It Could Happen Here Weekly 15

Episode Transcript
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(01:46):
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen
Here a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally also
about what you can do about it. And today we're
doing We're we're going, we're we're going completely full into it.

(02:07):
What you can do about an episode, and specifically we're
gonna be talking about unions, union organizing, the basics of
what they are and also some of the history of it,
and to to talk with us about this. I I
have brought. I brought my good friend John Horonymus, who
is a nurse steward with National Nurses United in Chicago. John,

(02:28):
how are you? How are you doing? I'm doing good.
Yesterday was my first full day back at work after
being out on light duty from having covid UH for
this last year. And so I got home yesterday and
was pretty tired because I haven't walked that much in
a day. No, it's fine, but I mean it was
a good day. I got lots of lugs from my coworkers.

(02:49):
I didn't I didn't forget anyone's name, which I was
terrified of, um, and didn't funk anything up. Um. And
then when I got when I got home, I hopped
on after I got my kids from school, I hopped
on a union organizing call with twenty nurses from a
hospital in the South. We're very excited about so um

(03:12):
I was. It was. It was a big day that
that rules. Oh yeah, yeah, I guess that should also
do a do a very very brief long COVID check
in because this is a everthing that I think people
are talking about that is also like a huge labor issue,
which is that Yeah, like long COVID fucking sucks and

(03:37):
like I like I know, like my like like one
of my cousins had it, and you know, they they've
been in bad shape for a long time, like they
still can't taste properly, and like they I think you
got from from what I remember, like pretty bad, like
in terms of yeah, sorry if you don't have to,
we don't want to, but oh I don't care. I
mean I think people should like know that this is

(03:58):
still going on, like the pandemic is still happening. Um,
people are still getting sick and some are still dying,
which really sucks. And the long COVID thing is real.
Um they I didn't get sick in the sense of
showing up having to be in like a hospital or
I see you or anything like that. Mine book, I

(04:19):
got sick, and um, the recovery, like the the year
or the month or so after I got sick was
when things actually got bad because something happened with my
um my nerves and my neuro I had a neuromuscular
variant of like the long COVID symptoms, and that led

(04:41):
me to having all its kinds of issues with basically
just being exhausted from basic things. Anything more than just
getting up and walking around. I would have to like
lay in bed afterwards. And it would add multiple episodes
of the past year where I would cross some invisible
line in terms of like endurance and then be stuck
in bed for a week. And so it's been a

(05:01):
long thing, but I've been slowly getting better, and people
who fall into that neuromuscular thing do slowly get better.
I think that's the upshot. People with heart problems, those
tend to be permanent and aren't getting better, which sucks. Um,
But yeah, I mean it's just like I think that

(05:21):
a lot of people. It's a very weird, surreal thing
to watch what is effectively like a like a a
global public health catastrophe get politicized the way it has
and treated the way it has been by everybody involved.
So um, anyway, I just I'm doing better with that,

(05:42):
and it's shaped me over the last year, and it's
shaped union organizing, and um, I'm glad that I would
say this to people who are thinking about unions. I'm
glad that I had the union kind of backing me up, um,
even when I had to pull them a little bit
in the direct the right direction. It's much better to
have that kind of collective power behind you when you're

(06:05):
dealing with those kind of problems. So that's actually a
good way into looking at just sort of in general
what a union is, because I think there's there's there's
two things here. There is what a union is legally
and what a union actually is in terms of just

(06:25):
the people in it and the sort of power behind it.
And so I was wondering if you could, well, one,
I mean, just on an incredibly basic level, explain what
a union is like legally, like what is legally defined
as doing, because I feel like that's also something that
is not as well understood as it should be. Yeah,
for sure. So in the United States, there's a series

(06:46):
of laws that kind of regulates um, you know, the
kind of collective UM bargaining UM and collective organization of
workers at work UM and or being to understand is
that UM. Those laws are mostly designed to constrain workers

(07:08):
power to affect their their you know, working conditions UM.
And so when you look at what a union legally
is UM, unions are, for the most part UM, they're
legal organizations that kind of like operate on a dues basis.

(07:31):
So if you're in a union, you're paying dues out
of your paycheck. UM. If you work at a unionized workplace,
those dues will get subtracted out regardless of your membership
or activity within the union. UM. One thing that people
don't understand is that you can if you don't want
your dues to go to anything besides supporting organizing your

(07:54):
particular workplace, you can request unions are legally wired to
offer you that as an option UM. And then those
dudes get taken out of your paycheck and they get
used to do things like rent a union hall, UM,
pay staffers to help you with your organizing. UM. They

(08:19):
get taken to do lobbying, various types of political activity.
And so for a lot of people, unions will feel
like a professional association that lobbies on their behalf rather
than a collective expression of the will of workers in
a particular workplace. But UM or it'll feel like patronage

(08:43):
machine for you know, Democratic Party, that sort of stuff. UM.
But that being said, UM unions all have by laws,
they all have mechanisms by which there you know, theoretically
democratically accountable to the membership UM. And there are oftentimes

(09:04):
UM campaigns by workers to change how unions operate and UM.
And then also you know, when you're setting up a union,
if you're in a new if you're in a place
that doesn't have a union, and you're looking to get
a union because you're fed up with not having any
kind of power over your workplace, or you feel like
people are getting discriminated against or bullied, UM, you feel

(09:27):
like you haven't gotten a raise, UM, those sorts of things.
You can pick the union that you decide if you
want to get up a collective bargaining agreement, which is
a legal contract kind of like dictating how your workplace
operates in a uniform way. You can pick the union
that you want to organize with, and their unions that
are better to organize with, that are more democratic and

(09:49):
more collectively accountable. There are unions that are more organized
or more focused on actually building the union power and
organizing new workplaces. And then there are unions that are
kind of like there you know, and I'm gonna say
that kind of blur in the US, there's like a
blurry line between rank and file unions and business unions

(10:11):
because even the rank and file unions are kind of
constrained by the same pressures that business unions operate under.
And I'll explain the difference. I'll sell any difference in
a second, but I just want to say that, like
when you're when you're getting a new union, it's really
important for you to critically look at what your options
are and you're setting who you're organizing with, because unions

(10:35):
have different cultures and different amounts of um, different kinds
of politics, and you should be aware of that before
you and your coworkers decide to commit to working with
one union while you're getting an or a union organized. Um.
And then I can explain that next part if you
want me to. All right, So, yeah, So, And you know,

(10:59):
if you it deep into union history and deep into
organizing and figuring out like what unions are and what
they do and how they've worked kind of in the past,
you'll find that there's different types of unions. So American
unions started as like kind of like craft guilds, where

(11:20):
basically you would have a factory that might have like
twenty different unions of each individual group of people UM
in each individual skill set would be underneath the union,
and it was used as a way to kind of
control UM who was able to do the work and
who was getting hired in to do the work. And

(11:41):
a lot of times that would end up in the
United States UM being segregated UM and there would be
these called union scabbing where you would go in and
do work against people who are striking because your union
was fine and you were cool with your boss and
these other people, whatever their problem is, You're just going

(12:03):
to keep doing. The boss will offer you more money
and you'll do the work right. So, and a lot
of that has kind of carried into we called trade
unions in the US a specific and trade unionism is
particularly UM prominent in UH in construction. So you'll have carpenters,

(12:24):
and you'll have you know, masons, and you'll have you know,
pipe fitters and iron workers and all these different guys
and they all kind of come together and work as
a crew for like a construction company, and oftentimes their
union operates more like a contractor than like a collective
like expression of the power of those workers. So um,

(12:48):
then there are more there are unions that are would
be considered like industrial unions, so industrial unions. Industrial unionism
was invented by a union a hundred years ago called
the Industrial Workers of the World, and they were like,
what if we got took all of the workers in
an industry and got them into one big union, right,

(13:11):
and then what if all those workers in those different
industries were talking to each other and building their their
power And the goal would be that you had become
so powerful that you could basically take over industries as
workers and run them on a democratic basis, so that
you wouldn't have you kind of liquidate capital and want

(13:33):
I want to say this briefly also like yeah, so
the bosses did not like this. I mean the MW,
Like the MW was so feared that like like there's
only the Everett massacre where it's like it got to
a point in the early neteen hundreds where just a
group of IWW people showing up to a place was
enough to get like the the the the entire like
the entire city police force and like rounding up literally

(13:55):
every right winger they could do and deputizing them and
then just opening fire like into the crowd because like
the IWW had showed up on a boat like this
was these people were terried, like people were terrified of them.
And I think that the other thing I think is
really interesting about the early WWS history is that is
the so you know, part of the response to them
is like they are just massive, and this is what

(14:16):
the first red scare was. Basically it was an anti
IWW thing. And also you know, they shot people, they
arrested people, they like they deported people, and but they
also you know a lot of the things that I
think we we have this tendency to look at as
like a socialist reform where for example, like putting workers
on corporate boards, right, or like like in internal democratic

(14:37):
self management, but that's like, you know, that's still still
sort of boss controlled, right. It's like, well, okay, you
have like a council of people who can make recommendations
or like even even down to you know, we're going
to have our own internal like corporate unions like set
up by the company, but you know that the corporate
union gives you a workers council and the council can
sort of control production. But you know, it's it's still
it's still run by the bosses. Like all of these
things were stuff that like the Rockefellers set up or

(14:59):
like even even the early New Levels would set stuff
up because they were they were so scared of people,
Like they were so scared if people just taking over
stuff democratically, just running it just literally through the union
that they were like, we will we will literally give
you democracy in the workplace. We will give you like
we will give you like workers on corporate boards literally

(15:20):
just so long as you don't like take everything over. Yeah,
I think that it's it's hard for people to imagine
how intense like the struggle for getting any kind of
rights in the workplace. I've been in the United States
in particular. I think a lot of people think that,

(15:44):
you know, uh, maybe not so much anymore. But when
I was younger, you know, twenty years ago, people would
be like, oh, you know, we're in America. We've got
you know, like we've got all these things, like we've
got you know, an eight hour work day, and we've
got like a weekend and all. And the thing is
is it literally only people were murdered to win those things, right, Like,
if you like the reason why we have an eight

(16:05):
hour work day is because there was in Chicago a
famous uh, a famous strike that um ended up with
a massacre of UM. It was like a police riot,
and then they rounded up a bunch of union organizers,
socialists and anarchists who were like involved in the labor

(16:29):
movement at that time, and then the state of Illinois
hung them. UM. And so the wife of one of them,
of one of those people who was murdered at the
Haymarket or they called them the Haymarket murders, h Albert
Parsons was one of them. Her or his wife, Lucy Parsons,

(16:52):
who was had a very veritable kind of like not
quite sure what her background was, but we do know
that she was probably be a former slave. H Albert
Parsons was a former Confederate. They got married in the South,
became Southern Republicans trying to like participate in radical reconstruction,

(17:12):
and then they basically had to flee because they were
um with their lives to the north and UH. But
after that whole trial and all that shook out, Lucy
Parsons became a labor agitator across the United States, fighting
for the eight Hour Day and U and they memorialized

(17:33):
the Haymarket Martyrs and something that I think some of
your listeners will know about. Maybe they won't, but you know,
made a made a A lot of people is like, oh,
that's Russian or some foreign sort of thing. Now, that
is an American labor tradition that like started here, and
it was because of a specific like the the labor
movement in the movement for the eight hour day in

(17:54):
the United States. So um, and that's kind of like
once you go from the i w W and industrial
unions as an idea, it got crushed in the twenties
because it was so terrifying. There's a really good, uh,
a really good essay on all that called the stop
Watch and the Wooden Shoe by a guy named Mike Davis,
who kind of explains how it is that IWW as

(18:17):
the first union too not only um try and build
workers organization, but to challenge workplace organization and to make
those push back on how production was happening and fight
something called the speed up where I think a lot
of people who have worked have experienced this time where
a boss will come in and say we're gonna do
things differently. And they'll either get rid of a worker

(18:41):
and put all the extra work onto people who remain,
or they'll change things so you're doing more with the
same amount of time. UM they got you know, they
provoked a backlash. UM. There were like spectacular like general strikes.
The first general strike in America. UH in Seattle, there

(19:02):
were i w W members who are key members of
the Seattle Labor Council, which took craft unions and got
their radicals together and coordinated a general strike, which is
where there's a lot of tweets about general strikes, but
general strikes require a lot of organization and coordination. We
can talk about that later if we want to, but

(19:23):
the key thing is the IWW was always pushing for
the organization necessary to pull off a general strike, and
they did it. And so amongst those different things and
their mind wars in Colorado, mine wars in Virginia, West Virginia, UM,
they were the first union that was explicitly anti racist. UM.

(19:48):
They they weren't perfect, but they were, but they organized
multi racial unions in UM Philadelphia, the docks, and various
other places. They were one of the few unions that
really took the first steps into organizing in the South
in the way that um, a lot of unions have

(20:09):
kind of failed too since and because they were so
effective and so frightening, they got crushed. Yeah, I mean. Also,
whatever thing I want I want to say about them
is that like, like the WW fought in the Mexican
Revolution because you know a lot of the WW members
in California particular were like a lot of a lot
of indigenous people, a lot of sort of boted Mexican immigrants.

(20:30):
So yeah, they had these huge eies and like they
like they I think, I think to this day, this
is still true outside of Puerto Rico, Like they are
the only leftist movement that has ever like taking control
of an American city, like they took to Lexico and
Mexicality and like a bunch of the sort of the
border area. Yeah. That that's that, that's you know, part
of why it just escalates to everyone starts shooting them

(20:54):
because well, and and they were truly an international union
because they were they focused on uh, longshoremen and organizing
and docks that sort of thing. There were members of
the i w W organizing basically everywhere in the world,
and they were considered part of like what was like
a global movement, and we call them syndicalists, which is

(21:18):
kind of like a an Italian term or French term um,
which is this the you know, like like the Latin
version of the Union of syndicate and UM. There were
similar unions across the world up through the early twentieth
century until right about the time when the Russians, the

(21:39):
Russian Revolution happened, and then there were subsequent crackdowns. And
because these people, who I mean, the IWW was a
mix of native native born Americans and immigrants, and they
were painted as this foreign sort of force. They were

(22:01):
un American. That was like the whole nexus of un
Americanism as like an idea, and the US state was
able to mobilize after World War One to really put
that down. And so so there's a lot of history
there and then, but the idea of the industrial Union

(22:21):
didn't go away, right The union, the IWW was effectively
dismembered and scattered. But a lot of people who had
experienced as IWW members, who had been in those strikes
UM didn't like just disappear. They didn't all get deported
or sent away. UM. A lot of them kind of

(22:43):
tuck their heads down and went back to work, you know.
And in the ninet thirties we saw the rise of
another industrial the next step towards industrial unionism. So it's
called the c i OH, which is the Congress of
Industrial Organization. Now there were multiple at that point. There

(23:04):
was the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Party of America,
and UM former members of the i w W and
various like anarchists who were participants in kind of the
organization of the c i O. And the thing about

(23:25):
c i O was was that when they came together, UM,
it was in the Great Depression had really kind of
kicked off, and they were able to organize like really
explosively across all these new industries. So they like the
u a W. United Auto Workers was like part of

(23:46):
the c i O, and they would they pioneered forms
of strikes called sit down strike, which was basically a
factory seizure. All the workers would just say, we're not
going to walk out, We're going to lock ourselves in
and we're going to sit down and it's our factory now,
and now you're going to have to negotiate with And

(24:09):
it became this thing where it was like millions of
people were like the I w W at any one
time was like hundreds of thousands of people. And the
c I O became a thing where it was millions
of people and UM. And at least at the beginning
when they had there, when they had we're at the

(24:31):
peak of their like power and militancy. UM. They were
able to mobilize workers to take over factories, take over
factories from some of the most powerful corporations on the
earth on Earth. And you know, at the same time, UM,
while they were doing this, the police and UH company

(24:55):
UM company security and vigilantes which had never gone away
from like the IW we're doing the same sorts of things.
So they would regularly beat strikers, would regularly there would
be you know, regular labor massacres, UM disappearances of various
UM of labor organizers or labor leaders or even just

(25:19):
random workers that they thought were like, oh, you're a unionist, UM.
You know, get in the back of this uh, get
in the back of this truck. And then they were
never seen again. UM. And then laws started to be enacted,
I believe out of fear that if this, if this
movement didn't get somehow put under brought in under control,

(25:44):
that there would be a revolution and so. Uh so
that's when we started to see the enactment of laws
like the National Labor Relations Act, which made having a
union like that was the first time when being any
union is considered legal at the federal level. And that uh,

(26:05):
the FDR and the New Deal Democrats basically attempted to
broker something called labor peace where they would say, we're
no longer going to mobilize the state against workers in
the way that we have previously. Now local police would
still side with bosses that sort of thing. But uh,
and those sorts of massacres and that sort of stuff

(26:28):
didn't really go away until like the forties. Um. But um,
that was the beginning of because what you do see
is unions get channeled into Once you have like a
million people in the union, you have just enormous amounts
of resources, all these dues coming in. You have the
beginning of the labor bureaucracy. Whereas before it would be

(26:52):
you know, there would be hired you know, paid labor organizers,
but they were always shifting around, and they were they
were brought up as communists or socialists, and they had
ideological commitments to building the power of the union and
the power workers that you know, if you are just
a you know, and someone with some ambition and decided

(27:14):
you want to become like anyone at this point, you know,
who wants to become a paid union staffer. If you're
like you know, if you care to and a lot
of people, um, then being a union staffer was a
different thing than it is now. It was I think
I'm trying to remember the name of the president. I

(27:37):
think it's John Lewis. John Lewis, who was a Republican
back in the day said, you know, I think famously
said at one point it's like if you want to
build a union, or if you want to build a house,
you call a carpenter, if you want to build a union,
you call communists, and so uh and so they would
literally would go to like the the you know, the

(27:58):
Communist Party and say we need organizers. And the Communist
Party did a lot of work to training people to
be organizers. And they were militant, they were ready to
throw down because to them, they were looking at this
as part of a class struggle against you know, bosses,
and you know, a way of overthrown capital UM. That

(28:19):
kind of went through until World War two. And uh,
when World War two hit, that's when the Soviet Union,
which in many ways controlled what was happening with communists
with cp us A, basically said we need a labor

(28:39):
piece because we need to support the war effort. And
so that's when union started signing contracts with no strike clauses,
and they started um agreeing that they would no longer
strike UM and and they started agreeing to things like

(29:01):
speed ups. There used to be a time when uh,
these mass industrial unions, the stewards would walk around with
a whistle on their neck. They have a whistle on
a lanyard and any time that workers decided that this
is like an example of how powerful these unions were.
Not just like as like an organization, but every day

(29:22):
at your workplace, if you thought that something was not right,
or you were not being treated fairly, or somehow the
contract was in breach, you would go to your steward
and your steward would pull out this whistle and it
would blow the whistle. It's called a whistle stop strike
and everyone would set down their tools until management would
come out and they would either agree to pay more

(29:46):
or stop what was happening and fix it, and so um,
there was a time when strikes would be you would
have intermittent work stoppages. So you wouldn't go out like indefinitely.
You would go out on strike like three months though
that happened. You wouldn't just and it wouldn't just be
your factory. It would be Hey, we're getting on the

(30:07):
phone and we're calling our friends down the street at
the next at your supplier. It's called a secondary strike.
So if you're working at like a steel mill, and
your steel mills dependent on coke from the next factory over,
you're calling up your friends in the same union down
the way, say stop sending coke, stop sending materials. Where

(30:28):
these things to us? We're on strike, you guys, you
all set your tools down, you go on strike. And
it would and these strikes would like massively expand, so
you would see things instead of seeing you know, we
just went through Striketober, right, Yeah, and we just and
so we saw like what we call a strike wave.

(30:49):
But in and in some ways it was a strike wave.
But I think that we still don't. I think it's
so far away from living memory of what a real
strike wave is where people would go on strike in
one factory and then the next factory, in the next factory,
the next very It literally would be a way of
people um going on strike. And this was all the
results of all the organization that people had, in the

(31:11):
militant attitude that people had about like how they were
going to be treated at work. It's worth mentioning that
one of the so the National Labor Relations Act, which
because past nineteen turty five, which is like the you know,
this is the beginning of labor piece, like you know,
it's okay, we'll give you the right to re union,
but you cannot do secondary strikes like that, Like this
is this is explicitly banned in this if I'm remembering

(31:31):
this right, is that there's a specific thing that says
you can't do secondary strikes anymore. And you know, and
this was this was you know, the basis of this
piece was that like, yeah, as you sort of said before,
it was like, well, okay, so the state will put
their guns down, but the workers also essentially had to
put their guns down. And yeah, and this this starts
this whole process of you know, once once you lose

(31:55):
like that kind of consciousness. And once you lose just
the practical experience of doing this stuff, it kind of
it fades and and over time, you know, yeah, the
atrophies and and the unions get weaker and weaker because
you know, like with without like you know what, once
you once you've set aside, right and you've decided that
you're gonna essentially you know, okay, we're gonna we're gonna
follow the laws, we're gonna sit down, we're gonna do this,

(32:17):
We're gonna like negotiate in good faith, we're going to
have all of this sort of um, you know, we're
we're gonna go through the national relations board. It's like, well,
at that point, people like people, people's willingness to pick
the weapons back up that they put down just sort
of continues to diminish. Well, I think what happens is

(32:39):
I mean, And so there was like a ten year period.
So first there was like the first five you know,
five ten years of c I oh was when we
see like this really like intense militancy within these unions.
And halfway through like you know, the passage of that
first long in the nineties, Um, that's when we started

(32:59):
to see the erosion, and we constantly see I think
I think that people don't understand that our bosses are
always trying to assert their control over work, and we'll
see that like UM, bosses will do all kinds of
contortions as long as they get to stay in charge
and that they're unquestioned. And I don't think we understand
quite how long the long game is for UM, for management,

(33:21):
for our bosses, and for capital. And so you know,
it starts with the National Labor Relations Act and then
it goes through uh, um, it goes through World War
two and our World War two. That's when the c
i O goes from you know, you know, millions of
people to like tens of millions and it becomes like
a thing where like that's when you know, like Americans

(33:44):
are in a union, right um, because I mean to
the extent that that, to the extent that um, there
were those compromises happened. It didn't just compromise. It wasn't
just like a failure of like, oh, like we're just
going to start capitulating. It's like there were interests inside

(34:05):
the union. They're looking at like, well, this is a
lot of resources and power that we have now but
wait until like it's you know of Americans paying union dudes,
and there were people inside the Democratic Party who were
willing to trade UM that labor piece for that. You
would start to see, you know, that's when politicians would

(34:27):
show up to UM two union halls to talk and
try and get you know, and that's when you know,
the Democratic Party, it would be it wouldn't be unusual
to hear a Democratic politician UM say things about like
labor that you would like that no politician would say today.
And now that doesn't mean that they were like on

(34:48):
the side of the workers, but you know, you would
have literally, um, President Eisenhower telling the president of U. S.
Steel to get fucked over like a general, like you're
you're trying to shut down like you know, this is
like the the steel industry is the lifeblood of backbone
of the American economy, um, you know, and you're trying
to shut this down, trying to kill the golden goose,

(35:12):
like get back to work, let the pay these people
what they're asking UM. But you know, so you would
see the people who kind of floated to the top
of those UH unions trading there, trading away their workers
power and their workers well being for more and more months.
First off, there would be more money, so you would

(35:33):
you like, they would start getting raises that were really substantial,
and it would boost up a union steel worker or
union auto worker into what we consider like the comfortable
middle class where people could like buy a like a
fishing cabin or something up on a lake, send their
kids to college, all these sorts of things that we're
just kind of like unobtainable sorts of things if you

(35:55):
were the same in the same industry twenty years earlier
and um and that felt like wins you know, two people.
And also in the nineteen forties, after World War Two,
they passed the taff Hartley Act, which basically meant that
they forced unions. Well they didn't, okay, they wrote into
law that it was illegal to be a communist or

(36:18):
an anarchist in uh in a union. And so they're
literally still unions that still have language in their in
their membership parts or they're like I declare, I'm I've
never been a member of the Communist Party. I'm not
an you know, an anarchist. Uh. I mean like I've
I have friends who have pulled that out. Now it

(36:38):
doesn't have any effect now. But that was they basically
took all the people, you know, the people that uh
that were you know, the people that you would have
called to build the union twenty years later or before
we're getting thrown out of unions. And that didn't happen
in every like there were attempts to do that in
all kinds of countries. Uh, they try to do it

(37:00):
in the UK, and the unions in the UK told
basically told the government to go fund themselves. And they
you know, it's like but because the leadership of the
of the c I O industrial unions began to see
themselves more in alignment with are ruling class and are

(37:21):
you know, like the Democratic Party, they decided that they
were big enough that they didn't have to have militants
involved anymore. And that's when you know, uh, people were
literally would get fired out of did either either militants
in staff would get fired or uh, they would get
fired out of factories if you're like a rank and

(37:42):
file worker. So um, and that's when we begin to
see the rise of what we call business unionism. And
that's where he would have union bureaucrats would and um
would you know, would basically start making concessionary contracts and
this started you know back in you know, a lot
of people are like, oh, you know, back in the fifties,

(38:03):
unions are really powerful and they were powerful to get
you know, like raises, but those races came at the
expense of control over the work process. It came at
the expense of the speed up UM and as unions
like because the rank and file workers, like you're saying,
you know, rank and file workers, and they see their
things there, these tools getting put down, and they were

(38:23):
more reluctant to pick them up, first off, is because
of the amount of money that they're getting paid. And
but they did push back. They were like this is
I mean, like there's a really great book called The
Next Shift UM by Gabriel Winant. It's all about the
shift from steel, the steel industry as like the center

(38:44):
of the U. S economy to healthcare UM and how
unions basically started to erode away there like throw it
like hand over their power in exchange for money. And
then when they are told like there was UM and
attempts to get socialized medicine and the under the Truman administration,

(39:08):
and when they were basically ah, they they hit a
speed bump in there and it got shot down. They
decided that instead of trying to win those uh, those
broad social reforms for everybody, they're like, well, we can
use our our power to strike to get basically construct

(39:29):
a private welfare state for our workers. And so that's
when you begin to see UM things like uh. The
they call them like the gold plated insurance plans for
certain types of unionized workers, and those would kind of
UM and those are kind of used as like a
private welfare state for all those workers. And it was

(39:50):
built with the assumption you're going to have low cost
workers basically doing all this care work UM, and oftentimes
it would be women of color and UM. And through
that you start to see this real sharp pick client
from the sixties in like uh in union um, militancy UM.

