It Could Happen Here Weekly 102

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to
let you know this is a compilation episode. So every
episode of the week that just happened is here in
one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you
to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions. Hey, everyone, Robert Evans here,
Welcome to It could happen here, as I'm sure you're aware,
at this point over the weekend, somewhere between five hundred
and one thousand Hamas fighters. Those numbers have a lot
of flex in them. It's really unclear at this moment.
That just kind of my guess based on what I've

(00:43):
seen so far, carried out a successful infiltration and sneak
attack across a wide swath of the Israeli border. Their
methods were varied from motorized hang gliders and boats to
mobile columns of technicals and bulldozers which they use to
breach fence lines. Surprise seems to have been newly total
in their worst intelligence failure since the nineteen seventies. Many

(01:04):
IDF troops were caught literally in their underwear. Casualties seem
to have been highest among the police, who were unprepared
for militants armed with conventional military weapons. Casualty accounts remain
heavily in flux, so I will not labor over them here.
Suffice to say that the best information at the time
that I'm writing this suggests at least one thousand dead

(01:25):
in the first day or so of fighting. It appears
at the moment to be fairly evenly split between Israeli soldiers, police,
and civilians, as well as Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians.
We can expect the death toll among Palestinians to rise
steadily in the near future as the bombing of Gaza escalates.
It is very clear, though, that the Hamas did not

(01:47):
strike only military targets, and Israelis and Palestinians are not
the only people killed.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Right now, there are reports.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Coming in that a music festival, it was some sort
of sytrance psychedelia festival in southern Israel, on land that
was possibly illegally occupied, was attacked by Hamas militants. Something
like two hundred and sixty people are confirmed to have
been killed. There's pretty hideous video of a young German
woman in her twenties, her corpse stripped, being paraded around

(02:15):
by fighters. It's very ugly stuff. There's also unclear videos
of other killings. I've seen one video of a man
beating another man's head in it's claimed to be a
HUMAS militant and civilian clothes beating a Filipino guest worker
in Israel to death. There's no actual evidence that I've
seen as to who either person in the video is,

(02:36):
and a lot of the videos of horrible things that
are spreading right now are just that, videos that definitely
show violence, but that are extremely unclear as to who
is perpetrating the violence and why. We do, of course
know that hummas targeted a number of civilians. A significant
number were killed, including people in their homes, and unknown
numbers of people were kidnapped and taken back across the

(02:59):
border to be ransomed later for imprisoned fighters and Palestinian civilians.
This has happened before in previous escalations of conflict in
the area. It's not a new tactic, and the videos
of it are of course horrifying. The capturing and killing
of civilians is by any definition of the term, a
war crime. Israel's response has been horrifying as well, and

(03:20):
writ on a larger scale. Significant chunks of Gaza have
already been leveled in air strikes. At least one hospital
has been targeted, killing a nurse. Israel has cut off
power to Gasam, an active collective punishment that also qualifies
as a war crime. That term has less weight than
it used to these days. Many of us in the
West grew up with illusions about a rules based international order.

(03:42):
The crimes occurring now will continue to erode the idea
that war might ever have limits, Like whitewater cutting a
path through stone. I try to stay plugged into such things,
and I become aware of this most recent eruption as
it happened. I spent several hours trying to understand the
early open source dilligence, watching people that I trusted in
the region post videos that they could verify, and then

(04:05):
I went to sleep. When I woke up, I saw
the expected river of bloodthirst on social media. This is
also nothing new. The Internet has not created this behavior.
You may have read when you were in high school
that early in the US Civil War, picnicking civilians would
show up to ogle the Battle of Manassas. Certain aspects
of online culture have, however, lent a deeper ugliness to

(04:27):
the affair. I noticed this for the first time during
the fighting against ISIS. I reported from Mosel several times
and kept up with various Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, and
Twitter accounts that shared footage and updates from the field.
A subculture developed around this, fueled by a mix of
professional seeking intel and amateurs, some of whom later became experts,

(04:47):
and others of whom simply liked watching the violence. All
of us experienced a degree of desensitization, and Gallo's humor
was common. Researchers would share their favorite ISIS nachets, actively
Jihati theme music, and throw Arabic phrases that they'd read
in issues of Debiq, Isis's magazine into daily conversation. Lines

(05:08):
of dialogue from different videos of combat became catchphrases. The
best known of these was probably a video released in
April of twenty sixteen, which showed a group of four
ISIS fighters battling Kurdish troops north of Mosul. These guys
were not overly familiar with their weaponry, much of which
had recently been looted from Iraqi army stores. One of
the fighters in the video, Abu Hajar, fucks up constantly,

(05:31):
at one point roasting his own men with the back
blast of a rocket launcher. The timing on it is
pretty perfect, and it's basically impossible not to laugh a
little at this. His comrade shouts a now infamous line
at him, what is wrong with you? Abu Hajar. The
man who filmed the video dies, of course, and so
did a bunch of other people that day. Now, these

(05:52):
guys are Isis fighters, so it wasn't hard to laugh
at the footage and move on. I did, and so
did many other people. I still chuckle sometime at it.
Of late, though, I've come to find the laughter more unsettling.
This started after the expanded Russian invasion of Ukraine. I
began to see videos of wounded, dying, and dead Russian conscripts.
These were often close in gory shots, devoid of broader information,

(06:16):
and shot purely for entertainments. One thing to watch combat
videos in which people die if it gives you an
understanding of the nature of combat in that theater of war.
The kinds of weapons, use the efficacy of certain tactics.
It's another to just look at a bleeding teenager as
he slowly dies and joke about it. Now, some of
the folks who were laughing are people I knew Ukrainian

(06:37):
civilians and volunteers, and I cannot blame them, and do
not blame them for taking satisfaction or even mirth in
the death of an invader. That is how war works,
that is how war has always worked. It is foolish
and cruel to ask for decorum from people under siege.
I'm sure many Goasins feel the same about footage now
flooding the Internet from this most recent attack. But many

(07:00):
of the people cheering at dead Russian conscripts were not
soldiers and not civilians who were being shelled by that state,
but were random Americans, middle class, suburban war aficionados, far
from the danger, who spent time, who took a moment
from their day to joke about suffering soldiers in a
foreign country. A mirror of that behavior now proliferates as well.

(07:21):
It curdled my gut then and it still does. But
my feelings here are immaterial. I have come to believe
that this behavior is impossible to avoid or even mitigate.
To a very substantial degree. It also appears to be
nearly universal. Social media has made barbarism easier than ever
to monetize. As the years have gone on, every new

(07:42):
eruption of violence around the world brings with it more
footage faster. Ocent open source intelligence accounts have gone from
a niche obsession among reporters and conflict nerds to mainstream entertainment.
Because views equal money, especially on Twitter, where Elon Musk
pays people based on the end game age they get,
there is now a financial incentive to post videos that

(08:03):
will be shared widely, and as always, the stuff that
is shared most widely is the stuff that makes people angry.
Videos need not be truthful to spread. In some cases,
this means reposting old footage as if it is new.
This is particularly easy with the conflict in Gaza, since
Israel has launched so many strikes against it over the years.
One video of a building crumbling into rubble left or

(08:26):
a missile strike is as good as another. To the
rats scrambling for Elon Musk's pocket change, many viral disinformation
videos are just clips from the check video game Arma two.
For roughly a decade, footage of in game combat has
gone viral, netting followers and sometimes money for all manner
of shady figures. If you see video that's claimed to
be an Israeli helicopter or a Russian helicopter or an

(08:48):
American helicopter being shot down in some erupting field, you
should really double check that, because there's always a very
good chance that it's a clip from this video game
of a chopper going down or of some other kind
of military vehicle being taken out. In real warfare. It's
quite rare to get footage at a good angle and
close to that sort of thing. So anytime you see
footage that seems like it might be too good to

(09:11):
be real, it probably is. Such disinformation is, of course unsightly,
but that's not all it is. It can provoke violence
as well. A recent New York Times article on social
media disinformation makes this clear quote. The Times found several
pieces of misinformation that spread out across Israeli and Palestinian
neighborhood and activist WhatsApp groups this week. One which appeared

(09:32):
as a block of Hebrew text or an audio file,
contained a warning that Palestinian mobs were preparing to descend
on Israeli civilians. Palestinians are coming, parents, Protect your children,
read the message, which pointed specifically to several suburban areas
north of Tel Aviv. Thousands of people were in one
of the telegram groups where the post was shared. The
post then appeared in several WhatsApp groups, which had dozens

(09:52):
to hundreds of members. Now there were no reports of
violence in the areas mentioned in this post. This kind
of thing happened all over the world and has been
happening for years, and the fact that it's untrue does
not stop similar viral lies from inspiring and justifying mass
violence in places like India and Myanmar. In both those countries,
much of this targeted disinformation was posted at the direct

(10:15):
behest of state security agencies to further their efforts at genocide.
None of this is new. It all just works much
faster thanks to social media. The one truly significant change
in recent months has been the addition of a direct
profit motive to sharing lies. The best recent example of
this is a fellow named Mario Naffall. He's a con
artist and a crypto scammer who embezzled from his own

(10:37):
company and has built a massive following retweeting out of
context videos, starting with the Wagner rebellion in Russia. Earlier
this year, Elon Musk, whose ignorance of that conflict is unsurpassed,
called Naffall's messages the best coverage I've seen so far.
More recently, Marion Na Fall has been responsible for spreading
fake news about the potential capture of Nimrod Alone, who

(11:01):
is the commander of Israel's southern forces in the region.
The video that he claimed was Nimrod Alone being taken
into captivity was in fact a completely different person. It's
actually unclear who. Mario does not know anything about anything,
and I think was just lying because that would be
the most salacious thing possible. It's also worth noting that

(11:21):
Elon Musk recently made a post highlighting a couple of
ocent accounts that were his recommendations, his picks for credible
people to report on the conflict, and you should follow
these folks. He then deleted part of that tweet and
self censored himself when one of the sources he had
picked referred to dead Hamas fighters as martyrs, which Elon
had an issue with. Clearly, what he's doing is attempting

(11:43):
to pick and set his own propaganda dispensers, you know,
the people that, for whatever reason he thinks, are providing
the most convenient narrative about what's happening. None of this
should be mistaken for actual news.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
It is likely that.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Much, perhaps most, of the footage on your timeline from
the fighting in Gaza and Israel is reposted video that
is not current. Obviously, there is a lot of current
footage going out right now too, but a significant amount
of it is not. I find this exasperating, even as
I wonder how much that really matters. Is sharing old
footage of civilian homes being leveled by Israeli missiles really

(12:19):
an issue when similar homes are being bombed at the
same time. I do still think so, but I'm no
longer sure that my feelings on the matter are quite rational.
The most commonly accepted definition of intelligence of intellect that
you'll find is the ability to adapt to change and
select environments, or the ability to deal with change in

(12:40):
your environment. If that is truly the best measure of intelligence,
then my discussed at disinformation makes me kind of stupid.
Its purveyors have had blinding success in using it to
push their own narratives and to shape reality. I use
the word barbarism earlier to describe this, and it's a
loaded word, but not nearly so loaded as its synonym, savagery.

(13:03):
Savagery is a word that inspires powerful emotions for good reason.
It was often used by white supremacist colonizers to paint
whole peoples as backwards and less human, especially when they
engaged in acts of resistance that were in reality no
bloodier or more violent than the acts being perpetrated against them.
The word predates European colonialism, though it seems to date

(13:25):
back to around thirteen hundred, and it entered French salvage
like the Cologne Johnny depphawks from the Latin salvaticus, which
literally means of the woods. Why this digression because in
two thousand and four, an Islamist strategist named Abu Baker
Naji published a book on the Internet titled Management of Savagery.
In Naji's conception, savagery was defined as terrorist attacks against

(13:48):
civilian infrastructure and stufflike tourist facilities, which were meant to
provoke violent escalations from superpowers, that violence would radicalize more
people against the West and lead to a progressive degradation
of social order and operational capacity. In the nation's nause
saw as enemies, The management of savagery was a key
text for the men who wound up creating the Islamic State.

(14:10):
Some will use this to argue that the tactics failed,
since Isis is not exactly thriving at present. To do
so would be to ignore the six trillion dollars the
United States lit on fire fighting a disastrous war on terror,
which supercharged much of the underlying instability in our country
and may yet lead to a collapse in domestic order.
I will admit that I have found the framework of

(14:32):
managing savagery useful in my interpretation and understanding of conflict,
both domestic and international. In twenty twenty I got to
watch the process up close over the course of dozens
of protests. The basic strategy of most Portland protests that year.
When like this you got a bunch of people to
march up to a police building, they would chant and
yell until the police got angry and then gassed and

(14:53):
or beat up everybody. After a while, this dynamic was
widely understood and accepted by protesters. They saw their suffering
and the risk that they engaged in as an acceptable
trade off because it revealed the violence and savagery inherent
in policing as an institution. This, they hoped would radicalize
others against it, people who watched clips of videos from

(15:14):
the protest or who attended themselves, And for a time
this strategy worked quite well. Many people who had been
a political on the matter grew utterly hardened against the
cops after a few hours in the gas clouds. People
cannot endure violence, however, without being changed by it, so
as the week's war on, participants grew more and more
comfortable with not just property destruction, but with the use

(15:34):
of things like molotov cocktails. One may consider a molotov
to be necessary sometimes, and throughout history they often have been,
but savage is as good a term to describe firebombs
as any. No one was killed by any molotov that
I ever saw used in Portland, but of course no
protests come close to the savagery of warfare. The emotional
dynamics at play are shades of each other, though, and

(15:57):
I thought it might be useful to mention. Perhaps a
more or illustrative example would be my own experiences in Mosul.
In the early summer of twenty seventeen. My team and
I were embedded with an Iraqi federal police unit in
the Old City, where the fighting was intense and hideous.
We came under fire from a sniper. Some of the
shots were so close that chipped concrete hit my helmet.
The mortar team with us responded with the help of

(16:18):
a spotter. They dropped explosive shells on homes and shops
until they hit and killed the sniper. In that moment,
I felt elation I've seldom felt since. After we found
better cover, I began composing the scene in my head,
laying out how I would write it. Then my fixer, Sangar,
said something that interrupted my train of thought and has
remained with me ever since. Did you count how many
rounds they fired before they hit him? I told him

(16:40):
I thought it was six or seven. Maybe where do
you think the others landed?

Speaker 3 (16:45):
From?

Speaker 1 (16:45):
His tone was clear what he meant. The old city
was crowded. Many civilians had not yet been able to
escape the Isis lines. Their homes were often next door
to fighting positions. And the density of the city meant
that any honest hit still had a good chance of
hitting someone. Later, I met a man whose house had
been hit twenty times by mortar rounds and rockets before
he had a chance to escape with his family, So

(17:09):
the glee of the moment faded. My writing about that
scene was more sober, more careful, and much better. As
a result, saying our's words have helped me shape both
my coverage of war and my reactions to it. Ever
since this shouldn't matter to people being bombed out of
their homes and losing loved ones right now, it might
be helpful though, to those of us watching bloodshed from
behind a screen, at least until we're the ones filming.

Speaker 4 (17:46):
Welcome to It could happen here on Garrison Davis. This
is the show where we talk about how everything is
kind of falling apart and how we can sometimes put
it back together. Joining me is my dear, dear collaborator
and friend, James is Stout. Good Good morning, James.

Speaker 5 (18:02):
Good morning, Garrison.

Speaker 6 (18:03):
That's very kind of you, Thank you, And we.

Speaker 4 (18:05):
Got a very special episode here today. We are talking
with four people who have put together a new book
by Aka Press called no Parseran. We're gonna have kind
of a little bit of a like a group discussion
about anti fascist history and this kind of this the
state of anti fascism in the past few years. I know,

(18:27):
this is how I kind of got started with radical
politics growing up in Portland, Oregon. You see Nazis marching
around in your street and you're like, oh, well, this
is obviously a problem. Someone should probably do something about this.
And stuff has changed a lot the past the past
few years. I mean, like the anti fascist movement that
I got kind of that I kind of got into

(18:47):
only twenty eighteen. You know, it's very different now, and
it's I don't know, there's these types of things live
on through like oral histories as well as you know, books,
and I think it's really cool to have these types
of conversations. So joining us today is Shane Burley, Emily Gorcinski,
Michael Novic, and Darryl Lamont Jakins. Greetings everyone, I'm going

(19:10):
to hand it over to Shane and you can kind
of talk about the book, I guess.

Speaker 7 (19:16):
Yeah, thanks Scarrison, Thanks James for having us on the
whole crew of us. Yeah, this book was something came
out last year, but we had been working on it
for about four years. I'm starting in twenty eighteen. I
was drunk with Kim Kelly and New York and we
thought it'd be really great to put together something with
all of our friends. And what do you do with

(19:38):
a big group of people. It takes like four or
five years to pull off. But really the idea was
trying to do something that was bigger than what had
been written about anti fascism at that point, which was
shockingly narrow. What people understood of as of just a
few movements, mostly very recent history, and so much wasn't

(19:59):
being included in that conversation. So the idea was, how
can we build out like a much bigger picture of
this by including as many voices as possible.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
So we ended up getting a couple.

Speaker 7 (20:10):
Of dozen folks together that had different takes on it,
some talking about tech, some talking about deep history, some
talking about anti fascism in their countries other continents, and
so in general, the idea was to make it feel
like a discussion between people who either know each other
or should be like in some kind of comradeship with

(20:30):
each other. So that was sort of where it came together.
I think with this conversation, the way we were thinking
about this is I wanted to I wanted the opportunity
to talk with basically my friends about their history a
little bit, and so I asked three folks that had
a really long history with doing organizing work, and so
I thought it would be cool maybe if you go
through talking to them a little bit about their prehistory

(20:54):
or their early history organizing. And Michael, your history goes
back the furthest as you know, we know, so I
thought we could kick off with you and then talk
with Emily and then Darryl, just kind of getting into
your background. So how do you get started in movement work?
Actually I should say first, when did you get started
in movement where?

