Good morning, peeps, and welcome to WOKP Daily with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker, Folks. It is wild when I take off for a couple of days and come back and things are just as bad,
if not worse, than they were the week prior. But that is where I find myself after coming back from being in San Francisco for the Lesbians Who Tech Summit that I have the opportunity to MC and co host, and I will tell you know, it's really hard when I'm on stage to be able to be in the news, and so when I have to dive back in, it's like I'm anticipating that things have changed, something has happened that is better than what it was prior, and that
is certainly not the fucking case this week, coming back to realize that Jim Jordan was unable to clinch the speakership like Steve Scalise before him, that now there are a band of nine idiots that are running for this position that need that requires two hundred and seventeen votes, none of which these people have the ability to get. Don't think that you should know who these folks are, because no one knows who they are, including people inside
of their own fucking party. You have a majority of them, if not all of them, voted to overturn the free and fair election in twenty twenty. So there's you know,
hots off to those folks. And you know it is I can't express enough at a time when we are seeing such global unrest, we are wrestling with two fucking wars that are happening right now that America is essentially funding, because let us be real about that, that when you look at Ukraine and you look at what is happening to Gaza by Israel and in Israel, we're not in
a great fucking place. And the fact is we have no House of Representatives that can approve the billions of dollars that are necessary to support allies, to get humanitarian aid, and to do whatever it is that we need to do. Oh and by the way, keep our own fucking government funded,
which that shut down is coming November seventeenth. If in fact, we don't get twelve bills through the House of Representatives and the Senate that are able to fund government for an entire year, when I say that, we are in an absolute shit show, shit storm, shit Tornado. This is what I fucking mean, and coming into the presidential election where there are so many seats that are up. Not only are we talking about the presidential but we're talking about seats that are up in the Senate, seats that
are up in the House. I just really don't know what Republicans are fucking running on. Right with their four seat majority in the House, what are they saying, vote for us, give us more seats so that we can show you just how fucking dysfunctional we are. It would be so comical if the times weren't so goddamn stark
and serious, but they are right. And so I'm looking around after having taken a few days, and I'm just like, wow, so things have gotten even worse Because when you were starting out with a oh, Eescalise and a Jordan is who we're offering up, I'm like, no, there has got to be better people than that, And Republicans have shown
me no, there are no better people. We just have nine worse people who you don't know, Yeah, wild, wild folks, And you know I know that right now there are people who are quitting jobs, getting fired from jobs, getting signed blind over their stances around what is happening in Israel and Palestine, that there are people in these United States, from a six year old Palestinian boy to now a forty year old rabbi in Detroit. The hate is overspilling.
There is no way for us to watch the murders of close to now five thousand civilians in Gaza and think to ourselves, this is going well. These are people, these are largely children, right, that are being taken out as Israel goes to war with quote unquote Hamas, which by the way, they have been at war with for decades. So what makes this time any different other than the fact that fourteen hundred right Israeli's war murdered in the
span of a week. So folks like I keep saying this that hate just begets eight, violence begets violence, and America coming out and saying that we're gonna continue funding this without understanding the repercussions of what that is and Joe Biden trying to align what is happening in the Middle East with what is happening in Ukraine and Russia, to me is a major fucking misstep. And I say it as somebody who is not a foreign leader, who is not a foreign relations expert, but is a person
that believes in our collective humanity. These two things are not the fucking same, and trying to paint with a broad stroke is going to leave us. Leave this administration, I believe in a really bad place heading into twenty twenty four. Not to mention changing gears real quick, that Donald Trump still remains in a giant fucking pickle, as you have Sidney Powell and Chesburro who have leaded guilty, who are going to testify against Donald Trump, and the
other folks like, oh my god. You know, I think that if I were to go away and come back a year later, sadly, I don't think much will have changed. So how we get through this with our sanity intact? Dear friends, that is going to be the where the real work is coming up next. I'm really looking forward to you all getting to hear this conversation with award winning journalist Vincent Bevins, whose new book is out now, If We Burn the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
Vincent and I get into a conversation about his book about the decade of protests, and you know, essentially where
we go from here. What we've learned over the last ten years, and what the future of protesting looks like given this state of our world, given the state of technology and social media, and how and where people gather that conversation Coming up next, folks, I am very happy to welcome to OKF Daily for the very first time award winning journalist Vincent Bevins, whose new book If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution is on
stands now, which examine how the so called mass Protest decade failed to achieve meaningful change and what's next for activists who sacrificed so much. Vincent, Welcome to the show.
Yeah, thank you so much.
