Part Two: The Battle in Seattle: How Scrappy Protesters Shut Down the World Trade Organization

really political, but sometimes I whatever. I'm not defending this. I like my show and you might too. Otherwise you might not be listening to part two of an episode. This is part two of a two parter that's tied into a broader project I am doing talking about well, it's part two of talking about the Battle of Seattle in nineteen ninety nine, but it's part to something or other of a larger thing. I am doing about the alter globalization movement, about the fight against neoliberalism and basically

radical politics at the turn of the millennium. I have a producer. My producer's name is Sophie. Sophie isn't on the call because there's no guest. It's just me and a microphone. But Sophie is still here with us today and also listening in on the call while not live but later editing. It is our audio engineer, Eva hi Eva, and our theme music was written for us by n Woman.

And so where we left our heroes. I talked about the five different groups that came together to well, they didn't come together, the five different groups of various levels of interacting with each other that were all different, diverse coalitions themselves of various groups that all went to Seattle to try to stop the World Trade Organization from on democratically making decisions to got the world for profit. So everyone was getting ready and then they went to Seattle.

That's what we're going to talk about this time, We're actually going to get there. Imagine that an entire episode of context. No one's ever heard of Margaret doing that. So people were like, you know, it's not enough to do a day of action or even like several days of action. Because of the summit was several days long. People wanted to get started early to build up momentum. They called for nine days of action before the protests even started. It was billed as a street theater convergence

by Dan. Dan got like a two week lease on

a building for one thousand dollars. I feel like I must be missing a zero here, but I really think it was one thousand dollars. I read that they're like total budget for all of the protest stuff was about twenty grand total or something. I'm not sure it's a really good return on investment. I'm just saying anyway, they got a lease on his building and they open it up as a convergence center, which is a staple of

protests at the time. Basically, you rent out a building and that's where you have your meetings and you make art and occasionally you hide from police and hope you don't all get mass arrested. That's the one that you actually like pay for and then like other places, are squatted by people who are a little bit more risk tolerant.

The welcome center was called four to twenty the Denny Space because it was at four to twenty East Denny Way in a former night club, and yes, people did already use four twenty as the weed number in nineteen ninety nine. I went back and double checked. I was pretty sure because I was alive during that time, but I was like, I don't know Wikipedia says that four to twenty was popularized in nineteen ninety one by High Times magazine, and that's why there's a Wikipedia article in

today's sources. So I wanted to double check that people got themselves a conversion space. And over nine days leading up to the protests, several thousand people came through. They put on action after action to help inform local folks about the upcoming protests and help get people organized and build up momentum and get practice walking around with giant puppets and stuff and like stilt walkers and clowns, and

I bet there was fire breathing, I don't know. On November twenty first, there was a big parade through a neighborhood. On November twenty second, Global Exchange protested sweatshop labor in front of the gap, and folks dropped a banner from the building that read sweatshops free trade or corporate slavery. One night, people did what's called a newspaper rap, where

you print a fake front page on a newspaper and go around to all the newspaper boxes and put your cover on the papers inside. They somehow did this to twenty five thousand copies in one night of the newspaper, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and basically they put a fake front page that talks about how badly the paper was covering. The wto the fact that they did this to twenty five thousand papers in one night is so amazing. There's like so much truth to the many hands make light

work thing, which is actually it's funny. It's one of the reasons that writing fiction or making movies about this kind of thing is so hard because Western storytelling is so this is complete tangent, but it's interesting to me, so maybe you'll like it. Western storytelling is so built on individuals, individual characters that it really struggles with building

tension and plot and moving things forward with groups. And it's hard to get an audience to like it when you do it because you have to break so many of the rules. And that's why. For example, there's a movie about the Battle of Seattle called The Battle of Seattle, and it's not a particularly good movie. It's not quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. I always avoided watching it, and I've read a book

critiquing it. It's in the sources, but it focuses on these like individual leaders, and that's just not an effective way to understand this, especially when you're talking about twenty five thousand copies of a newspaper. That's not something three

people do anyway. There were parades and marches everywhere for days, and they were all of the hits of the era, like the radical cheerleaders who crashed a mainstream parade, or a four hundred person strong critical mass bike ride, critical mass bike rides or well, they're just called critical masses.