Speaker 8 (21:14):
Well, yeah, so I sometimes felt a little bit of
a dinosaur. I was born in nineteen forty seven, so
the fascism in power was a fairly recent reality in
my life. My father was an immigrant from Poland. I
came here in the thirties. Most of his family was
destroyed in Ballastoke. They had an uprising there similar to

(21:36):
the Warsaw Getto uprising, and almost everybody was lipidated in
that process. So there's a family history there for me
also obviously grew up in the shadow of the US
atomic bombing of Rosha Monagasaki and the US incarceration of
Japanese Americans and concentration camps, so you know, those realities

(22:00):
in my life. I've lived in a you know, orthodox
Jewish immigrant working class family and neighborhood in Brooklyn, which
is now dominated by extremely right wing forces Borough Park.
It's one of the bastions of probably uh you know,
neo fashionst Republican prosionists. But somehow when I grew up

(22:24):
there that was not the case. Anyway, I got involved
in politics in the sixties and you know student movement stuff,
anti war stuff, and at Brooklyn College, which when I
was there was a three public, four year college part
of the City University system in New York, and I

(22:46):
was actually eventually elected student body president. They had liquidated
the student government earlier when you know, people opposed the
Korean War, and we had a struggle to get you know,
for student rights and anti war stuff and so on,
and we succeeded in getting student body elections for officers

(23:07):
for the first time in about a dozen years. But
you know, as part of all that anti war and
anti police brutality and other stuff that was going on
in Brooklyn at the time. And then we raised the
question of the fact that Brooklyn College was ninety eight
percent white or nine percent white in a borough that
even then was you know, the majority black in Puerto Rican.

(23:31):
And suddenly all the student support we had had for
all the other struggles cops off the campus and you know,
Navy off the campus, and so on we go, you know,
got a dean of students fired and other stuff. But
as soon as we raised the question of opening the
campus up and having open ambissions to the city university
system and a special emissions program for black and Puerto
Rican high school students, most of our student support evaporated.

(23:56):
And for me that was an object lesson that unless
you're you know, conscious the organizing about internalized and institutionalized racism,
everything else you do that is you know, progressive or
anti imperialist or anti war is kind of a house
of cards or you know, castles made of sand. And
in particular and raising those issues, we discovered that there

(24:18):
was a fascist element down the campus. There were people
who formed the early Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn who
were primarily anti black and Also there's a group called
the youth what was it, Young Americans for Vitom YAF,
which was like the youth wing of the National Review,
right wing Republican formation, and they were pretty openly fascistic

(24:41):
in their politics. So, you know, it became a question
that if you were doing you know, anti racist and
anti war and anti capitalist organizing, you were going to
face not just you know, a struggle against the force
of the state, but that there were reactionary elements within
particularly white society. And I think because I said the colonialism,

(25:01):
you know, there's a mass base for that. And struck
by the title of the show just say, I don't
know if people are familiar with the book, it can't
happen here, but obviously your title is a reflection it
could happen here. I think it has happened here. For
one thing, I think the fashion has always been an
element of US political culture because of settler colonialism. You knows,

(25:26):
definition of fascism is that it's bringing the methods of
rule of the colonies into the metropol But the US
is the settler colony, and therefore there are colonized people
inside this country. You can always have been and so
fascistic elements of you know, slave labor genocide, you know,
land theft, all the rest have always been part and
part of that is also creating that mass base within

(25:49):
the settler population that supports you know, that leadership. So anyway,
I think that that you know, that both those personal
aspects and that consciousness, and so I came in contact with,
you know, the very radical forces in the Black Freedom
Circle back then. The Black Panther Party is very active.

(26:10):
There was one of the people in the Black Student
Union joined the Black Panther Party. You know, there's a
period of very fascist attacks and the Panthers had formed
the National Committee of Combat Fascism and had an analysis
that you know, the US was fascistic, and you know,
George Jackson at that time said, you know, fascism is

(26:33):
already here, and I think he meant it, you know literally,
And so that's part of the perspective I've carried through
for you know, I don't know what that is sixty
years now close to him.

Speaker 7 (26:45):
Yeah, I mean, I think really quickly, I would like
to hear kind of what your experience was with forming
John Brown. Where did the idea come from? Because I
think for a lot of a lot of people are
thinking of recent anti fascist American anti fascist history ends
up being kind of a starting point for a certain
kind of no platform tactic. So how did you first

(27:06):
kind of develop that? What brought you in?

Speaker 8 (27:09):
So, yeah, just to say, I was, you know, coming
out of the movement as I did, I moved from
New York to California because there was a strong There
was a newspaper called The Movement, which was the newspaper
basically of friends of Snick. It was the people who
left Snick when Snick adopted a black power analysis and

(27:31):
said that white people who were involved should go organize
in the white community. And there was a you know,
kind of a I was part of a working class
organizing collective in Hayward, California. Eventually out of that I
got connected with, you know, some of the people that
lad a foreign Prairie Fire organized committee. I was in
a group in the Bay Area called the June twenty

(27:51):
eighth Union. It was a gay ends, pro socialist, anti imperiallests,
pro feminist collective of mostly people of being the set.
And we went to what was called the Hard Times Conference,
which was put on by Prairie Far Organizing Committee in Chicago,
and it turned out that there was secretly an effort
by the weather underground to come up from underground to

(28:17):
create a new communist party, and they surfaced that at
that conference. But there's a lot of opposition to that
from across the board, from different Black liberation, American Indian movement,
the Puerto Rican, depending, the Struggle, Chicago movement, all of them,
you know, felt that there was a sell out of
the politics there anyway. Out of that process I was
part of. I joined a Prairie Fire Organized Committee eventually,

(28:40):
and that split and then it was a West coast
group which captained Prairie far the East coast formed a
group called the main Eineteenth Communist Organization and they launched
the original John Brown Anti Clan Committee, an initiative from
the prisons, the organized prisoners and New York had discovered

(29:02):
that there was an extensive network of clan claverns that
were based in the prison guards and some of the
white prisoners, and they asked for outside supporters to begin
to expose that and deal with it and help them
deal with it. And John Brandon, the Gillen Committee, was
formed out of that. Separately very far on the West
Coast had formed a group called Take a Stand against

(29:22):
the Klan. There was a lot of you know, that
was the period that the beginning of the sort notification
of the clan that was going on. So this is
the seventies and eventually, you know, under a challenge from
particularly the New African Independence movement, the Malcolm Xis grassroots movement,
New African People's Organization, which both Prairie Fire on the

(29:45):
West Coast and May nineteenth and the East Coast were
connected to, they pushed for a joint organization. So at
that point there was a kind of reconstitution of John
Brannan at the Clan Committee, and so I was part
of that and we merged. You know, there were chapters
in Atlanta, Chicago, the Bay Area, Los Angeles where I

(30:06):
ended up in New York, I think Bowling Green, maybe
the couple of Connecticut, and so they were quite active
in that period, and you know, street level confrontations and
you know, other exposures of early Neo Nazi activity and
clan activity, but particularly from a perspective of conscious and

(30:32):
active solidarity with the black freedom struggling, particularly the New
African Independence Movement which is a very high level of unity,
and over a period of time, you know, there was
a struggle to broaden that out and try to be
a more all embracing organization that could relate to the struggle.
There were a lot of different formations at that time.
There was the National Anti Clan Network, and there was

(30:55):
a couple of others, and there were different politics among
all of them, and you know, John Brandeth Glen made
that time took more of a position of pro direct
action and also, as they say, kind of just salidated
with the Black freedom struggle as a basis for doing
that work.

Speaker 7 (31:13):
The Anti Clan Network I think so people kind of
know that's where the Southern Poverty Law Center eventually came
out of another networks of these different groups out here
in Oregon, the Rural Organizing Project was sort of like
a down the line there. I think it's interesting too
about the founding story. I was talking with our mutual
friend Lisa Roth, who is part of the founding of that.

(31:34):
Very first iteration of the John Brown Committee was they
were doing a prison organizing with Black Panthers and Upstate
New York and they were writing these letters saying the
prison guards are clan and they thought, you mean, they're
really racist, you know, obviously they're the prison guards. Yeah,
and when they went and looked it up. No, the

(31:55):
president of the prison guard union was the Grand Dragon
of the State KKK.

Speaker 8 (32:00):
He actually he had a position within the prison system
as the head of the sort of education activity, educational
activities in the prisons, and was using his formal position
within the prison system to organize white prisoners along with
the guards into clan collaborance.

Speaker 7 (32:16):
Which seems like a total that was sort of a
validation with the centerpiece of John Brown being that cops
and clan have that kind of collaboration because that was
there kind of the founding like lesson of that organizing.

Speaker 8 (32:29):
Sure, the blue by day, White by night and a
lot of those slogans come out of that period, and
you know, I think it is you know, it's related
to the later the ar a line that you know,
fascism is built from above and below that there's you know,
elements within the state that are operating independently, but there
are also state forces and then they're you know independent. Yeah,

(32:49):
so called revolutionary fascists that claim to be opposing the state,
but we're not really.

Speaker 7 (32:56):
Well, I think to fast forward a little bit, quite
a bit, Emily, I remember when we first met each other.
Obviously it was probably shortly after Unite the Right happened.
But how did you first get drawn into organizing? Did
you have a long history before that happened, or were
you just part of getting involved around the ramp up
to that now?

Speaker 3 (33:16):
I think, you know, compared to the other folks here,
I'm sort of the summer child of the group, right,
I don't have a super long history in organizing. I
think that, you know, I came to anti fascism before
Unite the Right happened. I work in the tech industry,
and sometimes sort of around the gamer Gate era, I

(33:40):
started noticing how white supremacist the tech industry had become. Right,
it was sort of this nexus for a lot of
this strongly libertarian, strongly supremacist mindset. It was sort of
the worst of that meritocratic ideal that a lot of

(34:01):
us had to experience in university and in our workplaces,
and it just seemed like it was getting out of control.
And that was kind of at the same time that
we were seeing a lot more women come into the
tech industry, we were starting to see a lot of
changes in the space, and then there was sort of
like this this vacuum left by gamer Gate as that

(34:21):
all sort of died down, a lot of this sort
of energy needed to go somewhere, and so I started
speaking out against some white supremacist organizing that was happening
at conferences and things like that. And I think the
first wake up call for me happened when some folks
that are linked to Milo Yanapolis put together a list

(34:43):
of SGW Social Justice Warriors and this was journalists and
activists and people who were speaking out and I somehow
made that list. And I realized, after you know, looking
at this and seeing what was going on, that be
political being sort of just somebody with an opinion, wasn't

(35:04):
you know, there was no way to be that wasn't
a defense against what was coming. And so I just
sort of looked inside and said, well, if this is
the way it's going to be, like, I'm going to
fight back, I'm gonna I'm gonna figure out what to do.
I didn't really have a lot of organizing ties, they
didn't really have a network, so like every other person,
I just you know, shouted at Twitter and somehow that worked.

(35:29):
The irony of this all is that all this was
going on, I was starting to do you know, digital activism,
using my my tech skills to try to shine light
on things that were wrong in the federal government and
the Trump administration and things like that, and I really.

Speaker 9 (35:47):
Just wanted to step away from that.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
I kind of had, like I went to Prague after
Trump was inaugurated.

Speaker 9 (35:53):
I wanted to like, you know, clear the air a
little bit.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
I didn't like the fact that I was on this
hit list that was put together by people who have
like a couple of handshakes away from the president's desk.
So I went to Europe. I went to Prague, and
I cleared my head. And when I came back, I said,
you know what, I'm going to just focus on local activism.
I'm going to focus on the issues that are in
my community. I knew that we had things going on
with our local low income housing space, we had a

(36:20):
lot of you know stuff around the statues that was
coming up in town, and I didn't really expect, like
it was kind of random that Unite the Right was
you know, destined for Charlottesville, and so all of the work,
all of the organizing that I had started to do
that spring, and that where I guess that winter in

(36:40):
that spring started to pay off, as you know, as
Charlottesville became the target of all of the neo Nazis.
So I think it was sort of I don't want
to say it's it's fortunate, because it's not really the
greatest like it's not a positive thing that that's what happened.
But I guess that I am lucky as I came

(37:01):
to this awakening it was happening you know, before and
not after, and that I was able to use the
network that I was building, the audience I was building
in order to help like back. So yeah, I guess
that's that's sort of like, I don't know that I
would have been, you know, as much as dedicated as
it was if it wasn't for that very personal sort

(37:23):
of experience. And I look back at that and I'm
kind of embarrassed by that. But you know, we all
have our own paths.

Speaker 7 (37:30):
Yeah, absolutely, And I think, you know, there's something interesting
about that year in advance of the Unite the Right,
where we're different groups were testing the waters a little bit,
and how that was their ability to ramp up in
the area but it was also the anti fascist ability
to ramp up, you know, so talking with Mimi and
other organizers there, like those earlier events, like the earlier

(37:52):
Clan rally that happened like, you know, months earlier, or
kind of those that early flash mob that Richard Spencer led,
that gave people the opportunity to build up the base.
So how did you kind of shift to focusing on
that first? I guess how did you hear about Unite
the Riots, this big kind of like target event, But
what was the steps along the way there?

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Yeah, I think one of the things that really that
I really tried to do that year was to use
the experience I was having traveling to try to understand
the history of movements that were against you know, great
state powers. Right when I was in Prague, I spent
a lot of time reading about and looking into and

(38:33):
walking through the sites of where the Prague Spring took
place and where the Builder Revolution took place, and how
these groups of people were able to overcome this massive
amount of state violence and still be successful. And when
Richard Spencer first came to town that first flashbob is
now called Charlottesville one point.

Speaker 9 (38:51):
Zero, I was in Berlin at the time.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
I woke up to see what was going on, and
it was, you know, I think again just sort of
these you know, the universe coming into alignment. As that
was happening, there's also this big anti Nazi demonstration that
was happening in Berlin. So I took that opportunity to
go and learn about what anti fascists are doing in

(39:15):
other countries and other localities, how they are organizing, how
they spread their message. And so I think that, you know,
as I learned about all of this going on, what
the first thing that I tried to do is just
look around and say, what can we learn from people
who have been here before, who have done this before
and have this in their living memory. And that's what

(39:36):
I tried to take back to Charlottesville. And then, you know,
I think it was after that trip I was in
Berlin in May. I came back for that trip. I
joined in the anti fascist march almost as soon as
I got back, and that's when we had heard we've
like learned about the two rallies, the July eighth KKK
rally and the August twelfth Unite the Right, and at

(39:56):
that point, like from that moment, it was just like
every making moment of my day was spent organizing for
those rallies.

Speaker 7 (40:06):
It's the sort of effect that just circumstance sort of
speeds people's capacity to do it, but that maybe even
maybe capacity is not the right word. They're kind of
understanding of what it takes to do that work. So
I was interviewing a number of the rabbis in the area,
and these were not super political folks. These were not
people like from some activist synagogues who were mainline synagogues,

(40:28):
but they connected with a number of faith leaders from
the historically black churches, both of which were saying, Okay,
we're both going to be targeted here, and there's no
there's no institutions coming to help. Really, there's no one
we can count on here. So they created those collaborative
spaces and really pretty complicated and effective organizing models, having
no experience doing it because of that hyper intense space,

(40:51):
which I think is in a way that's why those
circumstances have such an important effect on it. So how
did you basically planned those couple of weeks in advance?
How are you thinking about it, and what was the
kind of groups you were working with so like networks
that were coming together formal organizations.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Yeah, I think there were a bunch of you know,
organizations on the ground that I connected with. Certainly, we
had a local chapter of Surge showing up for racial
justice and they were doing a lot of organizing. And
there was you know, the Anarchist People of Color APOC.
They were a great group of people that we connected

(41:31):
with and that I connected with. And it also happened
that I started dating somebody who's also connected to the
local anti fascist scene at the time, so I sort
of brought into all of these circles through that relationship
as well. And so I think that sort of all
of these things combined really made it clear that we
had a small but very knowledgeable base of people that

(41:55):
could organize. And I think that one of the things
that we did exceptionally well in the lead up is
because we had such a small core of people who
don't who didn't really have you know, a breadth of experience,
you know, in doing this, we were able to compartmentalize
really well. You know, some people were focusing on, you know,
what are we going to do with the you know,

(42:16):
the clergy collective and how are they going to organize
what is their action going to be? And we had
a media collective and that was where I put most
of my energy. And so I think that we had
these different groups of people that could focus on different
things that helped helped us unblock ourselves from like the grander,
sort of more theoretical, more abstract way to respond. We

(42:39):
just we didn't have the time to debate over tactics,
We didn't have time to debate over the ideology of
anti fascism, what the right thing to do was, or
what the best thing to do was. We really had
to focus our time on what do we have time
to do? What can we achieve given the constraints that
we have, And with those sort of constraints, I think

(43:00):
that maybe we left some good actions on the table,
But what we came up with I think was fairly effective.

Speaker 7 (43:09):
Do you think that it carried those community folks together
through and after the event you feel like those community
ties are still there?

Speaker 3 (43:17):
I think some of them are and some of them
are not. There are certainly community times that have broken.
There was a lot of pressure that built up. There
were differences of opinions that we set aside and hoped
to resolve afterwards, and those did not necessarily get resolved
in some cases, some interpersonal issues, interorganizational issues.

Speaker 9 (43:42):
I remember at one point there was a.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
Decision that was being made, driven by a couple of
the organizing groups, that they would not support anyone that
was going to be armed, and this was a tension
point between those groups and groups like Redneck Revolt that
were coming armed to help support anti fascist rallies, and
that like that is something that still, you know, affected

(44:04):
me pretty well because I was being targeted because of
how present I was in social media and Twitter and.

Speaker 9 (44:11):
Things like that.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
I needed to have an armed security detail, and you know,
that freated a lot of a lot of tension.

Speaker 9 (44:19):
I didn't have legal like I had legal support pulled
away from me.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
I didn't have legal support until until November of that
year when noise of a.

Speaker 9 (44:27):
Lawsuit started happening.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
So I think that some of those things did create
some tension that led to fracturing of community, but some
things actually really did tie the community back together and
kept it close even as we have drifted apart and
moved into different you know, different cities, different countries, different states, whatever.

Speaker 9 (44:46):
I think it's a bit of both you.