(40:15):
And that's when factory, when capital starts moving factories out
of city centers where it's very easy to organize a factory,
when everyone lives within walking distance the factory, and when
they're done with their shift at the factory, they're all
at the bar outside the outside the factory gates, and
you can just like if you want to have a
union meeting, if you want organized, even a wildcat strike,

(40:39):
all you have to do is show up at the
right bar, and that's where everyone is after they're done
with their shift. Um, they started moving and dispersing the
industrial capacity of the United of you know, the the
US urban core out into suburbs. So that's now where
you'll drive through rural Indiana and you'll pass like five

(41:00):
factories and they're surrounded by nothing but corn fields. It's
because it's a lot harder to organize auto workers when
they all live thirty minute drive from each other and
none of them hang out at the same bar anymore. Uh.
And then you start to see UM. And all through
that time, the commitments to anti racism are eroded, so

(41:22):
you'll see UM jobs get start to get segregated out
inside it's like steel mills and things like that. But
then you know there's also the rise of rank and
file movements to push back. So UM. All the while
we're talking about this, there's always workers who remember what
these things were like and why, and the power that

(41:43):
they used to have, and they would do the best
that they could get organized. So UM. There's a really
good UM documentary. You can find a YouTube called Finally
got the news. It's about the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement
in Detroit, which was a rank and file reform movement
organized by UM by black auto workers. They got like

(42:07):
a fair amount of support from white auto workers because
they're basically there's you know, interviews with U a W.
Bureaucrats and they're just like, you know, we're getting people
these raises. Why are they upset that they're like getting
named in the factory right, or why are they getting
upset that you know, you know, black workers are constantly
getting put into the shittiest jobs or the first to

(42:28):
get laid off, that sort of thing. And that's a
it's a really I suggest anyone has time. And that
came out of like the I think that was immediately
after the was getting organized after the assassination Martin Luther
King and all the riots that were happening in the
h in the sixties had like that late sixties period
UM in the seventies, there was a teamster, the teamster

(42:52):
rank and file rebellion. My grandpa was a team trucker,
was a teamster. She was like a punch card operator.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean like teams at
these unions got so big and they have kind that's
how you end up with like there's UAW teaching assistance
now right, Um, Like how do you end up with

(43:13):
these huge like uh unions? And during teams are rebellion
And my grandpa would tell these stories like we're going on,
there would be a wildcat strike and they call it
out over the CB radios. And the way they would
enforce the picket line wasn't just like oh, we're gonna
like standing in the road or something. They would hang
coke bottles full of rocks over the overpasses, just high

(43:35):
enough up to like that cars have pass underneath them,
but if you hit one and you were in a truck,
it's funk up your day. Um. And that was like
a really um like a really kind of like powerful
pushback by breaking file workers against what they saw was
the erosion of their power. Because I think that I
think there's this sometimes amongst people who would cosider themselves

(43:58):
to be left or whatever, there's like this kind of
doom and gloom like, oh, it's only like we're only losing, right.
But and there's been a lot of as the seventies happened,
and capital is kind of reconfiguring itself in the middle
of all the economic upheaval inflation. Um, basically, they got
to the point where we can't maintain labor peace and
maintain profits, right, so they could maintain labor peace and

(44:21):
have something more like a socialist system, or they can
maintain control over the work process and just do everything
in their power to destroy the power of workers. And
they decided to do that. UM. So I think we
were coming out of this kind of era where you know,
if you were in a union and working at a factory, um,

(44:43):
there was a real threat that they're like, well, we're
just going to shut this factory down and you know,
not to get signed. Well, first it was the pet
Go strike with Reagan. Reagan gets elected and air air
traffic controllers decided they're going to go strike and um,
and they and Reagan decided he was going to break

(45:06):
it and they brought in they Basically there was this
bigger session. It was like this huge mess where people
were really desperate for work, and UM, you know, they said,
we're going to hire anyone to be an air traffic
controller and we're gonna break the strike. And that was
the first real the first like that. The beginning of

(45:27):
the end of that final like that big moment era
of industrial unionism in the United States. And we went
from a place where you know, U a W had millions,
the United Auto Workers had millions and millions of workers,
and if you drove a car or a truck in
his main America was made by union worker to this
point where now the U a W is around fifty people.

(45:49):
I was shocked when I heard that, literally like two
weeks ago. Um, you know, we just had the big
U a W strike at John Dear Um. And there's
been and you know, all through this while this is
going on, Um, there's various union corruption scandals. And that's
again the cause of like when you kick out all
the people who have an ideological commitment to improving the

(46:11):
lives of working people and building the power of working
people out of this organization that's only existence is to
like build the power of working people. Um, then you
then you end up with people who are basically criminals,
like you end up like there would be uh. I
think Reagan scat like Ronald Reagan was h was a

(46:34):
union member, but he was like the union member for
like a corrupt like there was like there was like
a battle between like the c I O controlled union
in like Hollywood and like the corrupt like moss mobbed
up union and the mobbed up union, like that was
the side if I'm sure that that was a side
that Reagan picked and uh and yeah, so it's like

(46:57):
you could kind of and there was a lot of
like media where they would be like you know, the
waterfronts in various like movies and things talking about union corruption.
And I think that union corruption is real, and it's
a it's when it happens, it's a huge problem. It
shouldn't like it's in other countries like in like in Germany,

(47:17):
if they found out like a union union official like
misappropriated like two thousand euros, it would be a nationwide
scandal like um also in uh in like European countries,
like you pay union dudes on a voluntary basis right
in the US legally since we're a close shop system,

(47:39):
like once you're at a union uh union workplace, your
dudes get taken, whether you know whether you're happy with
the union or not. Now there are people will say
that's really important because unions need every penny they can
to fight where they have. But when unions have to
fight for membership and make sure that their membership knows

(48:00):
that they're getting like what they're paying for. You get
a little bit more responsiveness. So I think that's another
thing that especially people are thinking about unions and thinking
about joining a union are creating getting any of the workplace.
Just understand what a union is and how they work
and where your money is going to, and that if
you're unhappy with that, the best thing to do is

(48:22):
to get involved with your union, to try and like
get connected with your coworkers who have similar complaints and
change the union. Because there's a saying it's like any
union is better than no union. That's not always true,
but it generally is there there there's like a very
small chance that like you're like living in nine nine

(48:44):
China and like your union is like is controlled by
like a commodation of the K and T and like
literally the Chinese heroin trade. But you know that that like, yeah,
that like doesn't like there there there are things where
you'll have like they're my dad worked at a factory

(49:04):
and there was it was a teamster organized factory and
like some of the stewards were bullies and literally like
there were some people who were dealing drugs out of it,
and they gave the the workers like try to bring
in another union, and the and the management decided to
offer to also try and desertify de certify the union

(49:27):
at the same time, and the workers voted to desert.
And the thing is is that now that factory shut
down and gone. Um, And I guess, like the thing
is is that you have to it's far better for
workers to assert their rights within their union where they
have some modicum of democratic control over what's going on

(49:48):
than it is to just throw up your hands and
like there's and do nothing. Because if you do nothing,
the boss is always doing something. Yeah, Like that's the
thing is, like management is always organizing. They're always coming
up with ways to like to undermine the control of
workers at work, to pitt people against each other. Um,

(50:09):
we can get into it later, but like, uh, they want,
they'll use racism and those sorts of things to dole
out favors or curry favoritism and like you know, pitt
people against each other. So I think that it's important
to just say that, like the union is going to
be your only effective way to push back. Well, the
union or collective action, because I guess I also want

(50:32):
to say that there are times when organizing union isn't
the best solution to solving your problem at work. Ultimately,
this is all about how do you solve problems at
work right? And they're sometimes when you can do collective
action that is protected as you know as labor organizing,
but it's not done within a union and so and
because America is the really best of place and you

(50:53):
have right to work states and places where like being
in a union is like literally illegal. Um sometimes putting
the time, you're like you can't get into a union
and therefore you have to come up with other solutions.
Or sometimes because the nature of a workplace, like getting
a union is like it is very hard or like

(51:14):
basically impossible, that doesn't mean that you can't organize. And
I think that that's the thing that everyone needs to understand.
I think there's a lot of like boosterism of unions
amongst younger workers because people just don't understand how they
work or they haven't experienced in themselves. And I think
that the main thing is is that you've got to
be very careful with your time and understanding, like building

(51:37):
a union can take like ten years from the beginning
of we're upset to now we have a collective bargaining agreement,
or now we have a collective bargaining agreement. It could
be another five or ten years before you actually get
to the point where you're organized enough to go on strike.
And people oftentimes think that that's like they look back

(51:59):
at the history of things and they're like, oh, it's
so easy. But back then people were taking all they
mean they it took them years to build the the
US labor movement into what it was at its peak.
It took decades, right, And I think that we are
kind of used to this instant gratification kind of stuff.
We have to understand that it's like, if you're going
to be in a workplace where you're there for enough

(52:22):
time to build the trust and relationships and understanding of
how the work workplace works and keep your job and
be someone that people don't look at as like a
shirk or whatever. Not that I don't think that people
should you know, people should work as hard as they
can and not any more harder than that, but whatever. Um,

(52:43):
but I think that you know, I'm anti work, but
you know that's the whole other thing. Unions are the
best way to limit the amount of work that you
have to do um if you're gonna if you're going
to uh, you know, work as a wage labor um.
But I will just say that it's like I think
that people don't that. It's difficult sometimes to understand how
much work goes into getting to the point of getting

(53:06):
a union, but it's always worth putting the time in
to get there. And you may not win the first try,
but if you are, if if the conditions are right,
and things like, you know, we make our history, but
not in conditions of our choosing. Sometimes things don't work out,
but not doing it is I think a it's detrimental

(53:28):
to you and your co workers. And even times like
I've talked with people who have been involved in campaigns
where they got fired but then all of a sudden,
conditions improved afterwards, and they look at that as like, oh, ship,
we didn't get our union, but everyone got raises and
they change some things that work, and that's actually a victory.
So you know, I think that I think of each

(53:50):
other as like collective building collective power, and the amount
of time it takes to do that is daunting, but
I think it's the sort of thing that we need
to do if first serious about changing how we can
actually like how our lives work and how much power
we have outside of work, because unions are also places

(54:10):
where we do things that affect outside of our work
as well. I'm Colleen with Join me, the host of

(54:30):
Eating Will Broke podcast While I eat a meal created
by self made entrepreneurs, influencers, and celebrities over a meal
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Kidding and Assia. This is the professor. We're here on
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(54:50):
meal that got me through a time when I was broken.
Listen to Eating While Broke on the I Heart Radio app,
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I'm Robert sex Reese, host of The Doctor sex Rees Show.
And every episode I listened to people talk about their
sex and intimacy issues and yes, I despise every minute

(55:10):
of it. And she she made mistakes too, she did
she kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real.
We're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us
can do about it. So join me. Won't you listen
to the Doctors Sex re Show every Tuesday on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get
your podcast. UM, George Slade Uprising. You know, in Minneapolis,

(55:40):
there were nurses union nurses who walked out the door
um to support uh, you know, people who were uh
basically having an insurrection against like, you know, police violence
in in Minneapolis when the WHENVID pandemic hit off, year

(56:02):
of everything going off, nurses nurses were going out and
confronting uh. Union nurses were going out and confronting anti
mass protesters. Like I was literally getting screamed at by
like some Looney Tunes doctor holding a banner that said
nurses are dying. Go home with like twenty other union nurses.
And we were the only people out there who are
like together, who are you know, immediately impacted by this stuff?

(56:27):
And UM, and I think it made a difference, Like
I think it's important, and so I think that UM.
And there's some idea called social unionism. So if you
get to the point where building a union and you're
making progress, and you get to that point where you
have a union always be advocating for to the extent
that you can that your union is engaged in the
kind of UM like connecting with your community around your workplace,

(56:51):
figuring out the things that are impacting people's lives outside
of unions, because I think that's another thing that UM
For a long time, unions just ignored or let atrophy
because they didn't think it was their problem anymore. Was
you know, mutual aid helped build the labor movement. You know,
workers would get would literally like in West Virginia and

(57:13):
matuan uh they had uh company police throwing people out
of their apartments who are on strike, and the there
were you know, all of a sudden, two thousand of
your fellow workers showing up and throwing the police out
of town and putting people's uh, you know, belongings back
in their house or you know. And I believe we're

(57:36):
getting back to that point where you know, teachers went
on striking West Virginia and the union and the teachers
did everything they could to support their students while they
were out. Because like, I think there's this idea that
a lot of union workers at this point are you know,

(57:57):
everyone is like, you know, the American workforces so desperate
and so and they've just been pushed around so much
that you know, there was this idea for a time
like in Wisconsin, what was or what was the Scott
Walker was constant uprising just Elen, wasn't it? I think
it was like right around occupy it was around there,

(58:19):
and like there was this idea that's like, oh, you're
a nurse, Oh you're a teacher, Like you should just
be happy that your job has some kind of meaning
to it, right, And it was a lot of like
weird discourse around in the media and about like how
dare these people? I think that they deserve anything? And
the thing is is that how can you, like, as

(58:42):
a nurse, how can I take care of my patients
safely when I'm constantly having um like more and more
work put on me, right, and that that immediately affects
the people that I'm taken care of. So that when
when we went on strike in twenty nineteen, it was
around our safes laffing. UM. And if I've seen management

(59:05):
make decisions about staffing that kill people, and I've seen
management make decisions that lead to my co workers getting injured, um,
I management made decisions that led to me getting uh
COVID and messed me up for a year. And uh
so when people in these kind of care worker roles,
which I think has become a more prominent part of

(59:27):
the US economy as people are getting older and they
need more like care work, home care workers, nursing home workers,
hospital workers. UM. Parents don't can't rely on family the
way they used to help take care kids. School has
become like this really important like uh institution for you know,

(59:49):
working class survival. UM that you can't do those jobs
as a worker if you don't have the resources. So
like our our children were at the Chicago Public School
and there that you know, the Chicago Teachers Union, which
was taken over by the rank and file UM, I
think in two thousand five or six by you know,

(01:00:11):
a group of black women led by Karen Lewis. They
set up a group called like a rank and file
caucus called the Caucus of Rank and File Educators or
Radical Educators. CORES might be messing on that, but it's
called CORE. They went out on striking and as a

(01:00:34):
you know, as just this was before my kids were
old not to be in those schools. I was out
there still taking them coffee donuts, right, because I knew
that they were in there. Because things stuck. By the
time my kids were old enough in nineteen for it
to be a big thing and the teachers went on
strike in Chicago, it had gotten so it's so bad
that Chicago teachers, like Chicago Public schools have the the

(01:00:58):
lowest number of staff of two students of any school
system in Illinois. It's not even like half right and um,
And it's funny because the state have been constantly trying
to erode the power of the union. They're making Chicago
teachers like pay their for their own retirement basically in

(01:01:19):
a way that no other like workers have to. Um.
They were making it so that Chicago teachers could only
go on strike. Over of the teachers voted to go
on strike. Um. So when so what that does is
there's kind of like a a little bit of a
flip where oh, we have to make of you know,

(01:01:42):
people agree to go on strike. Well, let's organize so
much that we get people to agree to go on strike,
and then how powerful is our strikes, our strikes going
to be. We're literally like one of the things I
do as a steward is I connect with all the
different unions and at the University of Chicago at work
through a labor council. We were going, as you know,

(01:02:04):
university workers to all the picket lines of the public
schools around our neighborhood and we're bringing out coffee, bringing
out donuts, talking to people. Hey, I'm a nurse. We
were on strike like six or like two or three
months ago. What do you all need? Connecting with people?
And then and then like at one point when the
teachers were like, we're not getting what we want and

(01:02:25):
this is LORI lightfoot is trash there, uh, we helped
organize this mass march where multiple marches of teachers and
school workers and we're all out in the streets dodging
cop cars until we have this big convergence. And it
was really beautiful. Like we had like multiple people with

(01:02:46):
like multiple banners and different columns, each one saying we
will win, going through the streets of our neighborhood. UM
and like messing up like the commercial traffic area in
uh in our very bougie neighborhood and um. But that
was happening all over the city and it's just like
when you see that happen it's because we're literally in

(01:03:07):
the support of the community for those strikes was so
overwhelming because people knew that. It's like these people, aren't it.
I mean, like, first off, it's a hard job. There's
no reason why anyone doing that job shouldn't have like
a materially comfortable life. That's how stressful it is and
how much work they do. And I really, like, I

(01:03:27):
really need to emphasize this enough people. There's like this
whole thing is like, oh, teachers don't work over the summer, Like,
oh but no, no, Like their job sucks. They have
to they have to deal these kids all day. And
the other thing is like you know, the part of
it that you don't see is they have to do
all the lessed plans. They have to great all the stuff,
have to do all this stuff like after the school
day end, they have to do all this honestibly, all
the time. This job is awful. It is extremely hard,

(01:03:49):
and like they don't Yeah, the conditions are extremely bad.
I'll never forget when I'll never forget when I ran
into my seventh grade science teacher on the summer she
was waiting tables at a local restaurant. You know, I
mean and so I think that there's this assumption that like, uh,
that especially care workers get some sort of you can't

(01:04:12):
you know, you can't cash in fulfillment right or prestige
or whatever that doesn't pay the rent, that doesn't put
you know, groceries on your table um that sort of thing.
And so, you know, I think we're beginning to see
this thing resurgence. And it started with teachers and I
know for and teachers and nurses have been out fighting

(01:04:32):
like hell for the past like five years, and it's
beginning to kind of like spark other kinds of organizing
outside of outside of the care work areas, and a
lot of this stuff was It's funny how it was
kind of like predicted by occupy and like revolt of
the carrying classes. Someone who wrote a really cool book
that just came out, David Graber, who was talking about like,

(01:04:54):
why is it that we're seeing all these people who
are out in the streets like during occupy, who are
like social workers and nurses and teachers and all this stuff.
There there's something going on here, and I think that
so you'll see places where organizing conditions are easier because
the pressure on especially care workers right now is immense

(01:05:18):
in a way that it isn't as immense other places.
But look at for those like when you're thinking about
unions and whether to do build a union at your
workplace or do some sort of collective organizing your workplace,
do you have the dynamics where you guys are can
the boss shut down your uh, your your workplace and

(01:05:40):
move it like ten miles without completely destroying their like
their business, right And so you know, we've seen strikes
happen in grocery stores, um and uh Massachusetts there was
a really like uh, pretty well publicized grocery strike and
apparently there was like internal documents got released to like

(01:06:03):
shareholders about how that was like one of the most
like it was like for a month in the winter
or three weeks, and they said they lost like of
customers refused across the picket line. I mean, and I
think we're thinking it's like getting to the point where
you can go on strike, it's a lot, it's a
process and it takes a lot of work, and I
think that people underestimate what that looks like. Hence we

(01:06:26):
see hashtag general strike things all the time. Um, But
like when you get there, I think that we're at
a point now where people have a lot more sympathy
for workers, and workers have become more visible in a
way that they weren't before. Like the essential workers over
the past year and a half have been the only
workers that sometimes people will see, right, so you'll see

(01:06:49):
things also like you have you know, Amazonians United, which
is a union that's organizing, but they're trying to organize
something called a solidarity union. So they're not you know,
at least the ones here in Chicago, and I think
some of them in New York. And this may be changing.
Things are always shifting around, but for a long for
a while, through like the pandemic, they were organizing on

(01:07:11):
a like in contrast to the best sumer uh Amazon campaign. Sorry,
there was a a business union tried to organize a
union in Alabama, Investment Alabama at an Amazon warehouse, and
there was a lot of like media attention to that.
Democratic politicians were paying attention to it. Joe Biden said,

(01:07:35):
I support the right of workers to choose to have
the choice. Stabby union some really milk toast bullshit and
a lot of celebrities showing up and what wasn't happening
was you weren't seeing a lot of evidence that the
workers themselves were very excited about the union, and it
turned out that that campaign failed. UM, whereas workers at

(01:07:58):
Amazonians united up here, like in Chicago, and granted it's
a very different organizing environment in Illinois than it is
in Alabama, UM, they haven't been focusing on getting contract.
They've been focusing on getting work changes. Like they're like,
we want to have water, like we need water breaks,
and so they would they have these stand up meetings
at the beginning of every shift, and they had coordinated

(01:08:21):
where you have, you know, thirty of your coworkers all
say we're not starting until we get water, and then
management panics because they're not used to that kind of demand.
They're used to We're going to have a campaign. Then
we can you know, mess with votes and that sort
of thing and make people afraid. Collective action overcomes fear, right,