So let's dive in and talk about what you are seeing, what you saw as the mass protest decade, what led you to writing this book, and talk to us about bring us back to the last decade of upheaval right of activism that kind of woke many people up, not only in this country but around the globe. Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean, I think there's two answers to the question of how I came to this project, why I decided to write a book like this. First of all, as far as we know, more people took part in mass protests around the world from twenty ten to twenty twenty than at any other point in human history. The wave of mass protests that really started in North Africa, Teunisia, and Egypt in twenty ten and then went basically global over the next ten years exceeded even the very contentious
nineteen sixties. But in many cases, did we not only see things go nowhere, did we not only see protests simply not work because that would be less surprising. I mean, that was basically what happened back in two thousand and three with the protests against the Iraq War. What was very strange is the a parent phenomenon that many mass protests that seemed to be successful at first actually ended up leading to the opposite of what they asked for if you took a long enough timeline and examined what
really happened in the years afterwards. So that's this big, big, sort of global question that seemed to present itself to me into a lot of people that I think do want to change the world. And then my own particular relation to this is that I was in Brazil in twenty thirteen when a mass protest organized by leftists and anarchists ultimately created the conditions, not on purpose, not right away, for the far right to take more power in that country.
So it's kind of a personal story, but I think it is one that is quite relevant all around the planet.
Well, let's talk about those places in which the opposite occurred from the mass protest that did take place, because
I think that that is important. I think that you know, oftentimes, as someone you know myself who has participated in countless, countless marches, countless protests over the course of my political career, it has always been the fall safe right, if you don't like something, if you want something to change, get hundreds thousands or hundreds of thousands of people into the street, and then the change you want will happen. I'm making it obviously seem a little easier than we know that
it is, but that's essentially the goal. When the opposite occurs, though, I think that it's not only shocking to those that did take to the streets, but those that are watching. And I'm wanting to get a sense of in your personal experience in Brazil, why do you think that that happened? Right?
No, I think, and I think that quick summary of the way that we view these things is quite right. I think that deep down that's kind of an assumption that quite a lot of people had, definitely in Brazil, certainly in countries like Egypt, certainly in many other countries around the world, this idea that when there is injustice, when elites commit abuses against citizens, the natural, if not the only, if not the best, even the natural way to respond to that is a mass protest. And I
try in this book to establish how that came together. Historically, this wasn't always the case. Even as recently in the fifties and early sixties, people would not have thought that that was the natural way to respond to injustice. But in our certainly by the twenty tens, I think that assumption was widely held, and it was held I think by me in a deep, deep part of my soul. And as you said, the idea was that if you got enough people, if everybody sort of came out, that
would deliver the results. But what often happened, and I'll use Brazil as an example, I think Egypt is another a good one, is that the huge amounts of people that do come out to the streets Number one may not be the exact same people that you expected to come out. So in the case of Brazil, you really got a strange situation in which the new arrivals onto the streets had different ideas of what the protest was about than the original arrivals. Or number two. So many
people can come to the streets. This schematic that you just outlined can be so can be so successful that actually a government is dislodged from power, or a government is in a position where they are so afraid of losing power that they would be willing to give something up to the streets in order to hold onto power.
But in that case of this unexpected power vacuum, and in that case of an unexpected moment when results can be seized or power can be seized, the kind of protest that became dominant in the twenty tens, I think a protest in general, but specifically the kind of protest that became dominant in the twenty tens has a very hard time taking advantage of that power vacuum. So often what we saw, to the great horror of the original activists, say in Egypt or in Brazil, is other actors, whether elites,
foreign governments, which intervene. But whoever's around and savvy enough and wants to sees that power vacuum, sees step into the power vacuum and sees sees the day for their
own purposes. And they often have very very different ideas about how to change society and the people who organized their protests and they may indeed have the exact opposite ideas, but they're ready, they're organized, and they step into the vacuum that was accidentally, unexpectedly created by huge amounts of people in the streets and take things forward in their own direction.
I mean, it's pretty you know, it's an extraordinary feat, right to get people organized in such a way where they go out into the streets, right, Like I think about twenty twenty, I think about the most recent mass protests that we had seen in this country that did spark global outrage, and that was on the murder of George Floyd, where we saw, in the midst of a global health pandemic, pre having vaccines and really understanding how this pandemic was spreading, people take to the streets in
their outrage and collective grief right that they experienced at the hands of watching a murder take place on video, and so I kind of want to get your thoughts there on how you saw the difference in twenty twenty versus let's say twenty ten, right at the beginning of the decade that you're viewing, what changed during this time, Vincent, and like, why was it so palpable in twenty twenty.