Speaker 7 (44:48):
Know, there's one of the founding members of Rose Head
Antifa said something that cast stuck with me, which is
that a lot of people will look to anti fascism
as a way to rebuild the left or as to
build this big mass united left. But that's not actually
what's being demanded of the situation. The situation is very
pretty straightforward is to basically destroy this opposition of people.

(45:11):
And how you do that. I mean, you can have
considerations about how they bring in the community and try
and align with other groups, but in the end, there's
other decisions are being made, and so people often get
disappointed when that ends up being what those projects actually are. Now, Darryl,
you were down there, I unite.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
The right right, correct, that was there. You're everywhere when
we're there, I try to be. I think one of
the things about Charlottesville that was really important is that
we saw it coming, and we had seen it coming months,
probably even years before it even happened. Hell, we saw

(45:50):
it before in my case, because one of those everywhere
places I had been was in York, Pennsylvania about twenty
years prior, where you had somebody from a group called
the World Church Creator. He was he was a local
from World Church to the Creator that invited the leader

(46:13):
of that group, Matt Hale, to hold the public meeting
at their local library. It was a tactic that that
particular group had and what that resulted in was about
three hundred Neo Nazis coming to York, PA, about three
four hundred anti fascists coming out to oppose them. And

(46:36):
you pretty much saw a parallel of Charlottesville. As I said,
up to an including a this was January twelve, twenty twelve,
and up to and including a someone driving into a
group of people and no one pad, no one died,
no one was killed, hurt pretty bad. I think the

(47:00):
only reason why he served two years was because one
of the people that he hit was a cop. Now
we fast forward to Charlottesville, and ironically, I saw the
person that organized things in York represented Vanguard America at Charlottesville.

(47:21):
And two days prior, Mike for One People's Project had
a little bit of a podcast where we basically said
that after everything that was going on in Charlottevielle prior
to Charlottefvield one point oh, Charlottesville two point zero, and
then this whole Unite the Right thing was happening where

(47:43):
it was just making a big production out of having
this event. We pretty much were resigned to the idea
that this was going to be the so called rights
ultimat in the sense that this was going to be
what and everybody, you know, realizing how bad things can get,

(48:05):
you know it's gonna be bad. We expected it to
be bad. I went to Charlotteville armed, and I think
really it was one of the first times that I
ever did strap up when I went to one of
these things. When everything went down, I mean, prior to
everything going down, I was just basically doing my think

(48:28):
videotaping everyone cracking jokes. I was playing happy Warrior because
you know, you see this all before up to and
including the fighting. The fighting is there. I mean, that
happens all the time, even that massively, I'm used to it.
What I wasn't used to was when someone was murdered,

(48:50):
when someone was killed, because that's never happened, and that
actually freaked me out. It Actually, I actually got really
pissed off when that went down, and I think a
lot of us did because if we recognize this ourselves,

(49:12):
if we who had been on the front lines all
these years recognized that this was the direction that was
going in. We also recognized that we had the ability
to do something about it beforehand. That's one of the
reasons why the ACO you got into a lot of
trouble because they were busy trying to protect the free
speech of everybody in all the neo Nazis there and

(49:37):
insisting that they were going to be in that park
because that's where they wanted to be. And when everything
went down, a lot of people just looked at the
ACO and said, could you at least recognize us how
dangerous they was trying to make the situation ACOU I
believe will no longer represent groups that insist on holding

(50:02):
armed rallies. I think that was one of the things
that they had said, that they were one of the changeups.
And even with the whole discussion about their freedom of
speech and saying it was a matter of that freeze speech,
people's attitudes were just like, Okay, fine, that's a given,
But couldn't you let them get their own attorneys? Why
do you have to keep defending the worst of society

(50:25):
in the name of a free speech that frankly doesn't
seem to be afforded. The rest of us whenever we
are opposing them. That's the attitude that a lot of
people had, and it was really the last straw. Charlotteville
was really the last straw, and people really got on
a different footing and dealing with fascism. I was used

(50:50):
to people trying to pull all the stops and trying
to defend the quote unquote defend the freedom of speech
of not just the fascist in our society, but the
right in general. So every time I would criticize somebody
on the right, somebody would try to say things ranging

(51:12):
from we have to respect their freedom of speech or
we should just ignore them, you know. And I hated
it whenever it was and when it was combined the
best way to fight hate speeches with more speech you
use the more speech, Well, why don't you just ignore them?
That stopped after Charlottesville. All of a sudden, people started saying, Okay,

(51:35):
we need to start doing something about this group. That's
why you saw forty thousand people in Boston protesting against
the fascist up there when they tried to hold a rally.
Maybe a week or two later, you know, that's why
you saw websites like the Daily Stormer get you know,

(51:56):
yanked out of yanked out of the mainstream, and now
they're sitting on the dark web. That's why you saw
people disowned their family members because they went to this rally.
We are seeing people being not just James Field's but
others being held legally accountable for what they did in Charlotteville.

(52:18):
And all of those individuals are fascists. All of the
individuals were white supremacists. We realized that we had the
ability to do something, and we started doing something. Unfortunately,
we stopped after Trump lost and people tried to go

(52:39):
back to that whole just ignore them routine, and within
months we got January sixth, and that was when they
tried they ratcheted up again about how we're going to
really curtail the right and all and all that we
but now that just became rhetoric. We're here again because

(53:03):
you're starting to see a lot of the rumblings with
the attacks on the trans community. Basically, conservatives across the
country are primarily trying to essentially do something to the
rest of the country. I mean, you heard that when
you go to the SEAPAC meeting, the Conservative Political Action

(53:23):
Conference a couple of months ago. All they did was
talk about things they wanted to do to America, you know,
And this is what we have been fighting all our lives.
This is what we have been warning about all our lives.
And while anti fascism has essentially become mainstream, there is

(53:50):
still a lot more work that we have to do
in order to basically see all that work therefore, and
that's them pretty much the deal.

Speaker 7 (54:03):
Yeah, that forty thousand person kind of response to a
Proud Boy rally in Boston just a couple of weeks
after Unite the Right, it was one of the most
common sense kind of moments and it totally dwarfs to them.
I mean, forty thousand people will do whatever they want, right,
forty thousand people will stop any kind of small march,
even a large one. And so the lesson was learned,

(54:24):
then it seemed to be forgotten immediately.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
And they're perfect example of that because that group that
they were protesting went on to become super Happy Fun America.
They're the group that now pushing the straight Pride rallies
and they are really in the forefront of all the
anti trans anti LGBTQ plus activity, and of course some

(54:49):
of them got arrested in at January sixth, so they
pretty much built up their stock since then, but so
did we, and it's just a matter of using this
Who's going to use their stock more effectively?

Speaker 5 (55:05):
Yeah, I think it was really interesting how you centered this,
like this shift that happened among people who weren't previously
involved in anti fascism from this kind of neoliberal understanding
or that maybe even liberal understanding of the sort of
struggle against fascism being one that could take place in
the open, with free speech being the most important thing

(55:26):
that's at stake, and one that moved like in a
moment right when when I Nazi killed Heather Higher two.
There's a ton more at stake than we thought. And
I think you're right that we've gone back, like right,
we've gone back to the previous understanding, which I think

(55:47):
is what everyone kind of a lot of people. I
guess they felt like they could vote for Joe Biden
and then it was done, like it had disappeared. And
I'd be interested to hear all of your insights, with
all your experience in the movement and like what needs
to be done. I guess to keep that organizing going
as wearing this kind of Nadir or thermidor of like

(56:09):
anti fascist organizing in the US.

Speaker 8 (56:12):
If I could offer something from maybe a little bit
of a longer view, you know. Yeah, you know, Darrell
talked about somebody being killed and that never happening before,
but of course it has happened before. And so in
nineteen seventy nine there was a death of the Clan
rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and people were you know,
attacked and killed by an alliance of the clan and

(56:36):
the Nazis with you know, the ATF had people in
one and the I forget I think the FBI had
people in the other and were instrumental in bringing the
two forces together to attack the anti Clan group and
several people were killed in that. And then the same
thing with.

Speaker 10 (56:55):
Aar in.

Speaker 8 (56:58):
Las Vegas. Lynn spit new Born, a black tattoo artist,
and Darren Shirsey was actually I think a sailor, active
duty sailor who were in anti racist action in Las
Vegas were executed and killed by neo Nazis there. And
so I think there is a history of that that
we need to be aware of, but also that there's

(57:19):
ups and downs and lulls in both fascist organizing anti
fashion organized. One of the things that happened after the
seventy nine killings is that Ronald Reagan launched his campaign
for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of the killing
of schwar Er Chainyan Goodman, on a state frights platform,

(57:42):
And while he was president, you know, I brought in
Pat rob Pat Buchanan and you know, went to Bittberg.
So there's a long history of the state, you know,
playing foot seat with these people, and I think we
should recognize that, but also that there are going to
be ups and downs in and both fascists and anti

(58:02):
fascist organizing, and you know, just see that that I
think the longer range perspective that is important to understand.
The other thing I did want to take a little
exception to is the idea that the role of anti
fascist is to destroy fascists, and I think that I
don't completely agree with that analysis. I think that it's
critical that actually anti fascists force to see themselves as

(58:24):
part of a revolutionary transformation of this society and its entirety,
and that the ability to actually reach an organizing people
has to do with making it clear that fascists are
not proviting an alternative to what's wrong with the society
although they claim to be and that we are, that
we're part of liberatory and you know, self determination elements,

(58:46):
anti colonial elements, you know, support for sovereignty of indigenous people,
you know, support for LGBTQ people's rights and all those
things that have a positive aspect of a way to
reorganize society in a different way than the facts are
putting forward. And I think that that is critically trying
to sustain the base and build a base by you know,

(59:06):
having a positive you know, one of the things that
I've been doing for many years, I published Turning the Tide,
which you know, started as a little zine we were
sending to the other chapters of Anti Racist Action and
also went to the prisons, and you know, eventually we
changed the subtitle of that to the Journal of Intercommunal Solidarity.
In the sense of saying, Okay, it's not just anti

(59:27):
racist action, it's not just anti fashions, but what are
we ford You have to have a positive if you
really want to organize people, you have to have a
positive sense of what they're struggling for, not just what
they're struggling against.

Speaker 2 (59:37):
Yeah, Michael's right, Greensboro did happen. I was really referring
to in recent time. It wasn't. It was the first
time for myself to be at a rally and not
see anyone and see somebody get murdered. But yes, Greensboro,
November third, I believe, nineteen seventy nine in North Carolina,

(01:00:00):
that happened, and all the clan members had actually gotten
away with it. They did not, They were found, they
cleared them. Meanwhile, federal court both.

Speaker 8 (01:00:11):
Their claim was that they were not. They were brought
up in civil rights charges in federal court and they
claim they weren't against black people, they were just against communists.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
And that right, there was something that even family members
when I first heard of. Remember I'm a kid at
this time. I'm sitting there listening to family members basically
laugh about the situation because all they saw were clan
and communists and they were just had the attitude of
just let them kill each other. And that was actually

(01:00:39):
a line that was said. I don't I don't know
which family members said it, but that was a line
that stuck with me since I was a kid and
at the time I wasn't really politically a stud I
just that's how I recalled that situation. And with Dan
and Spit the Las Vegas murders that that is a
different situation however, because that wasn't the rally they sought

(01:01:03):
them out. That was basically on the off time, so
to speak. Assassination. Yes, and we've seen that before, most
certainly Luke Kerner from Portland for example. I mean he survived,
but he's quadriplegic because somebody came after him.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
The German police intercepted one when Adam often came to
Germany to try to get me.

Speaker 9 (01:01:27):
I don't know if you know about.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
I think because I have been fairly public.

Speaker 8 (01:01:34):
I've been docked and tracked down by fascists and several
different occasions in different places that I lived in. You know,
we've had armed patrols that you know, at various points
that you know. It's clearly you know they do try
to target people as well as you know, attacking mess action.

Speaker 7 (01:01:53):
Emily, you've gotten it as much as anyone I've ever
seen in terms of doc saying and harassment and targeted
attacks and threats like that.

Speaker 9 (01:02:02):
Wait, who are you referring to? Oh, I think we've
all gotten it bad. I don't. I don't think that
there's any there's no competition.

Speaker 4 (01:02:09):
Here contests who has the most death threads on.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
I did want to just jump back real quick to
the thing that you were mentioning, Michael about you know, building,
anti fascism needs to be about building, and I think
that there's two there's two sides to this. I like
to talk about, like the breaking work, which is what
a lot of the street anty fascism is about. Right Like,
sometimes Nazis come marching into your town and.

Speaker 9 (01:02:40):
You have to break that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):
You have to stop that, you have to confront that,
and you have to do things to make it so
that they don't want to come back into your town
or any other towns like your town. And I think
that that's breaking work, you know, the work of cracking
down Nazis, docsing them, exposing them, whatever, that's breaking work.
I think that in the last few years has become

(01:03:01):
more high profile for various reasons. But I think that
as we're looking at you know, what you were mentioning there,
like the anti trans legislation, the rise of the political
far right in government in power, we do need a
different solution. I'm not saying that you can't go out

(01:03:21):
and like intercept Ron DeSantis's motorcade and like punch them.

Speaker 9 (01:03:25):
In the face.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
I am saying it will probably end very badly for
you if you try to do that, right, So, maybe
what we actually also need is to try to build
those alternative structures that are not reliant on the state.

Speaker 8 (01:03:39):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
You know, when we see these these trans bands coming
in like it's a horrible thing, But the only thing
that actually comes through my mind is we have more tools,
more resources now to create the networks of support than
we've ever had in history. A lot of our energy
should be pouring into supporting those networks, supporting that that care,

(01:04:01):
supporting that mobility and that freedom of movement, rather than
just trying to run up against this brick wall that
is this Republican you know, behemoth that is moving you
forward into all of our rights. Like we're not going
to face it down head on. We need to go
around it in some way. And I think that that

(01:04:22):
that going around it is going to require that building,
that community, that that sort of redevelopment of those alternative structures.
So I think it's so important to have that as well.

Speaker 4 (01:04:33):
Big thanks to Shane Burley for setting up this conversation.
The second half of our talk with Michael Novic, Emily Gorchinski,
and Daryl Lamont Jenkins will be coming out tomorrow. We'll
talk a bit more about the modern state of anti
fascism and what things from the past might help inform
us in the anti fascist struggle of today. See you

(01:04:54):
on the other side, Welcome back to it could happen here.
This is Garrison Davis. This episode is part two of

(01:05:16):
a conversation that myself and James Stout had with some
of the contributors to a book by AK Press titled
No Passeran. It's an anti fascist anthology that talks about
the modern anti fascist movement and some of the writer's
own experiences with anti fascism. So we'll pick up our
conversation basically right where we left off, talking about the

(01:05:38):
modern state of anti fascism, anti fascists and like, you know,
the left quote unquote in general right now is kind
of in a weird place. You know, like a lot
of people were you know, extremely kind of catalyzed after Charlottesville,
and that led to a like massive resurgence of anti
racist action, anti fascist action, and I think the quote

(01:06:00):
unquote like Antifa movement of the twenty teens, as like
was is probably one of the largest like politically radicalizing
forces for people, especially people my age, people a little
bit older. It's you know, it's very influential in what
the kind of the modern like anarchists or you know,
left you know scene is, and there's like there's a

(01:06:21):
lot of positive parts of that. There's also you know,
there's some some drawbacks for that as well. Kind of
one one kind of recurring thing is that like when
your only tool is a hammer, then everything is a nail,
and there's certain elements of of like and and this
like antifa notion or like people who like grew up
with with like anti fascists and being their primary kind

(01:06:43):
of mode of practice. Then it can be very easily
turned horizontally. But you know, it's after after j six,
after after Biinden's been inaugurated, we have had this very
weird lull, but there's still been you know a lot
of fascist mobilization. But this is the sort of response
to it that you know, was very normalized in twenty

(01:07:05):
eighteen has has definitely shifted. We we've seen, like, you know,
the one thing that's been new is like you, like
you mentioned regarding you know, Charlotte Speld there's a lot
of like debate around if people should show up armed.
We now have like the Drag Time Story Hour kind
of defenses, like armed defenses with John Brown gun clubs
becoming more popular. But you know, one of the kind

(01:07:27):
of recurring things that everyone's kind of been talking about it.
I've been hearing like there's so many parallels to for
what we've been going through the past like five ten years,
to other kind of things in the past. Like while
all of the John Brown Anti Clan Committee stuff, there's
just a lot of cyclical notions. I mean, even I'm
here in Atlanta right now, there's this Rico grand jury indictment.

(01:07:50):
Everyone's thinking about like green scare stuff. Even even John
Brown Anti Clan Committee did grand jury resistance back in
like the eighties. Like it's this this, These things have
happened before. And I think one thing that you know,
the quote unquote laughter anti fascists sometimes they're kind of
bad at is actually passing down the history. There's this
tendency that when people get involved, we're kind of forced

(01:08:11):
to reinvent the wheel every time but it's like completely
like unnecessary, but we tend to just keep trying the
same things over and over again. So there's even people
younger than me who weren't even old enough to get
involved in anti fascist stuff in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen,
and they're now kind of growing up. There's still this
fascist mobilization. You know, Liberals are kind of passive because
they have their guy in the White House, and we're

(01:08:34):
going to be reaching a really interesting tipping point in
twenty twenty four. So for these types of people who
are like either wanting to get involved or who are
like just just starting to realize that, hey, maybe we
should actually do something about all this stuff, especially as
you know, trans existence is one of the main things
under attack right now. What is kind of some like
lessons from the passage you would like to be passed

(01:08:55):
down to people.

