is that a lot of the people at these protests like are not parents at all, Like they're not they're not they're not eve from the same school district.

They're just sort of like this this is just how this is just how the sort of right wing outrage machine has worked. This is where they're drawing people. Yeah, I mean and again, like it's it's a lot of the people and there there's gonna be big dudes who want to fight, but a lot of the people like

screaming are are like you know, middle aged women. The people who are like really like leading the charge on this because they're able to use their privilege because like no one's gonna stop them, right, So that that's like when they're leading the charge of two people who are gonna like scream and harass and chase how black security guards chase out, chase out the all of this, all the school remembers no one's they're they're very effective at

using their privilege to gain political ground by just like doing stuff on the ground. It's like, you know, this is like this is like the January six thing. It's like the January six thing. This is the new future of political action is just showing up in mass two places where no one's gonna stop you because you're like you're the you know, the good, relatable, you know every day Yeah, you're anyway, That's that's the stuff I had. Will probably have an ad break and then talk about

maybe some of how this stuff started. Speaking of using your privilege, you know, what is the greatest privilege? Being able to purchase the products that Yeah, that's exactly right. There's no privilege higher than being able to engage with these consumables. Yeah, and we're back, all right, Chris, you

want to close this out. Yeah, So the last thing I want to talk about that is interesting about this whole thing is, you know, we we've we've mostly been focusing on the very furthest right elements of this, but a lot of the school board stuff is tied to i mean just trade, a Republican party operatives and people who work in this sort of you know, I mean there's there's literally a bunch of people who work for Republican parties will get into it, and there's also this

sort of network of of Republican think tanks, Republicans sort of dark money dumps. That's a lot of a lot of AstroTurf groups and that kind of stuff. Yeah, and and so I want to talk about a few of these people because I think they're interesting. Um, I think we can start with Nicole Nelly, who's an interesting person. She's so she she most recently founded Parents Defending Education. Who are They're They're one of the big groups to sort of like spreads this this sort of attack on

school board stuff over the country. They have chapters, they organize people, and they also, you know, they do this thing where they collect co incident reports from from school districts that they you know, just distribute to all these people and they put it online. They have all of these they they they have a lot of stuff they do.

They do a lot of anti mask mandate stuff. So they have these like template letters, like template like fakely performed letter things that you can send to schools that if you don't want to wear a masks that is

that's a staple of this type of organizing. Now. Yeah, and and the interesting thing about Nickolenelly is that so this is not like her first organ like three years eighteen back in the Halcyon days of all right, you know, I'm not quite going to say it was before the mask fully came off, but it was well, the mask was like a little bit more on. She she previously founded a speech first Yeah you might remember, yeah as the Republic when free speech was the big talking point.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and so she ran that for a while. Now she's you know, organizing with the holy people who just wants to Yeah, they just move on, they move on to the new things. It was it was free speech, it was christ theory. Right now it's anti mask stuff. Next up is gonna be trans stuff going real hard. Just today we had the fucking person who BBC platforms the fucking lincum. Yeah, Lily the rapist Lily Kade manifesto where she details which specific trans women

she wants to personally kill. Yeah, I used to know Lily um. Oh yeah yeah yeah, uh real dark turned Um. I don't know. I guess it's not super surprising. She was definitely interviewed her for a documentary and it was she was a bit off putting. Uh, I didn't realize

this was going on. I mean, yeah, there's there's a lot of a lot a lot of reports of people in like the sex book industry of talking about her, like raping people in bathrooms, which again it's like, yeah, the people that's always screaming about oh no trans women or in bathrooms. Yeah, the people the person screaming about

this is an actual rapist. Like like when when when we say rapists here like she she she raped so many people that, like on Twitter, like I was scrolling through my feet and I saw multiple people who were like, oh, I know this person she assaulted me. Yeah, it's really bad. The people who the turfs are like pushing. Yeah, this is the BBC was platform. So like, yeah, like trans stuff is as soon as as soon as the anti mask anti vax stuff like dies down in the next

five months or whatever. Uh I I foresee a massive pivot towards specifically anti anti trans antiqueer antique stuff because that's going to be the new thing. Yep. And and and I think it's it's worth bearing in mind that this stuff. Yeah, and you know, with with the Coldnelly specifically, so she she worked she like worked at the Cato Institute,

which is like Murray Rothbart and Charles Cokes. Now it's it's yeah, it's it's it's basically it's basically this is a slight oversupplication, but it's basically one of the cokes sort of like money laundering like money operation things. She also worked at Freedom Works, who oh yeah, yeah this is great. So um this is this is one of the fun parts of this which is that so freedom Works is another one of the Coke's sort of dark money laundering machine things. And Freedom Works are basically the