It's where you get together a critical mass of people on bicycles to sort of ride together in the streets, and it's a bike rights style of protest, but it also gets used a lot in other protests, especially during this era. Two women dropped a banner from the retaining wall of I five, the big interstate that runs through Seattle, reading shut down the WTO. According to the source I read about it like one of the women's moms was like cheering her on from the side, and that's cool.

There's puppets, and there's stilt walkers and clowns, and there's marching bands and shit marching around thousands strong. In the build up to the protests, the police are largely hands off during all of this time. As best as I understand, both the mayor and the chief of police were like, we do not want to turn this into a shit show. We just need to keep our heads down, make sure that they don't like doing anything real bad. We'll just get through this. That seemed to be the attitude that

the state was taking in response. So they didn't come down and beat up all the stilt walkers in clowns, because that's also a bad image, although that'll happen later. Seventy five people squatted an abandoned building downtown and opened it up to house activists coming into town. So basically like if you show up a loan and are like, I don't know where to go, They're like, go to

the squad. You can go stay at the squad. And they managed to hold the building the entire length of the wto although not without tents, standoffs, and a number of confrontations and a lot of negotiations with lawyers and shit. At one point, riot cops surrounded the building. They were like, you all leave or get arrested. Only fifteen squatters stayed inside. Then the cops were chased off by reinforcements from the four to twenty space. Basically, they're like, it's coming down

to the wire, it's all going to happen. But then like tons of people from the conversion space come and converge on this area, and the cops are like, never mind, we don't want to do this. Through a friendly lawyer, squatters negotiated to hold the building through the length of the WTO and then hand it off to a homeless advocacy group. In exchange, the squatters were like, we'll sign waivers saying if we get hurt in the building, it's

not the landlord's fault. I actually don't expect that the landlord held up his side of this bargain, but I am not sure. I didn't find a follow up about what happened. And then on November twenty ninth, the WTO sort of began. There were no WTO meetings that day, but there was a big reception party for the arriving delegates. The WTO wanted to fly under the radar as much as possible and just kind of do this gala behind closed doors, but activists weren't going to let that happen.

The Rainforest Action Network used their climbing skills to hang a startlingly large banner, like literally professional like activists nonprofits hang really large, impressively large banners. They hung this banner off of one hundred and seventy foot crane. It had two arrows. One pointed one way and read democracy, and the other pointed the other way and said wto. As protests began to ramp up on the twenty ninth, hundreds

of people dressed as sea turtles roamed around downtown. This is like an environmentalist group, folks talking about how laws are being changed in a way that destroys the environment and kills all the sea turtles. And they would go around dress as sea turtles talking with people about the wto. Five thousand people led by faith leaders marched circles around the building where the opening reception was happening, so they

did not get to meet silently. And then I don't think people probably got too much sleep that night because the next day the shutdown began. But you know what comes before the shutdown. Actually, there probably wasn't a lot of advertising in the radical media at the time. This was probably the most advertising adverse group of radicals in history. Honestly, that was their whole thing. They did not like this.

One of the main magazines we all read was Adbusters. Anyway, that's not the current era, because I like feeding my dog. Here's ads and we're back. So they were going to shut down the WTO through direct action, and the way they did it was somewhat simple and very very effective. The fundamental building block of most direct action groups, especially

in horizontal movements, is the affinity group. These are tight knit groups of friends, usually five to fifteen people, who make decisions by consensus amongst one another and are willing to take risks together. This model, as I understand it, has roots going back to the anarchist organizing in Spain in the nineteen thirties leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War. The affinity group model is very good

for decentralized direct actions. You gather representatives from each affinity group into a spokes council and they can make plans together. The organizing for n thirty, as the day of action was called November thirtieth, was intentionally completely transparent. They didn't like post meeting notes to the Internet. I mean, actually they might have, but I'm not aware of it. But they were not trying to hide what they were doing. They would say, you know, plug into the following framework.