Speaker 8 (01:08:56):
A couple of things that come to mind. I was
reminded because James is in San Diego about you know,
one of the things we haven't talked about at all
is the border, and that's been a recurrent theme of
the right and of the state, both in terms of
building you know, a repressive apparatus so going back to
you know, the early days of People Against Racist Terror,

(01:09:19):
which is the group that I had in l A
after John brand Ask and Anti Clan Committe left. One
of the first actions we did was there was something
called the American Spring at the Mexican Border, which was
a neo fascist element. It kind of grew out of
the previous Clan border Watch that David Duka done and
they were trying to you know, build up a base

(01:09:42):
of support for you know, very you know, close the borders.
And so we did bring people from la and joined
up with San Diego. And actually at one of those
rallies somebody drove a car at and nearly hit someone
from the the you know, the anti fascist forces. So
I think that's an important piece of we should be

(01:10:02):
thinking about the other thing in terms of killings and shootings.
You know, somebody from the Red Nation was just shot
in Albuquerque, and you know, I think that again, the
question of Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous rights is a leading
edge of struggle. A lot of the struggles around missing
and murdered Indigenous women have to do with the you know,

(01:10:23):
fossil fuel industry and in the back in other places
where you know, women have disappeared and been killed by
you know, people in the fossil fuel industry basically, And
I think bringing all that to bear is really critical
to have the breadth of consciousness and the understanding that
there is a global struggle that's going on and indigenous

(01:10:44):
people in particular are part of that, about the survival
of humanity and of the planet in a sense. And
to situate anti fascist struggle in that context, I think
is really really important and relates to who are our allies,
who are leadership, where is the struggle being led by?
And so you know, one of the things we uncovered
here in La is that people involved in the militia

(01:11:05):
movement started their operations by supporting Christian militias in Guatemala
and the Philippines, attacking left forces in those countries and
indigenous forces in those countries. And you know, having that
global perspective, I think that's one of the really great
strengths of the book. By the way, that I thought
was really amazing, as the coverage of anti fascist movements

(01:11:26):
all around the world, and you know, the anti fascists
in India and so on, and having that sense that
it's not just you know, people of European descent or
you know, African Americans in the United States who are
post to fascism.

Speaker 2 (01:11:40):
But there's a.

Speaker 8 (01:11:41):
Very very broad, you know, movement around the world and
inside this country of people who are experiencing fascism literally
all the time that you know, gives a strength to
anti fascism.

Speaker 3 (01:11:55):
There is an exceptionalism that exists even in the left.
American exceptionalism that exists even in the American left when
it comes to how bad things are, how good we
are at organizing or whatever. And I think that a
lot of the time is one of the things that
we often forget is that we are not the only

(01:12:17):
people going through this, both in time and space. Right
there's movements that are going on elsewhere that are facing
a much deeper sort of repression than what we see
in the United States, and they are still finding ways
to organize. I like to do you know when we
talk about like the attack on queer rights, and you.

Speaker 9 (01:12:38):
Know, things like.

Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
All of these hateful laws that are being passed, which
will almost certainly be thrown out in the courts, and
that's you know, it's going to be a couple of years.
But you know, people are saying, well, this is going
to make Pride illegal, and this is you know, this
is the worst thing. This is like, you know, a
step towards genocide and all of that stuff. And I
think it's actually important for us to put things in perspective.

(01:13:02):
Istanbul has a much stricter set of restrictions on we
are organizing quirget demonstrations. Pride happens every year. Pride is
attacked by cops every year. They still continue to persist.

Speaker 9 (01:13:15):
What can we learn as Americans from that movement.

Speaker 3 (01:13:20):
I think that's a really important thing for the American
anti fascist scene to really start to think around and
try to take this moment. As you mentioned, there's a
lull that is happening now, both in the organizing and
in the popular support. We need to take that moment
to reflect on what is working, what is not, to

(01:13:41):
regroup and to find new approaches, new tactics. This is
something that I write about in the chapter I wrote
on trans anti fascism. Right, we need to, like, we
need to absolutely bring in historical contexts and comparative analysis
into our into into what we're doing. But that does

(01:14:01):
not mean that we need to say that everything is
literally the Holocaust. What we need to do is look
at what are the factors, what are the causes, what
are the root causes of the things that are happening,
and how can we strategically organize to disrupt and to
bypass those forces. So I think it's really important to
have that multifaceted perspective.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
I think that Emily is touched on something that is
really important. When we say that the police are are
attacking pride events, pride marches and such, that suggests that
somebody initiated something on our side. That speaks to what

(01:14:45):
it is we have to do. We have to initiate
certain actions. We cannot keep waiting for the fashions. We
can't keep waiting, we can't keep being reactive. We do
have to go on the offense. I mean, that's one
of the reasons myself and me and others have been

(01:15:05):
so successful. It is because we don't wait for the
fascists to do something. We do something to them before
they make a move. And we know when to do
it because they basically send us signals out courtesy of
their free speech, that they want to do something, and
we just take those cues and say, okay, here's how

(01:15:28):
we are going to go forward. We're going to let
people know about you. We're going to let people know
how to keep you at bay. I mean, that's the
kinds of things that we need to do. We need
to just basically say we are establishing this institution, we
are establishing the security around this institution, and you are

(01:15:48):
not going to be able to breach this institution. The
other thing that we do need to do in that
while we build that is also make it clear to
some of those that lack of a better term, or
wishy washy on the subject, are more mainstreamers and liberals
and such who are quick to defend the fashionsts that

(01:16:10):
they say they don't believe in before they defend us.
We gotta start telling them to chill, and we gotta
start telling them to pick a side and stop getting
in everybody's way. Stop being a bulwark because you're too
cowardly to put up this fight or you're too interested
in protecting your other interests as opposed to being concerned

(01:16:33):
about what's coming down the pike. The book starts off
with a discussion about a three way fight. We definitely
are in one.

Speaker 4 (01:16:43):
Do you want to explain what a three way fight is.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
Well three way fight is not only you're dealing with
the obvious enemy, so to speak, but you're also dealing
with those that are hesitant to do something about that
enemy to the point that they will fight you more.
To the point that they will fight you more. And frankly,
it's frustrating. It is a frustrating thing. But it is there,

(01:17:08):
and it has been there through our history, and I
mean even the mo I mean, I'm surprised I'm actually
referencing a Mel Gibson movie, but even the movie Brave
Heart brought that up. Now, I don't think that we
need to smack people upside their head with a mace,
but by the same token, we do have to let

(01:17:29):
people know that we do have to be a little
bit more I should say, assertive in our efforts as
we go forward and basically try to route this particular
fascist element, and an assertive means blowing past those that
are supposed to be on our side. I mean, because
I was thinking about the fact that this is now

(01:17:53):
the twelfth anniversary of Occupy Right, and Occupy was trying
to do that. Occupy it's still trying to do that.
In many respects. The folks that were in Occupy, but
some of the folks, because what you also saw at
Occupy were a lot of folks who thought that they
will be able to take advantage of the progress that

(01:18:18):
we were making in this effort and turned it into
a more fascist thing. I mean, I was just looking
at a lot of the characters that come out of
Occupy that went to the fascist side, and when you
look at who they are, you realize that you had
a whole bunch of opportunities that were within our ranks
that were looking for something totally different than what the

(01:18:40):
rest of us. We were looking out for each other
and Occupy. The true people that were dealing with Occupy
Wall Street were looking out for each other in our communities.
These guys just thought, hey, perfect opportunity to just say
that we're one with them and drag them over here
to the right. That's strasserism, that straight up stratsirism. But
when you look at it even further, it's just a

(01:19:01):
bunch of people that only cared about themselves ultimately. And
we've seen it after year after year in this fight.
So I think that it's going to be very important
to build and protect our institutions and recognize what it
is we are protecting them from. And it's not hard.
We have shown over and over and over again that

(01:19:23):
we are prepared to weigh that kind of war. We
just have to basically recognize it within ourselves when we
have to do it. And that's just. And do not
wait for people to die. I mean, Heather Hire did
not have to die. No one in January sixth, regardless
of how I feel about any of them had to die.

(01:19:44):
That should not be the thing that we should respond to.
We already know what to do, we just need to
do it.

Speaker 7 (01:19:52):
Yeah, I think it picked up on a lot of
what everyone said, especially Michael. I think part of what
gets out here is having a place for like broad
social movements where they're able to interact with one another
and support one another. So anti fascist movements as a
defensive movement have often been essential to actually operating other
kinds of organizing, you know. So like when I was

(01:20:14):
working with houseless encampments and we were doing food not
bombs and stuff. You get attacked by far right groups,
you had to have a defense development. There was no
other choice.

Speaker 2 (01:20:23):
Same thing.

Speaker 7 (01:20:23):
I've been at union offices that were attacked by the
far right, you have to have that defensi development. And
then on the same token, we're talking about mass actions
against far right demonstrations. It requires people that are coming
probably from all kinds of political backgrounds, but they've gotten
involved from different kinds of practices. We're having mutual aid
networks that support people getting there, sustaining themselves there, medical care,

(01:20:45):
all kinds of component pieces. So those things require that
kind of back and forth. And I think that also
begs to how do you get people in. We're talking
about a lot of problems with people on like the
moderate left not kind of taking the next steps, those
defensive steps that are necessary, but also how do we
find a pathway for them in? You know, if we're

(01:21:06):
talking about mass participation in something, if we're talking about
like a revolutionary movement with huge masses of people, we
have to figure out what those pathways for people are
and giving them access to them. And I think also
moving past what we've thought of as the far right before.
I mean, people have talked about this a little bit.
You know, a lot of what we think of as

(01:21:26):
recent anti fascism was built around finding the alt right
and other kind of recent short term projects and what
we have now is just radically different, just like it
will be in a few years, and so having a
deep kind of intersexual understanding of how that works, because
when you do that, you have that kind of natural
understanding of where that's going to show up again, how
it might interact with different communities, and what rule places

(01:21:47):
for you, How are you able to interact with it
as this person coming into a social movement.

Speaker 4 (01:21:52):
Yeah, I mean, especially considering something I've been kind of
watching and we're seeing a little bit of it with
this with this set of Republican primaries, is that we
have an incoming new wave of kind of gen z
and millennial Republicans who grew up in the alt right
era who are now bringing that sort of like alt
right street politics to electoralism, and how that's going to

(01:22:14):
be a posed it's going to be. You know, I
was just talking about before how we shouldn't just try
to like retread the same ground over and over and
without learning the histories from the past. But like this,
for a lot of people who have just been doing
like street politics the past few years, figuring out how
they're going to oppose like fascism in this much more
like electoral setting. It's going to be an interesting shift because, yeah,

(01:22:35):
you can like punch Richard Spencer and no one really
cares too much. But if you punch someone like you know, DeSantis,
that is going to be a different thing to kind
of sort through. And so, yeah, I think that is
kind of one of these shifts that you know, maybe
maybe coming up here soon and whatever kind of evolves
on the anti fascist side to kind of meet that

(01:22:56):
is going to be interesting to watch and take part in.

Speaker 8 (01:22:59):
Yeah, I think that, you know, the part of the
ARA analysis has always been that fascism is built from
above end below, and I think we really have to
understand that that the fascism is fascism is not only
the factor of the street politics and the people who
declare themselves to be fascist, but that there are fascist
elements in the structure of this society, and there are

(01:23:19):
fascist elements in power in this government right now. And
you know, the fascism has come to power in quite
a number of you know, in Italy, neo fascists as
the prime Minister in you know, in the United States,
Matt Gates, and that element has a clear you know,
they're in power within the Republican Party they control the

(01:23:42):
House representatives in a way, and I think that that's
a critical understanding. But also it speaks to the fact
that fascist practices and elements exist in a lot of
different places. And I think one of the things I've
always tried to put out to people is that this
is an aspect of the nature of imperialism, central colonialism,

(01:24:03):
and I want to emphasize that because I think there's
a fractal character to what we're dealing with or holographic,
you know, there's any element of this society that you
attempt to deal with, you're actually facing the entirety of
imperialism and fascism there. So if you look at the
labor movement right now, labor is a big resurgence, particularly

(01:24:23):
here in southern California. There have just been you know,
the hotel workers and restaurant works on strike, the screen
actors on strike, the writers go on strike, and the
fact that there, you know, there is a fascist element
to the employment structure and trying to organize it. If
you look what happened with the Amazon union, or just

(01:24:44):
the fact that again going back in history, you know,
the Taft Hartley Act was written to criminalize you know, communists,
and also solidarity with the labor movement and outlaw, you know,
solidarity strikes and that's fascist, that is you have to
understand that. And you know, one of the reasons that
the Puerto Rican Dependence Movement attack Congress was that the

(01:25:06):
US attempted to put the taft Tartly Act into practice
against the labor in Puerto Rico, and the Nationalist Party said, no,
we're going to counterattack. So I think that that's a
really critical understanding. We started out talking about the prisons,
and you know, there's nothing more fascists's in prison. And

(01:25:26):
one of the things they do in prison is they
use privilege to try to divide the prisoners, you know,
and we haven't talked much about privilege and how it
operates in the society, but you know, it's a key
factor in how people are are organized by the system
to collaborate to you know, get along by going along

(01:25:49):
and so. But even inside the prisons we've seen here
in California and elsewhere, you know, the Alabama, Georgia, elsewhere,
prisoners are able to organize under conditions of fascism that
exist in the prisons. They have ways to communicate with
each other they've built into racial solidarity in many cases.
So I think those are examples of anti fascism that

(01:26:10):
we need to embrace and understand the same way that
people organ you know, if you're organizing a union, you're
operating on a certain level clandestinely, because if you're open
about it, you're going to get fired, and they're going
to retaliate and they're going to Anybody you talk to
is going to get fired. So we need to have
an understanding of ways to organize that are not always

(01:26:33):
I'm not talking about arms struggle, but I'm saying that
people have to organize below the radar when you're dealing
with fascism, especially when it's in power, and fascism isn't power,
and a lot of sectors of the society right now
and people are dealing with it, as Emily said about
you know, Istanbul and Pride marches, you know, so you know,
I think we need to make those connections into the

(01:26:55):
labor movement, into the prison movement, into the you know,
formally incarcerated people's movement, you know, the solidarity with indigenous
druggers are going on against fascist the colonization of their
lands and struggles, and I think that if we understand
that that's an aspect of anti fascism, I think it
actually strengthens what we're engaged in.

Speaker 5 (01:27:16):
Definitely. I think it's also important just to, like, I guess,
if people are thinking about their organizing, and it's always
important to hear from those struggles as well as you know,
to to include them, but to really include them in
a sense of like listening and learning from rather than
sort of telling and saying this is like a cis
hat white guy. It's definitely a thing that I've perceived

(01:27:38):
in the movement in the last few years is a
desire to speak a little more and listen a little less.
And one thing I enjoyed about your book is that
when we talk about fascism, and we'd already mentioned Michael's
mentioned the border as a sort of a location for
fascist experiments within the United States, which I think it's
very hard to argue against living on the border. If

(01:28:00):
you protested in twenty twenty against police violence, you were
surveiled using technology that has been used for years where
I live, against migrants and citizens who live here. But
I really liked your perspective on looking at global fascisms,
because fascism is it's very easy to spend too much
time defining fascism, especially as anti fascists, right, Like, it's

(01:28:23):
extremely easy to be like, it's not fascism unless it
comes from the Fascia region of Italy, kind of like
this like cheese or champagne definition of fascism. But like
they've focused on, for instance, fascism in India, Like if
I go to the border, I was at the border
a couple of days ago, right that there are tons
of Punjabi Sikh people camped out in the desert right

(01:28:45):
now because border patroller are holding them in an open
air concentration camp, essentially because of what's happening in India
that they turn up here, right and as well as
bringing sort of migrant detention resistance and migrant mutual aid
and twenty fascism. I think it's in n AETI fascists also,
like we can take concrete action to protect and like

(01:29:07):
to care for victim survivors of fascisms. I guess people
who fled fascism, and like, when I think about what
my backgrounds in the study of the Spanish Civil War,
right that that's what my PhD is about the thing
that radicalized young often Jewish men growing up in the
same part of New York that you did, was often

(01:29:31):
seeing people fleeing fascism coming to their communities and then
being like, we can't allow that not only to not
happen here, but the crucial step that like, we can't
allow that to happen anywhere, and that being what kind
of motivated them to travel to Spain, and many of
many of them died fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Right.

(01:29:52):
But I think we could do better to do that
as well. Like now, I know not all of us
are living in the To States right now, but sometimes,
like Emily said, American anti fascism can be very exceptionalist
or whatever. But I think that we have so much
to learn from anti fascists in my sort of formative

(01:30:14):
experiences who were in Catalonia, in Spain, but also in India,
also in Russia, right, And I wonder if anyone could
shell like sort of I guess concrete ways that people
listening can help to expand that solidarity into an international
anti fascism.

Speaker 7 (01:30:34):
I think there's an interesting example, and it gets to
what Michael was stressing about fascism being kind of colonial
rule brought back to homeland.

Speaker 11 (01:30:43):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:30:45):
A lot of the methods that were used against kind
of mid century anti fascist organizers, for example, the Anti
Nazi League or later anti fascist action in the UK.
We're basically test run against Irish Republicans in Northern Ireland, right,
So those uprisings, different kind of methods of crowd control,
use of quote unquote non lethal weapons, different kinds of

(01:31:07):
forms of incarceration, and then used later against the Anti
Nazi League. So there's sort of a step. They're taking
this colonial rule back home that's the testing ground, and
then using it domestically. And I think what that actually
does is create a certain bridge between two communities that
there's now a point of connection where they can relate.
That doesn't mean they're in the same situation, right, Like

(01:31:27):
it doesn't mean that like someone protesting in the United
States is in the same situation as someone in to
call in my space. But having that shared system that
actually binds us together in that sense of solidarity, that's
a new model of safety, that's a new model of community.
So it's now seeing my strength in that alignment with
someone else, So connecting with communities internationally, learning from what

(01:31:49):
they're doing, but making real connections between them, ones that
have a real sense of weight between them, where someone's
success in international social movement has real effect on your
lives and back and forth. I think committing to that
is actually the kind of biggest thing we can do
that creates an international movement and it makes everyone stronger,

(01:32:09):
everyone more effective.