people who created the Tea Party. Like there are the people who turned the Tea Party from like a bunch of weird guy just like like six weirdos into like, you know, the the basically the the the the entirety of the pre Trump conservative political machine who like built a Republican party after it was like completely discredited, um into two thousand's. And this is true of a lot of the people who are in charge of these big

organs have connections like this. Um, the person you found in No Left Turn, which is No Left Turn know for an education, They're they're they're they're not one of these big sort of anti school board things. I mean they they are the people. They're one of people who like they have a list of books on their website that they want banned. Wow. Yeah it's great. And their

founder rights for the Heritage foundations like magazine. So they're there, there's there's all of this stuff, and I think maybe the most implematic one is this guy is Mark Ruffo, who Yeah, so so he's he's the guy who just created the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing. He like threw together a bunch of like inc just like these incredibly tenuous connections. Like there's a bunch of sort of old uh cultural Marxism conspiracy stuff in there. Yeah,

it's a lot of like Frankfurt's school type ship. Yeah yeah, and and but but what I think is interesting about him, it's less his ideas, which are just pseudo intellectual. Yeah, he doesn't he's not actually super smart in what he says that there's a lot of videos of him talking to actual philosopher is getting schooled about what rice theory is. Like, he's actually not that intelligent in this in this side

of things. But but you know that the thing is that there's nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a trick up his sleeve, exactly. And you know, and then the trick basically is Fox News. And you know, the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that this was you know, Mark Ruffo. He's very very explicit about this that this this, this was his solution to the George Floyd up rising. Yea, was that, oh, we we need we need to we need to find this thing

to stop the medicum of this uprising. And this is this is who Tucker Carlson brings on and starts bring onwenty and this blows up. He immediately gets hired by the Manhattan Institute, which is a very not that old but there from the eighties, but a very an old, extremely powerful conservative think tank that I don't think. I think it's less known than things like the Heritage Foundation or the kid who wants to Yeah, I would say

so yeah. But he gets they hired him like immediately because you know, the sort of mainline at the Republican Party very quickly is like, this is the thing that we can use as like a hammer, right, and so the Manhattan Institute publishes this roop o work for them. Now. I can't I'm not actually sure if you. I don't know if he specifically wrote this or he was just involved in it. I think it's it's the bye line

is just the Manhattan Institute. But they have this incredibly detailed tool kit explaining how you know, both both explaining what the sort of right wing like line on critical race theory is. And they have like a bunch of explainers, have like list of terms have you ever seen Yeah, yeah, it's actually yeah, if you've ever seen like list of terms of people want banned, Like it's all just pulled

from this document, right, so I add stuff. Um, But but the interesting part of about this is the other thing is this this is an organizing manual, right, It's it's it's a thing that tells you how to go and how to find other people, like other other people. You know, if if you're like an incensed right wing like freaking one of these school districts, It's like, okay, well here's here's how you like talk to other people in your districts. Here's here's a list of options of

like things you can do going public. And then there's a very interesting thing part of this that that I think is really disturbing and outlines like really what's going on here, which is there's this whole like freak out thing about this thing called minority rule, where like, oh, the left has this like they have this like militant minority that that will compel the majority to follow them by because they keep on showing up and they keep

on doing things. And if if this minority like it keeps, keep keeps, you know, being more in transient than everyone else, then they will inevitably win. And this the three quarters of this section is this like weird fear mongering thing about it. But then the last part of it is a bunch is the thing us saying, oh, we need to do this ourselves, right, this is how we win. We win by being more in transient. We win by

showing up more often of course. Yeah, and you know, and this is this is the other thing is this is from like last year. I think this is like the kid this summer. Yeah, okay, that's sorry. This is this is one. Yeah, this is really the ship. But it's interesting because it's like this is the sort of you know this, this is this is the Republican Party essentially, I mean institute, very very mainstre Republican Party. This, yeah, this is this is how they do aspective in person organizing.