(01:08:44):
So when you have collective action, even through a regular
like a more regular conventional union campaign, those collective actions
are what leads to successful unions. So like UM, so
you know, they'd say we aren't starting the shift until
we get water, and then all of a sudden, a
manager disappears and then comes back with palates full of water, right,

(01:09:05):
and all of a sudden, people are like, I'm gonna
have a drink water before I start like all together.
And then they go off and do their thing, and
it's like, you know, things like that build the power
of the union to the point where they shut down
that warehouse. But then Amazonian United popped up in the
three new warehouses that they stuff in Chicago. So it's

(01:09:26):
like when you build that kind of collective power and
people feel like this is how you get things, then
it's hard to repress. Right. It's one thing where like
we lost an election, why did we even bother? It's
another thing where like, no, we wont like all this
like this, that, and the other thing like we got
you know, like our regular schedules fixed, We got like

(01:09:46):
water on our ships. We got this. You know. That's
what gets people into the mindset that they can change.
And so I think this is the thing that a
lot of people don't get. It's it's like, the difficult
part isn't getting people to agree that things are fun
up at your workplace. Most people understand that things are
sucked up in their workplace. Difficult part isn't saying that, like, well,
this is a solution, right. The difficult part is getting

(01:10:09):
people to understand that collective action is the only way
to solve the problems, right even within unionized workplaces. Getting
your coworkers to understand that if we don't do this
as a collective we will fail. And so like when
there was a like the first successful private hospital union

(01:10:32):
drive in North Carolina popped off early. Um, throughout that campaign,
they were constantly like demonstrations of collective power. We're gonna
do a vigil. How many people are gonn show up
to the visual We're gonna all walk around stickers saying
like safe staffing saves lives or like you know, um,

(01:10:54):
patients over profits. That sort of stuff, and building that
kind of collective power together is what it's you. Um,
it's what gets you a successful Like that's what builds
a union. Fundamentally, union is um, there's the legal thing
and then there's the real thing. And the real thing
is only as powerful as people are willing to fight

(01:11:14):
for and build that kind of collective power together. When
nurses were on straight and I talked a lot about
nurses because I know a lot about nurses, but like
you know, or like you know in um In, Iowa,
when the John Deere strike happened, people were out on
the picket lines and people were ready to get hit
by cars to like stop scabs from coming like crossing
the picket line. And if you're not willing to do

(01:11:36):
that kind of stuff. And I'm not saying that you
need to put your body on the line for things,
but you do need to be willing to draw outside
the lines. Right, there's the law and then there's what
you can get people to do. And you will be
surprised when people start moving. They move fast, and they
get really riled up, like this, funk this, this is
what we're gonna do. And sometimes unions try and like

(01:11:58):
bottle that energy up um or you know, if you're
in a good union, you use that energy to fix things.
So I think that's kind of where land on all
this stuff. It's like be aware of like the pitfalls
of what organizing at work means. Everyone has the right
to organize at work everywhere in this country. If you

(01:12:19):
get fired for like for organizing, you can fight that
that sort of thing. Yeah, it is, it's federally protected,
Like it's this is this is a federal government thing
like you know, this is this is this is what
we got in exchange for everything else is like like
this is you know, like this this is what we
got in exchange of putting our guns down. Is that like, yeah,
the the the actual Feds will be like, no, you

(01:12:42):
can't do this. Yeah, I mean, and sometimes that doesn't
sound fold constellation and it doesn't always work. But and
I guess this is the other thing is there are
people who are like, this is how we're gonna, you know,
we're gonna when socialism is everyone's any union. And I guess,
like my take on it is is this is how

(01:13:03):
we build all the networks and get the skills and
all the necessary things to be prepared to do bigger
stuff down the road. So when we when workers are
talking to each other across like you know, at when Chicago,
when Chicago teachers went on strike, they didn't just go
on strike as the teachers. They also talked to the

(01:13:24):
They lined up their strike to go out as the
same as education like the school workers who are in
s c I you, and they went out at the
same time. Um in order to incre improve the power
of the strike because the more workers who are out
less able the bosses are to like like to undermine
the boss either with people scabbing on each other or whatever.

(01:13:46):
And I think it's just like and like that's the
point of our labor council is Like when like the
grad workers at Universe Chicago go on strike, we got
teachers out or we got well, there were teachers from
CTU out on those picket lines. There were nurses or
a new on those picket lines, and we were doing
everything we could to communicate to each other because like

(01:14:07):
in my work, it doesn't matter that I'm a nurse
and you're a secretary. We have the same boss. We
have the same problems a lot of the times. And
so I think people people want to do the thing,
which is to all have the glorious general strike that
like overthrows capitalism or whatever or fixes all the problems
that your work. But you know, starting everyone forgets all

(01:14:30):
the necessary intermediate steps to get to that point. And
sometimes it means just get the union and in the
door in the first place, because like at a campaign
I was a part of here in Chicago where my
Universe Chicago bought a non union hospital that was out
in the community. Just getting in there, they were able
to expose like basically an entire hospital wide scheme of

(01:14:52):
like racial racist like practices around raises and compensation. And
that is like that first step and then fixing that
right because you don't want to have like white worse
nurses making more than black nurses and black more than
like did immigrant nurses like Filipino or like Mexican nurses.

(01:15:12):
Get everyone on the same page so that you're fighting
together instead of fighting each other. And you know, those
are those first steps that you take. And then and
then you start reaching out to people on other other
workplaces or other work areas and build that kind of
militancy across unions so that you can support each other.

(01:15:32):
So maybe a secondary strike is illegal right now, but
that doesn't mean that you don't have, you know, teamsters
who won't cross the picket line, right you know, how
do you go out and make it or you can
build that solidarity so that like in Buffalo and the UM,
the c w A nurses went on strike and they
want pretty impressive things around staffing ratios. They literally had

(01:15:56):
other unions going out and picketing board members of their
hospital businesses and like getting really really like aggressive with
that sort of stuff. So I think that I think
that people need to just big takeaway is it's the
biggest barrier to any of this stuff, is just getting
people to believe that collective action is possible and they

(01:16:20):
can get you wins. And then making sure that you
take your time and be patient and understand that there's
going to be losses. But in the grand scheme of things,
don't don't don't mistake what looks like a setback when
it's actually a victory for like a victory, like for

(01:16:41):
a real like a defeat and um, and talk with
people like that's what they hate that, Like, bosses hate
it when we're talking with each other and talk to
people you're not comfortable with. That's the That's the other
thing is that people are very nervous to talk to people.
Like It's always funny when you run into people who
are ra ra like unions, ra ra like socialism, YadA, YadA, YadA,
and they don't talk to their co workers, right, and

(01:17:03):
your co workers are the people you're gonna be around
for maybe some years, and that's where you spend a
huge chunk of your time and like, but you don't
know what's going on. They're like, Oh, they're all hostile.
They don't want to know anything, they don't want to
do anything. Funny thing is is that oftentimes the most
people who seem very skeptical and anti union can be
flipped and sometimes those people become the best, like the

(01:17:25):
most dedicated people to the union. It also means that
you're going to talk to people you disagree with. Like
there was a Trump dude who was on like the
bargaining committee for the like our last strike. He fucking
loved that thing. He was like, we're going on strike,
but you know, it's also union full of black women,
and he shut the funk up when you know it
wasn't like, you know, being racist and ship, but you
know you're gonna be with those people. And part of

(01:17:47):
the thing is that it's about how we're all moving
together rather than making sure everyone is on the same
page for every single thing, because the biggest thing is
the collective action and building that collective power and hopefully
the collective powers. Hopefully the collective power outweighs. It's if
you stand firm on principles like anti racism and fighting

(01:18:10):
against discrimination and misogyny, that sort of thing. It actually
builds the power of the union. I think that's the
other things that people are like, Oh, I don't you know,
like you know, working class people are all racist or
reactionary or whatever. So I'm going to do that And
that's how I'm gonna get that's my in. And it's like,
I think there are a lot of people who like,
they really don't like, you know, they don't like being
around loud, racist assholes or people who you know, say slurs,

(01:18:35):
like especially if it's like I mean, you can make
the arguments like this is that's their way of dividing us.
Our goal is to be together. And historically speaking, the
one thing that's done the most too fight working class
racism is union organizing. Ye. So, And I think also,
like you know, in terms of like building something that's

(01:18:59):
actually durable and powerful on top of sort of just
the division. I mean, you know, even when it becomes
stuff like transphobia, right, it's like, you know, if if
you can convince people to fight like first, like fight
for the person next to them, right, you know, I
mean this is this is the thing that people like
said a lot during the during the brainding campaign, but

(01:19:20):
it was like you know, if people like, yeah, like
if you can get someone to uh fight, like fight
for the person next to you in a concrete way
in the workplace in a way that's actually real for
something that doesn't directly affect them. You the you know
a a it's just like the the amount of power
that you've built there is incredible. And then be also, Okay,

(01:19:44):
I forgot where I was going with that, Daniel, please
cut that. Hold on, hold on, I can kind of
build off, but we just say this. My personal experience
is that queer women run the labor movement and that
like and that if you think that people who have
been bullied from the day they like stepped into like
a into a kindergarten aren't going to be the people

(01:20:06):
who are most equipped to fight bullshit, bullying from a
boss or justice or bullshit you're fucking like, like, just
get the funk out because you haven't been in a
union and you don't know what you know, I mean,
you like the like people. Unions are at their best
when they incorporate, you know, all, like when they are

(01:20:29):
fighting for everybody, because what a boss can get away
with with the weakest person, that's what they'll do to
all of us if they get the chance. And so
I think that there's this idea that's like, oh, we're
going to set we're not going to we're going to
ignore this or that sort of thing. It's like, you know,
that's when people like, you know, people will turn away
from unions as they feel like they're not being listened

(01:20:51):
to or taken seriously. And you don't know what people's
like identities are just because you see how they look.
And so I think that it's real important for us
to understand that if we're going to fight these fights,
we need to do so with the understanding that it's everybody,
and that the working class is a giant, multi racial
conglomeration of every identity in this country. Um, and that

(01:21:13):
the more marginal your identity is, the more useful having
a union is to like solving your problems. Like I said,
like racist racist compensation practices, there was no way that
was going to get fixed, Like it wasn't even uncovered.
People didn't understand it was happening until like the union
got in. Doesn't mean there are other ways to fix things,
but it's one of the one of the most powerful

(01:21:35):
ways to fix things. I think that people just like
don't understand because they don't have experience. Because they don't
have an experience, they end up with they end up
with misconceptions about what they're going to get into, and
then they get disappointed. And I think the reality, I mean,
I think that the reality is not as bad as
sometimes it seems. But also you gotta go into all

(01:21:57):
this ship with open eyes. And I think of there's
and that's the other thing one of the fun things.
Maybe this will make it into the podcast. I don't know,
but um, one of the fun things is always like
hanging out with like if you like every workplace has
like its lefties just about, and like hanging out with
the lefties who just can't get their brains wrapped around

(01:22:19):
the ship that you need to have a union. I
think that there's like this idea that's like, oh, I'm
gonna talk to my friend. They're like they're like they
say they're a communists, so that the and then that
all those people do not always but they're they're sitting there.
It's like talking a bunch of ship about like the union.
They're a bunch of sellouts is or that, and it's
like literally it's the only thing you're gonna do to
get your like to fix the problem, and you're just like,

(01:22:41):
we're just trying to get this problem fixed. Can we
just set aside what you think needs to happen like
that you guys talked about it. You're like Spartacus leak
meeting or whatever, like, oh, this isn't a real strike,
Like we're not going out until like for like you know,
three months. And it's like, you know, it's like the
sort of thing where um sometimes or oftentimes, And I

(01:23:02):
think it's because a lot of people kind of pick
up their politics almost like an aesthetic as opposed to
like a thing that like is about like fixing the
problems in their lives. And sometimes even I'm like, you know,
like this is the problem that I face. Is like
like shit is real like for a lot of people.
And you can sit there and talk about this or that,

(01:23:24):
and like you're you know, you think that things. You know,
you've got this perfect ideal vision of what things should be,
and then you've got this kind of imperfect thing in
front of you that is, even though it's imperfect, it's
basically what you've got. And so it's like you've got
to kind of you've got to work with what you
have and fix it up and make it the best
that you think it can be. Um, But also understand

(01:23:46):
because it's an organization full of people, that it's not
going to be perfect every time. And yeah, maybe your
union is going to do some liberal ship you know,
and you're gonna and that's gonna annoy you. But you know, like, um,
those people are still going to show up on the
picket line if you're like, if you're organized and you're good,
and like, you know, that's it's not the end of

(01:24:07):
the world that your union isn't perfect. Um, but you've
got to do everything you can to do your best
to make it better because if you don't, then then
liberals will do whatever they're gonna do, or conservatives will
do whatever they're gonna do, and then they will like
furtter away this thing. Like you can destroy a union
if you aren't engaged. Like a union can be destroyed

(01:24:27):
by people who think that you know, they're just like
I just want to get my rays and like go home,
and like, you know, if people's main concern is like
their healthcare or like you know, that hour of prep
time before they start their shift, or whatever, should you
start their school day or whatever. Um. You know, a
union can like dissolve out from underneath you and people

(01:24:48):
are like, why is no one showing up to this thing?
It's because you didn't talk to people and kind of
what it is. I think that's the other thing. It's
like listen, Like there's this idea that you're gonna get
up and give a big speech and get everyone really
excited about your about like being in a union. But
the main thing is listening to people and listening to
people who are critics. You know, your co workers who
have complaints aren't like people that you should ignore. Those

(01:25:10):
are people who need to listen to because those are
people who they've got I mean, everyone's got legitimate problems
with how you know work is happening. And like just
because someone's like, you know, union is like, you know, trash,
Like then find out why they think it's trash and
then try and be like I want to try and
fix out what can we do to fix it together?
That sort of thing. I remember when when I was working,

(01:25:33):
so I worked at like maintenance and a county facility
for a while, and you know, so I was like
a like I was like I was like a summer
higher basically, and so would we We weren't in the union,
but like everyone we were working for was in the union,
and they all like, you know, these are old ex
construction worker guys and you know, like they're in the union.

(01:25:55):
But like I remember that we show these conversations that
were like, okay, so we have a union meeting this week,
like do you want to be the person who tries
to talk about raising wages? And it was like everyone
was just like no, And you know, people you know,
like these guys are like very right wing and they
were just sort of like piste off all the time.
But it was interesting because the thing they were piste
off all the time about was that, like, you know,

(01:26:16):
their union didn't do anything like their union like they
they they're they they're like they were They were basically
constantly annoyed that like the union didn't like the the
the union wasn't fighting for pay raises, uson wasn't sort
of fighting. And I think that was, you know, an
example of how this stuff sort of just fails if
if people aren't like people don't feel like they can

(01:26:38):
actually do something like itself. I mean, and they call
it service unionism. There's this idea that like um or
like like that a business union's job is to kind
of serve you and you kind of like they do
all the work. Like one of the complaints that some
people who are not big fans of our union and

(01:26:58):
our hospital is that, like, oh well, other other unions
have lawyers negotiate the contract for you. And when we negotiate,
we have a room full of nurses who are doing
the who are doing the negotiations, and the goal is
to have it be as transparent as possible. And like

(01:27:18):
the idea that you're going to hand over negotiations to
a lawyer and somehow get a better deal than than
a room full of the actual workers. And it's funny
because we have our bargaining team and then like will
periodically do something called open bargaining because it's the thing
that bosses hate. It's like they want to make a
deal like with a door shut right, Um, But there's

(01:27:42):
no reason why a union has to do that. Like,
you can invite whoever you want to your bargaining. You
can invite community members to your bargaining if you feel
like you're man it could because management behind closed doors
will say all kinds of things, and you know, they'll
they'll trash talk everyone involved, and they'll you know, and
they will make absurd demands about you know, it's like, oh,

(01:28:03):
you're all gonna take a pay cut, you know, on
this contract, that sort of thing, and they hate it.
They absolutely hate it when like workers actually show up
to these things. And so, um, I think that understanding that, Like,
I think there's this idea that like some people are

(01:28:24):
big on like we have to be kind of like
secretive to like get the best deal, and like we
shouldn't be like we shouldn't be transparent with everyone about
what's going on because that's how like because then they'll
figure out some way to counter us. But in my experience,
my understanding is that the more transparent your union is,

(01:28:45):
the more involved people get, and the more able people are,
the more willing people are to put their time and
energy into it. Because that's what comes down to is
like people out to like everyone's working and busy and
their life life is hard and sucks, and so like
do you have time to like dedicate to show up
to like talk to like if you why would you
go to a union meeting? If when you raise the

(01:29:07):
concern like we want higher wages, and like the union
like staffer doesn't care if you get higher wages because
they're like while we're getting our union dudes, and like
what what then do we care? Right? That's like a
huge problem. And the part of the thing is that
those problems don't get solved if they if they exist,
because they that definitely exists in some muni and a

(01:29:29):
lot of unions, more unions than uh than not um,
if the workers don't get organized together, Like we just
saw an election within the Teamsters International where uh the
halfa uh don't Jimmy Haffa Jr. One of the half

(01:29:50):
a kids, was like president of the union and was
this like not doing a great job and um, and
like there was a rank and file like push to
get that guy uh unelected, you know, and put it
replaced with a rank and file worker who wants to
put actual time and resources into organizing you know. Like

(01:30:10):
there's nothing sadder than a than like watching a union
campaign fail because the union clearly is phoning it in.
Like that's happened. I've seen it happen not inside my union,
but in other unions and uh, and I mean, like
at my workplace, there's several unions and I've seen I've
seen a failed campaign and it's like obvious, like there's

(01:30:33):
you know, I'm not I don't co sign everything that
someone like Jaye mccavalary. I think that's alway share mcavleary
has to say. She wrote like no shortcuts. Um, I
don't sign off on everything she has to say, but
she has some really insightful things. It's like if you're
not organizing to win, like you'll fail, and like you
have to take this so seriously. And that's where like
I'll say that, like, if you've got a choice between

(01:30:55):
I'm gonna put time into a political political campaign versus
a union campaign, You're going to get way more bang
for your buck. You're gonna get so much more experience.
You're gonna get like a durable organization that's going to
be around for years if you put that time into
a union campaign. Because like, imagine winning an election, right, um,

(01:31:16):
except the politician you're running against is the incumbent and
they can basically drag every one of their constituents into
like a meeting and tell them how awful you are
all the time, and lie and say whatever they want,
and then they can, you know, do all kinds of
tricks to like basically dismantle your campaign. So I guess,

(01:31:37):
like the thing that I would say is that like
if you if you do it the right way and
you actually win one of those campaigns, you're gonna come
out way ahead in sort of understanding. Like you have
to talk to people, you have to be super organized,
you have to know what people's issues are in their
different targeting units. UM. You have to find people like
part of like it's successful campaigns. I've been part of

(01:31:59):
literally going on a search to go find like the
people that need to be like signing cards and stuff.
And you just have to be a very good listener,
ready to talk and listen and hear what people have
to say. Um, and then turn that um information into knowledge,
knowledge and power UM and UM. I think that if

(01:32:22):
you pull it off, you have done something substantially harder
than say like winning a school board election or something
like that. I mean, it's it's it really is. It's
like taking like those kind of skills that you would
use to like win some sort of small municipal election,
and it's like exponentially more hard because the rules are
just so tilted against you winning. So if you are

(01:32:46):
serious about it, if you're serious about changing the world,
if you can't like someone, Yeah, I think Murray Buckschen
once said, if you can't run for dog catcher, you
probably shouldn't be talking about revolution, you know, But I
think that probably more you know, more appropriate to be, Like,
if you can't win a union election, you probably shouldn't
be talking about revolution because even if you want to

(01:33:08):
do all the things, you need to have the ability,
the skills, the ability immediate conflict, getting everyone on board
to do the collective action that like you would need
to do to successfully kind of like carry out like
you know, it's one thing to have the the grand insurrection.
It's the other thing to carry it forward and keep
carrying it to the point where you're over the line

(01:33:29):
you've completely changed the world, right, So and I think
that And so I just think that like UM and
I think that's similar things go with like you know,
tenant organizing, community organizing. There's various types of organizing that
use those similar skills that you get in like a
union campaign. UM. And it's just a very different type

(01:33:49):
of UM politics and organization and skills that you would
get from, you know, showing up for your local justice
dem and you know, like knocking on the door, sister rangers.
You'll never you may never speak to you again. You know.
When you're talking with your coworkers, those are your coworkers.
They are going to be there until you're you know,
you retire or you're fired yep, or you quit. So anyway,

(01:34:12):
that's I guess that's another good takeaway I think from
all this. So one thing I wanted to make sure
to get to is, so I think there's a lot
of people who are listening to this, who working no
need workplaces and want to try to start this, and
I wanted to know what would be your recommendations for them.

(01:34:34):
You know, how, how how do you start this process?
What does this look like? In what kinds of conversations
should you be having with your coworkers? Yeah, for sure.
So um, I think one of the first things that
I think a lot of people, a lot of people
don't understand is that there is an amount of risk

(01:34:54):
and stuff too organizing, and that you're, like, first off,
like you should be chill and like not like running
around telling everyone you want a union, because that's a
great way to lose your job. Um. I think the
thing is is that you build relationships and find out
what's happening, like just like you know, take from your

(01:35:15):
experience and figure out what's like in h like, man,
it really sucks like I got like I got screwed
over on my vacation requests or like I, you know, man,
our raises were really shitty this year, and I heard like,
you know, boss talking about like how much like like
they've made so much money that sort of thing. Um,
So I think that it comes down to you have

(01:35:38):
to be It's kind of like a combination of like
like an investigative reporter and like someone who is just
really good at like talking to people and just kind
of like understanding what's making them tick and understanding also
that maybe you're not the person who's going to get
everyone on board, but that finding other people who ever,

(01:36:01):
Like I think the big thing is like who's like
the most prospected person on like in your work area
that sort of thing, who like they know that the
unit or they know the work area, they've been there
the longest, they have like the most experience. People look
up to them. There are the people who train other
people that sort of thing. Those are the people who
everyone looks to when it comes down to these sorts

(01:36:23):
of things, and you know, just you don't have to
be friends with everybody, but like doing it's I think
it's really good to just, like two, be open to
listening to everybody that you work with and finding out
what it is that's really going on. Yes, I've noticed
like in a lot of places that I've worked, like

(01:36:45):
the boss is often don't really know what's going on either,
like they, And I think that that that's something I
can give you if you understand how the process works
and who's doing what and what people like need, that
gives you like a big vantage over the bosses who
just have no idea what's going on, which I think, Yeah,

(01:37:09):
I think it's very it's very normal for bosses to
really not know what's happening, and there's always someone who does,
like figuring out the people who really know how things
work are like those are like the those are the
people who, um, you want to be talking with and
figuring out like where they kind of stand on things,

(01:37:31):
and um, you know, I think like the first step
is like just having good relationships and people trusting you
and you know, you know, if you know, like, I
don't think everyone needs to be a superstar workers sort
of thing to be a good union organizer. But like
they always say, it's like people who have the most
problems oftentimes are people that are don't make great organizers

(01:37:54):
because people don't see them as people to follow. But
um um, but I think that it's important to just
like talk with your to like just figure out what's
going on first. That's your first step. Figure out what's
going on? What are the things I mean? And you
can come around together in you know, and like and
how do you get people outside of the workplace? So

(01:38:16):
you talk like how do you, like do you have
like a group chat or signal chat or like a
What's app chat or Facebook group? And where do you
just like start kind of like and you know, be
very care be careful about who's involved and just kind
of like low key, just like start talking with folks
and identifying to people who, um, who are outside of
your work area, who know people like sometimes it's you know,

(01:38:37):
you'll talk to people and they're like, I don't want
to talk about a union, but you'll be like, do
you know anyone who cares? Who who has said anything
about unions before, and so talking to people to find
out who they know. Like these are all this kind
of like crucial first steps to like organizing. And I
think the thing is is that, like there have been

(01:38:57):
times where you'll have a non union work place where
if the people in a particular area of of like
a of like a hospital or like a workplace wherever,
we'll do some collective thing that gets some sort of results.
So I think it's always like it's like, let's get
people to sign off on a petition about like you know,

(01:39:18):
like if of your coworkers are unhappy with like raises
or something like that. Like the more people that are
involved in those first steps, the more likely it is
that it won't result in retaliation and like you'll end
up getting some sort of victory. Um. So I guess

(01:39:38):
like the thing that I would say is just like
be be ready for like people to look at greet
you with skepticism because like it's it's hard, it's a
hard thing to do, and always just be finding out
what is bothering people and then look at little things
that you can do to kind of like flex power,

(01:39:58):
like to like actively flects your power and um. It
can be as small as like everyone bringing up the
same issue at like a work meeting, right Like if
you and it could be like, hey, let's talk about
this at this work meeting. This is and if we
all say something together, like, we're going to be fine, right. UM.