This is the framework we're currently deciding on it. This is how it's going. They announced months ahead of time exactly how they were going to shut down the WTO. Here are the seven principles they worked with, because again I think that people should know how stuff gets done.

And I am paraphrasing these seven principles from the organizer and writer David Solnett, who has his own biases, but so does everyone one clear what and why logic to quote the Direct Action Network quote, we are planning a large scale, well organized, high visibility action to shut down the World Trade Organization on Tuesday, November thirtieth. The World Trade Organization has no right to make undemocratic, unaccountable, destructive

decisions about our lives, our communities, and the earth. We will non violently and creatively block them from meeting. So very clear about the what and why. Two broadly publicized. They set up a website, They printed one hundred thousand colored postcards. They emailed every email list of every organization. They had a road show people they showed people how to plug in three mass training and mass organization, and thousands of people from all sorts of activist spheres went

to direct action trainings. Four decentralization. There were some core principles, but things were organized by affinity groups coming together to form clusters so they were able to make decisions spontaneously and quickly, and arresting organizers wasn't going to stop shit. Five Action agreements. They agreed that people would be nonviolent

and not do property destruction. Six open organizing. By organizing openly, you're actually much more resistant against infiltration and stuff because when things aren't secret, when the secrets get out, that's not a problem because you knew the secrets were going to get out, and yeah, if plans get leaked in their public whatever. Seven Media and framing. There was a lot of work done talking to medio using very specific framing.

To be honest, the media didn't really use the framing they suggested, and I don't know how effective this particular one was, but so it goes they did do a lot of their own medium, so maybe that was effective. Those are the seven principles. They did all this organizing in the open, and what they did is they divided the area that they wanted to shut down into thirteen pie slices, and an affinity groups joined clusters, which are larger organizing groups, and each cluster took one of the

pie slices. So like you and your seven friends might agree to join some like lockdown intersection alongside four other affinity groups, for example, exactly how you all behaved would be up to your affinity group and your cluster, and you would democratically determine how your actions would work in conjunction with other people's actions, for example. And I am definitely using this example because I think it's a funny name.

A cluster that called itself Flaming Dildos agreed to shut down the spot right next to the Inner State that ran underneath the convention center. Overall, the direct action protesters were young. According to David Solnett, they were quote students, Earth firsters and young people who really went out there in the front, but not exclusively. There were significant numbers of middle aged people and a few old folks. No

one was sure what would happen. They spent like six months planning this thing, and they had their very specific plan about what they were going to do, and they'd spent all this effort and they had no idea what was going to happen. They figured they would disrupt things. They also figured they'd probably get mass arrested pretty quickly and the WTO meetings would continue. But these actions were

more than disruptive. The World Trade Organization wasn't even able to hold its opening ceremonies because at seven am or so, people went to the convention center and started blockading intersections and all the entrances to the building. They put up a fifty foot tripod with someone locked at the top. They would drag cement barrels. When I say drag, they were probably on dollies. I don't actually know, but that's the way that I would whatever. I've moved to cement

barrel and I did it on a fucking dolly. It's the only time sealed toed boots ever came into I wore steal too boots every day of my life in my twenties, and one time it was really useful anyway. Whatever, So they would drag cement barrels into the street that people then like, it's a barrel full of cement with like a pipe running through it, with like a piece of rebar in the pipe, so that if you put a carabiner on a chain around your wrist. You can reach in and clip the carabiner to the rebar in