Speaker 2 (01:32:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:32:12):
Yeah, I think one of the strengths of anti racist
action was that it was always an international organization. It
was US and Canada, and there were a lot of
chapters in Canada, and that really helped break some of
the US exceptionalism understanding. But he also had corresponding organizations.
It was Resistancia, Redskin in Colombia, in Bogaton, and a

(01:32:34):
couple of like Colleie. I think, and you know, I
think that that really is an important element. And again
what I said is that we need to understand that,
you know, similar to what Lennon said about the Russian Empire,
that is the prison house of nations, that there are
captive nations inside the borders of the United States, and
that you know, indigenous sovereignty and you know Puerto Rican independence,

(01:32:56):
and you know Hawaiian sovereignty and a lot of other issues.
And I think those are things that you know, the
fascists try to exploit. Also, you know, they present themselves,
you know, fascionism presents itself in the Third World as
a strategy for you know, national dependence. When the Japanese
you know, empire.

Speaker 2 (01:33:14):
But it so forward.

Speaker 8 (01:33:15):
It was the you know, they presented themselves as being
opposing British and US imperiless in Asia. You know that,
and you know then they were imposing their own imperialism.
But you know that that internationalist element I think is
really critical. And uh, I think the same thing in labor.
I think that the labor movement, you know, needs in

(01:33:37):
this country needs to think about, you know, prison struggles
as part of the labor movement, needs to think about
the internationalists aularity with labor struggles elsewhere. One of the
things I raised with in relation to the Screen Actors
Guild and Writers Guild here is that you know, they
raised this whole thing about artificial intelligence. And I don't
know if people are aware, but artificial intelligence depends on

(01:34:01):
tens of thousands of people in the Philippines and elsewhere
that are working you know, as gig workers processing stuff
to put it into artificial intelligence. And you know, the
same thing you're saying about the border, the technology of
self driving vehicles is based on the same technology using

(01:34:23):
to you know, for motion detection on the border.

Speaker 4 (01:34:27):
You know.

Speaker 8 (01:34:27):
And the reason they're doing that is also because the
people driving self driving vehicles is not just Google and Uber,
but it's the US Army Tank Division, which wants to
have automated self driving tanks the same way they have drones.
And having that understanding that it is up against the
global system and the fascists or a piece of that,

(01:34:49):
but they're not the only piece of that, I think
is really really critical to understanding what we have to
deal with.

Speaker 3 (01:34:54):
We talk about, you know, what would a fascist government
look like if it was in control, you know, full
control with no opposition. I think there are plenty of
examples of that, and there's a fascist war happening right
now in Ukraine, and I think that there's so much
that we can learn from what is going on there

(01:35:15):
that oftentimes I think that as anti fascists we find
ourselves wanting to be with the left, that we get
into a political situation that gets muddled. I went to
the border twice in Ukraine when the war broke out.
I would relive Unite the right one hundred times before

(01:35:36):
I had to go back to that again. We don't
understand scales until you have seen it, until you've seen
the hundred or the thousand yards there from hundreds of people,
you know, poring over the border. I'm sure James, you're
you're you're very familiar with this, with the border work
that you're doing there.

Speaker 9 (01:35:55):
These things are.

Speaker 3 (01:35:58):
So often distant to abstract to us that we we
lose sight, that we think that we can influence things
within our own spaces that will then have an impact
on these bigger, bigger systems, and we can't write. So
I think that you know, to go back to you know,
what would be the call of action? You know, what

(01:36:19):
would I want the listener to take take away from this.
I think that this is about as somebody said earlier, listen,
listen more, and speak less. Right, try to read, Try
to to see what people elsewhere are doing, how they're organizing,
what their needs are. You know, how do we do
mutual aid in earthquake and flood stricken areas? How do

(01:36:42):
we do mutual aid for refugees who are fleeing a war,
and things like that. There's just so so much out
there that we need to bring into perspective. And if
you think that you can fix any of it, or
even just a small part of it simply through speaking
up or you know, awareness campaigns, I think that you'reld.
So I think my call it action is go out,

(01:37:04):
read books, meet people, get off of Twitter. Scrass for
me to say it. But the master's tools can't dismantle
the Master's house, right. We can't keep this pattern of
outreach cycles up. In order to move the issue forward,
we have to come up with something new. My challenge
to people is to put your brains together and figure

(01:37:25):
out what that new is going to look like.

Speaker 5 (01:37:27):
Maybe that's where we could end actually is with each
of you suggesting something like Emily has just done right,
something to read, something to do, and an action to
take they could concretely help us oppose and rebuff and
push back against fascism.

Speaker 2 (01:37:44):
I think it was pretty much going back to what
I was saying earlier that it will begin when we
take the bull by the horns. It will begin whenever
we decide that we are going to with establish this.
I mean, it goes back. You know, I grew up
with hip hop. I was in the punk scene. Both

(01:38:09):
those genres, both those cultures were created by people who
by those who didn't see, say the mainstream listening to them.
So they said, you know what, we don't need them.
We need to just go ahead and do what we
need to do so we can benefit what it is
we want to do. And that's the attitude that we

(01:38:30):
got to have. We got to have that hip hop attitude,
gotta have that punk attitude, and we just simply got
to build the institutions that will address the situation. And
I will say it again, that's what Occupy was about.
I think we need to continue to learn the lessons
from Occupy in order to go forward. And once we

(01:38:52):
start doing that, first of all, when we do that,
we're going to see again people trying to either co
op or or take it down. And we got to
also protect ourselves from from that as well. I mean,
I know I'm repeating what I had said earlier, but
I think that the solutions and you know what what

(01:39:16):
I didn't say, I think the solutions are already being implemented.
I think that we are all have been working and
doing this. Folks that aren't on this Folks that aren't
on this podcast, folks that would never be on any
pockets are just basically putting their time and to make
sure that the things are done properly. I just got

(01:39:37):
I just saw on the news that they had in Delaware,
they just passed the law against I guess what they
call panic panic killings in regards to the l g
B t Q community. You know that what they also
call back in the day, the gay panic thing defense. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:40:00):
Delaware became the seventeenth state, I believe, yesterday to make
that illegal. It should have been illegal in the first place,
but they basically for those who don't know what that means,
it generally means you cannot kill somebody because you're freaked
out over someone being gag. I mean, that's just basically

(01:40:21):
what it is concerned for. It happened after Jenny Jones.
Somebody expressed their feelings towards another man, and that person
after the Jenny Jones show, had murdered that person, and
the killer, instead of getting first degree murder, got second
degree murder because he used the gay panic defense. So

(01:40:43):
people initially, so that was where everything started and everybody
was saying that we got to do something about that.
If it was not for us putting together the mechanism
and the institutions to basically basically voiceocers and voice our
issues and say we got to do something about this today,
would that have happened. It should not be seventeen states,

(01:41:06):
by the way, it should be all fifty. But that's
the kind of things that we need to do. These
are the things that it's all going to depend on
us and how we act to things that is going
to make all the difference in the world. So when
everybody's ready, that's rock and roll.

Speaker 7 (01:41:28):
I think I'm really interested in getting people connected to
social movements for their entire lives and seeing things through
being really connected with the communities. And I think that's
about looking about where people fit in, where they feel
comfortable building those relationships because it happens both at the
kind of local and national international scale. So finding I
think a piece and pathway for folks. I mean, right now,

(01:41:50):
I think considering what we're dealing with climate and economic collapse,
mutual aid networks or a natural central piece of that.
So it's a labor movement.

Speaker 2 (01:42:00):
And going where the far right is.

Speaker 7 (01:42:02):
Having their front lines, making our defensive front lines. So
for example, in defense of trans healthcare against that that
trans legislation, and defense of queer events like directing story
are that's absolutely important and we have those relationships now.
So it's about sort of finding a place to be
able to reproduce those social movements and grow them. And again,
like Daryl said, people are doing that, and I think

(01:42:24):
like as there are shifts, people have to kind of
redefine that a little bit. But having that adaptability is
what we've kind of learned over this rapidly changing environment
the last few years.

Speaker 8 (01:42:33):
Yeah, I'll tacond again to give people a little bit
of sense of the longer view. I think that the
rise of the Christian Right in this country has a
lot to do with the destruction of the labor movement
and the collapse of organized labor. Was that vacuum was
filled by, you know, the Christian right, because the labor
movement at one point did touch people throughout their lives

(01:42:56):
and their culture, and it was not just in your workplace,
but it was a community organization. And I think that
we have to rebuild that, you know, from the bottom up,
and it is happening. There's a lot of young people
involved in labor organizing. I think that again what I
said earlier about the fractal nature of the system, I
think one of the things people left in the name
is anything they're trying to do, they have an enemy.

(01:43:18):
It's not just a problem that they're trying to face.
They have there is an enemy out there that is
trying to enforce the system that we have as it collapses.
And I think that that's critical. So, yes, the mutual
aid and the kind of things Emily was talking about,
I think are critical. I think people are working on
people's assemblies. I was at this dual power gathering and

(01:43:40):
the Midwest, and there was just one up in Portland recently.
And I think that the understanding that all the power
and all the wealth that this system possesses is actually
stolen from the people that it oppresses and exploits, and
that it's our power and it's our power to take
it back. We have the creative power. I think that's critical,
and that their power is exploitive and power over an

(01:44:01):
hour is the power, you know, to create. I think
that understanding and that concept of solidary and I do
think that you know again, Stephen Bico, part of the
Black Conscience movement in South Africa, said the you know,
the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is
the minds of the oppressed. And I think to the

(01:44:22):
extent that we can wage to struggle for a different
consciousness that is not based on privilege, is not based
on getting along by going along, is not based on individualism,
you know, but it is based on collective solidarity, and
that actually disempowers the people that we're dealing with and
threatens them in ways that you know, they're they're they're

(01:44:44):
freaked out. They understand better than we do the the
tenuous nature of their power. And you know, the reason
for fascism to turn to fashions is that they want
to try to intimidate people and you know, U you know,
break people people solidarity up. And I think that that,

(01:45:04):
you know, we need to understand there's a dialectic there
and to the extent that we can create those connections
between people that actually disempowers them, the fascists and the state.
You know, I have a different perspective on the three
way fight. I think the three way fight is versus
the fascists, you know, the self declared fascists and against

(01:45:25):
the state and the capitalist, the bourgeoisie, and you know,
they're not identical. They have contradictions with each other, and
we can exploit those and drive wages of our own.
I think we have to find wedge issues that peel
people off from their identification with the oppressor, with white
supremacy and with imperialism, and you know, pull people together

(01:45:46):
and then who've been you know, separated from that identification
with the state and with white power, and bring them
into solidarity with you know, the global majority of people
who are struggling for you know, survival the better world.

Speaker 4 (01:46:01):
Does anyone have anything to plug besides the book?

Speaker 5 (01:46:05):
Yeah, explicitly plug the books. I don't think we did, Like, like,
what where can you buy it?

Speaker 6 (01:46:10):
What's the code?

Speaker 2 (01:46:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (01:46:12):
I can plug in and do the self promotion. So
the book is no passon Anti Fascist Dispatches from a
World on Crisis, So we all have chapters in it.
I edited it. It's with AK Press, who listeners are
probably familiar with, so you can get Akpress. Always recommend
folks go to Akpress and buy directly if they can,
but you can get it pretty much anywhere and it's

(01:46:34):
a hefty read. It's about five hundred pages, about twenty
five chapters, and it really covers the gamut. Some of
the stuff we talked about, some stuff we didn't get to,
so it's a really good overview of some of the
different conversations happening in the anti fascist movement and hopefully
where it goes in the future.

Speaker 2 (01:46:49):
Yeah, I'll take that.

Speaker 8 (01:46:51):
I think the chapter in anti Fascism in the black
metal scene was really fascinating and worth the price of
the book all by itself. Honestly, the stuff by India
I did want to talk to other books. I've been
involved in what is called the Blue Agave Revolution. It's
self published myself and Olso Blanco, Indigenous political Prisoner Contact,

(01:47:11):
Anti Racist Actions, anti Racist dot org or email me,
Anti Racist on the Square, laid Yahoo dot com. I
was also involved with, although I did edit or anything,
but I contributed a lot of material to We Go
Where They Go, which is from PM Press. It's the
history of AAR and it's chock full of incredible material
about you know, specificity. One of the things we didn't

(01:47:33):
talk about AARs involved in was cop Watch. But you know,
just a lot of you know cultural material and other
stuff there that it's well worth reading.

Speaker 2 (01:47:42):
Well, I guess I'll chime in. I'd say I have
a lot of stuff out there right now. One of
the things that you can look for with me is
a documentary that was put out in twenty eighteen called
all Right, Age of Rage. It's somewhere online. I believe
it's on TB right now. What was on Netflix. I
found out that the reason why it's not on Netflix

(01:48:04):
anyway is because Netflix has deemed it too political. But
you can still find it out there. It's a really
good remer on basically what it is we're fighting in
this current time. We don't walk in fear is the
is the latest documentary that I've been involved with. Some
students in Villanova University wanted to do a documentary about me,

(01:48:26):
and it's not exactly available to the public. What I've
been doing. You can probably find it at film festivals
and things like that. But what I've been doing is
showing it at various events that I've been invited to,
whether it's some sort of speaking engagement or what have you.
So it's only a half hour long, but if anybody

(01:48:50):
in a university or in a bookstore or whatever, and
would like me to come out and show the documentary
to folks and talk about it later. Please feel free
to give me hit me up over at our website
One People's Project dot com. We also have a newsline

(01:49:10):
that's adevox dot com. Both of them on threads and
on ig We also have also The last thing that
I would like to hype is also in twenty eighteen,
there are There was the movie Skin where Mike Culter
who played Luke Cage and it's in the TV show Evil.
He plays me. It's about a neo Nazi, someone from

(01:49:35):
the villain the Social Club, one of the nastiest and forces,
who got out thanks to myself and others. And it's
a beautiful story and it's been out since twenty eighteen.
The short film is a different story. I'm not gonna
say too much about it because you need to watch it.

(01:49:55):
You can find it on YouTube, or you can find
a feature feature Skin on Amazon Prime. But you can
find they find a short film on YouTube. It actually
won an Oscar in twenty nineteen and I'm listening as
a consulting producer, so I guess I have an oscar.
And that's about it. I mean, if you want me
to speak, come to your colleges or whatever to speak

(01:50:18):
or show the documentary. We don't walk in fear. Feel
free to give me a ring. I'll be happy to
see you. I love traveling.

Speaker 8 (01:50:25):
I can mentioned one other things. Actually I did. We
talked earlier. I am the intern general manager of KPFK
ninety point seven FM in Los Angeles. It's one of
the PACIFICA radio stations, so it's KPFK dot org. We
have stopped labed spying on the radio. We have It's
going down on the radio. We have Society of Native
Nations and American Nadian Airwaves in the radio. We have

(01:50:47):
La Rasa Radio, a lot of others very worthwhile. It's
at KPFK dot org and we're in a current membership
drive for October. Anyone else joined the station. They don't
live in La Anti Racist dot org has about thirty
five years of turning the tie and a bunch of
stuff actually from earlier. I put some of the stuff
from brother Reform from being in sexism but I worked

(01:51:08):
on in the seventies up there, including a letter from
Michelle McGee was just recently released. Finally, after I think
forty eight years in prison, survivor of the Marine Courthouse rebellion.

Speaker 9 (01:51:20):
I don't have anything to plug.

Speaker 3 (01:51:21):
I have a book that I'm working on getting representation for,
but that's still a little bit too early for me
to plug. So I'll just maybe plug a little bit
of what is continuing to happen in Charlottesville before we end.

Speaker 9 (01:51:35):
So some of you may.

Speaker 3 (01:51:38):
Not be aware that criminal cases are still being brought
against the neo Nazis who marched with the tiki torches.
We have sort of successfully convinced the local prosecutor.

Speaker 9 (01:51:51):
To do something about.

Speaker 3 (01:51:52):
These fascists who have obviously terrorized the community and continued
to do it in.

Speaker 9 (01:51:58):
Their other communities. Whether or not you agree.

Speaker 3 (01:52:02):
With that approach, the community in Charlottesfield and Alcomorell still
needs that support and that witnessing. As this all heads
to trial this winter, we're expecting some renewed fascist attention.
So I'll just give a shout out for the community

(01:52:23):
and ask.

Speaker 9 (01:52:23):
For your awareness.

Speaker 5 (01:52:26):
Great, well, thank you very much for time everyone. I
think that was really instructive and interesting, and yeah, everyone
should read the book. I read much of it before
we started today. It's great, it's very interesting. Yeah, thank
you very much.

Speaker 4 (01:52:55):
Welcome to what could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. This
is the show where we talk about how everything kind
of feels like it's falling apart and how we can
perhaps sometimes put some of that back together. In about
a month's time, there's going to be what's being labeled
a quote unquote mass nonviolent direct action converging on the
Cop City construction site in Atlanta, Georgia.

Speaker 2 (01:53:17):
Now.

Speaker 4 (01:53:17):
A few weeks ago I interviewed the two people going
around the country giving the block Cop City Speaking Tour
in preparation for this upcoming action next month in Atlanta.
Like always, the opinions of those interviewed on the show
don't necessarily reflect the views of the show or myself.
And with this action in particular, there has been quite

(01:53:38):
the variety of opinions regarding its risk level and its
ideological and tactical validity. But the action is going to happen.
It is going to take place on November thirteenth, no
matter you know some people disagreeing with aspects of it
or having concerns about aspects of it, it is it
is going to take place. So my interest in putting

(01:53:59):
out this episode is to have a very open and
clear discussion regarding some of the questions people have about
this quote unquote non violent action and also provide enough
informations that people can make their own informed decision regarding
what's going to happen next November. So with that, here
is my conversation with Sam and Jamie from the Block

(01:54:20):
Cop City speaking tour. Joining me today is Sam from
Block Cop City and Jamie Peck. Both of you have
been going around the country I think it's around seventy
cities right now, doing a speaking tour to talk about
this upcoming action in November to Block cop City. Thanks
for coming on.

Speaker 11 (01:54:40):
Guys, No problem, Yeah, thanks for having us.

Speaker 4 (01:54:43):
So I assume anyone who's listening to this is already
familiar with cop City, whether through their own their own
keeping up with the news, or even if they're just
even if they just listen to the show. We have
covered Coup City quite extensively the past like two years.
So let's talk about this this kind of upcoming action,

(01:55:04):
because it's very different than kind of the previous mobilizations
that we've seen, which have taken form as like weeks
of action. We had one last last June, we had
one the previous March. So what's different about this new
upcoming three day kind of mobilization.