(01:40:19):
So like starting with those first steps, I think it
is the first like thing, Like the first thing is
know what's going on, build relationships, be a trustworthy person,
Like you can't be like the unit gossip or the
the work area gossip that like knows that's in everyone's
business or stirring up stuff and be successful at this. UM.
But if you are, you know, if you're someone that

(01:40:41):
people like trust or look to or you know, like
a person that people are like they help solve our problems,
those are the people who I mean you're going to
be well set to begin to kind of take the
steps on that and then you know as you kind
of build those kind of like build that organization step
by step. No, no union UM is going to invest

(01:41:04):
the time in a union campaign. If it's just you
and like two other people, like you need like you
need to get a room, They're always say like, well,
if you get a room full of people together, I'm
willing to talk to them, and that's kind of the thing.
And you know, Zoom and stuff has actually made that
a little bit easier UM, which in some ways can
be a weakness because you end up with like it's

(01:41:25):
a lot less commitment to show up to a Zoom
meeting that it is to UM to show up at
like a bar or a place after work UM or
a church or wherever. It's like a good, like h
like neutral safe place and people feel like they can
be honest with each other about what's going on. UM.
But at the same time, just like being the more

(01:41:50):
the the more people you get on board with the thing,
the more likely that it will succeed. You'll attract support
from like an actual union that UM is able to
help you if you decide that that's how you want
to do it, or if that makes sense in a
legal context. And so I just like always like start small,
figure out the small things, be willing to do like

(01:42:11):
collective action to get little small victories. And that's a
great way to get started, I think, and then like
really do like sleuthing and research, like figure out how
things actually work. UM. That's like you know, That was
a problem with the Best Market campaign down in uh
down in Alabama with those Amazon workers is they didn't
know how many people worked at that facility, and then

(01:42:34):
all of a sudden they're like, oh, yeah, we're going
to include like an extra thousand people in this vote,
you know, like six weeks out, and you know, like
I don't want to I don't want to take a
dump on the people who did that. But like, if
you don't know that there's like another thousand people, or
you don't have like everyone on board, you're not going
to succeed. So no, everything you can as you're going

(01:42:57):
in and do everything you can to find out things
or make buddies with the friends buddies of the people
who are gonna you know, know these things and you know,
and then support each other, like it means showing up
when like someone Sometimes what we do during these campaigns
is someone will will have the contact for someone who's interested,

(01:43:18):
and then your job is to go and find that
person where they work and talk with them and then
talk with them while they talk with their coworkers or
back up them while they're talking to the co workers.
Because they trust their their coworkers, trust their coworker, you know,
you're a random stranger, you know, and then like, don't
be afraid to say I don't know, but I will
find out. Right, there's like this, there's this pressure I
think to like have all the answers to like whatever

(01:43:40):
people's questions are. And I think that it's like, um,
I think that it's like I think that it's important
to be honest when you don't understand, but then do
the work of figuring out the answers for people. UM.
And I think people respect that. And you know, a

(01:44:00):
lot of people who are vocally against these sorts of
things up front it's because they don't know. And if
you you know, you're like, no, we've got a right
to do this, or like, you know, the the you know,
a management will say things like managion will say things
like oh you will, um, you know, the union will
get in between our relationship with you know, with you

(01:44:23):
and us, right, And the point is is that like, well,
the union is us where the code where the people
doing it? Like everyone running You can't run a union
if you don't have a bunch of people involved from
the workplace. And it's like and making sure that people
who are UM those people who end up being kind
of like spokespersons for everyone else are people that folks

(01:44:43):
trust and they have like a good like grasp of
what everyone wants and yeah, so yeah, and then like
you know, don't get bogged down in the legal ship.
Like you know, collective action really is like your most
powerful tool. Um all the other kind of like the
grievance is not stuff. It's important and you can't let
it go, but it's also like it's designed to kind

(01:45:05):
of grind people down. So um, you know, the more
collective action you take, like the more likely it is
that you're going to be successful and keep people engaged
and excited. Yeah, going back to what you were saying earlier,
this might mind up being last episode depending on where
this breaks down time wise, But yeah, I think it's

(01:45:26):
also it's just this is going to take time and
a lot of work, and I think it's it's it's
important age to understand going in that this is a
long and difficult process. It's not gonna happen overnight, and
be that it's a lot of work, Like you have
to there's there's a lot of things that you have
to do. There's a lot of sort of logistics. There's

(01:45:48):
a lot of talking, there's a lot of like negotiating,
there's a lot of sort of I mean just just
even I don't know, before anything gets off the ground,
you have to spend enormous amounts of time and effort
doing off And that's that's that's like it's just the
reality of it. So yeah, there's there's no there's there's
no there's there's there's there's no magic bullet like there's

(01:46:09):
no sort of yeah, there's there's no just like one
thing you can do that like magically makes a you
need appear. It's a bunch of people coming together and
like fighting for it for a long time. Yeah, I
think that that's like the main thing is like you're
it's it's a cliche. That's like it's a marathon, not
as prints. Um. Sometimes I hate when people say that ship,

(01:46:31):
but it's true, like you you really do have like, um,
you're in it for the long haul, and a lot
of times it's like your people are ready to do
these things when they're like this is like I don't
want you know, it's one thing to pop up in
a place and be there for like you know, six months,
to be like I need a we need a union. Right.

(01:46:52):
No one you know that works in that place trust you.
They don't know who you are. Like, they're not going
to follow you to do anything or you know, or
take you you know, follow your lead. Um. It's the
people who are like, I'm gonna be here, this is
my this is where I want to be, and you know,
this is a I want to be here for the
next few years. And think of it as like a

(01:47:13):
long term investment in the quality of your life and
the quality of life at your workplace, because to win,
you have to be sticking around, you know. And I
think that's where it gets tough with people who are
in like precarious types of employment or different types of
and that's where you have to start looking at alternate

(01:47:34):
ways to organize because maybe you're a precarious worker who
does maybe you drive, like for a right here service,
or maybe you like do delivery or like you know,
um for an app or whatever you delivery for an app.
And I think the thing is is like that sort
of thing because of how and you know, these aren't
like new forms of work. This is actually really old

(01:47:56):
forms of work that are just like been like rebranded
by tech bros decided like they're like they're like they're great.
Genius is like rebranding the kind of like precarious work
that was really like prominent like throughout the nineteenth century.
And it's like, so then what do you do is
you come up with ways to organize people regardless of
like oh, like i'm you know, I work for this,

(01:48:19):
like I work for lift or work for Uber and
it kind of switches back and forth. Like the thing is,
it's like that's when you start talking with you know,
rideshare drivers across different like apps or whatever, and then
you come up with a way to work collectively, um
to to change sorts of things. And sometimes that's it's
gonna be it's gonna be tough, you know. And that's

(01:48:41):
when I kind of look at those that sort of
thing is like this is where it's a learning experience
and maybe I don't get everything I want, but you
know it's really important. I mean, it's like building these
networks of people who care about like what they're working.
Conditions are like, and you can pull things off maybe
unexpectedly that you didn't expect. We're going to be like
the thing, you know, like you may start with something

(01:49:04):
that looks like a union drive and then you end
up with something that looks like very different. It could
you know, could go in all sorts of different directions.
So um, you know there and look outside of the US,
you know, their countries where like in UM, I think
that there have been some pretty successful delivery app organ

(01:49:24):
to organizing in London, UM. And you know, I think
that to a certain extent, like formal extent, US unions
have not been very successful in organizing those workers because
it doesn't it's hard to do from the extant business

(01:49:46):
union model, and so it's like it's one of those
things where you know, it used to be, you know,
they would have like you know, the fight would be
instead of trying to get like workers are like a
contract at a particular like work site, you set up
a hiring hall, like the i w W would set

(01:50:06):
up hiring halls, UM and like you know for lumberjacks
and that sort of thing, and those workers are always precarious, right,
but they would go trying set up so that like
people would only take jobs out of the hiring hall
and that's how they would control their like their work.
And I think that more unions needed. And part of
this is, like would if there's any union people out

(01:50:29):
there who are in staff and that sort of thing.
Is like, there needs to be a serious re examination
of how we do unions in this country. And I
think a lot of people inside unions understand that, but
no one has quite done it yet in a way
that's effective. And I think that we really do need
to kind of re evaluate that sort of stuff. So
just you know, as someone who's going into like a

(01:50:51):
new sort of organizing campaign, just understand that like getting
the union contract isn't necessarily the end gold end goal
is to try and get your boss to do things
differently so that you're not like miserable at work. And
that might look like a contractor it might look like
you know, a a one day like uh, you know,
app strike or something like that. You know, you'll you'll

(01:51:13):
figure you've got to figure out how it's gonna work.
Like with you know, in healthcare, you know, there's this
idea that like, you know, there's the gold standard of
the strike where you strike until we win and we're
out for like you know, like two or three months. Well,
the problem is is that there's an industry of scab
nurses and healthcare workers where at any point they can

(01:51:33):
bring in people to replace enough of you that a
hospital can maintain operations. And unless you're super organized like
they were up in um Buffalo, uh with c W
A like, and have a big network of people and
you're ready to go to like you know, like picket
board members houses and that sort of stuff. Um, those

(01:51:54):
long term strikes can end in defeat where you end
up with you know, you're all replaced with scabs and
and it sucks, and it's happened, and then you gotta
I guess you gotta learn from it, you know, like
we've there was a famous strike in Minnesota with healthcare
workers and they went out and they were out for
months and months and there are people on you know,

(01:52:15):
going to the SUP kitchen to feed their kids and stuff,
and they lost right. And so my union tends to
do one day strikes, but instead of just being at
one hospital, we organized multiple hospitals across the country so
that it soaks up all the like scat drives up
right scabs and it really like that. I think ideas
like intermittent strikes were actually a really powerful tool back when,

(01:52:39):
you know, back when it was the c I oh,
and it was like we're going to just stop working
until he fixed this problem. UM. And that's why they
made them illegal. And it takes a lot of work
to pull them off. But if you can't pull them off,
that could be an effective way. And if you're not
in a union, maybe getting people down for a one
day like work stoppage at your work or even you know,
maybe it's like we're not starting our shift right. I've

(01:53:01):
been in the room. I've been in the room where
it's like, no, we're not going out to take that
assignment until like we get our staff situation set up
like fixed. And you know, sometimes it's just those collective
actions are you know, it's not the end, Like there's
no end. I'll be all one size fits all solution,
just be ready to kind of like explore what it means,

(01:53:24):
get all the resources you can. There's groups like there's
still like the Industrial Workers of the World, which has
really good organizing trainings o T one oh one and
one oh two. I'll pitch that as a member of
as a also a dual carding member of the i
w w UM. But there's also Labor Notes UM and
other groups like Essential Workers Organizing Committee. That's sort of

(01:53:46):
things that like give you good like rundowns on how
to do the organizing work. So just be careful, always
be careful. Be aware that people are afraid. Bosses use
fear um to scare you guys, to scare everybody, and like,
the the more people on board with a thing, the
less fear. Like it's amazing when you're running up into

(01:54:08):
a strike and you're really firing on all cylinders and
like everyone in your like work areas, like we're getting
together to take a picture, like getting ready to go
on strike, and it's like literally, I mean when we
went on strike, when our hospital went on strike, it
was the first time where like there was like nurses
on one places the first time when all of us
were in one place ever. And it's this massive like

(01:54:30):
coming together thing experience. And it's really hard to describe
when you when because you know, we're always griping at
each other about this or that thing is like, but
when you're actually all out there together at the same time,
when you pull it off, it's really amazing. Um, it's hard,
it's it's hard to describe, um, but when you do it,
it's like it's like the purest drug. And so I've

(01:54:52):
I've heard some people who are union skeptical be like,
well you just experienced like the good ship, and like
what about all the defeats, Like, well, get the little hits,
get the little hits here and there, and get yourself
to the point where you can do the big thing.
You know, you're the whole thing is like getting people
to do the thing is like the is it's like
the perennial uh, you know, curse at the left, can

(01:55:15):
you do it? Or curse of you know, like the
the organizer activist or you know, whatever you wanna call it.
You know, it's just but you know, if you don't
do anything, nothing happens. You can all sit and complain
and nothing changes. So you know, the only way to
changes things is take those complaints and turn them into

(01:55:35):
collective action. Yeah. I think I think that's that's that
that that that that's that's a pretty good positive note
to end on. Just go do thing. Go do the
thing now, stop tweets, stop tweeting, stop tweeting about it,
Go do the thing. Um. Yeah, I think that's I Like,
I guess one last thing, because I talked about social

(01:55:57):
media and talk. You know, I talked smack. I Like,
I've been off Twitter for some months now, is it
really cleared my brain? But you know, um, being on
finding the social media space where your your coworkers are
at is really important. And that might mean setting up
like a discord or you know what's app or a
Facebook group. You can set up secret Facebook groups that

(01:56:19):
no one can see. And yeah, like you like, Facebook
will periodically shut them down. But like our hospital has
like a like a Facebook group with like two thousand
nurses and we and that's where we got really amped up.
And it was a way for us to be talking
with each other and talk each other through um, the
stress of setting up you know this thing. And then also,

(01:56:42):
like you know, people workers can't organize like like people
will do organizing even if like they don't have like
that full support. So like some coworkers, not coworkers, but
members of my union went on strike at Cook County
this year, and the whole thing was organized practice without
like staff right because the staff were barred from being

(01:57:05):
in meetings, like in person meetings because of COVID, and
they couldn't go into the hospital because of COVID. So
people were very pissed about how things have been going,
and they were talking to each other and we organized
that strike. They organized that strike on their own practically, Um,
you know, it lined up. They were off there. You know,

(01:57:26):
they didn't have that no strike clause like operating at
the time, and um, and they pulled off like a
pretty like a significant victory um from their one day
strike and it really um really you know, like got
them some big wins. But and they didn't they didn't
need the union to do it for them. You know,
the union was kind of like a facilitation tool rather

(01:57:48):
than like the thing that got it done. I think
that's the other thing is that there are people who
think that like it's all dependent on like having like
this hero staffer sort of thing situation, and at the
end of the day, like if it's out the workers
doing it themselves, nothing's going to happen. Yeah. Yeah, the power,
the power is with the working class itself, and if

(01:58:09):
the working class doesn't use it, nothing will ever happen. Yeah,
but if it does use it, I will trail off here.
Sounds good. So, John, is is there any place that
you want people to find things that you do? Like, Yeah,
I used to be on Twitter. UM periodically will show

(01:58:32):
up on h varn vlog, which is uh see Derek
Varnes m vlog on YouTube. UM there's I recommend people
h listen to. There's a group of podcasts called the
Emancipatient Network. I really like their stuff, specially UM. There's

(01:58:55):
a what's it called General Intellect Unit which talks about
like cybernetics and the lab. UM. They have a lot
of particularly cool stuff that's just come out recently about
UM about strategy that I think is really important for
everyone to understand. UM. I was a founding member of
the uh Libertarian Socialist Caucus at d s A, but

(01:59:16):
I'm no longer in d s A. There's a but
that group is still kind of kicking around. We're coming
up with new things. Uh. Then then I guess like, UM,
the University Chicago Labor Council is a group that I
spend a lot of time with. And there's also a
Tennants United High Park with LAN, which is a tenant
union that you helped set up. And yeah, so you know, UM,

(01:59:42):
go out there and you know, don't don't listen to
me or don't try and find follow me. Go like
you go figure it out and you're our neighborhood and yeah,
and set up a mill, set up a million different
you know, like labor councils and worker committees and tenant
unions that. Yeah, like Bill, build power. That's why I
think I sometimes we are afraid of the term power.

(02:00:04):
I think that power is that it's best when it's everybody.
And so I guess I might say it's like, go
out there and build community and worker power, and um,
don't be afraid because fear is the one thing that
they've got to wave over our heads. And sometimes you
just got to take that jump and do the thing.

(02:00:25):
And uh and that's how we're hopefully going to win
one day in the world. Yep. And you can do
this just like all of these things, everything we've been
talking about for the past like two hours, these were
all just done by ordinary people. Like there's there's there's
it's all it's all done my random people. And you
know that random person can be you. You just have

(02:00:46):
to go and do go do the thing. Yeah. So yeah,
this that this has been It could happen here. You
can find us on Twitter at Happened Here pod and
also on Instagram. There and Uh, yeah, there's other cool
Zone stuff. Oh, I guess yeah, we there's there's there's

(02:01:06):
a new show called Mega Corp that that we have
that's about how corporations are bad and the first seasons
about Amazon. It's out now. Okay, it just doesn't have
a Twitter, but yeah, it's It's called Mega Corp. And
you can find it wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Yes, okay, bye.

(02:01:39):
The art world it is essentially a money laundering business.
The best fakes are still hanging off people's walls. You know,
they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm
out like Baldwin. And this is a podcast about deception, greed,
and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting
was fake. Um. Listen to Art Fraud starting February one

(02:02:05):
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. I'm Evrodsky, author of the New
York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator.

(02:02:29):
And I'm Dr Addina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical
correspondent with an expertise and the science of stress, resilience,
mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our
podcast Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and
Hell of Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so
hard for women to treat their time with the value
it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen

(02:02:52):
to Time Out, a fair play podcast on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome everybody too. It could happen here. UM podcast about
I don't know how things are kind of kind of

(02:03:12):
kind of crumbling and how we can maybe put it,
put stuff, put stuff back together. And today I am
excited to talk with a senior Let's see what is
what is what? What is the actual? What's actual term?
I saw it? A senior programs strategist at Wikimedia, Alex Stinson. Hello, greetings, Hi,

(02:03:34):
it's so good to be here. I'm very excited about
our talk today because I mean, this should this should
surprise nobody that I used to I used to be
a Wikipedia editor back in the day. Not not shocking
at all, if if, if you know me. Um, but yeah,
we're gonna be talking about what kind of Wikipedia just
itself and then also, uh, climate misinformation and disinformation and

(02:03:59):
how we can maybe create a better understanding of climate
change in its effects across kind of the world, and
how digital information works. Those are all kind of topics
we talk about often enough, but never within the actual
context of like Wikipedia as an entity. Um, so I
guess let's let's just start there with with Wikipedia, and

(02:04:19):
like for those who don't maybe maybe people like use website,
but they're not quite sure what it is, Like how
how do you actually describe what Wikipedia is? Because it
is like an interesting kind of amorphous entity. It's so
many things. Um. I think most people are used to
thinking about Wikipedia is like the fact checking device. Like
I have a bar argument with my friends and I

(02:04:40):
pull out my phone and yeah, yeahs website at me. Right, Um,
it's a lot of things. It's three language Wikipedia's. Actually
it's not just one. Each of these communities has its
own editorial community. Um. Last I checked, it's like sixty
million articles across the languages. It's it's really it's a

(02:05:00):
lot of different content. Um. And a topic can be
on each of those Wikipedia's right. Um, And this is
important as we start talking about disinformation, is like each
Wikipedia because it's edited by people in that language, and
it's written by that language community. Um. You know, each
article is different and it have different perspectives. Um. Two

(02:05:21):
hundred eighty thousand volunteers editing every month. So this is
a lot of people, right. But the bulk of that's
happening on English Wikipedia and some of the larger languages
that are spoken across multiple cultural context And then there's
also a lot of other content sitting behind Wikipedia. So
there's a media repository, um. And there's a we called

(02:05:44):
Wikimedia Commons, and there's a database called wiki Data, which
kind of powers those little knowledge graphs on the right
side of Google and a whole bunch of other parts
of the Internet. Wikidata shows up in Amazon, Alexa and
all kinds of other places, right. And and so it's
it's we're not just like one website. It's many websites,

(02:06:06):
lots of knowledge, lots of platforms, lots of context. Um.
And we'll come back to that more as we talked. Yeah,
what really interesting part of it is like I don't know,
my my personal kind of social leanings. I generally kind
of like things that are more decentralized in general. Um.
Other other hosts in the podcast are generally kind of

(02:06:29):
on like the progressive left libertarian spectrum. Um. And one
thing I do really appreciate about Wikipedia is is it's
more like it's it's not I I don't think it's
like open source, but its the way it has decentralized
editing and all that kind of stuff. It's just a
really interesting model of of like what if a lot

(02:06:50):
more stuff worked this way? And I'm not sure like
how how much of like a decentralization focus is there,
like consciously at people at like the foundation and people
who try to like act really like run it behind
the scenes and stuff. Yeah. So Wikipedia grows out of
the like open source movement and the kind of early
days of the Internet. Right, this idea that like knowledge
wants to be free, technology wants to be free, software

(02:07:12):
wants to be free. Um, let's let's use the legal
infrastructure to like create freedom, right uh in that sense.
And then there's also the free as in like anyone
can edit, and then the free to like do whatever
you want out there in the world. Um. There there's
people are like free as in beer and free as
in speech, right uh. And those things are those things

(02:07:33):
are also there's they're always intention uh and they're kind
of working. And as you can imagine, especially when you
get outside of kind of multicultural Internet spaces like English Wikipedia, um,
it can get challenging. Like if you're in Croatia and
everyone is speaking Croatian, there's a very small bubble in
which to create that Wikipedia, right, um. And so it's

(02:07:55):
interesting in that sense. Um. I think there's also another
part of Wikipedia that a lot of people don't see,
which is the movement behind it. So there's the editorial communities.
People show up and make edits. Um. But because there's
this ideology that you're talking about, this like decentralized, like
we need to share knowledge or culture or language on
the Internet, there's also a whole social movement sitting behind

(02:08:18):
the scenes. Uh. And there there's a podcast recently dot
com The Wikipedia Story that kind of captured that the
essence of that, um. And it's it's a lot of
people like myself, So I started editing in high school.
Yeah yeah, one of those like, oh I know how
to click the edit button and I figure out how

(02:08:39):
to use the Internet and that kind of thing. But
there's a lot of people that like the intuitiveness of
clicking and edit button on a piece of open source
software to create content is just not It's not clear, right,
And so you have to organize and invite people in
and so we have a whole movement that does that too.
That there's about a d organizations around the world that

(02:09:01):
we organize events, work with libraries and museums and educational institutions,
and so there's always this um kind of interesting dynamic
where our values, which is this like open software platform
stuff has also lived in our practice, in our outreach,
like creating change through society by sharing knowledge and education. Um.