We we talked about this a bit in our episodes um about the like in the aftermath of the abortion ruling, in Texas and how and how like the religious righting

organizing has worked in local districts. Yeah, this, this is how they are able to get things done, which is why there's been so many school by members who either got fired, who have had to step down, who have been harassed off the job, and are now there's people, you know a lot of a lot of like people I would describe as people holding very extreme views are now running and taking these spots um because if you can do if you can do this type of like

again it's not grassroots, but it's it's it is it is like astroturp, so like it appears grassroots. But if can do this type of like fox grassroots organizing, you can gain a lot of power over specific areas and make a lot of people's lives a lot more miserable. And that's that's that's what the goal is, right, the goal is to make trans kids lives miserable. The goals they get people to not wear masks and dive of

COVID like that those are the results of these actions. Well, I think I think there's an interesting interplay here though, because I think because so freedom works, like like even even a lot of the specific protests that are happening. And this is especially true of of the very earlier, earliest ones. I think like when when like the very first school board protests that were happening. Yeah, like like a lot of these summer to follow was when they

started to start up. Yeah, and and those a lot of those were directly organized by by people who work for Freedom Works. And and this is this is what a lot of the c RT ones yeah, yeah, yeah, they see the CRT one very specifically freedom works. And this is what I think is interesting about this is that you know, okay, freedom works. It's like, okay, so what does freedom works out of this? Freedom Works wants the T party again, right, because you know this, this

is what freedom Works does. Right there. They're they're they're basically the group that comes in when when the Republicans start losing election cycles. They're like, Okay, well now we need to get the balance of power back, we need to bring drawn the Democrats out. So they're they're they're

largely trying to build a sort of electoral base. And and again like this, this this will look familiar to people who remember two thousand and ten because it's the same thing, except And this is the thing that I I I this is the part where I genuinely they can't tell whether the Freedom Works people, whether the Cokes, whether that, whether this sort of dark wning network either I don't. I can't tell whether they understand what they're

doing and like it or they're just incredibly naive. But you know this is not two thousand ten, right, You can't when when when you start mobilizing people like mobilizing people on the right wing to go to a place, they don't just like sit there and hold signs anymore.

They cannot you cannot contain them at this point. You cannot control the spread like you have once you've you've opened this can, and there's no way of putting them back in because as soon as they start organized is it on appside telegram, they're one step away from skull masks. And then they're being okay with cheering around people that are going to go beat up that are going to

go beat up people in these meetings. Yeah, And this is this is this is really the thing that I think it's not just January six that we live in the shadow January six, but it's also about you know, if you look at how how the anti lockdown protest went in. Right, you have a bunch of people showing up with guns the capitals and that stuff was extremely effective. And that in the conformation between that in January six has you know, it's open the floodgates and now that

was that was to January six being possible. Is the more and more protests around capitals of people showing up in mass to overwhelm anyone. And because they're all white, because they're all like middle class conservatives, no one's gonna stop them. Yeah, and and you know, and this is the thing, right, you know, the Cokes. I I genuinely don't know what the Cokes want out of this. My guess is that the thing that they want is a new based Republican voters. But that's not what they're creating.

The thing that they're creating is a new core fascist street fighters. And you know it, at some point, it doesn't it literally doesn't matter whether or not this is what the coachs are trying to do or like not trying to do, because they're in the end it's it's just pushing people towards thinking there's no political solution. It's still only only violence. And overwhelming people in mass is the only way to get the change that they want. The change they want is to have trans kids not exists.

And yeah, just more, more and more like fascistic policies. Um, whether that be you know, banning books that mentioned gay people existing or what it's like to be a gay person, whether that be teaching people that racism is still an actual thing that exists, or that be putting a mask

on so you don't kill your grandma or whatever. Yep. Well, and you know, and I think I think one last thing, right, you know, we saw what happened last time they were in power, right, and it was you know, and like you can you can talk about how a lot of the worst stuff were still happening. Was like, yeah, they

put a bunch of people in concentration camps. Right, and if they if they take back power again, and there's a good chance that they're going to because you know, the Democrats are being they they you know, the Democrats never want to be in power. The thing they want to be minority opposition so they can do fundraising, right, and if you know, when when when these people, if these people take power again, it's going to be even

worse than it was last time. Yeah, the thing looking at looking at the Virginia election the night of recording is a great example of that. Yeah uh In terms of yeah, it turns out when Democrats just do nothing and just sit around in office, you don't convince young people to want to vote for them because they're not actually doing anything. So then they just sit out. Then the Republicans actually do vote in people, then we get uh we anti CRT person elected to be the governor

of Virginia. And that's the episode. Good times. Well, I hope everybody's optimistic feeling nice. Well, um, we'll be back with something else. Research your school boards, who's in it, and just protests around it and maybe show up with some of your I don't know buddies with your lattes and stand in front of the building and be like, no, we don't want you, we don't want you to shut stuff down because no one else is going to stop them.

It has to be just like regular people. You can't cops, it's not going to be any elected democrat and honestly, like you can't rely on teens and black block to do this. That is this isn't this isn't what they need to be doing. It should be like yeah, it'd be like millennials and Gen X need to be like, Hey, no, we're not gonna We're not gonna have you doing this. Well, that's the that's the episode. Hey, we'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now until the heat

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