Speaker 12 (01:55:23):
So yeah, obviously it's taking place on one day instead
of a whole week, and there's gonna be two days
of nonviolent direct action training leading up to the day
of which would be really important to make sure that
everybody feels prepared for what we're.

Speaker 6 (01:55:39):
About to do.

Speaker 12 (01:55:41):
It's different in a few different ways. I feel like
this is a passover. I answering the four questions, Right,
how has this action different from all other actions? Well,
it's gonna be like a real centralization of efforts, right
because other weeks of action have been a little more diffuse,
a little more right out, And here we're sort of

(01:56:01):
bringing to bear the full power of all the people
coming from all over the country in the same place
at the same time. Because there's safety in numbers and
there's power in numbers. And I feel like the June
Week of Action people were kind of going all over
the place, not really sure what to do when. And
I talk to a lot of people who were like,
just tell us what to do, tell.

Speaker 6 (01:56:23):
Us what the move is on this particular day.

Speaker 12 (01:56:25):
And we'll be there and there is no one to
do that, which you know is sometimes a hazard of
sort of anarchistic movements. Right, nobody's in charge, and we're
not in charge right now either. I should say. Everybody
is going to have a chance to have input on
the final plan in a thing called spokes councils that
we're doing the weekend before the action.

Speaker 6 (01:56:46):
But yeah, I think we're picking.

Speaker 12 (01:56:49):
A lane, and we're doing a thing, and this particular
lane has been chosen for a number of different reasons.

Speaker 7 (01:56:55):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:56:56):
The movement is in an interesting place right.

Speaker 12 (01:56:58):
Now, where more people than ever know about cop City,
more people than ever are.

Speaker 6 (01:57:03):
Opposed to cop City, as.

Speaker 12 (01:57:05):
Evidenced by the one hundred and twenty thousand petition signatures
that the referendum campaign was able to collect to actually
get a referendum on the ballot to let the people
of Atlanta actually vote on whether or not they want
this thing built.

Speaker 6 (01:57:18):
Of course, the city is throwing every trick in the book.

Speaker 12 (01:57:20):
At them because they do not want to let the
people vote. But on the other hand, right, lots of
people know about it, lots of people oppose it, but
the number of people who are willing and able to
show up and do direct action against it has dwindled,
and that's for a few different reasons. Right, there's been
so much repression of the movement. One hundred people at

(01:57:41):
least are now facing charges. We've got people facing domestic
terrorism charges, We've got people facing RICO charges, just like
an absurd overreach of the state, even according to mainstream
legal scholars. So we really need a way for people
to feel empowered doing direct action again is what we've
settled upon as a solution, and maybe Sam can take

(01:58:04):
it from there.

Speaker 10 (01:58:05):
Sure, thanks, yeah, to build upon that, I suppose, Right,
you were sort of asking why is it that less
people than ever are taking embodied action in the forest,
And one of those reasons also is.

Speaker 11 (01:58:16):
People have been directing attention to other initiatives.

Speaker 10 (01:58:19):
Right, So the one hundred and twenty thousand petition signatures is,
you know, gathered by something like three thousand volunteers.

Speaker 11 (01:58:27):
There's all sorts of different parties throughout the movement who
have been trying, you know, just another diverse tactic.

Speaker 10 (01:58:34):
Right, This movement has seen incredibly diverse tactics over the
last two years, all sort of moving in unison with
one another, and we sort of see block Top City
as just another type of tactic in a larger repertoire
of a toolkit. You know, we haven't actually had an
instance of over a thousand people doing embodied direct action

(01:58:56):
in the forest, like that's never occurred in this campaign.
We've had a lot of people during some weeks of Action,
but this is a little bit different in the scope.

Speaker 11 (01:59:04):
It's a little bit different in flavor.

Speaker 10 (01:59:06):
I liked what you were saying, Jamie about the sort
of like a lot of other sort of convergences in
Atlanta that were called weeks of action where we're distributed,
we're very autonomously organized, and we're sort of treading a
line between like the main sort of organizing style. You know,
we're on tour right now, right calling in from Vancouver
and you're over in Maine, vast continental wide tour. One

(01:59:29):
of the primary functions of this tour is like the
activation of affinity groups to sort of catalyze and come
down to Atlanta so that crews can sort of have
the confidence of flexibility, the warmth and the revelry that
comes with moving through space with your homies, with your comrades,
while at the same time there's a very large cohort

(01:59:51):
of various logistical teams trying to figure out various programming events.

Speaker 11 (01:59:54):
The locations of these trainings, how to feed.

Speaker 10 (01:59:57):
People, how to house people, how to keep people entertained,
things like that. So it's I think the scope is larger,
potentially hitting eighty cities if we can finalize a few
final requests and the sort of the action itself, right, so,
as Jamie was saying, is sort of confined to one day, right,

(02:00:20):
but it's a four day convergence. So the action itself
is being Our goal is to sort of carve out
of space.

Speaker 11 (02:00:27):
That day of on the morning of Monday, November.

Speaker 10 (02:00:29):
Thirteenth, which thousands of people can take embodied action together
in the forest.

Speaker 4 (02:00:35):
Again, when you say like embodied action, this thing has
been advertised as using quote unquote strategic non violence as
opposed to like moralistic non violence, like where you like
oppose violent direct action on principle. Instead, this has been
trying to employ non violence as a strategic action. Do
you want to talk a little bit about kind of

(02:00:55):
how that's being envisioned, because I know there's certainly, even
in Atlanta, there's a lot of people who are either
skeptical or confused or fear that there's like other you know,
safety issues with within action as public as this, right,
because you're trying to get thousands of people to show up,
So this is this very publicly announced thing, which also
gives the police a big heads up. So I know

(02:01:16):
there's been a lot of you know, there's there's a
lot of questions, and I feel like, you know, the
this this aspect of non violence is a very interesting
one because the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement has been
I think very historically defined by you know, very spontaneous,
fiery acts of sabotage. So I guess, yeah, just that's
I want to kind of I'm interested in this kind

(02:01:37):
of strategic non violence aspect.

Speaker 12 (02:01:39):
Well, I don't know that it's been defined by these
strategic acts of sabotage, which, by the way, I don't
consider violence against private property to violence. Tend to apply
that to human beings only. But yeah, we certainly we
don't disavow violence. We don't dis about any tactics in
the fight. I mean, the highest level of violence that

(02:02:03):
any activists have even been accused of is probably about
the same level that you'd find if you've ever had
a Roman candle fight with your friends, right, you're shooting
fireworks in each other's general direction. Obviously that wasn't happening
for fun when folks did it in the activism world.
But yeah, why non violence?

Speaker 6 (02:02:24):
Why now? It's a great question, and I think a
lot of.

Speaker 12 (02:02:27):
It has to do with responding to the charges on
the table.

Speaker 6 (02:02:31):
A lot of it has to.

Speaker 12 (02:02:32):
Do with wanting to create an easier on ramp for
people and something that can be openly promoted because, you know,
for better or for worse, the media has at times
portrayed certain corners of the movement as these like scary
eco terrorists, and you know, when people are doing a
higher risk action, it's inherently something that you can't really

(02:02:53):
go around the country talking about and engaging groups of people.

Speaker 6 (02:02:56):
That you don't know.

Speaker 12 (02:02:57):
So, you know, we wanted to strike this balance, right
and what are we doing? Well, yes, technically it's a crime,
so was what Martin Luther King did in the nineteen sixties,
And we wanted to draw on that legacy, right, because
the civil rights movement has a deep, deep legacy in
Atlanta itself.

Speaker 6 (02:03:15):
So like we've had rallies at the MLK Center.

Speaker 12 (02:03:18):
And now, so, okay, we're doing a thing, right, There's
a thousand people there, there's children, there's clergy, it's in
broad daylight. The state is sort of caught in a
buyant now because okay, it could arrest one thousand people
in broad daylight and charge them with domestic terrorism. That

(02:03:38):
would create a political crisis, and that would be an
international outrage, and I think it would also be fairly unprecedented.
It's possible that that would happen, although I don't think
that's what's going to happen.

Speaker 6 (02:03:50):
There was recently a similar kind of.

Speaker 12 (02:03:52):
Direct action on the construction site that the Faith Coalition
against Cop City did. Actually, five people chained themselves to
the construction of equipment and they were arrested. They're all
out on misdemeanors now, which is what you usually get
charged with for a protest of that nature. Right, So, yeah,
the state could hypothetically arrest a thousand people and charge

(02:04:13):
them with terrorism. That would be an international outrage, that
would be a political crisis. On the other hand, the
state could do and there are signs that has been
pulling back, right because what I just said, if the
state charges people with misdemeanors for doing the exact same
thing that people were recently charged with terrorism or hit
with RICO charges for doing that will also serve to

(02:04:36):
further delegitimize these charges for the people already facing them.

Speaker 4 (02:04:42):
Mass arrests are certainly pretty big concern for people when
they're deciding if they want to go to such an action.
And I mean, because this action is happening, and you know,
one of the most I would say, it's probably in
like the top five most police areas of the country
right now, is in the South River Forest is specifically
the Copsity construction site. It's certainly concerned a lot of

(02:05:04):
people have, especially when you know we're talking about possibly
police arresting hundreds of people try to kettle them in
the site. It's it's certainly a very very valid concern
to have.

Speaker 10 (02:05:14):
I'll also add a little bit to that. So for me,
the the question of like mass arrest is actually maybe
not even in the top five reasons why I'm interested in.

Speaker 11 (02:05:25):
Doing this campaign.

Speaker 10 (02:05:27):
I think it obviously is a possibility, right, I would
say the goal of this action for me at least
is not to get arrested. Yeah, obviously, like you know,
many civil disobedience campaigns, like that's an explicit part of
their understanding.

Speaker 4 (02:05:43):
Yeah, like a lot of change, right, Yeah, A lot
of like the extinction rebellion kind of tactics, even some
of them more kind of earth first tactics kind of
revolve around being arrested as a part of the tactic itself.
And there's certainly been a lot of pushback towards that
type of like self sacrificial tactic here in Atlanta the
past few years, and kind of in the general kind

(02:06:04):
of anarchistic mill you that's kind of been like stewing that,
you know, is is this kind of self sacrifice of
being arrested actually useful in any way? And I'm sure
that is part of part of some people's thought process
going into this, is is you know, if there's a
decent chance I am going to get arrested just for
walking onto a site, is is it worth it? But

(02:06:26):
sorry you were I realized I was interrupted you and
went on a short, a short rant.

Speaker 10 (02:06:33):
No, that's okay, it's a it's a it's a very
important issue to a lot of us, right, So, yeah,
like sort of as I was saying, like that the
goal of this act is action is not to get arrested.
But but obviously, as you were saying, like we're waltzing
onto the fucking sorry cops city construction site, it's a
very good chance, to say the least. And but for me,

(02:06:57):
the other interesting parts about this is right is embodied
action in the forest has just not felt possible for
months and months and months. There hasn't been an occupation
of the forest since the cops killed tort in January
of this year, except for a couple of days during
the March Week of Action, But largely speaking, in the
forests has been held by big scary men with big

(02:07:18):
scary guns for many months now, and the horizons feel
incredibly obscured.

Speaker 11 (02:07:24):
You know.

Speaker 10 (02:07:24):
It's it's very unclear what the movement could do right now,
that could that could jump start our energies, that could
serve as a container for the thousands and thousands and
thousands of disillusioned and disenfranchised folks who have been working
tirelessly at other methods of change as well. Right so,
our sort of theory is the most powerful action that

(02:07:47):
we can do is one that's sort of defined by
our by our power in numbers, by our power in
our unity by our power and sticking together in order.
So for me, the interesting question isn't even necessarily what
happens on November thirteenth of this year, the day of
the action. For me, the interesting question is like, what
new horizons does this open up in the movement? How

(02:08:09):
we can reactivate and recatalyze our energy and understand and
prove to ourselves in a collective fashion that embodied action
in the forest is indeed possible at a math level,
and this actually sort of seeks to advance the energy
and the movement to a new height that hasn't actually occurred.
What's going to happen is more people than ever will

(02:08:29):
be in the forest together at the same time, and
that right now is precisely what's needed in this.

Speaker 11 (02:08:34):
Moment, and the only way to do.

Speaker 10 (02:08:36):
That as we're doing this publicly and above ground one
to help aid in that sort of facilitation of just
a numbers game, right, and then two is like we
want people to be able to make an informed and
consensual decision on how they want to engage, and the
only way that they can do that is for them
to actually know what the heck is going to happen, Right, So,

(02:08:57):
we're going around and being incredibly clear about what the
plan is and how the finalized version of the plan
will be, as Jamie sort of opened with, discussed democratically
and horizontally at these in person outdoor COVID Safe Spokes
Council meetings on Saturday, November eleventh and Sunday, November twelfth,
down there in Atlanta, where all these affinity groups from
around the country, around the state, and around the city

(02:09:18):
of Atlanta will sort of elect one of their home
needs to go to this larger general assembly type thing
that will then sort of democratically and horizontally determine what
the actual specifics of Monday's plan will be. Are there
any sort of community agreements that we want to that
we want to uplift and highlight so that we can
all sort of know and be on the same page

(02:09:39):
and move in a similar way together. And those could
be I don't want to speak for with there because
those will be determined in the Spokes Council. But the
sort of like there's been questions, I guess lastly, there's
been questions about well, what does that actually look like
to maintain a level of non violence whatever that might
actually mean.

Speaker 11 (02:09:59):
In a space.

Speaker 10 (02:09:59):
Right, Like, I'm sure a lot of folks listening, and
myself included, probably all of us here have witnessed, you know,
for lack of a better word, peace policing or something
to that effect. Right, Our wager with this, our goal
with this, is the activation of affinity groups of crews
that roll up together who enter into this sort of
like consensual horizontal decision making space where community agreements are

(02:10:22):
explicitly laid out in the days leading up to the action,
those specific affinity groups can hold each other accountable to
those norms in whatever way that they want, Right, you
and your homies holding it down for one another in
like what we're calling for, right is non violence. Like
that we can debate, we can have a heavy political

(02:10:43):
debate about.

Speaker 11 (02:10:43):
Like the meaning of violence and the meaning of non violence.
But like the.

Speaker 10 (02:10:47):
Language of non violence has a rich history in American
social justice movements, right, Like that term has meaning to
a lot of people, And that's actually what's being advocated
for on this day, but only on that day. Right, Like,
So what we're talking about is like in this specific
space that we're going to like create together, this is
what we're doing. What we're calling for in this moment

(02:11:08):
in time, in this specific geography, if people have other
ways to engage in other spaces or at other times.
One of the hallmarks of the movement is that by
all means they should right.

Speaker 11 (02:11:18):
That's what's kept this movement strong and this is no different.

Speaker 12 (02:11:21):
Yeah, I'd like to add that there's definitely a precedent
for this within the movement. There were probably a number
of events like this, but this was the one that
I was there for. There was a march a rally
into March at the MLK Center during the March Week
of Action, and it was put on by Community Movement Builders,

(02:11:42):
which is a great group, all black group organizing in
specifically black working class communities in Atlanta, led by Kamal Franklin,
and he put out a statement before this rally in
March saying, you know, attention camera, this particular event is

(02:12:03):
going to be a low risk event. We've decided that
is what we need today. We've done a lot of
work in the community getting community members to come out
to this who maybe haven't been that involved in the past.
A lot of older working class Black people are going.

Speaker 6 (02:12:19):
To be there.

Speaker 12 (02:12:19):
Please don't do anything that's going to attract extra attention
from the cops. Don't do anything spicy, you know, don't
break windows. If they tell you to stay on the sidewalk,
stay on the sidewalk. Not that there's anything wrong with
those tactics right in general, And he went out of
his way to say, we do not denounce these tactics
in general. It is just not the right thing to

(02:12:40):
do today at this particular thing. And everybody pretty much listened,
and everybody bathed themselves, and I thought it was a
really cool example of you know, the respect, the mutual
respect across different different corners of this movement.

Speaker 4 (02:12:55):
Yeah, I've definitely been thinking about that action in relation
to this, to this upcoming kind of event.

Speaker 11 (02:13:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:13:02):
I think it was on the Thursday of the fifth
Week of Action, a few days after there was like
the mass arrests at at the music festival, because I
mean there were they were in the in the in
the lead up to that Community Movement Builders march, there
were very similar questions around like, yeah, like who's going
to enforce nonviolence, which really is kind of a silly question,

(02:13:23):
and that there is you know, there is precedent absolutely
of people like peace policing and even turning over people
to the cops. That that that that that is a precedent.
But in this case, like you you know, these specific
people and community movement builders have been pretty down with
the more militant aspects of this movement for years, and

(02:13:43):
you know, in the in the hours before that action,
you know, people sought and gained more clarification on like no,
like we're not going to like fuck you over, but like, hey,
we're trying to like bring our grandmas and our kids
to this. And not that the police need any excuse
to you know, attack people, but this is you know it,
this is the thing that we're planning, This is what
this is what we're trying to do. You don't have

(02:14:04):
to come if you don't want to, you know. And
it's it is that type of like mutual understanding and
agreement that actions like this kind of rest on. Because
I certainly know that there's there's probably a good deal
of forest defenders who you know, would like to jump
at the opportunity to do you know, spicy stuff on
the site, because that's that's a you know, from their perspective,
that's a very uh, it's a very attractive proposal, which

(02:14:28):
you know also as president. In these types of big
mass mobilizations, There's there's certainly aspects of that that kind
of intersect with this especially. You know, one concern people
may have is that this is being pushed as like, hey,
we're you know, we're going to all these cities, We're
trying to mobilize all these people, get a thousand people,
we're all planning this thing together. There's there's a certain

(02:14:48):
risk that that type of language could be turned against
any of the possibly hundreds of people arrested on March
thirteenth and rule these into and have that role in
to the reco charges that people are facing in Georgia. Now,
I also kind of, from my understanding, part of this
action is to kind of showcase the kind of absurdity

(02:15:10):
of these reco charges by by demonstrating this is like
very typical civil rights kind of you know, social movement organizing.
But I think those two things I think can actually coexist,
where yes, this is very typical civil rights organizing, and
also the state specifically, you know, the state that you

(02:15:31):
know in Atlanta have been have have not cared at
all and is very is very willing to use these
to use charges like this as a chilling tactic to
suppress any future like protest or mobilization against cop City.
So this is like, I think one other dynamic that
people are certainly thinking about in terms of, you know,

(02:15:53):
deciding if they want to participate in something like this.