Yeah, And I think I think that's a really good question. I think there's maybe three ways I can answer it if I can go sort of later. I think that first of all, across what I call the mass protest decade, often the spark, often the thing that does get people onto the streets is a shocking case of police brutality. So this is what we forget. This, this is what started. This is what started the so called Arab spring. This in Tunisia, it was originally a fruit vendor that was harassing,
that was protesting harassment from a local official. In Egypt, it was a protest against police brutality. In Brazil, it was viral images of a crackdown on ultimately journalists that set off set the country on fire. So this kind of thing is I think extremely powerful. I think that across many many national and economic conditions, across countries. Basically
you have an awareness that police brutality is real. It is the way that the existing power structure reproduces itself, that it stays in power, and it is quite shocking when regular people see it. But the second thing I will say is that you said it's quite hard to get people organized to come out like this. I think that actually what is so powerful, or indeed, initially it seems to be powerful about this particular type of protest.
And I lay out all of these various ingredients in the book, and I expend with where they come from, but just to summarize what it is, I say that these are apparently spontaneous, leaderless, digitally coordinated, horizontal to the organized mass protests. And I think the thing that makes them so successful and far far more successful than a lot of the people that put together this specific recipe had ever expected, is that you don't require much organization.
Like everybody can see a viral video at two pm and be on the streets at five pm and or at two ten pm and not necessarily know each other, not necessarily have the same ideas as to what would you what you would do if you know you were to be successful, if you were to, you know, I don't think in twenty twenty the goal would have been or you would have necessarily wanted to, like overthrow the
government of the United States. Maybe some people did, but certainly if that were the ultimate goal, I think people would have different ideas about how what was supposed to happen afterwards. And so the question of this type of organization of people, people coming together around a response to a particular active injustice is really really good at mobilizing people,
but it doesn't require pre existing organization. So in the case of many other countries in what I call the mass protest decade, they got onto the streets with very very different ideas of what they were supposed to be there for, and then they ended up there fighting, expelling each other from the streets, having real battles over the future of the movement. And if there had been sort of and again this is a very very difficult thing
to do. If you had the kind of organizations which would have been more common in the fifties and sixties, you probably would have had some pre existing understanding of how to work together in the streets. But again that was very very difficult to put together. The Internet in general, but specific types of social media firms that we saw become dominant twenty tens made it very very easy to
get people together, at least on the streets. So the question in my book specifically, I focus on January first, twenty ten to January first, twenty twenty. But I've been very gratified to hear that a lot of people that were intimately involved in organizing around racial justice and police brutality in the United States over those years found they told me that certain other things in other countries resonated with things that they had been through. I was really,
you know, grateful to hear that. But I don't specifically go into exactly twenty twenty. But to answer your final question in my three part answer to your to your very your good question, because it because it had so much in it, I think not that much changed. Really.
I think, really kind of by twenty twenty, you had the reproduction of the model that was in I don't want to say in style because that makes it sound a little bit too weak, but that had been seen as natural and effective and the obvious way to respond to injustice, back to basically Takoir Square in Egypt, in twenty eleven, and I think the strange thing about this decade is that a lot of a lot of the most powerful or seemingly powerful methods get reproduced even after,
you know, not only in very very different national situations, but after it's becomes clear that they didn't work out in the original case. So Egypt, for example, by twenty thirteen, just to list one of the quick examples of how things got worse. By twenty thirteen, there was a coup which derailed the incipient democratic revolution in Egypt and installed
the dictator that was even worse. So I think the ease with which this kind of thing can come together in the era of digital connectivity, which is often I think a false connected, like we feel like we're connected, but really we're sitting at home alone looking at our computers, the ease with which this kind of connectivity allows for a certain type of protest to come together didn't really change,
I think from twenty ten to twenty twenty. I think it is kind of the same approach that we saw at the beginning.
How do you think that the advent of misinformation and just you know, lies, alternative facts, these kinds of troll farms play into the willingness and the ability for people to glean information quickly download it, and then get into the streets.
Yeah, I think this is a big thing that changed. This is one thing that does absolutely change from twenty ten to twenty twenty. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember something that is often shocking to like properly young people that I speak to that two
thousand and eight, two thousand nine, ten, twenty eleven. The dominant idea, the dominant approach to the Internet was to believe that anything that happened because of the Internet, anything that happened because of social media, was inherently progressive, Like the Internet would just make the world more transparent, more democratic, people would have more access to truth, more people would be able to raise their voices. Whatever you thought should
happen to the global system. You thought that the Internet was going to push us there. Now, slowly across the decade, specifically in the US, by like twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, we started to realize a couple things. One we didn't get like the internet full stop. We didn't get the
Internet in the abstract. We got a specific set of online experiences that were shaped by for profit firms which manipulate what we see in order to some more advertising that that moves certain things to the top of your feed based on what they think will keep you glued
to your phones. We didn't just get like the Internet in its full in its full power, right, we got a specific type of Internet, and by twenty sixteen, I think people started to realize, like, oh, anybody, you can use the Internet to say whatever, right, powerful, powerful individuals, governments, corporations figured out how to do viral posts. They figured out how to spread the message that they wanted to spread.