the center of the thing. And now you can't get out, or rather now people can't get you out. I mean they can torture you and try and get you too. Just what they're going to do spoiler alert. But anyway, it's an activist staple. There was also people dragging dumpsters into the street. There were cars that were turned into lock boxes. There were giant puppets everywhere. There was a human chain around the convention. They blocked off parking garages, hotels,

and underground tunnels. Delegates for the wto wearing ID tags that said delegate were chased off. Cops tell delegates they

can't help them. Like the delegates to go out and be like, hey, how do I get in? The cops like, I don't think you can, buddy. The Secretary of State of the United States, Madeline Albright, was trapped in her hotel by the protests and the governor can't mobilize enough forces to get her out. The protesters have planned three waves. The most arrestable affinity groups go out first. Arrestable means like you're kind of planning to get arrested, or you're

very willing to get arrested. The arrestable affinity groups go first to lockdown, and then a second wave was to arrive to support these lockdowns just by being present and clogging up the streets with numbers. The third wave was the People's Assembly, which was basically more NGO type groups, non governmental organization type groups that picked direct action support

over the Big Labor March. The Big Labor March was happening elsewhere, and it was pretty much designed not to interfere directly the Big Labor March, though it did require a decent number of police, which meant fewer police were available to stop the action. And like best as I can tell, you're talking about this massive disparity. You're talking about about four hundred police officers to police this entire like thousands and thousands of people strong direct action, which

is wasn't enough police. Well, it depends on what your goals are. I'm not in favor of the police in this particular context, but from the police's point of view, it was not enough police. And then the police, well before anyone started breaking shit, hours beforehand, police just fucking

went wild on people. Why this happened? At least one conjecture about why this has happened in a report that's in the show notes, that was quoted in a Crime Think article, Why this happened is actually sort of interesting,

but not as interesting as these deals. And Rebecca, so, policing in the US and presumably everywhere has always been pretty massively and not just in a like Margaret doesn't like the concept of police in prison sort of way, but in a way in which police have been tied into organized crime in various ways in various places since

more or less the beginning of modern policing. Corruption isn't always even throughout the ranks, and Seattle had this famously corrupt police department in the sixties and seventies, but by nineteen ninety nine it was led by people who are trying to reform out that corruption, and a lot of the crooked cops didn't want to get reformed. Specifically, they

wanted to embarrass the police chief. While the city had been saying it was going to respect free speech and be a bit hands off during the protests, you know, only arrest people who like breached a certain perimeter and try not to arrest on violent people. The rank and file police were spreading the word that protesters are basically there to try and kill them, Like they were like, we think five or six of us are going to die tomorrow, you know. And they complained about how the

brass wanted to be too soft on the protesters. They also figured if they could turn the whole thing into a riot, it would embarrass the hell out of the mayor and the chief of police, and so the police had every reason to start shit. Basically. That is one way it has been presented by someone who was actually there and involved in organizing. I also have this suspicion

that it's like like cops are more violent when they're outnumbered. Cops are more violent when they are trying to be in control of a situation that they don't have absolute control, like when you have a protest. That's just more about like kettling and containment. It's because the police just wildly outnumber everyone. Whatever. When the opening ceremonies to the wto are canceled, the cops start some shit. They fire tear gas into the crowd of people locked down in the streets.

They open up with pepper spray canisters like the fire extinguisher style ones. They open up with baton rounds which are shot out of basically grenade launchers. And what's funny about all this now is like, yeah, of course the cops did that living in twenty twenty five, or you might be living in the future in the United States, Like, of course the cops are like pepper spray is their middle name, but they don't like it as much as hitting people with stuff more directly. This wasn't the usual

thing in nineteen ninety nine. For all of this to happen, This was shocking to people. And they're doing this everywhere in nineteen ninety nine at these protests, the cops are just attacking people everywhere, but they can't stop all the protests because the lockdowns are now supported by this like mass number of kind of rowdy crowd that is like down for direct action, even if they're not like the

black block or whatever. In most of the accounts of Seattle that I've read written by organizers, you've got the kind of like good and noble nonviolent direct actionists who kind of take the abuse from the police. And then you've got the black block that's a totally separate entity and like ne'er the Twains shall meet. Based on first hand accounts, I suspect that this isn't the case universally.