(02:09:23):
And so I think, yeah, it's it's it's an interesting
it's an interesting dynamic. Yeah, I think that does create
a really oftentimes beautiful reflection. It can it can have
some dark sides different once in a while, but it
is it is really nice to have like kind of
the ideology driving it being reflected in the actions of
operating it and spreading it and that kind of thing. Um.

(02:09:44):
So this is something we kind of briefly touched on already,
but I think I'd like to move on to kind
of why like how climate change and broader like social
issues are covered on Wikipedia because you already mentioned like
it's kind because there's not a Wikipedia, there's many based
on different languages in places. It feels like to me,

(02:10:05):
whenever social issues kind of get covered on Wikipedia, it's
going to be in some part like a local reflection
of whatever is in that area. You know, if if
there's like a white liberal writing articles in New York,
it's gonna be different than someone you know, halfway across
the world writing them in you know, a much smaller country.
Let's say, like Belarus, who's under like what I would

(02:10:26):
call a dictatorship. Um, so that's gonna change kind of
the nature of what people are making because of that
kind of divide. So how how does that kind of
crop up? And is there any like solutions to that
or because because the because of the decentralized thing, it's like,
how much can we like impose like who like I'm

(02:10:47):
i'm I'm I'm not in Belarus? How much can I
impose what I want their Wikipedia to look like? Yeah,
there's kind of two or three dynamics you're you're touching
on here. The first is because they're kind of an
intention bias, Like something comes up in the news and
our Wikipedia community like people are within minutes of breaking

(02:11:07):
news stories are usually like editing the page, working to
improve it. Right. Um, So if things show up in
the you know, European American press, uh, it's very likely,
especially something like English Wikipedia will pick up on it
and immediately cover it. And because there are multiple perspectives
in those press usually um kind of the ideological uh

(02:11:30):
kind of multi sided nice like works itself out because
there's a lot of eyes and a lot of people
who know how to edit there, right, um on in
a kind of cultural linguistic geographic context where there's like
one set of stories and there's not a lot of diversity.
Um uh, this this happens. And and I'm going to

(02:11:52):
refer to the Croattion Wikipedia because we actually had an
external researcher look at Croatian Wikipedia, because part of it
has been caught by by folks with kind of very
ideological leanings in a way that's excluding others. And this
is not good, right. It creates a very one sided
information environment and it really reflects um kind of the

(02:12:14):
news dynamic going on there. So when like breaking news happens,
or when a topic like a social issue or not
necess like climate change, is not a social issue, right,
this is a global, like life threatening issue. UM. When
when something becomes politicized, it's very easy for especially in
smaller language wikipedias, for a few people to kind of

(02:12:36):
swing the whole perspective on that. UM. So yeah, there's
this breaking news issue and this is where are kind
of organized communities are really important. So the example we
when I point out of this working well, UM is
in medicine. So are our medical community during the Bola
outbreaks a few years back. UM in West Africa. We're

(02:12:59):
able to organize both on English and then languages that
were accessible for local communities, high quality coverage of the
medical content because it's like has impact on people's lives,
and so they recruited translators. They thought about, like what's
a simple way to communicate the story, um in that context,
and like what do the workers, the or the advocates

(02:13:23):
or whoever on the ground who's working with that crisis,
what knowledge do they need? Right? UM? And you see
like other open technology movements do stuff like this, like
humanitarian Open Streetmap has a similar kind of way of organizing.
They're like, hey, there's a crisis happening, UM, let's pull
people together from different parts of the world who have

(02:13:44):
the right knowledge or skills and like address the knowledge gap. Um.
So so you can solve it. It's just it's complicated. Um.
And you know, we've been trying to address as a
movement what we call the gender gap. So there's both
less women editors as women's content on many of the wikis,
and like, it's taken years, and it's very hard to organize,

(02:14:08):
and even when there's investment in it, um, it's it's
challenging to to make substantial progress because there might be
contextual issues around it too. And so you can't just
like drop in on a Central Asian language with a
like Western perspective and expect to like change the culture

(02:14:28):
of the wiki overnight. You have to engage with it
consistently and be persistent and work on it over and
over and over again. We are going to take a
short break to hear a message from our lovely lovely
advertisers unless it's exomobile again, but we will be back shortly, Okay,
and we're back. Um. One one thing that we cover decently.

(02:14:52):
Part of my job and and and and Robert Evans's
job is disinformation and misinformation and how that's to a
tough spreads online um, particularly you usually kind of linked
to like political extremism um or conspiracy theories or you know,
in that general kind of bubble um. And so what

(02:15:12):
what type of kind of climate misinformation has really been
festering on various you know wikipedias across the world really,
because like we were just were talking about like these
topics and how and how and like why it happens,
but like what are the main types of misinformation or
disinformation that is much more like prevalent? Yeah, Um, So

(02:15:33):
the first is just kind of neglect of uh, content
that's happening across the various things related to climate. Um.
But we've identified on English Wikipedia over three thousand seven
dred articles that are directly related to climate change. Uh.
We don't have a very big editorial community in English

(02:15:54):
on that topic. That's like interesting fluent in the science
and fluent and the other stuff. And then you go
out to the other languages and like some of the
languages have like three thousand of them, some of them
have like two hundred, right, um, And so there is
both um and some of that content was like translated
several years ago, right or five or ten years ago

(02:16:16):
and yeah, you know, and like the climate rhetoric has
really changed it and like numbers and statistics, all that
stuff gets updated every year, and it's yeah, that is
there is there's there's a lot to cap with and
like reading the IPCC report or looking at any of
the consensus science, there's like a lot of change that
you have to be influent in, like science communication, you

(02:16:37):
have to understand like where to look for the information. Um.
And it's interesting. My partner is a Spanish language speaker
and she was in a kind of workshop for journalists
in Argentina for a climate communication and the workshop was like, oh,
you should cite the Guardian, right, so even as to

(02:16:59):
to kind of understand and this climate stuff. So a
lot of these local language contexts, there aren't even good sources,
and the sources they do have are often citing like
the dominant narrative that's going on and like the anglophone
news cycle, right, because there's not a lot of climate
communication going on, and so there's just a lot of
complexity involved in updating that much content all the time. Um.

(02:17:24):
And so the bulk of the stuff that kind of
creeps in is like this neglect. Right. It's like some
dominant idea in the narrative just hasn't been updated, and
like we need someone to update it. Um. And that's
like an organizing problem, right, that's uh, Like we need
more people who are science literate, who speak the local language,
who understand how to edit Wikipedia. Um. And that's trainable,

(02:17:45):
Like we can do that. Yeah. The reason that matters,
the neglect matters is it stops people from making decisions
about climate change because they don't have like an accurate
sense of what we need to do, right, which is
cut the falsephiel, increase increased resilience, do adaptation like actual
political change right um. And so so that that's just

(02:18:10):
it's a problem. Um. The other stuff is a bit
more it's a little bit more complicated. Um. One of
the things that happens is, as you know, there's quite
a manipulation of narrative that has happened around climate change.
There's this really great podcast by Amy Westervelt about how

(02:18:32):
the fossil fuel industry like got its message into schools
in the last three years in the US, and like
that narrative is just so prevalent and so one of
the things about wikipedias that we try to do a
balance of positions. If there are reputable sources kind of
describing or analyzing a topic, and this is back to

(02:18:54):
your polarization question too. If they're reputable sources does gribing
on topic, we try to give them equal weight and
balance across the article. The problem with climate is that
some of the narratives that look like reputable sources are
just pumped out of fossil fuel industry funded think tanks, right,

(02:19:16):
and these things are not truthful narratives, right. Um. And
so the BBC ran an article, uh two weeks ago
on kind of climate denial and some of these smaller languages,
a smaller language wikipedias, and what they found was a
lot of these narratives being given equal weight with the

(02:19:37):
climate science. Um. And I took a look our community
after that BBC article came out, started looking across all
the language Wikipedia articles about just the main climate change page,
and they found thirty one Wikipedia's that had some of
that like equal weight of bad climate science. Interesting. Yeah, um,

(02:20:00):
And you know the BBC article only found like five
or ten, right, we found another lot a lot more yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so it's it's like it's a really like these
narratives just seep in and you know, again, I'm gonna
go back to the Croatian example, Like if your media
environment has been locked down by a certain political rhetoric, too,

(02:20:24):
those narratives might have traveled from like the Anglo sphere
into these other spaces and then gotten stuck, right, and
it's just like keeps getting recycled, and so that causes delay. Um.
And I was listening to your podcasts recently about soft
climate denial, Like this is what's happening in other language environments, right,

(02:20:50):
is people are rehearsing this misinformation. It seems like a
valid position because it's been rehearsed so many times by
by folks. Some people who are championing that position are
like doing so unknowingly, and then the process, we're kind
of disconnecting it entirely from the source of the information.

(02:21:12):
And that is just it's it's really bad. One interesting
thing that I thought of when you were bringing up
like sourcing, how sourcing itself coming an issue in like
in the States. There's kind of like a joke that
like wicked, like when people use just Wikipedia as like
as a source to be like they just they just
link the article. But like that is the default for

(02:21:33):
so many people when they begin begin a research project,
is like, Okay, what's the what's the what is what
does Wikipedia have on it? What's the sources Wikipedia uses?
Um and kind of branch off from there. It's a
very common thing. So I'm not sure what like how
different internet culture will be different in in other countries,
But if they do not, if they if they don't
have like the base sourcing necessary to create like a

(02:21:57):
decent home page article, then just sourcing from Wikipedia in
the first place becomes so much harder. Um, because you
were saying, like just use the Guardian is is like
one of the things, like that's not horrible advice, but
if it's only just from one thing, then that that's
going to change the entire nature of like coverage and
information on specific topics. Yeah. Yeah, I've had just be

(02:22:19):
really interesting kind of thing that I never thought of
before is how different countries wikipedias or like language with
Wikipedia's will have will have like different sources. So then
getting information from from the page it's just going to
be so different. And like yeah, like like the whole,
like the whole like teared of sourcing is just completely changed. Yeah,

(02:22:41):
And and I think, like you know, in medicine, and
most medical practitioners expect most of the medical literature to
be in a handful of languages like English and Chinese
and that kind of stuff, right, And like part of
your professional work and part of like saving people's lives
is being able to use those sources. And so if
they metical Wikipedia article has a translation from like an

(02:23:03):
English article into another language, and you're distributing that to
medical practitioners and they find the citation and it's in
English and they can go follow the source, Like that's
not such a big deal. But with in a topic
like climate UM, where the vast majority of the people
that have to make decisions on this information do not

(02:23:23):
have access to other languages. Maybe their access to English
is through like machine translation Google or something like that.
Like having not having sources in your local language, UM,
or just having the sources that were translated from an
English Wikipedia article, which happens a lot on these smaller
language wikipedias, is kind of like not helpful for climate

(02:23:47):
decision making. UM. And this is where it's UM and
it's easy for example, and a lot of these like
Eastern European languages or Central Asian UH languages for like
a politically spun news site opinion about something to kind
of creep in at the same level of of kind

(02:24:08):
of UH validity, as as another as scientific research as
the the you know, consensus understanding of the climate prices.
So how how might I know we talked about like
like trainings for like journalists and people to start editing
Wikipedia's in their language, but like, how how do we

(02:24:28):
kind of improve climate communication overall with open access to
information and you know, creating more linguistic um diversity and stuff. Yeah, well,
I think there's like a couple opportunities um in this,
and then I there's some other misinformation I also want
to talk about too, UM. But I think that this,
the sourcing one is a particularly challenging one. UM. We

(02:24:54):
need like more basic science based climate communication and more languages.
And I'm not saying like just the the like more languages,
like the big un languages are the ones that are
kind of colonial across cultural languages like Spanish or French
or Arabic or you know, all these languages that have

(02:25:14):
been used across cultures. We also need it in local
languages um. And we needed to be evidence based and
we needed to be an audience based. Right. So if
if someone is like searching online in Swahili about how
like drought is happening in Kenya, right or Tanzania or
or the you know they're suddenly flooding, or like I

(02:25:35):
need to deal with X, Y and z adaptation to
the climate crisis, um, which is by the way, what
all of the global South is doing right now, right, like,
the global South is having to adapt to this crisis
that polluting countries has have made. Yeah, and we're not
actually giving them the resources to the to the problem

(02:25:57):
that we've caused. You Well, it's not even giving the research.
We're not even like the people who are like, we
want to adapt our society. We're not resourcing the folks
on the ground who have the agency, who have the understanding,
who know how to do the research in the context,
who know how to do the communication in the context. Right,
We're not even like bolstering their their request for help. Right,

(02:26:20):
Like the the the UN Climate Conference kind of failed
on this adaptation funding. Right, And uh, this is you know,
this is where like a platform like Wikipedia and like
kind of approaching this from a knowledge activist perspective where
you're like there are people who need this knowledge to address,

(02:26:41):
like understand what's happening around them so they can make decisions.
That doesn't like you know, yeah, we need those kinds
of information. We need open source knowledge, not just Wikipedia
but one of the platforms um and and you know
the you all do open source investation, and you're used

(02:27:01):
to like open source software communities, and I listen a
couple of your podcasts and you're kind of constantly speaking
back to those open communities that that come out of
like anglophone software spaces, um and, like we need to
acknowledge that. Like we we figured out how to acknowledge,
but we haven't given all those tools. We haven't transferred

(02:27:23):
the knowledge on how to do it. We haven't adapted
those tools to other parts of the world and other languages.
Um And. So just like starting to look for these
other communities, asking for the people, like who's ready to organize,
like giving them money to go do it right, these
things are like really practical, um And I think we're

(02:27:46):
we're not We're not often not listening or we're not
looking for that solution. And reinder, like most of the
people having to adapt, um are in the global South
and speak other languages, Like we need to be there
in that language if we want the climate crisis so
like resolve itself without you know, destroying people's lives. Yeah. Absolutely, Um, yeah,

(02:28:13):
that's that's the thing we try to bring up, is
that the people is going to be initially worse affected
are the people who are already kind of not in
the greatest situation in the first place. That's like how
how like how like the areas that are gonna that
are gonna experience the most flooding, the most extreme weather events,
all this kind of stuff. It's it's it's not it's
not starting with something like New York City. It's starting

(02:28:35):
with areas that are already dealing with a lot of
like local issues and now this is just something else
on top. And yeah, fixing all of that is uh,
I mean, fixing all of it's impossible. We can we
can only take like small adaptive steps to like mitigate
some of the worse effects. And yeah, I mean that
that's that's stuff that comes up a bunch. But you

(02:28:57):
you mentioned you wanted to at least briefly mention and um,
some other forms of disinformation. Yeah. So we we've also
witnessed a couple of times, UM where something will hit
like breaking news or become a political position in a context,
and then like we will see bad actors show up
on Wikipedia and try to manipulate it. UM. I have

(02:29:18):
two examples of those. The first is about a year
year ago. Uh, we found a group of accounts editing
about some of the inter Amazonian highways that the Bolsonaro
presidency is building through through the Amazon UM where they

(02:29:39):
were trying to remove the environmental and indigenous people's uh
impact assessments from the Wikipedia articles. Uh and so like
basic human rights stuff, basic you know, healthy environment things
that the government is like expected to follow through on.
We're being like manipulated out of the articles for a

(02:30:05):
more like pro economic growth narrative UM. And so you
know it's we can't like the shift towards this like
very extreme right like economic growth only version of reality
um does play out on the wikie Now were we
were lucky that this was fairly trans like fairly easy

(02:30:26):
to see once we found it, But we had to
coordinate across UM, English, Spanish and Portuguese to like address
the problem. So so we need like multi lingual communities
who are kind of coordinating and talking to each other
to address that. Um. The other thing we've seen is like,
so did you I don't know how well you follow

(02:30:48):
the climate movement? Um, but did you see when Disha
rabb got arrested in India? By chance? I don't think so.
So she She's a youth climate active that was part
of Friday's for Future India, which is like a group
kind of sister group of the group that formed in
Europe around Greta Twinberg. Right. Um and uh she uh um.

(02:31:15):
Her Gmail account got attached to a Google doc. Uh
just seen active on a Google doc that was about
sharing social media about the India the farmers protests in
India which have been like a real political sticking point issue.
And I had written so I'm both a volunteer and

(02:31:35):
a professional who organizes the community. And in my volunteer time,
I had written the biography Adisha Rabbi like months before
the Indian government kind of identified her with this social
media tool kit. And um, when she got arrested for
something that's like just basic social organizing tactic with social media. Um,

(02:31:58):
the kind of Hindu nationalist social media environment like zoomed
in on her Wikipedia article and on all these other
social media presences she had, and they tried to silence it.
Um be like okay, we need to leave this article.
And uh, fortunately like a group of us were watching

(02:32:18):
the page and we caught it and we're able to
stop that. But there's kind of the the the kind
of flash mob situation that happens a lot now in
social media, where it's that is, this thing has been polarized,
now we need to go attack it. Um. And so
you can imagine like English Wikipedia has a healthy immune

(02:32:39):
system for this kind of stuff. It like sees it,
but it has enough, it has enough people that it
can do that. Yeah. Yeah, but you can imagine on
a smaller wiki that the narrative could shift and stay
permanently shifted quite quickly. Yeah, um, if that happened. And
so that that's another concern. Right. So there's like the
subtle like a few accounts just like quietly removing things

(02:33:01):
and then like the act of political um kind of
intervention that happens. And in terms of like disinformation, do
you see the Wikipedia as being kind of susceptible to
like intentional disinformation campaigns of people slowly kind of editing
the ideology of of articles to to push kind of
some agenda. What whether that be like individually and like

(02:33:23):
like you know, more of like a crowd operation um
or even like run by like people with political power. Um,
Like do do you how much of a risk do
you see that with this kind of open source idea
is that of of like intentional slow dissemination of disinformation
on like important articles and stuff. Well, so I think

(02:33:43):
I might reframe your question a little bit, like, uh,
all open source kind of knowledge spaces are susceptible to that, right, Um,
the question is to like what degree and how harmful
is it going to be? Right? Um? Like is it
is it like very open to this? And will it

(02:34:04):
cause a lot of problems? Um? The bigger language wikipedias
have healthy immune systems, but we we have a combination
of kind of bots that are like AI generated that
flag bag edits, and then we have a lot of
community patrolling happening. And even in some of the smaller
communities that have like medium sized editor communities like Swedish Wikipedia,

(02:34:25):
it doesn't take a lot for that local language community
to patrol the pages and like be like oh, Okay, Um,
these changes are kind of weird. I can roll it back. Um, Like,
this doesn't seem like it fits our culture of Wikipedia.
The problem is when a language Wikipedia has very few
editors and they're not active all the time. Um and

(02:34:49):
and so this is where we need kind of more
eyes on the content, right, because it's it's very easy
for like a really small language community to kind of
have little bit of content but never see it maintained.
Um and and this is where the like where where
our communities are forming around these languages, like a lot

(02:35:09):
of the West African languages for example, that our communities
are are kind of organizing in we we like invest
in those communities existing and like figuring out the governance
and training people how to edit and getting access to
the kind of technical skills to do this. Um And
you know, we have kind of systems that we're hoping

(02:35:30):
over the next few years invest in that resilience, right,
like building a code of conduct making it easier for
communities to see this kind of stuff. But it is
three languages, right, um yeah, And it is a volunteer
built system, and you do need a healthy editatorial community
in order to keep a wiki from like drifting too much. Um.

(02:35:55):
So a good example of listening to get a reference
creation because it's the one we've done research on. Like
it was possible for a few people to push people
who are more in consensus with the global position on
various topics out of the wiki. Um. And that's just

(02:36:16):
like we we have to find a balance between like
local language uh. And this is my personal opinion, right,
we need to find a balance between kind of local
language sovereignty on this stuff and also not like radicalizing
its topical environment. And we and we see this particularly

(02:36:36):
on impactful topics, right, like ones that directly affect like
politics or in the kids climate crisis, like people's livelihoods
and ability to function in society, right. Um. And we
just like we need to be cautious about that. But
but you know, Wikipedia is a common resource. Uh. And
I think this is really important. Like the way Wikipedia

(02:36:58):
works is you know, THEMNIA Foundation provides the servers. We
fund our communities, we support them, we help them work
through governance issues. But like the we need editorial communities
to maintain it. That's what those thousand people are doing
as volunteers as they're building an editorial practice that makes

(02:37:18):
the content work, um and and we we need that, um.
And so we need you know, like minded communities like
the people for your podcasts who are like, oh, we
need the Internet to be reliable and have accurate information
a lot to show up, um. Because if we don't
do that, it's it's really like it's the common resource

(02:37:41):
we we we have a decent international listening MACE as well. UM.
And I'm thinking like, what would would you like recommend
people you know in different countries or even people inside
inside kind of like, uh, you know the States, America, Canada,
the UK who are like multi langual, would you at
least encourage them to browse other language wikipedias and maybe

(02:38:02):
start making edits when they see this type of misinformation
popping up. Yeah, so I to kind of perspectives on
this one, UM, look for a local organized community. So
we we have what's called Wikimedia Affiliates. These are fifty
organizations around the world. They regularly run events, especially now

(02:38:23):
that we're leaving COVID, increasingly more in person events. They
train folks like look for them in your context and
if you need help finding you know, find me on
Twitter and I can connect you with those communities. UM.
And the other part is small edits. So I think
a lot of people look at Wikipedia and they think

(02:38:43):
about like a traditional publishing platform, right, like, oh, you know,
I have to write the whole whole article. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
I have to be a master. And and the secret
sauce to all of this is like most people start
with one citation, one comma, one type of fix, and
they do a handful of those a month, and then
they keep coming back. And as you do those small edits,

(02:39:04):
you start reading the content more carefully and fixing the
things you can fix. And so I I recommend going
in to like add one citation, Like if you go
and add one citation today, that like makes life better,
or you fix the communication on the sentence. UM. The
other part of it is, you know, I said there's
these organized groups, uh for the climate in particular, I

(02:39:27):
run this campaign called Wiki for Human Rights, which is
focused on UM. We with it's a theme that we
kind of identified with you and human rights on the
right to a healthy environment, which is this new human
right that has been acknowledged by the Human Rights Council,
And we're we're organizing kind of writing contests and edit

(02:39:47):
the fonds and kind of train names for communities to
go and look for the human dimension of the climate crisis. So,
I think when we think about climate communication, a lot
of people are like science right there, like oh, this
is you know about how weather systems work and how
the atmosphere it forms, and the kind of stuff and
the content that's more impactful is this like human inflected stuff,

(02:40:11):
like how does the climate crisis in fact you as
an individual and agriculture in the cities you live in,
and the clothing you buy in the manufactured goods mine
around the corner that's producing water pollution that's gonna harm
your children for the next thirty years, right, um? And

(02:40:32):
and that is the kind of stuff that we're encouraging
communities to pay attention to. Is it is more the
like justice and human rights oriented perspective on these topics.
And your cat is very cute. Every once in a
while they love to love to take the camera. Um

(02:40:53):
and so yeah. So so if you follow me on Twitter,
I will I can hook you up with that campaign
as well. Um yeah, where where can people find you
online and to learn more information about you know, the
various kind of topics we've discussed today, So UM search
if you're interested in climate change stuff on Wikipedia English.