Speaker 10 (02:15:56):
Sure, yeah, above all, one of the primary functions repression, right,
is to to scare us into inaction, right, And in
the face of that, the worst thing that we can
do is power away and shrink. And precisely, this type
of mass mobilization is the ultimate show of solidarity with

(02:16:17):
all people who have been swept up into various trumped
up legal charges related to this movement. And and also
there's you know, throughout the history of American social movements,
there's there's there's president after president after precedent of people
organizing their communities and their friends that they care about
to travel to a place of you know, of injustice

(02:16:41):
and stand in solidarity together.

Speaker 5 (02:16:42):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:16:43):
This is like, this isn't a classic organizing tactic. It's
nothing particularly new. It's the first time that I've been
involved in and sort of this scale of organizing and
this sort of specific flavor I think with any action,
right just because we call it non violence doesn't mean
that violence won't occur on the site, specifically maybe at

(02:17:04):
the hands of the police or other law enforcement agencies. Right,
just because we call it non violence doesn't mean that
there isn't risk involved. Right, with any action that we
go to, there's risk involved. But you know, our understanding
is that the risk of inaction far outweighs the risk
of action in this moment.

Speaker 6 (02:17:23):
Yeah, because they're going to build that thing if nobody
does anything. They're trying to build it right now.

Speaker 12 (02:17:28):
And what's going to happen after that, Well, there's going
to be hundreds and hundreds more cops on the streets,
trained in all the latest militarized technological ways to you
oppress and terrorize civilian populations and put down the next
big popular uprising, which they've connected it with very explicitly.

Speaker 6 (02:17:49):
So we should be thinking about it in that way too.

Speaker 10 (02:17:52):
And you know, we're a generation without victories, right.

Speaker 11 (02:17:58):
It just sort of feels like we.

Speaker 10 (02:18:01):
I don't want to minimize the real tangible wins that
do indeed happen, but largely speaking, it feels like we're
a generation without victories.

Speaker 11 (02:18:07):
We need to win social struggles.

Speaker 10 (02:18:10):
And tens of thousands of people from around the world
are watching the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement hoping that
it wins. Right, So I sort of asked myself what
would have happened if Standing Rock would have won? Right,
Like Standing Rock raised the bar for what it means
to resist a pipeline en camp in an unseated indigenous
territory in this country. It raised the bar for that, right,

(02:18:31):
So the next time that invariably rulls around, hopefully we
can begin from that ploy that point.

Speaker 11 (02:18:36):
But the pipeline is built.

Speaker 10 (02:18:38):
Right, oil is flowing through it, oil is leaking through it.
It didn't win that element of the work, and that's
why it's important that we have victories. And that's why
you know, there's so much, so many people pouring so
much energy into the Defend the Atlanta Forest, Stop cop City,
No Hollywood Dystopia campaign, because we know it's winnable, but
we need to ratchet up. And this is precisely the

(02:18:59):
sort of level of accessible but also drastically heightened level
of ratcheting up of our intensity of our collective power
together that's possible in this moment.

Speaker 4 (02:19:08):
One thing that Sam you kind of mentioned earlier in
this conversation is that this plan is really just one
spear in the many that's trying to put cracks in
the facade of the cop City project, and this action
is really just being put in relation to a whole
bunch of other things that could happen that would eventually
lead to cop City being stopped. I think that's a

(02:19:30):
really important aspect to kind of clarify, because you know,
there are some detractors who are you know, framing this
action as being like the only you know, path forward
that organizers are wanting to do, and I don't know this.
This movement's been very very based on people taking their
own spontaneous action and there being not just one strategy,
not just one plan. There's always a big, a big,

(02:19:53):
you know, litany of things that could be going on,
which all kind of starts to put pressure on this
on this house of cards, so to speak.

Speaker 10 (02:20:01):
There's a political crisis, a bruin in Atlanta that has
been for a very long time. Right, Andre Dickens, for
some reason, has put all of his chips into this thing,
and he is like hated for it.

Speaker 8 (02:20:13):
Right.

Speaker 11 (02:20:13):
The Atlanta Police Foundation has taken out millions and millions
and millions of dollars of loans to build this thing.
If they fail to build Copcity, which they will, then
they will default on those loans and they might go bankrupt.

Speaker 10 (02:20:28):
So this entire project not is essentially a house of cards,
and it doesn't really feel that way because it's being
buttressed on all sides by corporations, by crony politicians, by
big men with big guns, you know. But they're doing
so precisely because it's fragile, precisely because it's a house
of cards, and there's zero buy in from the community

(02:20:50):
and from people and standing in solidarity around the world
for this project.

Speaker 11 (02:20:55):
What could be a fatal death blow to this movement
is a mass quantitative uptick in the number of people
taking action in the forest, and that would be a
new and novel blow to this thing that it hasn't
really seen.

Speaker 12 (02:21:12):
There really is a battle happening over the like who
gets to use this language of social justice and who
gets to draw on the legacy of the civil rights movement?
Right and there are two really competing narratives right now.
You have the stop Cop City movement, which has a
pretty complete analysis, i would say, of the ways that

(02:21:35):
racial oppression and class exploitation power, American capitalism, right, and
the ways that copcity feed into and enable those.

Speaker 6 (02:21:45):
Things with the help of the bourgeois state.

Speaker 12 (02:21:48):
And then you have the cynical take from the City
of Atlanta and from the political class.

Speaker 6 (02:21:54):
I'm looking at a.

Speaker 12 (02:21:55):
Post that just I think just was posted by the
City of to Twitter account. It says Mayor Andre for
Atlanta welcomed guests to the March on Washington's sixtieth Dream
Youth panel at North Atlanta High School. Mayor Dickens highlighted
the significance of mlk's nonviolence movement and shared his hopes
that our youth will work together to fulfill mlk's dream

(02:22:19):
hashtag m W sixty. So there we have a cynical
attempt to harness the legacy of the civil rights movement, right,
because what the fuck is he even talking about? Like,
how are youths going to work together to fulfill Mlk's
dream of you know, freedom equality? Uh, not just in

(02:22:43):
terms of who gets to buy things at a particular store,
but like true economic power and equality for everyone, especially
black proletarians who have served a very specific and important
role in American capitalism.

Speaker 6 (02:23:00):
Right, what is he talking about? If not, like, we're
doing exactly what MLKA.

Speaker 9 (02:23:07):
Used to do.

Speaker 12 (02:23:07):
This is a non violent act of civil disobedience. So
what could he What else could he mean by that?
Does he mean voting for Democrats? Does he mean, you know,
working for NGOs? Does he mean joining this political class?
Because I think, like it actually makes me feel better
that the people of Atlanta seem to know that this
is bullshit. Despite all of the propaganda that's been coming

(02:23:30):
out from from the state and from the you know,
the bourgeois media and the mainstream press that just kind
of uncritically reports the things that the mayor says, the
things that the cops say. The propaganda isn't working. One
hundred and twenty thousand people signed this petition in a
city of five hundred thousand. I mean, I think they

(02:23:51):
can clearly see who's really carrying on this project of
social justice and equality.

Speaker 4 (02:23:59):
Great. I always I always love checking up on the
City of Atlanta Twitter account because at least once a
day they post some absolutely absurd thing. I guess because
the last thing I think it's probably worth mentioning is
that like a big part of this plan is trying
to catalyze affinity groups to come to the city, you

(02:24:20):
know with you know, specifically with the idea of them
participating in this in this action on November thirteenth, But
you know, nothing is stopping affinity groups from pursuing other
forms of direct action during the for the four or
so days they might be in town. I think it's
you know, a big, a large part of this movement's
been very based on like self determination and radical autonomy,

(02:24:43):
whether that's that includes your ability to participate in you know,
big big collective max big collective mass actions, or just
having fun with your friends around the city, like what
happened near the end of the last week of action
where eight motorcycles mysteriously vanished from the material plane.

Speaker 11 (02:25:04):
So that.

Speaker 4 (02:25:07):
We're about a month away from this. If people are
interested in want to kind of learn more information about
this proposal, where can people find, as said information.

Speaker 11 (02:25:19):
Yeah, thanks for that.

Speaker 10 (02:25:21):
We're currently in the middle of our Wei Lanni worldwide
Math Action speaking tour eighty cities from from Portland, Maine
to Portland, Oregon, Vancouver to Tijuana and everywhere in between.
Jamie and I will also be co hosting a Zoom
tour stop on Saturday, October fourteenth, at three pm Eastern time.
Check out blochcopcity dot org for information on those tour stops,

(02:25:43):
including the ones on Zoom. There's also going to be
a schedule for the weekends festivities that is coming up
quite soon, which could include several cultural events, welcoming ceremonies too,
in person spokes concil meetings, general direct action, non violent
direct action trainings, as well as other ways to spend
time quality time together down in the forest leading up

(02:26:04):
to the mass action on the morning of Monday, November thirteenth.

Speaker 11 (02:26:08):
If people have resources.

Speaker 10 (02:26:10):
They would like to donate to the movement, whether that
be in the form of in person housing. Has helped
with transportation, help with collective cooking processes, help with social
media outreach, journalistic outreach, help with just thinking through this
thing right and how we can make it as empowering
and successful as possible and help sort of allow this

(02:26:33):
to once again raise the bar for what it means
to fight against deforestation, to fight against over policing in
black and brown communities around the country, to fight against
economic injustice and the attack and dignified forms of life,
cross social movements and regions.

Speaker 11 (02:26:52):
You can contact us.

Speaker 10 (02:26:53):
Via our contact form on the web page, which you
can find on black opsidt org, slash contact and there's
a contact to fill out. There's also a Gmail block
coopcityatgmail dot com. So if any of those things are
if you want to figure out how to plug in,
feel free to direct your correspondence to one of those channels.

Speaker 6 (02:27:10):
Yeah, blockcopcity dot org.

Speaker 12 (02:27:13):
You can watch our hype video, you can read our
invitation to action. You can well, the tour might be
mostly over by then, but you can look at where
the tour has been.

Speaker 6 (02:27:24):
Lots of good.

Speaker 12 (02:27:25):
Information on that website, and there's also lots of ways
to get in touch. So yeah, hope to see you
all in November.

Speaker 10 (02:27:34):
You're cordially invited to activate an affinity group. Come down
to November between Friday Veterans Day November tenth to Monday
November thirteenth, and then also it's important to note that
probably on the fourteenth and the fifteenth there'll be collective
days of healing and anti repression work that will be
happening citywide as well.

Speaker 4 (02:27:54):
That does it for us today on the show. Once again,
thanks to Sam and Jamie for talking with me about
this action. Hopefully you have a little bit more information
about this than you had going into it. You can
certainly find more information about this action and a variety
of other opinions on the scenes. Do Noblog's website and
other kind of anarchistic news websites if you want to

(02:28:15):
go seeking out those other opinions. See you on the
other side.

Speaker 13 (02:28:35):
Hello everybody, and welcome to it could happen here. My
name is Sharene, and a lot has happened recently and
we definitely need to talk about it. There's a lot
to cover and things are changing every day. I can't
possibly talk about everything in a thirty minute podcast episode,

(02:28:57):
but just for context, I'm recording the bulk of this
on Wednesday, October eleventh. There are many different things that
we should get into, and we'll probably get into them
in other episodes, so look forward to those. But today
I want to talk about why exactly this attack from
Hamas is so different and so unprecedented for many reasons,

(02:29:20):
and why the response by Israel is also extremely unprecedented.
There has been a lot of violence, a lot of death,
and I thought a better way to start to learn
about this might be with something really specific, like learning
about the border fence that has been cajing in Gaza
for years, why Israel thought it was so impermeable, and

(02:29:42):
how they were wrong. So let's begin the video and
images going around on social media of a bulldozer breaking
through a portion of the fence that has long enclosed
the Gaza stript for years, this cage that surrounds that territory,
the image of a bulldozer there's running straight through it
and Palestinians running to the other side. I don't think

(02:30:06):
you can find anything better to represent the long history
of Israeli Palestinian tensions, the decades of brutal Israeli occupation,
the recurrent Hamas bombings and rocket strikes, and the political
deterioration on both sides than this image. No one thought
this was going to happen. Professor Clive Jones, director of

(02:30:29):
Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University, said,
this is the first time since nineteen forty eight that
any Palestinian militant movement has taken territory in Israel proper
that symbolic victory and defeat for Israel will resonate across
the region. So on the morning of October seventh, there

(02:30:51):
was a surprise attack from Hamas against Israel. What happened
was a colossal failure of Israeli intelligence as well as
the Israeli government. I'll go into this in more detail
in a bit, but in this surprise attack, resistance fighters
were entering an up to twenty nine different locations outside
the Gaza Strip. Most significantly, fighters tore through the border fence,

(02:31:13):
which has also been called the Iron Wall. They knocked
it aside with bulldozers, drove right through it with jeeps
and motorcycles. Other Hamas fighters sailed right over it with
fan powered gliders, and others hopped on boats to try
to reach the other side by sea. A crucial component
of Israel's defense from an attack like this, or at
least it was supposed to be, was this sophisticated border fence.

(02:31:38):
I want to talk about how exactly Israel came to
build this fence, because throughout most of its history, the
IDF did not want much to do with defensive measures.
Its traditional security concept rested on three complimentary pillars, the terrents,
early warning, and decisive battlefield victory. Guided by the concept,

(02:32:00):
the IDF built offensive power designed to deter enemies from
attacking and intelligence raised in order to detect when that
deterns had eroded. If it was unable to convince the
other side that it was better off avoiding conflict, the
IDF would bring the full might of its offensive capabilities
in search of a rapid and decisive quote unquote victory,

(02:32:23):
which just means they would end up killing a lot
of people. They would fly in cities and masker hundreds
of people in order to essentially make the other side
lose all hope and not fight back, and if they did,
to tell them never to fight back again. This would,
according to this concept, initially strengthen the terrens. The idea

(02:32:43):
of defense for Israel began sneaking into the conversation in
the nineteen sixties, as Israel considered purchasing the Hawk surface
to air missile system from the US. This idea had
some opposition at the highest level of the IDF. Air
Force Commander Ezer Wiseman opposed the idea on the grounds
that it would give Israel's political chiefs an excuse to

(02:33:05):
avoid the bold offensive operations, in this case, surprise airstrikes
that would take out entire buildings, which he viewed as
necessary to win a war in the end, though five
Hawk missile batteries were purchased just before the nineteen sixty
seven Six Day War for thirty million dollars. The first

(02:33:25):
makings of the present day security fence began in nineteen
ninety four, after the signing of the Interim Agreement on
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, when Israel constructed
a forty mile fence along its boundary with Eastern Palestine.
The construction was completed in nineteen ninety six, though it
didn't necessarily represent a hard border. In two thousand and five,

(02:33:48):
under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel carried out a
disengagement from Gaza, which included, among other things, pulling out
its troops. This meant that the one kilometer buffer zone
that the Israeli Defence forces maintained after the first fence
was torn down by Gozens in two thousand was no
longer a possibility. A plan for an alternate forty five

(02:34:09):
fence a few dozen meters east of the original fence,
entirely on Israeli land, was then developed. The present day
forty mile long barricade has several sections. A twenty foot
high smart fence, which is the over the ground fence
with a maritime section manned by sensors to detect encouragements
from the water, and an underground wall of classified depth

(02:34:32):
and thickness with sensors to detect any digging. The overground barrier,
which makes up eighty one percent of the fence, is
supported by a complex network of cameras, radar systems, as
well as command and control rooms. One hundred and forty
thousand tons of iron and steel were used in the
construction of the underground wall, which took three and a

(02:34:53):
half years to complete. The total cost of the project
is estimated at one point eleven billion dollar. The project
of the quote unquote smart fence was publicly announced in
twenty sixteen, and in twenty twenty one, Israel announced the
completion of the smart fence, which included an underground concrete barrier.

(02:35:14):
This addition, which I feel like is important to mention,
was because Hamas used underground tunnels to blind side Israeli forces.
In twenty fourteen, access near the fence on the Gaza
side was limited to farmers who were on foot. On
the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put
in place to monitor threats and slow intruders. With the

(02:35:36):
announcement of its completion in twenty twenty one, the then
Defence Minister Benny Gantz said, the barrier placed a quote
iron wall between Hamas and southern Israel. But on October seventh,
as we saw, the wall failed massively and a surprise
series of coordinated efforts enabled Tamas to get past the wall.