And I think by twenty twenty, twenty one, twenty twenty three, if you think about sort of the way that liberal media in the United States would cover a apparently spontaneous mass of people marching on a capitol because of something they saw online back in twenty ten, that would have been read as necessarily good. In twenty twenty three, people might think, Okay, but who are these guys, Like, what
are they doing? What did they see online? What part of the Internet have they have they been hanging out in? And I think this is something that is a reversal that is really unfortunate, because I don't think that the Internet had to be that way. But the Internet that we now live on is that way, and that really affects the ways that what seemed to be so libratory about movements brought together partially by social media because many
many other factors bring them together. There's all the material and real societal factors that bring people together. But the movements that are brought together by partially social media end up having more problems than they should.
If we had the Internet that I think that we could do you think, then, Vincent, to be honest, it's not as if the genie is going to go back in the bottle, right in terms of the Internet and how we see it and what we had dreamt about the democratization of information, right like that was the thing was that there were all these gatekeepers, whether you were looking at you know, networks or you're looking at studios, and that the Internet was going to be this gatekeeper
lists place right where everyone had a voice and could be an eyewitness reporter and so on and so forth. The genie is not going to go back in the bottle. But do you think that because of how we now understand the Internet to be this force of capitalism right, end of misinformation, that we then at some point kind of revert back to the original contours of what organizing and protesting was.
Yeah, I think absolutely. I think your last point, I mean to do this book to reconstruct this work of history, and it's really like a story. I think people will see different lessons in it based on the way that
they come to the story of the decade. But to construct it, I do in interviews with two hundred, two hundred and fifty people around the world in twelve countries, and a lot of people come to the conclusion that you just outlined at the end of your question that it might be harder, it might take more work, but getting together and really meeting people and really forming the kind of organizations that allow us to work collectively, to work together, hand in hand to build a better world.
That's something we can't give up on. And then the first part of your question, I think the loss you know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, I think ultimately in a strange way, relates to one of the other themes that really energes in the book, and that is that this that scheme of the you outlined, I think so succinctly of like we thought to just okay, bad thing happens people in streets, lots of people.
In the streets, right yeah, and.
Then resolution right like this right all right. I think this all was related to a sort of deep optimism about technology, but also about the progress of history in general, Like I talk a little bit about it in the book what I call the Ideology of Progress. Martin Luther King has a very famous aout where he says, like, you can't just like assume progress is going to happen. You have to make it happen. So one million percent agree that you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
And I also agree that it's not easy to win back democratic control over the means of communication, like the the the environment online that we that we live our lives these days like nothing like no magical force, no history you know, no no new tool, no new you know. The passage of time is not going to do it
for us. It would require just like more effective protest movements in the future, I think will require careful analysis of what we can get done and then building building connections with other people to try to fight fight to do it, Like it's it's going to be hard. You can't snap your fingers and get back to the possible internet we all envisioned. It's going to take like building connections with other people and hard work to fight people that want.
To keep it that way, you know, because I I do I think about it in the way that you know, Again, the advent of social media, right, was about connecting people, was about us, you know, being able to find those friends that we might have lost touch with, being able to see family that we no longer able to gather with at the kitchen table on Sunday evenings like you
know to be. And but what has happened, right, is that you no longer see those feeds no right, that those feeds you know, are few and far between, the things that are overly advertising to you and the things that you're being pushed in the algorithm to see. And so I almost believe that maybe that is kind of the put that the going back is the way forward.
And I guess I will I will end with that question and ask you, like, as you look back and you reflect on this story of the last decade, what what what insight does it provide you for the next decade? The one that we are currently in. And do you see it as a reverting back as a way to move forward?
Yeah, I mean I ideally, when you move forward, you always learn from. And indeed, these two hundred, two hundred and fifty people that sat down with me over the last four years and often shared very, very difficult experiences would not have done so if they did not believe
that you could learn from. So ideally, the situation that they would like to see I'm not speaking for myself now is a world in which ten fifteen years ago from now, sorry, in twenty thirty twenty thirty five, you can look back at the apparent failures of the twenty tens and see, actually what are the seeds of ultimate victories in the future. But for that to happen, you
do not go back, I think, but you do. You must study very carefully, try to learn from and then incorporate as time as time, whether we like it or not, ceases endless lyon right like there will be more years coming, there will be more struggles. And the whole motivation that these people had to spend time with me just a journalists, and that's ever sort of carry out a revolution on my mind is to get together as humanity and try to learn from what happened recently.
Fantastic Vincent, thank you so much for making the time to join wilkaf Folks. The book is If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. It is on stands now, and folks, including the New Yorker, has raved that your clear eyed, sympathetic account of the unfulfilled promise of these protests leaves the reader with a bold vision of the future. Folks, get it now. That is it for me today, Dear friends, on woke as always. Power to the people and to all the people. Power.
Get woke and stay woke as fuck.