(02:41:14):
Wikipedia has a wonderful wiki project climate change that has
a little tab at the So if you search wiki
project climate change on Google and you find there's a
tab at the top that says get started with easy
edits and that kind of can get you oriented to
like where can you affect English Wikipedia on this? And
you know, once you find a gap on English, it's

(02:41:35):
easy to find it on other languages. UM. For the
kind of learning about wiki free human rights, you can
search for that UM and or follow me on Twitter
UM s A D A D S sad ads on Twitter. UM. UH.
We also have a group called Wikimedians for Sustainable Development
who's kind of communicating on Twitter, which is the group

(02:41:57):
that's really focused on sustainability topics were generally UM, and
you know, the other way to look is find something
you've been reading about about the climate crisis or stainability
issues in the news, look it up on Wikipedia, see
if it's missing. UM. If it's not, click that edit
button at a sence right. UM. The good example of this,

(02:42:19):
I learned about a park and UH the center of
Nairobi that's being protested by environmental activists because some of
the big trees were being cut down a Huru park,
right Uh. This came by on my Twitter handle, Like
I'm not connected to this at the moment, right um,
But because I had news sources, I had three or

(02:42:42):
four news sources, I could say really simply in two
thousand one, the park came under scrutiny for renovation that
included removing old trees. That's a climate action, right uh.
And I think you know, I am constantly overwhelmed by
the climate crisis, as as is a lot of yea yeah,
And and like just being able to tell that little story,

(02:43:05):
like hey, um, the decisions people are making are not
productive here, right Um. Just just gathering that story is important.
And what's important is Wikipedia plays institutional memory on this, right.
I feel like, you know, a lot of a lot
of activists work is very temporal. It's very like in
that moment, right um. And if it doesn't get documented

(02:43:29):
on Wikipedia, the local news sources are gonna get lost
in the window of time. Um. And so I think,
you know, if you to do your little activist motion,
like a sentence describing what happened in a moment where
resistance was happening is like a huge step forward, right, um,

(02:43:49):
because it connects the environmental crisis, clanic crisis, human rights
issues to like daily lives. Like people look up this
park probably on Google because they want to go there, right,
or they read about it because people are like when
was it created? What was that protest that happened there
the other day? And if those sourcesn't there, um, then

(02:44:10):
it doesn't really exist in their minds. Yeah, it doesn't
exist in their minds. And I think that's like one
of the big issues with climate crisis and you know,
amplified even worse in other languages, right, is that people
aren't making that connection. They aren't seeing it around them,
and they're not you know, kind of connecting action to

(02:44:30):
how we address it. That. Uh, that is a really
good that's a really good point. And yeah, I mean
I will encourage everybody to to start making small ledits.
That's what's what I did for a long time before
I moved into like open source um journalism and reporting.
It's a great way to get started, and it's a
great way to get just start start disseminating small bits

(02:44:52):
of information because the only thing that we can really
do is people is small steps. We can have like
an adaptive goal in mind, but you need to take
small steps to get there. And that is a really
great way to start influencing the way people think about
climate and our situation. Um yeah. And and I think too,

(02:45:13):
you know, your your podcast kind of appeals to folks
who are interested in like finding the truth and reality, right,
and that that's that's like that that investigation is what
a Wikipedia article is. It is like one ten hundred
editors out there in the world trying to go, like,
what the heck is this topic about? Right? How do

(02:45:34):
I compile my notes? Uh? In a way that helps
other people? And I think in the face of the
climate crisis, Dr Ianna Johnson says, like, find the thing
you're good at, find the thing you're passionate about, and
find the thing that like or that that makes you
feel good and you're you're just rewarding, And find the
thing that actually like helps affect the climate crisis. Right.

(02:45:55):
And a small editor on Wikipedia meets your kind of
knowledge needs. It's very satisfying because people will read it
and it is incriminal change in the right direction, right,
People will make decisions on it. Uh Yeah, I mean
and I guess, uh, I think that I think that
probably closes this up today. And let's do have anything

(02:46:17):
else to add. Um, I guess one more plug for
your Twitter so we can get get more eyeballs on you,
um and the work that you're doing. Yeah. Um so
at S A D A D S it's my long
term handle on the internet and you you can find
me over uh and I tweet about Wikipedia and the

(02:46:39):
commer carssis will and we'll we'll link the Wikipedia wiki
project climate change page in the description for people to find.
Thank you so much for taking time to talk to
us all about these topics. Um, I'm really really great, uh,
really grateful to have this type of knowledge readily accessible
to more people. Also, you know, in the spirit of Wikipedia.

(02:47:03):
Thanks so, thank you so much. Um. You can follow
us by subscribing to the feed and on Twitter, Instagram,
at Happened here pod and cool Zone Media. See you
on the other side. Everybody, Raffie is the voice of

(02:47:29):
some of the happiest songs of our generation. Baby so
who is the man behind baby Bluga? Every human being
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Dad and host of Finding Raffie, a new podcast from

(02:47:51):
my Heart Radio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the
i Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's Up Guys on my Shot and I am Troy
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latest trends and finance. We hold court and have exclusive
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(02:48:13):
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Listen to as our guests reveal their business models, hardships
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We want to know what you want to know. We
talked to the legends of business, sports and entertainment about
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(02:48:33):
class mixed with pop culture. You want to learn about
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We got you interested in starting a trucking company or
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podcast is available now. Listen to Earnier Leisure on the
Black Effect podcast Network, I Heart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts,

(02:48:53):
or wherever you get your podcasts. It's it's could happen here.
That's the podcast that this is. It's about things crumbling

(02:49:15):
and uh, how to maybe uncrumble some of the things
that are crumbling. And today when we think about the crumbles,
when you start thinking about the hell world that that
we're all increasingly inhabiting, the scary ship that is getting
scarier day by day. Number one on a lot of
people's list is going to be the cops. Um real
cause of anxiety for a significant chunk of people listening

(02:49:37):
to this podcast right now, including its hosts. Um Alexander,
you and I have chatted before on the air. Our
guest today, Alexander Williams. Um, you were a police officer
in the past and you are not currently and you
want to chat about UM. The topic kind of the
way you pitched it to us is there's a lot

(02:49:58):
of aspects of police training that are very similar to
what colts do to indoctrinate people, and you kind of
wanted to speak on that. Yeah, there's a lot of
there's a lot of cross sections. Um So, yeah, I
used to be a cop. I was in law enforcement
for just shot a fifteen years until I woke up
and got out luckily. And all the stuff that's been

(02:50:22):
going on over the last couple of years, and the
craziness and really ingesting a lot of stuff around, you know, cults,
And I've started going down that the little checklist that
you go down of like are you in a high
control group? And man, they all just look just deemed
in my head every single time of like, oh, this
is exactly what it was like being a cop. Oh,

(02:50:44):
this is exactly what it was like being a cop.
And I'm curious, kind of before we get more into it,
do you want to walk us through a little bit
more kind of what was your process of Um, I know,
de radicalization isn't exactly the right term, but I think
you know what I'm getting. It's it's in the it's
in the it's in the neighborhood shore. Yeah. Mine. So

(02:51:04):
I was raising a cop family. My dad was a
copy went the whole nine yards, retirement, the whole thing,
and when I got into it, just shy of twenty
two years old, which that's young to be making these
kinds of choices looking back on it. Um. We had
talked on the last podcast of your season one, UM

(02:51:28):
about when my brother got arrested and got beat by
my own team, my my own crew, and the jail
that I worked with, which is the jails is where
I primarily spent most of my time. And I think
that that was, uh, item number one kind of on
my shelf, like people call it, that's that's that's a
big one to right on the shelf. Um. And during

(02:51:52):
my training, I've always been an obstinate little bastard and
I've always had that kind of like authority defiance. And
in training, they they start telling you really early like hey,
you know what you know where your family, we understand you,
We're going to get you. And then like the language
even then kind of flared red flags wrong for me.

(02:52:13):
And whenever a group of people says we're your family,
and so right, like that's what you like, we're your
family and you can talk to us anytime. Fine, where
your family? And I got your back, Fine, we're your
family and that's why you need to do this. Things
have gone to ride. It's it's it usually is where
your family comma now yeah? Yeah, and yes, So that

(02:52:37):
that was like literally day one. It was where your
family now, where you're you know, they use all that language,
the familiar language, where your brothers, your sisters. Yeah. And
the one that kicked for me and my brain was
they said, within a year, you're not gonna have any
friends that aren't cops. Like all of your friends are

(02:52:57):
going to be gone because they're not gonna understand stand
you and they're not going to be able to be
around you and handle you. So within a year, you know,
we're going to be everything you've got. And for me
that was like that was a line of the sand
and like part of my brain was screaming like nope,
never letting that happen. I will not let my uh
myself not have any non cop friends. Yeah that's probably

(02:53:20):
good because that's I mean, you have like when it
it gets to it's the same thing that happens to anybody, right,
Like some people got like last year in Portland and
Activist Brain where there was this all the people were
spending time with other people were out protesting, and so
we have this really intense bond, and we also are
kind of separated, increasingly separated from the people around us
because we just can't communicate with anybody else. And that

(02:53:42):
kind of going on for years and years, because this
is your career for twenty something years, and it's like, yeah,
that would you'd be, you'd be after a couple of
years of that you were inhabiting a different planet. They
really are. And it's the how you said that, like,
you know, this is usually twenty to thirty years, you know,
because you want to get that sweet retirement at the
end after you've abused your mind and your body for

(02:54:04):
three decades um. It was it keyed off something that
you and Garrison talked about in a previous episode of
The Hiring Practices where the Washington Stay guys and they
were they got busted because the therapist was showing tons
of bias, and that brought up for me the hiring
process because those psych exams are the only time as

(02:54:28):
a cop that you get a psych exam. That's the
only time you ever talked to a therapist mandatorially. Yeah, Yeah,
it's a really bad move, And there's a joke in
cop culture of like, well, yeah, you gotta pass it
before you get hired, because after you get hired, you're
never going to pass that test. M because you know,
being a cop is is micro dosing PTSD in your

(02:54:51):
system the entire time. See, I guess one thing I'm
wondering because you you were in it for fifteen years,
So that's the it's not an insignificant span of time.
Has it gotten to be more that way? Because I
knew about fifteen something years ago when I was like
eighteen nineteen, just like I lived in the shitty little
apartment complex and like the dude who live below above me,

(02:55:14):
and then like the dude who lived two doors down,
we're both Dallas cops um and I don't know, like
I you know, I was not particularly political at that point,
but I didn't They didn't seem to have trouble relating,
Like they would hang out and ship after work, like
just like not like like we would be like barbecuing
outside and they would drop by and stuff, and it
was never I never got the sense that they were

(02:55:36):
living in a separate planet. But this is like fifteen
years ago, and I'm wondering what to what extent do
you think this is kind of increased in recent memory,
like this the kind of you don't really uh socialize
with people outside of the family, so to speak. It
is kind of like that. So, yeah, a lot of

(02:55:56):
language are using is perfect because so what you're describing
and when I remember from being a kid in the
eighties and the nineties and stuff, was um community policing
Like it's it's a literal style of policing, going back
to more of like the professional police style before it
went military, and in areas where people actively live in

(02:56:17):
their community and engage with their community, there's a striking
difference in the level of police violence that happens. But nowadays, uh,
it's not the same thing because a lot of especially
in bigger metropolitan areas, you're a cop there, you can't
afford to live there. You're you're definitely not getting paid
enough to live most of the time in the cities

(02:56:39):
that you're supposed to be you know, a part of.
And it's gotten to the point where they actually teach
this like method up methodically in academies. They'll be like, hey,
if you want to be a cop in a big town,
you need to start shopping around in the smaller cities
around it to find a place to live maybe like
an hour away. Um. And then they also pitch it

(02:56:59):
as a same thing because it's all about, you know,
the cheology Grossman. We're all under attack, so they'll teach people,
you know what, it's it's safest to not live in
the town where you're a cop now. M So it's
become intentional and it's one of those things where because
I don't want to breeze past this is not the
episode world talk about community policing. There's very good criticisms

(02:57:21):
of community policing, and there's a lot of things that
doesn't solve. But I think it's yeah, yeah, absolutely, we're
not trying to say like the solution is just to
get cops, you know, to be members of their communities.
But it it is worse when they're driving in from
an hour out of town and see it as like
I'm occupying almost this area like it does. Yeah, that
language fits perfectly, especially with Grossman and all that. Yes,

(02:57:45):
and we've got a two partner on David Grossman or
Behind the Bastards if you want to check it out.
But he's kind of the one of the big one
of the big individuals, who's who's done the most to
like really push UM. I don't even like it's usually
framed as militarized thinking, But I don't know a lot
of soldiers who have been who were trained to think
that way about ship Like most of the people I

(02:58:06):
knew who were getting shot at every day for years overseas,
we're not thinking the way Grossman does. No, that's probably
because he never actually wouldn't did anything. I think maybe
we should probably Alexander, have you go start going through
this um this document you put together, kind of walking
through UM and I wonder if you might start when

(02:58:27):
you kind of started thinking about police training and the
mindset inculcated inside police departments from like a cultic perspective.
When did that really start to come together for you? Uh?
It probably really started to come together, um uh when
actually when I got involved, I used to be an instructor,
when I got you know, behind that part of the curtain,

(02:58:47):
and I got involved in those things. UM, and I
started going and teaching, and I started teaching other departments
that would come to us, and it was it was
a joke in my head at first was like, oh,
we all speak the same language. And then that got
my brain rolling on linguistics and how linguistics work and
how that you know, the words we use change how
we perceive reality. And then I clicked and I was like, Oh,

(02:59:10):
we're like a we're a subculture. We're We're like no
matter where you go in the country, we are a
little subculture. We are a little group. And that's what
started to kind of push me towards like it's like
being in a cult, because you know, you grow up
around Central California and there's a lot of really religious

(02:59:31):
people and you start seeing the intersectionality of it really fast. Yeah,
And that's interesting because we've talked a few times on
various shows I've done about how any good subculture, any
really good party, has elements of like a cult. Right,
There's there's little bits of that. There's bits of that
in friendship and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a thing
like cults are taking advantage, like pulling a bunch of

(02:59:53):
things that people do together in order to manipulate human beings. Um,
I'm wondering kind of where where you think where are
some of the areas you think it kind of crosses
the line with police from like this is you know
a degree of like I'm sure firefighters have a degree
of this. You know, Um, these are people that like
I hang around with all the time and we wipe

(03:00:14):
up in some intense situations together. That causes there are
culti aspects that's always going to cause. Um, I'm wondering,
kind of where where are the first areas you started
to realize this, this is crossing that line of Probably
the first area is in how much the department like
and this was universal and loss of departments that I
had contact with, is how much the department owns you?

(03:00:36):
And I mean like they use that language. They they'll
tell you like we own you. Like anything you do
in your personal life, your first thought needs to be
how does this affect my department and my my sheriff,
my chief, my whatever, Like every single thing you do
is supposed to be potentially pr for the department. So

(03:00:56):
they tell you flat out in the forefront of your
mind every waking moment, man, your own duty, you're you're
you're here, we own you. Um. And that that was
the first one that was just like oh man, like no,
I punch out at the end of my shift and
I go home. This isn't like, this isn't this is
a job. It's not supposed to be a life, it's

(03:01:18):
it's and that that was the first one that started
going it. Um. Probably the second one that I really
noticed was that you can tell anyone's a cop because
they'll tell you within about five seconds of meeting them.
But they're a com if you're at a bar, you're
at a party or at whatever, they'll be like, Hi,
my name, my miname's Alexander. I work for the Shares.
Part Like it's it's gonna come out of their mouth
in two seconds because it is. It's their identity, it's

(03:01:42):
their entire sense of self. Yeah, I wonder because one
of the things we've seen in the last couple of
years in particular, is aspects of that bleed out, like
the thin blue line flags and stuff, and some of
that's some of that's just you know, signpost. Some of
that's just I know people who were in uh, certain
jobs where they transported things that were sketchy and had

(03:02:03):
those flags. Is like, well maybe the cop won't search merry,
you know, but like there and there's elements that they're
just you know, I don't want the cops to stop
me from you know, fucking with these people or whatever.
But I think there's also elements of that. Um And
I think probably television is to blame for aspects of this,
but of kind of that sheep dog culture as as

(03:02:24):
a as grossman calls that are starting to bleed over
into chunks of the civilian world. UM And I guess
I'm wondering kind of like, yeah, what that looks like
as a as someone unlike the the deep inside of
that as a police officer, Like what is it? I'm wondering,
like to what extent where you kind of conscious of
that aspect of society like filling out around you, like

(03:02:46):
some of these like the cult of the of the
heroic police officer kind of spreading to be um something new,
which which it really started doing from like two thousand
and eighteen up to the present moment is when a
lot of that shift seems to have happened based on
kind of what I've sawn. No, that timeline fits perfectly
because I remember when I first got hired, the thin

(03:03:09):
Blue line. It existed, it was a thing, but it
was just it was just a matte black with a
blue line and that was it. Uh, And I you
didn't really even in cop culture, like I didn't grow
up seeing that thing in the eighties and the nineties
met much, not at all. And then when I was
in the department in the in the in the two thousand's,
you kind of saw it every now and again, someone
might have a pelpin like in the department, but out

(03:03:31):
in public, nobody had that stuff. No nobody, nobody had
any of that rocking stuff. And it didn't it never
really bothered me until it showed up on an American
flag and then that was that was a big red
flag of like, oh this this is bad. I was like,
this is this is nationalism, guys, this isn't good. And
like my whole crew look to me and go what's nationalism?

(03:03:51):
And I'm just like, fuck, is there this like sense
that people are toatying or is it this sense that
this is kind of the silent majority that backs us
in doing whatever hard work we need to do. I
think it's started out as tony, it really did, and
it's but it's now shifted into um this whole like,

(03:04:14):
you know, you get those guys that are like, oh,
if I see a cop getting in a fight, I'm
gonna get out of my car and I'm gonna jump
in there and I'm gonna back them up because they're
like they're playing top. They really want that authority or
that whatever, but for whatever reason, they don't go do it. Um.
But this has been a way of like kind of
they get to see themselves as being like a posse

(03:04:35):
kind of a thing, like I'm in the I'm in
the club. I'm not in the club, but like they're
my buddies and is there I don't know, does that
make being in the club cooler? The fact that there's
these kind of posse's forming around it, these people kind
of work worshiping the culture associated with it. I mean
there probably is now, but honestly, when I was in
there and freaked me the hell out, it really really

(03:04:56):
creeped me out. I didn't like it at all. Yeah,
I mean, you have to think about, if you're if
you're a reasonable person, how weird it would be to
see your job turned into a cult like Garrison. You
know that feeling, um or you're you're going to learn
when we when we make the cult. Yeah, okay, so
I wanted to. I guess let's let's let's get back

(03:05:17):
to this kind of list you put together, because you
were sort of going through different hallmarks of what makes
something a cult. One of them is the group displays
and excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and
whether he is alive or dead, regards his belief system, ideology,
in practices as the truth as law. Um. And I'll
remind you we were not talking about my podcast. We're
talking about cults here. Uh that's right, Um, yes, stay quiet, Garrison.

(03:05:43):
That's they're just smiling, silently staring at us through zoom.
I see you, okay, And you've written under this the
law is the higher power. They grant control of their actions.
Blind faith in the system frees them from having to
consider their role in the system. It's my job to
arrest in charge high let the court figure out the rest.

(03:06:03):
It sounds a lot like kill them all, let and
let God sort them out. In this case, the criminal
justice system is a direct replacement for God. I think,
I think this is this is a really good point.
This is even this is the thing even when I
was like a dumb kid and thought cops were fine,
this was the one thing that even like just even
still freaked me out about cops because every once in
a while you would see a video of like the

(03:06:25):
cop was randomly like assaulting somebody, and then other cops
nearby just mindlessly join in, and I'm like, whoa, that's
so such a weird kind of group dynamic of they
see someone doing something and they just don't question it
at all and immediately back it up, no matter what
actually was happening. Because like I always tried to think
things through more like logically, and that type of like

(03:06:45):
mindlessness really freaked me out. And I think was maybe
one of the first things that was like huh, maybe
it was. It was one of the first cracks and
like maybe cops actually aren't good. Um, I think, yeah,
I think this is a really great point in terms
of how this ties into like, yeah, it's my job
to it's my job to arrest and charge. I don't
sort out what happens afterwards, so it doesn't actually matter.

(03:07:07):
Like it's like I'm not I'm not actually hurting these
people because if if they did something wrong, it's going
to get figured out in the court system. I'm just
doing this like preliminary task. It's it plays into a
whole bunch of like weird psychological things that make you
feel better about horrible actions you're doing because you have
so much backing that's going to make sure what you
do actually isn't bad. Yeah, this is like this, you know,

(03:07:32):
this arrest, which may be physical and ugly, even if
they're innocent later. It's just part of what you have
to do to get to the point where you determine
whether or not they're innocence. So I'm not doing anything bad. Yeah. Yeah,
And actually, Garrison, I it's it's what you said. It's
perfect because in the bottom of the thing where I
was just spewing notes to myself, I literally put down here.
It's not a job to them. It's a central component

(03:07:52):
of their sense of self. This is why they will
do terrible things to validate their perceived reality. And how
these things, yeah, they it's you might say, like imagine
how like think about how hard it is to get
people to admit they're wrong about a political belief on Twitter,
especially when their name is attached to their account. Now

(03:08:13):
imagine you have like imagine that's the thing being argued
is like the central thing around which you organize your life.
And also you get to shoot people who make you angry.
Oh yeah, it's it's a rough situation to be it.
It is, it is, it's crazy. And the part that
I wrote of it's my job to arrest and charge high,

(03:08:34):
I think that's that's a part of the mentality of
it is like, yeah, I don't want to say it's
like a game, but it almost is like a game.
It's almost like they're trying to get points, like score
high and talk to me about talk to me about
when you say a rest and charge high kind of
what is that? What does that sort of look like
on the ground before we get into kind of why
people do that. So when you're using your your powers

(03:08:58):
of arrest, you're you're you're supposed to hear to go
a penal code. But there is code and I'm always
speaking to California because that's where i got my trainer. Um,
they don't expect cops to remember every single element of
every single PC code because that's ridiculous. No one's going
to be able to do that. Um. So there's there's
wiggle room. There's play where I know you did this

(03:09:19):
thing and I know it's what they call a wobbler,
Like I can go felony and go misdemeanor. They'll teach
you in the academy. They're like, if it's a wabbler,
you always charge felony every single time, even if you
don't think it's gonna work. Charge it felony, kick it
to the d A and let the d A c
if they can make it stick. And if they don't, whatever,
who cares. That's not part of our job anymore. Wow.

(03:09:41):
And yeah, And that's one of those things where a
lot of people I've had friends who got charged with
felonies that got dropped, but like, you're still living under
your You essentially have to live as like the diet
version of a felon while that's hanging over your head um,
which is not fun. No, And it's a big part
of the whole criminal justice. I'm sure you guys are aware.
That 's love to crack deals. They love to make

(03:10:02):
their big man general backroom deals. And facilitating that is
cops charging high. You're here in the room, you're facing
felony charges and the d A is gonna be like, oh, man,
I can knock that down to him his demeanor, But
that's because he knows he doesn't have a case, but
he didn't get that opportunity without a cop charging the
higher charge. Now you know who isn't going to charge

(03:10:27):
high because their prices are incredibly low, very reasonable, very fair.
The products and services that support our podcast. Uh, we're back.
So the next thing you've got on here is kind
of talking about cult characteristics. Questioning doubt and dissent are
discouraged or even punished. And you've written academies are commonly paramilitary.