The non violent blockaders confronted by police violence, they stand up to that more their supporters right the lockdown people are locked down, but they're not just like, oh, you're HEARDing me. This sucks. People block the streets with dumpsters, They throw rocks and bottles at the cops, and some of them cheer when they hear about the arrival of the black block, which now because that was their agreement is that they would wait and only go do their

shit if the police attacked. Now they're doing their shit. The one hundred to two hundred people are now running rampage through the downtown shopping district, attacking the symbols of capital directly. The block armed with hammers and crowbars and spray paint, broke a lot of windows at Nike stores and Starbucks and shit like that, and by most of the narratives, I was able to find some unaffiliated local youth took advantage of the situation to do some light looting.

There wasn't exactly complete solidarity between the block and the DAN protesters, and one report says they engaged in light scuffling, which was probably people yelling like, we're not violent at the Black Block and the Black Block being like, yeah, we don't care, and then just I don't know, to round out the image of everything that's happening, you've got the Infernal Noise Brigade. I love the Infernal Noise Brigade. I don't know what group to lump them in with.

They probably organize their DAN I don't know, but they're kind of Black Block, but they're they're not DAN. They're not the Black Block. They are the Infernal Noise Brigade. The Turn of the Millennium's most influential radical marching band.

This is a marching band wearing all black gas masks with black and green flags that they use which is probably a reference to green anarchism, but with black and green flags that they use for semaphore communication, like like literally they coordinate as a block where they're like, now we're moving this way, and you can tell because the flags are doing this, and they know what they're doing in the middle of these riots, and they play this

almost industrial music on their marching band instruments so in all of this, the outnumbered police are rioting, but they aren't regaining control of the streets because protesters are moving more quickly than the police. People who are locked down are attacked but not arrested, since there's no way to get them out. This has been presented in a couple

different ways. I believe the version of the story where it wasn't that the city was like, no, don't arrest anyone, although the city had been like, try to be hands off, but rather the police were so outnumbered and so strategically outmatched that they couldn't really arrest people that day, because how the hell would you get someone out if you

arrested them. And then, on top of it all, the twenty thousand person labor march hit down town, and the police let that happen because supposedly, again there's so many accounts of all of this, it has been conjectured that the police wanted this more moderate march to come through because they figured it would like kind of overwhelm the radicals and take them away from the blockades. Basically, the

opposite happened. The rank and file of the union were much more radical than their leaders, and they bolstered the protests. By one pm, the National Guard was called up and cops were driving hundreds of miles at top speed to reach the city. It's a big state, Washington, and so like Washington State police were like driving four hundred miles or whatever. Soon enough, the city was basically out of tear gas. Supposedly they only ordered about a quarter of

what they should have. Again, these are the sorts of problems that that's not true. I guess sometimes the state runs out of tear gas still. But a state of emergency was declared. Gas masks were confiscated, a curfew was imposed, protest signs were stolen, and then kind of as the evening went on, many people started getting arrested, including local residents on their own stoops asking police what the hell was going on. As night fell, protesters set a bonfire

and in an intersection and held it. I've seen this played up as a bonfire and downplayed as a lightly smoking dumpster. Every story, everyone has a story to tell. Everyone wants to be like, no, we were totally peaceful, and other people want to be like, we fucking ran those streets. The protesters largely left of their own volition, their work done that first day. The next day things

turned around. This is also a very common thing at multi day protests, as the first day the protesters have a certain advantage as the police are sort of caught off guard, and then the second day the police are real mad that they got caught off guard and they get a little wilder, just bad, because they were already pretty wild that first day. The next day, a martial