(02:35:57):
The fence was breached at twenty nine points, according to
the IDF. There were also Israeli guard towers positioned at
every five hundred feet along the perimeter of the wall
at some certain points, and the Hamas fighters there appeared
to encounter very little resistance. It soon became apparent that
the border was minimally staffed, with much of Israel's military

(02:36:19):
diverted to focus on the unrest in the West Bank.
Matthew Levitt is the director of the counter Terrorism Program
at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said
the most compelling parts of the system were the ones
that provided indicators and warnings. But you don't see in
advance that someone is masked at the fence. It's still

(02:36:41):
just a fence, a big fence, but just defence. Still,
he says, the idea of a bulldozer getting that close
to the fence at all just boggles the mind. The
attack has been documented as the following. To put it
very simply, using commercial drones, Hamas bombed as Raeligh observation towers,

(02:37:01):
communications infrastructure, and weapons systems along the border. Israel said
Hamas fired more than three thousand rockets into its territory,
with some reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Militants also use explosives to blow up sections of the barrier,
and men and motorbikes drove through the gaps, and then

(02:37:21):
the bulldozers did the rest and this allowed for enough
space for their larger vehicles to drive through. Experts said
an attack of this magnitude with all of these elements
would have required weeks at least of preparation and subterfuge.
But maybe you're asking, well, why now, why did Hamas
now decide to launch an attack of this magnitude. There

(02:37:45):
are some clues in the name that Hamas gave the attack.
They named it Operation of Alxa Flood. Just days before
the attack, hundreds of Israeli settlers, with the protection of
the Israeli forces stormed Atlexa Mosque and occupied Easter Russ.
I've talked about this before, but this compound is a
very important and contested religious site, and it's often very

(02:38:08):
often a target by Israeli settlers and the IDF. And
Hamas said it launched its attack in response to the
desecration of Alexa. Mohammad'ef, the Rassam Brigades commander said, we
have decided that the time has come to draw the
line for the enemy to understand their time is up

(02:38:29):
and they can't keep going without consequences. But again, experts
said this plan would have taken weeks to plan. I'm
sure the attacks on Aleximosque played a role in the attack,
but it was probably being worked on for quite some
time before that. And Hamas also said the attack was
a response to decades of Israeli violence and occupation. The

(02:38:51):
daily impact of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians
in Gaza and other occupied territories at the West Bank
is a huge part of this story. Let's take our
first break before I forget no clever segue here. Just
listen to these ads and we're back. Analysts and experts

(02:39:12):
have been warning for months that the reality on the
ground in Palestine and Israel was leading up to this.
Nor Ude, a political analyst and former Palestinian Authority spokeswoman,
said the record number of Palestinians killed, dispossessed, injured and
traumatized by Israeli forces and settlers across the occupied West Bank,

(02:39:34):
the continued siege on Gaza, the relentless attacks on Elxamosque,
they were all pushing the situation towards this moment. I
don't think anybody imagined the particulars of this moment, but
I think everybody with a sense of what was going
on knew that this quote unquote calm was deceiving and
that something was going to happen, something big. And it

(02:39:55):
did happen. The wall came down. But for the two
point three milli million Palestinians who have been virtually trapped
for fifteen years, as well as the Palestinians on the
West Bank who have been constantly surveilled, having their movement restricted,
and have experienced growing military violence, bulldozing through this fence
means something else. While the Israeli response was feded by

(02:40:19):
the failure of this system, making the future of all
Palestinians even more precarious. The impact of Saturday's attack for
Palestinians is hugely significant psychologically and symbolically. It shatters the
idea of Israel's military superiority. It's a physical symbol of
breaking out of the open air prison they've been held
captive in, letting them step onto the land that they've

(02:40:41):
been forced out of, some of them for their entire lives.
Most of the Palestinians in Gaza are children, and they
have only ever known life within the confines of that fence.
So bulldozing a hole right through this fence to the
other side will obviously have ripples in more ways than one.
I want to mention something here that I've been thinking

(02:41:02):
about is that Gaza is often referred to as the
world's biggest open air prison, which is true, but I
was thinking about it, and prison implies that they did
a crime. They did not do a crime. The Palestinians
are innocent. They're stuck in a cage against their will,

(02:41:22):
and they have no way out. I think a better
way to describe Gaza might be an open air concentration camp,
the biggest open air concentration camp period. It's just something
I've been thinking about because I feel like open air
prison implies they're all criminals and they're not. So just
something to think about when it comes to semantics and

(02:41:43):
the power of words, I suppose, even if it's subconscious.
Gaza has been under a land, sea and air blockade
since two thousand and seven. More than two point three
million Palestinians live there, all crammed in and they cannot
leave without Israeli permission, which very few people get. Hamas

(02:42:03):
is a political and armed group that took control of
two thousand and six, and there hasn't been an election since.
It's part of a regional alliance which also includes Iran
and the armed group has Bela and Lebanon. Hamas has
been designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, and
the EU, among many others. We'll be doing a history

(02:42:24):
more in depth about Hamas soon, but it's important to
note that Israel basically helped create it. More details will
be in that episode, obviously, but just to summarize very briefly,
Israel bolstered Hamas's creation and funded its expansion because it
wanted to divide the Palestinians amongst themselves and they viewed

(02:42:44):
the leftist PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was the
governing party at the time, as a threat, and so
they encouraged Haamas to flourish and thrive, which leads us
to now again be separate episode. There is so much
to cover and I can do it all today. Although

(02:43:05):
the PLO used to be the dominant party decades ago,
in recent years, the PLO and the secular FATA party
which the PLO is centered around, is often criticized for
being ineffective, and so many Palestinians see Hamas as the
most active group when it comes to resistance against the
violent Israeli occupation. Palestinians have lived in violent occupation for

(02:43:30):
seventy six years and the world has largely done nothing.
Palestinians have no outside support whatsoever, and no one is
coming to their aid or rescue. They unfortunately only have
this militant group because of this, and also just a
reminder that Palestine has actually tried everything and that violence

(02:43:52):
is not their first resort. Many Palestinians don't even support Hamas.
Let's not forget about BDS, which is a Palestinian nonviolent
movement which calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions for Israel.
BDS is now deemed illegal. In twenty twenty one, thirty
five states passed anti BDS laws, so even boycotting Israeli

(02:44:17):
products is suddenly illegal. So that was BDS. People are
obviously still engaged in BDS, and I encourage everyone to
read more about it, because divestment and sanctions work. It
worked in South Africa, but here we are. And then
in twenty eighteen, Palestinians in Gaza mounted the Great March
of Return to show the world their plight. Day after

(02:44:41):
day they walked unarmed to Israeli's military fences around Gaza.
How did Israel respond to this non violent protest. They
shot eight thousand Palestinians with live ammunition, killed two hundred
and twenty people and wounded thirty six. One thousand, one
hundred and forty three. Palestinians are getting killed regardless of

(02:45:06):
the existence of Hamas, because Israel bombing Gaza isn't actually
about Hamas but occupation and ethnic cleansing. Israel and Hamas
have fought many on and off quote unquote wars. I say,
quote unquote because it's not a war if only one
side has an army, and I personally really hate when
it's referred to as a war because it's falsely portraying

(02:45:28):
an occupation as an equal fight when there's actually an
oppressor and an oppressed. But regardless, the last big war
Israel had had with Hamas was in twenty twenty one.
In the past, it's usually been an exchange of fire
across the Gaza border. Hamas launches rockets into Israel, Israel
drops more bombs on Gaza. Hamas launches rockets into Israel,

(02:45:50):
Israel drops more bombs on Gaza, and so on. Usually
this results in a huge civilian death toll in Gaza,
with Israel bombing entire residential buildings and killing entire families
and hundreds of children. And just a reminder here that
Gaza does not have an iron dome to defend itself.
When Israel bombs Gaza, it does so knowing it is

(02:46:14):
very densely populated and filled with hundreds of innocent people
that have nothing to do with Hamas. They drop bombs
on buildings, hospitals, schools, nothing is off limits. I don't
have to remind you, or maybe I do that they've
also killed members of the press clearly wearing press vests.
But I guess that's another topic for another day. What

(02:46:37):
happened this time around with the attack that Hamas launched
on October seventh was very different, though it's repeatedly been
called unprecedented, and this is true for a few reasons,
One because of the scale of the attack that Hamas launched,
and two because nobody really saw it coming. As of
this recording, more than one thousand and two hundreds of

(02:47:00):
Israelis and foreign nationals, the majority of whom were civilians,
were killed and more than three thousand were wounded. Hamas
also said that it captured more than one hundred Israelis,
including some senior military officers. Nothing like this, especially at
this magnitude, has happened since two thousand and six, when

(02:47:20):
Hamas captured one Israeli soldier, Galatschilit and held him in
Gaza for five years. And in three days after Hamas
launched this attack on October seventh, there were still gun
battles going on between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces in
the three main areas in southern Israel, and despite verified
footage and reporting from Gaza that indisputably shows countless Palestinian

(02:47:45):
children who Israel has killed so far. Israel's murder of
Palestinian children is receiving little to no media attention in
the US or globally, but they create the worst possible
enemy the world, supports the destruction of an entire people,
And as an Arab, I want to mention that it's

(02:48:07):
really hard to see all of this play out, and
if you have any Arab friends, I'm sure they're going
through it too, especially if they're Palestinian, because it's almost
like deja vus of what happened after nine to eleven,
and what happened after nine to eleven didn't really stop.
To be honest, it's not like a somophobia took a
break and then came back. It's always been there, but

(02:48:27):
now it's very shameless and disgusting, and it makes no
attempt to cover itself because it's not only ignored, but
encouraged in order to validate the actions of the US
military and the Israeli military. Another reason for this all
being so unprecedented is Israel's failure to stop it from happening.

(02:48:48):
The Israeli Army is one of the world's most sophisticated
military and intelligence organizations as well as one of the
most powerful armies in the world. Because of the United
States support and billions of dollars in funding, any kind
of communication going in and out of Gaza, at least
in theory, would be listened to by Israel's intelligence units.
And again, the offence is heavily militarized, but still it collapsed.

(02:49:11):
I think another significant result of this, which I kind
of touched on earlier, is that this successful attack from
Hamas completely undermines the never endingly talked about power of
Israel and the power of their army and military, especially
their capability in the region. It kind of disrupts their
entire image in a way. I also want to quickly

(02:49:32):
mention that the claim that Hamas's attack was unprovoked is
ignoring the years of brutal occupation and exactly why they
attacked in the first place. It was a surprise, yes,
but I would never say it was unprovoked, because you
can't keep someone in captivity their entire lifetime and expect
them to hug it out. And maybe what I'm saying

(02:49:54):
sounds radical to you, especially by the standards of American media,
but here is this award winning Israeli journalist and writer
Gideon Levy. He wrote an incredible piece about what's happening
right now. He writes opinion pieces in a weekly column
for Herits, and he focuses particularly on the Israeli occupation

(02:50:16):
of Palestine, and he has won awards for his articles
on human rights. He wrote an incredibly moving, powerful piece
called Israel can't imprison two million Gozzens without paying a
cruel price. I want to read excerpts from this because
he is speaking as an Israeli and I think it's

(02:50:37):
extremely important to hear what he has to say. Behind
all this lies Israeli arrogance, the idea that we can
do whatever we like that will never pay the price
and never be punished for it, will carry on undisturbed.
We'll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess, and protect the settlers busy

(02:50:57):
with their programs. Will fire at innocent people, take out
people's eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob grab
people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing, and of
course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip
and everything will be all right. We'll build a terrifying
obstacle around Gaza and we'll be safe. Will rely on

(02:51:19):
the geniuses of the Army's eighty two hundred cyber intelligence
unit and on the Shinbet Security Service agents who know everything.
Fe'll warn us in time. It turns out that even
the world's most sophisticated and expensive obstacle can be breached
with a smoky old bulldozer when the motivation is great.
This arrogant barrier can be crossed by bicycle and moped,

(02:51:42):
despite the billions poured into it and all the famous
experts and fat cat contractors, we thought, we'd continue to
go down to Gaza, scatter a few crumbs in the
form of tens of thousands of Israeli work permits, always
contingent on good behavior, and still keep them in prison.
We'll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates,

(02:52:03):
and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they're erased, as
quite a few Israelians would like. We'll keep holding thousands
of Palestinian prisoners, some without trial, most of them political prisoners,
and we won't agree to discuss their release, even after
they've been in prison for decades. We'll tell them that
only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought

(02:52:26):
we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution,
only because we don't want to deal with all that,
and everything will continue that way forever. Once again, it
was proved that this isn't how it is. A few
hundred armed Palestinians breached the barrier and invaded Israel in
a way no Israeli imagine possible. A few hundred people

(02:52:48):
proved that it's impossible to imprison two million people forever
without paying a cruel price. Just as the smoky old
Palestinian bulldozer tore through the world's smartest barrier, it tore
away at Israel's arrogance and complacency. And that's also how
it tore away at the idea that it's enough to
occasionally attack Gaza with suicide drones and sell them to

(02:53:11):
half the world to maintain security. On Saturday, Israel saw
pictures it has never seen before, Palestinian vehicles patrolling gets cities,
bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear
away at that arrogance. The Gaza. Palestinians have decided they're
willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom.

(02:53:33):
Is there any hope in that?

Speaker 7 (02:53:35):
No?

Speaker 13 (02:53:36):
Will Israel learn its lesson? No, On Saturday, they were
already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about
occupying the strip and punishing Gaza, quote as it has
never been punished before. But Israel hasn't stopped punishing Gaza
since nineteen forty eight, not for a moment. After seventy

(02:53:56):
five years of abuse. The worst possible scenario awaits it
once again. The threats of flattening Gaza prove only one thing.
We haven't learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay,
even though Israel is paying a high price once again.
Prime Minister Benjamin N. Yaho bears a very great responsibility

(02:54:18):
for what happened, and he must pay that price. But
it didn't start with him, and it won't end after
he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the
Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza. Gaza,
most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel, Gaza,
which has never known a single day of freedom. I

(02:54:41):
just think that piece is very powerful, and I know
I read a good chunk of it. But I think
it's important to hear, especially from an Israeli as he mentioned, Israel,
because of this, has responded to the attack with extreme force.
Prime Minister a little Bitchna and Yahoo said the enemy
will pay an unprecedented price. Israel has bombed Gaza for days,

(02:55:04):
hitting Gaza with air strikes, targeting hospitals, mosques, entire residential buildings,
and calling Palestinians animals to the media, Israeli Defense Minister
Yoav Galant said we are fighting animals and acting accordingly.
Israel also said that it wants to wipe out Hamasa's
military capability and end its control of Gaza, which doesn't

(02:55:26):
really make sense because they're kind of targeting anything and
now anything they can hit, including civilians, and at the
end they want control themselves. So I think a lot
of right wing Israeli politicians, which was most of them
these days, say empty, stupid shit. And it also looks

(02:55:47):
like amidst all this, that a ground invasion is likely
going to happen because the IDF has been readying tanks
and military jeeps. It sucks that I have to say
this out loud, but peace should not come at the
spence and the brutal oppression of others. There was no
peace before this attack. The violence of the Israeli occupation

(02:56:08):
has been there since the state was established in nineteen
forty eight. Hamas is a direct result of that violence.
There has never been peace in Israel because it was
created in violence. And this clearly does not justify Hamas
killing innocent people. That is never okay. But Israel also

(02:56:30):
can justify killing thousands of people because of that. Abby Martin,
who is the creator and host of the Empire Files.
She also made the film Gaza Fights for Freedom, which
I highly recommend. She posted this exchange on her Twitter
between her and one of their field producers in Gaza,

(02:56:50):
and he says, I'm scared, Abby, I feel I could
die any second. Most of the people here lost power
and internet connections, so we don't know where they hit.
Entire neighborhoods are being erased. They killed twelve hundred of
us so far and destroyed massively, and yet they say
they have not started yet. We know massacres are coming,

(02:57:12):
and we're sure they got the green light from the
US to kill us all. So that is a perspective
of someone standing in Gaza living in fear which isn't
entirely new as far as living in fear goes, because
that's been the reality for Gazans for decades. But this
time it's different because it's very clear that Israel's committing

(02:57:33):
a purposeful genocide. But they're in the dark with no
one to help them, and I can only imagine how
helpless and hopeless it feels. It just it breaks my heart.
I just want to give a update, an unfortunate update,
because things are just fucked and people keep dying. But

(02:57:56):
I'm recording this update on the afternoon of October twelfth,
like a day after I recorded the original stuff, and
Israel has killed five hundred Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
since this morning, five hundred in the last six hours
twelve hours. Gaza's Health ministry said that one thousand, five

(02:58:17):
hundred and thirty seven Palestinians, including five hundred children and
two hundred and seventy six women, have been killed and
there are almost seven thousand others wounded because of these
Israeli air strikes. Loss of this magnitude is unsettling and overwhelming,
and I also want to mention this is something I

(02:58:38):
just learned. Israel has bombed the international airports of Aleppo
in Damascus in Syria, and this has forced them out
of service. So not only are they massacring the entire
families in Gaza, but they're also dropping bombs on civilian
airports in Syria. And the Western media still wants you

(02:58:58):
to think that Israel is the victim. It bears repeating
that Gaza is very densely populated, with two point three
million people trapped in a very small space, unable to leave,
with nowhere to escape to. An example of this empty,
stupid rhetoric that Israeli politicians are saying is when Natanyahu

(02:59:20):
said that civilians should leave and evacuate Gaza. He said
that knowing full well that that is impossible because his
government forbids it. He said that to the media so
the world can see that he is just and not
trying to attack any civilians. It's all a fucking show,
like I guess all politics are. But it's still really

(02:59:42):
infuriating and I hate it so much. And in Gaza,
before all of this, before the thousands that have already died,
there was already a blockade. They were trapped for fifteen years.
And now in addition to this blockade, Israel has imposed
a total siege on Gaza, inflicting collective punishment, which is

(03:00:04):
illegal under international law. But Israel routinely commits war crimes
and goes about its business unchecked. Why would it be
any different this time. Remember that half of Gaza's population
are under eighteen. Hundreds of children have been murdered, and
horrific videos have been circulating of the destruction of Gaza,

(03:00:25):
of bodies and babies and innocent people being pulled out
of the rubble. I had a break down last night
because I saw a video of a Palestinian father holding
his dead child's corpse and hugging it for the very
last time. And I'm very privileged to be sitting here
recording this, And if I have difficulty processing it, I

(03:00:47):
cannot imagine what Palestinians are going through. Israel controls everything
in Gaza. If cut off electricity, food, water, and gas
for an entire population, Israel is massacring Palestinians in a
blackout on purpose, so they're unable to connect with anyone
from the outside. No electricity also means that hospitals have

(03:01:11):
no way of the already limited machines they have available
to them so they can save lives. Before this, the
water in Gaza was already ninety seven percent undrinkable, and
now it's completely gone. This will lead to dehydration deaths,
among many, many other deaths. Israel is starving an entire

(03:01:32):
population live on your television, openly committing genocide as the
world watches on as it always does.

Speaker 1 (03:01:44):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat Death of the Universe.

Speaker 6 (03:01:50):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 13 (03:01:52):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherevery listen to podcasts. You can find
sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia
dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}It Could Happen Here Weekly 102