(03:10:48):
They're working to break down and build up cadets. As
discussed last season on my show, the FDO program is
where fresh cadets meet salty veterans in the cycle of
abuse starts. The paramilitary environment is usually casual and unnoticeable
until somebody questions orders or tradition. Questioning order gets the
that's an order threat, while questioning tradition and suggesting improvements
gets that's how it's always been done. There is no

(03:11:10):
forum for change your progress. Some places have these forums,
but they're just for public relations. And this is the
thing that I think people who are trying to engage
with from a perspective of like reform or whatever, trying
to change law enforcement. As a lot of people were
last year where things get jammed up a lot is
the there's this attitude among civilians, so to speak, among

(03:11:34):
most of us that like, well, anything the government does
should be subject to like what we should watch out.
We should look at it, we should see if it works.
If it doesn't work, we should change it to make
it work better. And that's how kind of everything should work.
And that's what you're getting it here. Is interesting because
it's the reticence to actual change among police as legendary.
But I don't think there's a lot of discussion of
the psychology behind it. Yeah, I mean it's that it

(03:11:58):
goes back to that whole will do anything to reinforce
our perception of reality thing. Um, Like I said earlier,
grew up in a cop family and it's specifically in
the department that I worked at, So you know, we
were called like blue bloods or legacy kids, and no
matter what was going on, like anything that you questioned,
it was always so, well, that's always it's that's the

(03:12:20):
way it's always been done. That's the way it's always
been done. And I grew to hate that answer, like
with a passion in my personal life everywhere I refused
to give that as an answer when I became a
sergeant eventually, Um, and yeah, they'll do anything. I mean
they will. They will bend laws, they'll break laws because

(03:12:42):
who's going to charge them? Yeah, because it's what they've
always done always. My department famously had um our union
got all of our union news embezzled by people in
our brass, and they got caught dead to rights. But
that case never went anywhere. Nobody would touch it with
a ten foot pole. Uh. And even if you go

(03:13:03):
and google it and you try to look at archives
from the local newspaper, it's gone. It never happened. And yeah,
that's interesting to me because that's like cops getting screwed
over by cops. Why how is that? How is that?
How is it? Like? What? What? What is the impulse
to defend the hat Well, because so there's a division
in in cop culture of like like ranks and a cult.

(03:13:26):
Once you get to what they call brass, your your lieutenant,
captain or higher, they don't look at us the same
way they don't look at the grunts, the line workers,
the guys doing the twelve hour shifts were all that
family talk goes out the window, and it's like well
we're mom and dad now, and they changed their role

(03:13:47):
in that world. And again, to maintain that power and authority,
they'll do whatever they have to do. Yeah that's um.
I mean it also kind of feeds in to this
this idea that like there used to be less restrictions there,
used to be like we used to really be able
to like do this and do that, like we like

(03:14:08):
a lot of violence get justified that way. But it
also it provides an opportunity I think for like police
who are trying to engage with reformers to do some
sneaky ship because often this like community policing is referred
to like, yeah, we need to go back to the
old methods of policing. It's like, well, but there were
probably do you remember the fire hoses being used to

(03:14:29):
black people during the Civil rights movement? Like there were
issues back before we got militarized. It's it's yeah, And
I mean, and that was the stuff they were doing outside. Um,
the jail I worked in, because you bring up fire hoses,
this is where I'm going. Um, they we had big
cotton fire hoses up on the floors and this jail
and there was actually built out of old parts of
the Texas prison. And you know, everyone talks about the

(03:14:51):
good old days when we could really do stuff. And
the story that always went around was that when the
inmates were getting rowdy, they would just walk down the
tier with the hose and just name them. And then
Jesus Christ put it back because again, who who's gonna
who's gonna tell on me? Who's gonna believe these guys? Yeah,
and that was back in like seventies era. You know,

(03:15:11):
it's the that's the big fist story that guys used
to always tell. But I'm like, I have no reason
to not believe that story. It sounds yeah, I mean,
worse stuff happens in prisons today, So yeah, I'm not surprised.
All right, moving on down your list. This one's really
interesting to me, and I'm curious from some detail on
this because this is not something I ever really thought about. UM.

(03:15:34):
Mind altering practices such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues,
denunciation sessions, or debilitating work routines are used in excess
and served to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders.
And you've written cop talk briefings, evails are always negative,
and the work routine is abusive. It is paired with
hyper vigilance. Um, I'm I'm extremely interested in that and
kind of like how it how it sounds like the

(03:15:56):
kind of language that you're talking about people using among
each other when they're doing this, So I you know almost,
I mean I'm not even almost in kind of a
PTSD response, I've blocked out like a lot of my
memories from those years, Like I'll talk to that yeah, yeah,
I'll talk to X cops and they're like, hey, remember

(03:16:16):
blah blah blah, and I'm like no, Um, so cop
talk is mostly slang. It's like it's the ten code stuff. Um.
But it gets stuck in your head and you start
and it's it's one of those things where they talk
about how you're not gonna have friends outside of work
because you're gonna start talking in this language. You will say,
you know, what's your twenty you know, I'm code for

(03:16:36):
if you see someone who's acting a certain way, like
out of the ordinary, maybe a mentally ill person, you'll
say like, oh, that's a jay cat. Like you'll use
this jailhouse slang and it just it permeates your brain
and like we said before, your words manipulate how you
for see reality and you just start seeing everything that way. Um.

(03:16:57):
The big one is the hyper vigilance cycle is the
is the abusive part. That's that's the part that really
got me thinking of cults of how they'll you know,
deny you food, sleep, make you work crazy hours and
do all these things. Um. And that's that's that's the
one that really keep the whole calb aspect for me

(03:17:19):
was the hyper vigilance cycle. The studies that have gone
into it. UM. I learned about it from a book
this little guy right here. It's called Emotional Survival for
Law Enforcement. It's by Kevin M. Gil Martin, PhD. He's
an ex cop who kind of PhD in neuroscience and studies,
studied cops brains and got to see how they function.

(03:17:40):
And he's the one that kind of coined this whole
hyper vigilance cycle of you're always edging at this parasympathetic
fight flight or freeze response time when you're on duty. Yeah,
it just stays up there the entire time. I'm sure
soldiers have had the same thing, funk. I'm sure you
had the same thing, Robert, when you were doing your
war journalism stuff man, or just being in Portland last year. Yeah. Yeah,

(03:18:04):
it keeps you at that edge, that cresting peek and
then you crash and you get back up and boom,
you peek up again and then you crash. And it's
almost like a drug. Your brain becomes addicted to that
peeked out feeling that you get from the hyper vigilance
because you do here a little better, you see a
little better, your brains moving a little faster because there's

(03:18:26):
that heightened amount of adrenaline just constantly dripping into your system,
and then you crash. And when you crash is when
you're not at work, So you start associating not being
at work with feeling bad and being at work feels good. Yeah,
I mean the same thing happens, I'm sure Garrison. It

(03:18:46):
happened like during the riots, where you would feel shitty
when you weren't out there. Um. Yes, some days I
would go out, not even to just to cover it,
just to kind of just stand there like a block
away because there was nothing else to do. Like it was.
There's like I could sit at home and rest, but
I'll just be watching whatever is happening, not doing anything else.

(03:19:06):
You just it. It feels it would feel more relaxing
just to stand on a street corner and watch people
throw stuff over events, because that that that's just that's
more relaxing than laying down. It was like, it's that
a very a very weird disassociate of like feeling that. Yeah,
Like my my brain is it's accustomed to this environment now,

(03:19:27):
So this is the environment I'm gonna be in. Right,
And look how fast your brain got into that groove now,
you know, imagine doing it for thirty years, yeah, instead
of like six months or even though it's it's it
started only after like two months, right, and or even
even in some cases like a month. Yeah, it's fast. Yeah. Um,

(03:19:52):
all right, So I wanted to get into the kind
of the next thing here. Um, the leadership dictates, sometimes
in great detail, how members should think and feel, e g.
Members must get permission today, change jobs, are married or
leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live, whether to
have children, how to discipline children, and so forth. Um,
very classic cult ship, right, Like the nut really of
what we had all all that stuff when I was

(03:20:15):
a kid. Yeah, I would guess that like the time
if you ask someone for a quick definition of a cult.
This is what they're gonna say something or there. This
this is the kind of ship they're going to highlight. Um,
and I'm interested in. Yeah, just talk because you already
chatted a bit about about this. Just the fact that,
like the way in which police policy works kind of

(03:20:36):
restructures how you function off duty, which I think is
something that people everyone understands elements of it, right, Like
if you're a fucking dishwasher for a living, you will
wash dishes differently forever, right Like if you if you
have bag your like bagsh it at a grocery store,
like that's something that you'll always kind of know how
to do. Like these bits and pieces of this, but

(03:20:57):
it's not quite the same as what you're talking about,
And I want to get kind of into why. Yeah,
it's kind of like when you're when you're as an adult,
you do something that you're like, oh, I used to
do that at my first job and I was like fifteen,
But yeah, it does stick with you the muscle. The
muscle memory sticks in those narrow pathways that your brain
gets carved unless you get the right kinds of mushrooms

(03:21:17):
to fix that. So and then you just throw ship
in the bed, smooth out those curves. Um. But yeah,
the leadership really does dictate. I mean some of them
are some of them you can foy, and some of
the republic you can. You can pull up policies and procedures,
standard operating procedures, and you can look at like there's
a ton of policies that literally dictate what you are

(03:21:39):
and are not allowed to do in your personal life.
Things you're allowed to post on social media, places, you're
allowed to go in uniform, And it all just starts
like tinking away at your armor. That that sense of identity,
that sense of self, and that's how the job becomes
your identity. Again. It permeates every corner of your life

(03:22:03):
if you let it. Um, if you don't have like
the I don't know the mental strength to kind of
resist that, it washes over your real fast. Because while
that's all going on, especially as a young cop, you
feel great, You're you're special. Now, you're you're in this,
you're in the magic club. You you have the the
symbol on your chest and the gun on your hip,

(03:22:25):
and it's really easy to let that slip and just
become everything about you. Um. Yeah, remember permissions, like so
permission to date and things like that might sound a
little weird, but there are times where like my wife
and I don't dress like the typical conservative Central Valley person,

(03:22:46):
uh and act out of work functions. I would get
I would get comments from people being like hey, maybe, yeah,
your your wife has a lot of really colorful hair,
like maybe she should tone that down. And again that
was another one where I'm like, what, No, that's my wife.
She can do whatever she damn well wants. Yeah, I

(03:23:08):
mean that's that's that's the kind of talking that should
get somebody slapped upside the head. Yeah. Um, the uh.
The next thing you have here is the group is elitist,
claiming a special exalted status for itself, it's leader and
its members. The leader is and I'm interested in kind
of because you you have you have elements of this

(03:23:29):
right um with it like the sheep dog thing. We're
kind of like the cop is the center of the
cult for people who are not Cop Coults. I don't know,
like does this exist, Like I don't see like cult
a cult leader sort of within this this thing. I
think it's it's almost more nebulous than that, where this
idea of the agent of the law is kind of

(03:23:49):
the center of the cult that the people who are
agents of the law buy into, as well as folks
outside of it. You know, I don't know, this is
probably deserve any I mean, I'm interested in your thoughts
on this. This probably deserves significantly more analysis then we're
going to give it today. But I think it's a
fascinating thing to think about. Right. It's kind of like
how I when I put earlier that the criminal justice

(03:24:10):
system is the direct substitute for God. It is God,
the law is God. I mean, how many times have
you gotten into a debate with someone where they'll be like, well,
it's ethically fine because it's legal, and you're like, well, no,
legality does not equal you know, ethical or moral and there.
But there's these people in America who are just like, no,
if it's legal, it's legal, that means it's okay. Yeah.

(03:24:32):
And the elitism, yeah, it's obvious. I mean, if you've
met it is kind of a religious belief though, that like, yeah,
it's illegal, so it's bad. She there were a criminal,
so they deserved X, like making a making a homebrewed
cleric that believed in the law for D, and D
was pretty easy to be like, Yeah, this is a church,
this is a religion. Um, yeah it is. It is

(03:24:56):
the sheep dog um on on sheep and the you know,
it's us against the wolves and blah blah law. And
then we have a guy's name in here that I
won't say, uh for anonymity. But we had we had
a braska, a lieutenant that would give us these prepared
speeches whenever he thought someone's morale was getting low, uh,
where he would talk about how and he was wrong
that the word sheriff comes from um like sanscript or

(03:25:19):
Arabic sharif, which is not true. It comes from shire Reeve.
It's old English, just squished because English is a hideous language. Um.
But he had to. I mean, I can't count how
many times he told me that exact same speech to
my face, over and over again, as if it was
the first time I was hearing the story. And to me,

(03:25:41):
that was another thing that clicked where I'm like, God,
it's like talking, It's like a call and response when
you're in church sometimes. Yeah, anytime you confront a religious person,
they just they have that that that that dogmatic skeew
that regurgitates and just like, well, here's my opinion that
I was told by someone who told me. Okay, So Alexander, UM,

(03:26:01):
we've got more to say. You've got a lot more
that you've written here. Um, we're gonna we've gone kind
of a little over the time we had here. So
I want to have you back on tomorrow for part
two of this before we roll out. Do you have
anything you'd like to plug? Maybe the Washington State Patrol? No? Um, No,
I don't really have anything to plug. I'm I'm never

(03:26:22):
say die where all the easier threes because I'm that
elder nerd from the nineties. Yeah, and uh saw hackers
in the theater. I it's claimed to fame. So yeah,
on Twitter if you want to come see me. How
are your hips doing that? It's okay, Garrison's never seen

(03:26:45):
Wayne's World. Oh I know that's true. That's true. Too young.
I tried to show Wayne's World to my brother, who's
still like five years older than Garrison, and did not take.
Didn't take. It's it's it's time thing. My oldest is
about four years younger than Garrison, and they've seen Wien's World. Wow. Okay, Ah,

(03:27:24):
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(03:27:45):
Is this fascinating world? Find a forest near you and
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Hay Lead the listeners take here. Last season on Lethal Lit,
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(03:28:06):
finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of
new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself
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now all signs point to a new serial killer in

(03:28:26):
Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better
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Murder mystery podcast, Lethal Lit, a tig Tara's Mystery out now,
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dropping weekly starting February nine. Subscribe now to never miss

(03:28:48):
an episode. Listen to Leave the Lit on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts,
ah where it's us, the podcast that we are. It
could happen here behind the podcast bad stuff. It could

(03:29:11):
happen here, it is, it could happen here. Okay, Well,
Part two of Why Police are Occult? Thanks Garrison, Thanks
for doing the job. That is one of our jobs, certainly,
but apparently not mine. Alexander Williams back again? Um, Alexander,
how are you? How are you feeling good? Was your
life in a radically different place now than it was

(03:29:32):
when we ended part one? Oh yeah? Like no, Well
that's for the best, because anything that would change in
about the thirty seconds between these episodes probably would not
have been a positive change. You're letting the magic out.
People are gonna know. Yeah, they should know already. Uh So.

(03:29:54):
The next thing you've got here, in terms of cult
characteristics that you saw inside the Police is the group
has a polarized us versus them mentality which may cause
conflict with the wider society. Um yeah, And I think
this is the one that like, yeah, we've all we
all kind of saw that one. Actually, are you sure
about that one? I'm not convinced. Yeah, it was a

(03:30:16):
Eureka moment, right, Yeah. Um, I do think it's probably
worth a little bit of exploration about like what it
means emotionally to be told like I want to defund
or even abolish the police as a police officer, like
that's that's a um yeah. Yeah. I remember the first

(03:30:41):
time that I heard that, the concept of it when
I was a cop. I think I was about five
years away from getting out, um, and it blew my mind.
It was it was like I'm like, you don't know,
we don't have enough funding, Like how how in the world,
But we can't do our job because in you know,
in our in my head, we're where the thing holding
society up. If we're not here, everything falls apart and crumbles. Um. So,

(03:31:06):
the idea of being told like we need to defund
the police for cops, it's it's an attack on your
values and your role in the world. It's also attack
on like your personal life because because your life is
police as well, right, and and and it's and it's
like you're you've you've been talking a lot about how
the job becomes such a central part of your identity

(03:31:27):
that it's not even just attacking like your paycheck, but
it's attacking like your essence now as a person. It
is It's like if you've ever had a debate with
with an extremely like evangelical religious person, it's the same
as trying to tell a cop like, hey, you don't
actually hold society up. You're not exactly as important as
you think you are. Um. And like I said, like,

(03:31:48):
we don't get we don't get paid very much. Health
insurance usually isn't that good um our our unions that
we toad as being the best, we're usually pretty corrupt um.
And they don't really go to bat for us and
get us the good health insurance and get us the
good pay. They get us just enough. And so when
a cop here's like, hey, we defund the police, it's
like from our perspective, we think what we're hearing is

(03:32:11):
we don't appreciate you. We already think you get paid
too much. We we think of it less about like
the structure of law enforcement, and we think it personally
of like, oh, you don't think my kids should have dinner? Yeah,
And that's uh, I mean yeah, of course that has
like of course it ends the way that we saw
it in you know, or at least it continues the

(03:32:31):
way we saw it and continue last year, right, And
and it's I think it could help like people like
us are on one side of the line and you know,
the other people are on the other side of the
line still, and I think it could help people on
our side of the of the of the barricades to
understand just how willing these guys are to do things

(03:32:51):
and things that they wouldn't normally do, things that you
would never consider doing on your own, but for the
job and as in order, they'll do it because again
it's part of their identity, and it's it's there. You know,
you're attacking me. You're also attacking my family, You're you're
It goes back to that grossman thing of being told

(03:33:12):
a lot of um, no matter what you do, you
go home tonight. So no matter what I do on
my shift, I go home tonight. It's better to be
judged by twelve and carried by six. Yeah, yeah, like
I'm thinking of like the police of the riot line,
and yeah, you can see them being like middle aged

(03:33:34):
conservative dudes, like look at all these like fucking like
gay queer teenagers throws to fat me. Right, it's like
the specific thing you're like, oh you you like I'm
getting attacked by like the lowest of the low society.
I'm being attacked by like did like degenerates and like
this weird kind of scum. I'm actually what society should be.
The people that are fighting against me are like this

(03:33:57):
weird anti social thing, right, That's that's how from their
perspective um when almost an actuality. I've been I've been
slowly kind of appropriating that type of language for when
I see a cop do something horrible, I'm like, wow,
look at that, like anti social, violent freak, because you
can look at that language because it flips the way
we usually view like aesthetics when you know, because like

(03:34:21):
when you see someone do something horribly horribly violent but
they addressed in a uniform, it is it has the
appearance of being proper, but like, no, that actually still
is anti social and extremely violent. So I think I've
been playing around with like flip flipping that language. But
you can definitely see it on the cops faces when
a whole bunch of like young queer as fun people
are throwing water bottles at them. Oh yeah, you can't.

(03:34:43):
And and the thing that to the thing to remember
about most cops is they're there. Their ego is paper
thin their skin. They cannot take a joke, they cannot
take an insult. The the number of cops that I
would see, and I would argue that I saw some
of the worst worst behavior than on the eats, because
because inside the jail you're you know, you're in your
own little world. You're inside these walls. The public can't

(03:35:05):
see you unless you're on camera and prebody cameras, you
know where all the cameras are. And I the the
amount of guys that like an inmate would call them
like the f slur or any other slur and the
cop would just snap, we just lose their mind. And

(03:35:25):
me and another couple other guys being the only kind
of cops that would get in the guy's way and
be like no, And it was never we couldn't say no,
that's wrong, don't do that. It was always no, it's
not worth it, or no, you're gonna get in trouble
or no, you know if you do that, he wins man,
because if we said don't do that, it's wrong. We
may have we may have stopped that bad thing from happening,

(03:35:46):
but we have now marked ourselves as being, you know,
potential apostates against the close. Um. So yeah, that's yeah.
Calling them names works. Sixt and stones do brey Cops
bones Like, Oh boy, it does work. Like in terms
of if if the goal is make them extremely angry, yes,

(03:36:07):
it doesn't work. It's yeah. Obviously. The next one you've
got is the leader. The leader is not accountable to
any authorities, um, which the police regulate and investigate themselves.
That's one of the most basic ones. But it does
it kind of. It does lead to this, like it
is interesting to think about the way the Church of

(03:36:28):
Scientology handles uh misbehavior from its agents and the way
that like a police department does. Because there's not a
ton of daylight betwixt the two. There's not listening to
you the l Ron episodes. Anyone who hasn't listened to them,
go back and listen to them. They're fantastic. One of
my favorites um, Yeah. Listening to that and the way

(03:36:48):
that they're a little internalized security system was structured was
very very analog to exactly what happens in law enforcement
when they're so so called policing themselves b s. Because
god they don't. They'll do every little thing to manipulate
the situation to have the cop come out on top

(03:37:09):
and not be in trouble because who's gonna all them
responsible that my own guy at my own department's interviewing me.
We've known each other since you were kids, or I've
known his dad, or his dad's known me, or or
he's you know, related or whatever. It never works when
the you know, the watchman are watching themselves. It doesn't work.

(03:37:31):
I don't know how. We don't, well I do, you
know how, But I really wish there was if we
do have to still have law enforcement civilian oversight with
actual power, actual authority to do. Yeah. That's that's the
thing is that everywhere and a lot of the times
that's been try to put into legislator, it doesn't. It's

(03:37:52):
always like neutered. It's always like and I like, I've
I've seen versions of it pop up in Portland and
it never does anything. Yeah, And that's I mean, obviously
the whole the question of is to what extent can
increasing civilian oversight uh solve problems? To what extent is
it like papering over them? Those are all things worth discussing. Um.

(03:38:17):
I think I want to kind of keep us focused
on the mindset that that inclcates, because that that's the
thing that I don't think people get in part because
like most people who are part of these abolitionous movements,
most people who are are on the sides that we
are on this um either probably don't know a police
officer very well apart and certainly almost most of them

(03:38:37):
have not been police officers. And I'm kind of wondering,
what are you actually scared of doing as a police officer,
Like what what what are you actually scared of in
terms of like the blowback, the fault, Like what what
is it you actually get worried about if it's not
pissing off everyone else in the city who wasn't a cop,

(03:38:59):
you know it? So, Yeah, what it comes down to is, uh,
you know that the the Church of law, the Church
of criminal justice, and what they're scared of is so
if I get a dirty cop who's not blatantly doing
something bad, like he just he hit a guy too
hard or something. It's something that hasn't hit the news yet. Um,

(03:39:22):
but I have to morally, like ethically, on paper, I'm
required to have an I A division investigate these people.
The reason that in my head when I was there
and being interviewed for these things, it's because you have
to hold up the infallibility of the law. It doesn't
matter what really happened. All that matters is what's in

(03:39:45):
black and white on paper in our files. If we
ever get audited by a federal body and we can say, look,
a bad thing happened, Yes, we investigated it, here's what
Here were the results. And it's all about holding up
the infallibility of the law, because if it really gets
out and cops really get in trouble for stuff like
some of the stuff that's been happening where cops are

(03:40:06):
actually being convicted finally for doing terrible things, it erodes
the blind faith that the masses have in law enforcement.
Because I've heard people here in Utah, which is a
very conservative place, look at some of those shootings that
have happened where the cops have actually been found guilty
and they've actually been like, oh wow, like I never

(03:40:27):
once thought a cop would do this, And it doesn't
sound like much, but in their head, that's that's a
seed that's setting in their consciousness. And that's that's the
whole point of the blue wall of silence and keeping
everything in the house is if everybody realizes that we're
just a little weird man behind a curtain, you know,
the Wizard of Oz doesn't work anymore. We have to

(03:40:49):
maintain this false image that we are infallible and we
know we know exactly what we're doing, and we are
taking care of you. You have to believe that, so
they'll do anything to maintain the lie. Wow. Yeah that
makes sense. It's bleak, but it makes sense. Yeah, it

(03:41:11):
felt bleak being in there. This ties into kind of
the the role of like lying right and and and
the kind of the cult thing you're tying this into
is that like colts will often talk about how the
things the cult is doing are so important that you
can do terrible things to achieve them, right. You see
this in the Church of Scientology and their Dirty Tricks programs.