law model was in place. There was a no protest zone being enforced, a civil emergency had been declared, and basically you could just get arrested if they didn't like the look of you. It was the next day that people were mass arrested, starting at seven point thirty in the morning. They targeted anyone they assumed as a ring leader, which isn't a particularly effective strategy against horizontal protests. Still,

they couldn't arrest enough people. People clogged the streets and blockaded downtown Seattle, and by day three the police ran out of transportation to get protesters out, partly because the protesters would refuse to leave the buses that they were on, and they would also they would fuck up their own booking by not giving their names, not carrying ID Basically, protesters agreed ahead of time to do something called jail solidarity if they were arrested. This is a tactic I've

had some success with myself. Everyone agrees that if they are arrested, they will refused to identify themselves, and they also agree to other conditions depending on you all agree ahead of time to what your conditions are. But you might be like, we're not going to walk on your own power. We're going to make them drag all hundreds of us, or we're going to like smudge our fingerprints

or make funny faces when they photograph us. This chokes up the jail bureaucracy rather quickly, making it harder for the police to determine who was arrested where, doing what, and making it much harder to single out individuals for elevated charges. Often, when everyone in a mass arrest does jail solidarity, every single person walks out of jail a

few days later without any charges. The time I did it, we all agreed to not give our names until certain conditions were met, like we wanted group trials, we want a pre trial release, and they couldn't separate us within the jails, And in the end they got so sick of us, they just let the lot of us out without any charges, and most people didn't even go to an arraignment check. She is funny because then I was like, I was never actually like booked at all. I was

just kind of held in a cell. There's not really a lot of legal things to say about that. Also, the other thing is that usually then after these mass arrests, people successfully sue, and a lot of movement infrastructure is built from suing the cities for violating their rights. Meanwhile, back to Seattle, they were coordinating with a dedicated legal team that worked from the outside to help get everyone out. Protesters sang on the buses and they fed each other

with snacks from their bags. Presumably the people who were doing the feeding were the people able to get out of their plastic cuffs. More than four hundred cases were dropped by the city when the city couldn't figure out who had been arrested when, and for two days, protesters camped outside the jail, and eventually the legal support team

came to an agreement with the city and protesters began to identify themselves. Basically, they're like, all right, our conditions have been met, will give our aims now. Folks got out soon enough and by January ninety percent of the cases were dropped. The police chief and several other highatt police officials resigned after all of this. Meanwhile, there were solidarity marches all over the world. They were thousands strong in India because it was France and the French love

and excuse to riot. Seventy five thousand people in eighty cities were marching. There was like hundreds of miners fighting cops. There was a street party in Times Square. Some people like overturned a cop car in London. After all of the protests in Seattle, the media worked overtime to discredit the protesters. They did this by focusing on the actions of about forty black block vandals and ignoring about forty

thousand other people. Yet, despite all the negative coverage that these protests got, when BusinessWeek ran a poll in January two thousand, month or so later, they found that fifty two percent of Americans were empathetic with the protesters. And I would like to remind everyone again, much like the burning down of the police precinct in the twenty twenty Uprising, those are higher numbers than what presidents get during elections. The World Trade Organization is never really recovered from this

disastrous meeting. Unfortunately, I only have so much time in my life, and in my week I focused on the protests and the protest impact on the World Trade Organization. I'm hoping as I continue to talk about the ultra globalization movement, I can also talk about the way that the meetings broke down internally as people felt disrespected from

developing nations and things like that. I don't know as much about that right now to include it with detail, but yeah, the World Trade Organization has never really recovered. They've continued to meet, and they've continued to run a foul of protesters, and the ultra globalization movement was just getting started. But that's a story for another day. I want to end with some excerpts from a memoir about Seattle written by an anonymous participant. This was published by

Crime Think. If you want to look in our sources quote seeing each other there we discovered we were part of a worldwide movement. This infused us with an incredible momentum and sense of purpose. Suddenly we knew we were

going to change the world, and we had a model for how to do so. The events of that one week in Seattle were more real to us than all the years that had led up to them, even for those of us who were not there. And then that same person wrote another bit. And this is the bit I'm going to close on. It's a little bit of a long quote. It is fucking worth it quote. I can't do it. I can't tell you what it felt like any more than a bird could tell me what it feels like to fly. I can tell you my story,

but it's only my head talking. My heart can't write, and my guts don't have lips. I cannot truly explain how it felt to taste X in every breath as the invisible forces of privilege and coercive power finally lost control. How it felt to stare down the world's most ruinous and abusive bullies and watch them blink. How it felt to fall in love with tens of thousands of people at once, to not know what would happen next, to

become dangerous. And that is a tragedy that haunts me as I write every one of these words, because if somehow I could share with you what it felt like for ten days in Seattle, you would never settle for anything less again. You would kick in your TV, run outside buck naked, tear up the freeway with your bare hands, flip tanks upside down, and dance with panda bears through the streets. The barbarians would emerge from exile to knock down Heaven's door, and the dead would rise up from

their coffins and cubicles. And once you got a taste of the sublime joy of reclaiming control of your life and your world, of regaining your lost kinship with a human community of which you are an integral component, of realizing your wildest dreams and desires, you would do whatever it takes to make it happen again. And I like that for a lot of reasons. I like even that they say this was more real to us than all the years that led up to them, even for those

of us who were not there. I wasn't there in Seattle. I joined this movement in two thousand and two after people said it was done and dying and there was only the tiniest remnants left, and that those tiny remnants that were left completely upended my life. I dropped out of college and I traveled to every protest I could. In some ways, I was chasing that high, that feeling

of being in community with strangers, accomplishing something real in a way that so much of what happens in our lives doesn't feel real, and you don't even know that it doesn't feel real until you feel reality. And that's not to say that like protests is the only thing and that's the only way to feel it at all. It's I mean, you know, like psychologically it could be like peak experiences or peak experiences you can get them at a fucking anime convention, but like there's still something

to it. And then I was wildly sad about it as the movement fell apart, and I felt we had accomplished nothing. And then I read an essay. I'm sure I'm going to talk about this a bunch more times in this series. I read an essay by David graeber rest in piece called the Shock of Victory about how protesters and activists and anarchists don't know when we've won, and it talked about the ways in which these protests, the alter globalization movement defeated the neoliberal consensus, even if

most of the meetings that we went to. We didn't shut down our short term goal. We didn't usually accomplish our long term goal of recreating society and having a social revolution we didn't accomplish. But our medium term goals of destroying the neoliberal agenda we accomplished. Not me, right, not me as a character in a movie of it, right, but as part of this global movement of largely led by and done by people in the quote unquote global

South to stop their countries from being completely gutted. And you know, we didn't completely stop destruction, but we stopped so much of it. I'm gonna take that with me to my grave. Anyway. The Overly Earnest Hour with Margaret Kiljoy is done. If you want more overly earnest stuff, I have a substack that you can subscribe to for

free or if you pay me more. You can read more personal anecdotes, including act If you go back in archives, there's a lot of me writing about that period of my life, my early twenties, my late teens and early twenties and what it felt like to be a squad protester or whatever. And also, okay, my latest book, The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice is three interconnected short stories, and most of them are much more about magic in

a more direct way where there's like demons and stuff involved. But one of the stories is about falling in love at a demonstration like this, in this case the Miami demonstrations of twenty twenty three. So I don't know. You can read that book, or you can play the tabletop roleplaying game Defenders of the Wild, which is also a board game. But there's also a role playing game book and I helped write that. And I will talk to you all next week. I might be talking about this

stuff more. I might take a break and talk about something else for a while. We'll see. By everyone, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of pool

Zone Me. For more podcasts and cool Zone media, visit our website goalzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the five or radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.