(03:41:33):
Sent and On had its its version of this um
and you you've written here. We are taught to lie
to get what we need. It's only true if it's
on tape or written down. As long as it looks good,
it is good. Um and I uh, I mean it.
It made me think, among other things, of a guy
I used to know who became a local prosecutor um,

(03:41:56):
and eventually quit because he kept being assured by police
officers that like something that they had put in, like
the charging document was true, and then being unable to
prove it in court. Um. And it it pissed him
off after a period of time. Um. And I'm interested,
like in the I'm sure like obviously some fraction of

(03:42:19):
people doing it are just like just literally don't give
a ship. But how does someone who actually does have
a moral compass and believe in the law. How does
someone who really believes justify lying to screw somebody over. Um.
So as the guy who was there, who had morals,

(03:42:40):
which is why I'm not there anymore, I couldn't all right,
And I actually got in trouble on a couple of
instances of everybody was going one way on a story
and I was going in the opposite direction. And without
using blatant terms they use all the like the little
you know, legal legal fuckory terms to not say what

(03:43:02):
they're trying to say, but implying and getting it across
to you of like you need to get on the
same page, you need to tow the line, you need
to you need to get in here. And I could
never do it. I just I don't know, it's just
my moral fiber won't let me do that kind of thing. Um.
I once was told by a lieutenant that I had

(03:43:25):
my moral fiber was too high, Like he literally told me,
because you can't expect everyone else to live up to
your moral standards. And I'm like, dude, we're we're supposed
to be like a little bit above the typical moral standard.
We're supposed to be the example of how you know,
our civilians, our citizens are supposed to act. But it

(03:43:46):
wasn't the truth. Yeah, I mean, my first I think
kind of radicalizing thing very early on was just like
the fake drug scandal in Dallas was realizing that like
on a significant scale, uh, local police had been planting
ship on people in order to charge them. People have
gone to prison, which happens other places too, but like, yeah, um,

(03:44:09):
and I'm the bulk of the work making something like
that happen, isn't the people who are planting the fake drugs,
the people who realize that the department will look bad
if it gets out, and then dedicate themselves to stopping
it from getting out even beyond because you have you know,
X number of people are willing to plant plant fake
drugs on a guy, but a much larger number of
people are willing to try to cover that up, So

(03:44:29):
it's not a problem. That's That's the thing I really
appreciate about, Alex. You're framing of this in terms of
like their main or not one of the main motivations
is not, you know, actually doing the job itself. It's
about it's about making sure that their reality and by extension,
what they want everyone else as a reality to be,
to stay the same. Like they all of the effort

(03:44:51):
into whether that be lying for supposedly in their view,
like moral reasons and all that kind of work. It's
it's it's it's to maintain the specific verse s of reality.
It's not it's not actually for like like it's it's
it's not for like actually promoting what is like the
law and the books by any means it's it's it's
it's the it's the thing like in hot Fuzz, it's

(03:45:13):
for the greater good. That's that's what that is. That
is what they're trying to That's what they're trying to do.
So even if they like, as long as their reality
is maintained, then you know, we have some semblance of
like order in the world, whether that be you know,
this nostalgic, semi like proto militaristic nationalist version of order.

(03:45:35):
But that's that's that's the thing that wants to be maintained.
So every every task, everything that they're doing isn't just
a simple task. It's all in the overall effort of
maintaining this like this perception. Um. And and that's a
a much more I think interesting way to think about police. Yeah,

(03:45:56):
it really is. Uh, these guys in like in Bill talk,
these guys would take the loopill in a heartbeat. Then
they don't rest Morpheus for trying to deal drugs. Like
that's how dedicated these guys are too, staying inside this
version of their reality. Now, um, I kind of let's
move on next to um the next kind of cult aspect.
The leadership induces feelings of shame and or guilt in

(03:46:18):
order to influence and control members. And you're talking you've
lotten down here toxic masculinity and the warrior mindset. Yeah. Um,
do you have any kind of like case examples of
how that that actually looks of like kind of using
shame or guilt to people who aren't kind of in
the this quote quote unquote warrior mindset. Uh? Yeah, I
mean it happened a lot. Um. There was a lot

(03:46:40):
of Monday night quarterbacking that would happen, especially with the
advent of like cameras and things becoming more popular. Uh.
I love my body camera. That was my little best friend.
But we would go you know, you go back and
you'd watch videos of incidents and things, and if somebody
wasn't like engaging fast enough, they would get roasted hard
like haze and you know, made fun of and mocked it.

(03:47:01):
And when you were in this, you know, we're a
family mindset, and you're you know, we're we got each
other's backs and we only understand each other. And then
all of a sudden you're on the outside because you
dared to have even a remotely moderate to liberal position
on anything, or you didn't jump in on the you know,
the the ass beating on something you fast enough, they

(03:47:23):
turn on you fast. Like. The only thing I could
compare it to is like you know every eighties and
like nineties military movie or or you know Nerds movie
where people just hate the ship out of each other,
and it's that that dude brow everyone's got a our
wire sun tattoo on their bicep, just rampant everywhere. I mean,

(03:47:45):
it permeated the whole place. That drove me that that
was one of the things that really drove me next,
because I've never been that kind of guy. I've always
been a a more of a a de escalation person
and a book reader. And then I think it helps
explain a lot why you see some of these videos
where it's just like why did they go to zero
to ten from zero to tend so fast with well,
because somebody's gonna make fun of them and call them

(03:48:07):
names if they don't go hard enough, fast enough on
somebody when they do certain things like and yeah, the
zero to a hundred thing also ties into that whole,
that whole hyper vigilance thing, that always being um a
compressed spring, and then it ties back into that warrior
mindset of like they tell you flat out like if
anyone ever attacks you, they're trying to kill you. It's

(03:48:29):
it's there's there's no offens or, but you need to
act like they're trying to kill you, because it goes
back to the whole I'm going home at the end
of the shift kind of thing. And once once that's
ingrained itself into like your muscle memory, and that becomes
the reflex, that becomes the thought that passes in front
of your mind when a critical incident happens, then that's
how you're gonna act, and you're gonna do and you're

(03:48:51):
gonna go from zero to a hundred because you're going
to assume that any little furtive movement movement which god,
there's that language, furtive movement, um, any little movement that
someone makes, like that's that's a green light. That's an
excuse that I can end whatever interaction I'm having with
this person with violence because they flinched enough where I think, Okay,

(03:49:11):
I got this. Yeah Jesus. Now. One of the next
ones you have here is talking about recruitment, which obviously
coult STU, but also like it's a job and jobs
do this constantly recruiting. I'm kind of wondering because you've
you've listed here things like Explorer programs, which are like
r OTC or the Boy Scouts kind of these different

(03:49:31):
one of which Kyle Rittenhouse did like ways in which
kind of people get onboarded. I'm wondering sort of what
how you see how you see police recruitment as kind
of different in a fundamentally cult your way. Then you know,
every job has to bring in new people, right like, yeah,
it's it's it didn't used to be this way. But
I think in the in the two thousand's, especially when numbers,

(03:49:53):
staffing numbers really started to drop because it's I don't
know if they've just realized it wasn't worth it or
they found somewhere better to get paid. But employment's gone
down for law enforcement, and so recruitment goes up in response.
But now they have a more active role in most
places where it's almost on part of the military. They'll
go to job fairs, they go to high school career days. Um,

(03:50:15):
they didn't used to do that stuff, and when they do,
they'll they'll find someone to like pull stuff out of
the pulp cultures that geist what we know what cool? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
what can we what can we cash in on to
try and draw these kids in, because just like the military,
cops are looking to pull in disenfranchised kids who probably

(03:50:38):
aren't going to go to college, don't think it's an option.
And here's this job. All you need is a high
school diploma. Here's the health insurance. Here's the retirement package,
which is trash. But you're seventeen. You don't know that,
you don't know how to read all this. But it
looks real coal. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, they or stuff.

(03:51:00):
I mean you're familiar with that. So but yeah, they
get little kids to go out and you know, the
little baby cops, and it's I mean, it's it's one
of those things, like some of this is so much
deeper than even the the individual departments or any choice
made by the police, because like as a kid, some
of the first toys I had were cop toys, right,
like everything every boy I think, like, yes, some of
the first what you're gonna get badge, a gun, You're

(03:51:22):
gonna play detective, You're gonna be watching cops shows, You're
gonna be watching movies where cops are the and that's
I mean that that's a bigger subject than today. But like, yeah, no,
that is, like what the one of the most prevalent
forms of media that's instilled in young uh boys? I
guess yeah. You know what else is instilled in young
boys the love of capitalism and products and specifically products

(03:51:47):
and services. Find a child and whisper the names of
our sponsor into their ears, preferably a child that's yours.
Hopefully know any child, any child throw something so their
parents look away, and then lean down and whisper better.
You only counts if you get caught. We're back, um.
And your next point was the group is preoccupied with

(03:52:09):
making money, which is a huge thing for cults. Um,
not all of them. There are some, like you know,
there there are some cults that were shall we say
pure um, but they're nearly We're like, hey man Manson,
just it was all about the music and the Heaven's
Gate was a pure cult. Yeah, yeah, Heaven's Gate. It

(03:52:34):
certainly wasn't just the money for Heaven's But yes, cops,
cops have civil acids forfeiture, which they just took a
hundred thousand dollars from someone in Dallas. Yeah, and the
person did not get charged with anything, um, which is
usually the case. Yeah, but but I mean, yeah, like

(03:52:55):
you have written here that like the main the main
way is just increasing their budget as much as possible,
which you have. Most police departments right now have the
biggest budget they've ever had. UM specifically in like main
cities we have, they're they're the most funded department, UM
in in for the whole city that there's there's this
there's this great gag in the opening episode of a

(03:53:15):
show called Ugly Americans that's about trying to rere financialize
the city's budget. And they have like like a social
spending and cop budget and they take like all of
social spending and move it over and leave this one
tiny sliver and they're like, oh there, that's better. That
will solve all the problems. Um. It's it is a
better sketch than what I explaining it just like this

(03:53:37):
sounds not funny, but the sketch is actually pretty good.
But yes, and and it is, and it is relatively
accurate in terms of just moving all the funding from
social programs over into law enforcement. Yeah. So there's uh there,
you know, there's everyone gets their financing different ways. There's county,
there's stayed there's their city. But a common thing that
would happen was, uh, law enforcement agencies woul try to

(03:54:02):
take anything that they could under the umbrella of law enforcement.
So if it was like, hey, we want to have more,
you know, security equipment at the high school, and then
the cops will be like, no, no, no, no, no,
give us that money. We'll give you another another officer
on campus. Or they want to hire something for the part,
you know, and we want to install lights the city
park to increase security. No no, no, no, no no no,

(03:54:23):
you just give us that money. We'll make sure our
guys patrol it more. Mm hmm. So they actively try
to just like coach money from everybody else. Yeah. I mean,
and you you can see this in a lot of
towns where like the number one use of public funds
is the police. I mean, it's it's all over the
country at this point. Um, yeah, that makes sense. Uh.

(03:54:47):
So members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time
to the group and group related activities. Um. Yeah, because
you have written here four years with no days off,
but scored a satisfactor, I was told to put in
more time outside of work. Yeah, So, like I said,
our emails were always sounds so much like MLM ship
it is. It is they they every time you're going

(03:55:08):
for an email, they negg you, like, no matter what
are Our scoring system was one to ten. Um, nobody
ever got higher than a six. Maybe I think I
saw like one or two sevens in my entire time there.
And when I became a supervisor, I asked the brass
I'm like, hey, I want to give this guy this
this upper grade of like an eight or nine, and

(03:55:28):
he told me flat, because no, we don't do that. Like,
no one's allowed to get higher than a seven. And
if you want a seven, you're gonna have to like
write a novel about how great this person is to
get them this rating. Um, it was just yeah, it was.
It was consistently just pinning you down. The four years
no dated off. So yeah, I did h four years
straight without calling in sick once, like I took vacations.

(03:55:49):
But um, when I went in from my email and
he slides me a thing that says it says attendance
satisfactory and I was like, what are you talking about.
I was like, I haven't taken a day a sick
day and four you know what? I have three kids.
How do you think I managed that? Like, I've sacrificed
to be here that much. And his response was, well, like, yeah,

(03:56:09):
but I never see you at barbecues, I never see
you at the union meetings. I never see you at
the fundraisers for the sheriff's reelection, even though it's blatantly
against policy and illegal to do. And I told him
that in his response was, what are you gonna do?
Tell on me? Are you're gonna tell Jesus? Yeah? That
makes sense. Yeah, yeah, I mean who are you going

(03:56:30):
to tell that? Who are you to? Yeah? And it is.
It's also just like this. It isolates you from other people.
It stops you from knowing folks that aren't cops. And
it's yeah, it's a lot like what your up line
is gonna tell you if you're selling mary kay that
that that that ties into the that ties into the
next point. Members are encouraged or required to live and

(03:56:52):
or socialize only with other group of members. Um. And
you say, this is like part of the hyper vigilance, isolate,
isolation cycle. But I also see this in terms of
like something I get into for fun, is I join
like a wife of cops? Um? Facebook groups just because
it's fast just to have all of just to have
all of these like cops spouses in a Facebook group

(03:57:14):
and it's super yeah, Like it's it's a really interesting
like culture of like just associating with other people on
the job. You know, there's like cop barbecues like you
mentioned and all this kind of stuff where it's like
we're the only ones that can understand you. So we're
gonna build like this like you know, force field around
all of us and we can be together as a
family and keep out everyone else because we're the ones

(03:57:37):
that really know what's up. Um. Yeah, it seems uh,
I mean for some people who are really into it,
I guess that is you know, that's how humans socialize
in some ways. So like you know, for people who
think being cops are good and quote unquote enjoy it,
I'm sure they have a decent time hanging out with
their cop buddies, right, Um. And I'm sure are the

(03:58:01):
cops spouse Facebook groups, I'm sure they have a good
time laughing about whatever viral video there is of someone
using too much force you know who who knows what?
Like how how they actually think about those types of
very isolated environments because you know, it's it's about fend
find you know, it's it's almost like it's it's extending
out into like fandom rules where you're associating with other

(03:58:22):
people the same way fandoms work, which is very just
very similar to to how cults work. Um so, yeah, yeah,
it's an armed, militant fandom. And your last point here,
the most loyal members, the true believers, feel there can
be no life outside the context of the group. They
believe there is no other way to be, and often

(03:58:43):
fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave or
even consider leaving the group. Yeah, so I put in
the note of just self expantiory. But yeah, it's me
quitting was we eared. I knew I needed to do it,

(03:59:03):
but I I had a massive existential crisis of identity
and of of logistical things, but a lot of it
was it was tied to my identity, and it was
it was letting go of something that was like a
core pillar of my personality and it really freaked me out.

(03:59:23):
And I think that if I was more inside the group,
and I was more like one of the guys, a
golden boy or something like, I probably would have never
left if I was. If I was getting that constant
reinforcement of the good boy feelings, I don't think I
would have quit. Um. But after I did quit, that
actually kicked off a cascade of people around my same

(03:59:47):
age and within my same seniority level in looking at
their job and looking at what it was doing to
them psychologically and physically and with their families, and thinking
to themselves, Oh, I can leave that. That is how
called how that is how leaving cults work. Yeah. Yeah.
And so once I left, a bunch of other guys
were like, oh, I don't have to do this until
I'm fifty five. I can I can go start another

(04:00:10):
career somewhere else. I can go start another retirement plan
at a different place. And I just it felt great
to see other people tear away and do that. But
at the same time, I know for some ofe that
it hurt mhm really bad to leave that behind, because
once you're once you are out. Um, you are kind

(04:00:31):
of out. Even if you leave amicably, like hey, I
just want to go do something else with my life,
you're no longer in those people's minds anymore, because you're
not part of the team. You're not in the club,
you're not in the family anymore. You're that guy that
used to be here. And I guess kind of at
the conclusion of this and this is you know, when

(04:00:52):
you when the question is like, how do you de
radicalize get people out of colts? How do you like,
no one has a good answer to that. So I
don't think we should expect you to suddenly have like
here's how to here's how to convince everybody to stop
doing this, because we can't do that for fucking Q
and on, like de radicalization of the people who say
they're involved in it are fucking drifting like it's it's

(04:01:13):
it's a big mess of a of a fucking field
in the first place. But I am wondering, do you
have some insights into like, yeah, how then do we
de radicalize these people? Uh? Like I don't think there
is Like I don't think there is a cookie cutter
answer for like pulling people out. Um, you know, we
can't bag them in a white vand and take them
to a hotel. Uh. The only thing I can think

(04:01:36):
of that would actually change the culture is a huge
shift in our national culture around like mental health and
toxic masculinity and you know, wrapping your identity into into
your job. Because it's not just cops that do this.
There's it's it's it's it's like that is that is
America now? Is that is like hustle culture. That is

(04:01:58):
what the idea of a rear is. My name is
blank and I am a blank. Like career. Career comes
from the word that means like careening, like you are
going full force into this thing that is that is
what you are doing now. That is your existence, is
your career. You're going at it um. That is that

(04:02:20):
is what this whole country is built on. Uh So
getting out of that for a lot of people, for
just regular jobs, it's difficult. Now adding on the idea
that you are the thing that holds society together, that
is that that has a whole other level of complexity,
like psychologically for the person inside it um because I'm sure,

(04:02:41):
like telemarketers, if you can get really into it and
make money, sure that can be a career. But you know,
you're not holding society together, and like that's not that's
not that's not a delusion that you have and nobody
outside shares has There's there there is, there is no
thin telemarketing line of supporting you. So it is it

(04:03:05):
is different for like police specifically, even more so than
like firefighters or like E. M. T. S. UM. This
particular fandom that's developed around police and and and like
the the incredible self importance that they is that is
cultivated um to. Yeah, like the idea of I'm doing
this to maintain reality is like a very like big

(04:03:29):
thing to tell yourself and get getting out of that
seems uh challenging. Yeah, it really is. It's like it's
almost it's almost worse than most like churches in a
sense because in this version it's so it's so materialized.
It's it's it is, Yeah, it's it's it's right in
front of you. I can reach out and touch it
because I'm part of society. But if I'm not here

(04:03:49):
and we're not here, you know, anarchy the bad guy
that the way people think the word means, you know,
everything's gonna catch fire. And the only reason people are
good to each other is because the law makes them
me that way and all that kind of toxic bs.
So the only thing I can think of to be
like to help de radicalize people is it's almost like
treating someone in your family that listens to too much

(04:04:11):
Q and on is to you know, if you know
a cop or you have a friend that used to
be a cop, and he ever like reaches out to you,
maybe with like kid gloves, kind of be like, hey,
how you doing just small things because that could maybe
lead to him putting them putting something on their shelf.

(04:04:31):
Just like when people get out of religions and things,
they'll often reach out to people and be like, hey,
this is such a fucking it kind of means something
if he's going outside of the group, and so yeah,
maybe recognize that, Like, you have an opportunity. Yeah, if
if a cop reaches out to you, it's just like
someone in a religious institution. They're reaching out to you

(04:04:52):
because they feel safe talking to you because you're not
going to turn them in. You it's not gonna have
any h immediate impact on their life right now. Yeah
that makes sense? Um, all right, well, Alexander, anything else
you wanted to get into. I mean I could talk

(04:05:13):
about this kind of stuff for days and days and
hours and hours, the whole hyper vigilance cycle. And like
I said, I've read a bunch of books on it.
I really tried to get training on just the hyper
vigilance cycle. Like, well, if you ask most cops about
hyper vigilance, they would just look at you and be like,
I don't even know what that means what you're talking about,
which is why I used to I used to give
this book the Emotional Survival Bout for law enforcement. I would.

(04:05:36):
I gave it to new hires, and some of those
new hires didn't come back, and I'm fine with that.
Yeah that's good. Yeah, some of them looked at it
and we're like, no, I'm not signing up for this
because you you really don't know what you're signing up
for the real stuff that you're signing up for until
you're in it. Yeah yeah, I mean also a cult

(04:06:00):
um Yeah yeah, well all right, uh Alexander, thank you
so much for coming on and for sharing this with us.
I think it's a useful look behind the curtain um
that that folks need um and this has been it
could happen here. You can find Garrison on the internet.

(04:06:22):
Go go go track down Garrison's fake Facebook account. You
know what goes do that you can't you can? I
I have I have made up possible specifically For this reason,
a cop wife group with Harrison joined me and Vanessa
so we could discuss our husband's careers. Hey, for all

(04:06:43):
you know, you may cause the de radicalization of the
cop Yeah. That or Garrison just gets really weirdly into
role playing as the wife of Like a career episode
is over, we are done. This is I am pulling
the luck. Hi, I'm Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.

(04:07:15):
And where the hosts of the science podcast Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, where every week we get to explore
some of the weirdest questions in the universe, Like if
sci fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with
the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can
we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants,
and crayfish? How would it interplanetary civilization function just free

(04:07:39):
will exist? Stuff to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries,
cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno history. Basically,
this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness
of reality. If anybody ever told you you ask the
weirdest questions, it is time to come join us in
the place where you belong. The Stuff to Blow Your

(04:08:00):
Mind podcast. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday, with
bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your
Mind on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. After thirty years, it's time
to return to the halls of West Beverly High and
hang out at the peach pit on the podcast. Nine

(04:08:20):
O two one o MG joined Jenny Garth and Tori
Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills
nine O two one oh. From the very beginning, we
get to tell the fans all of the behind the
scenes stories to actually happen, so they know what happened
on camera obviously, but we can tell them all the
good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy
details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades.

(04:08:43):
As nine O two one oh, super fan and radio
host Sissany sits in with Jenny and Tory, two reminisce,
reflect and relive each moment, from Brandon and Kelly's first
kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates, you have an amazing memory.
You remember everything about the entire tenure is that we
filmed that show, and you remember absolutely nothing of the

(04:09:04):
ten years that we filmed that show. Listen to nine
O two one OMG on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Harrison starts
the episode. I don't trust Robbert to me. You want
me to start? I don't trust Rowbert to this. It's time, Garrison,

(04:09:24):
it's time for you to learn. Wow, my advice is
a tonal shrieking. I am not doing that. Everyone's gonna
be like, oh, Garrison's just copying Robert's tone and cadence.
You mean you mean they're making sounds with my mouth. Yeah,
that's that's how. That's how, that's how communication works. Start
the episode with that and trigger everybody like me. You

(04:09:47):
use a microphone, it's very real. Yeah, you stieve we're recording.
Let's let's do this. Hey, it's time for stories. We
love we love stories here Attika had happen here pod
the podcast about how things are kind of falling apart
and too maybe some ways to put them back together. Um,

(04:10:08):
I'm Garrison, I'm starting this episode today. I'm not sure why.
Hungover Robert is real hungry because I didn't trust Robert
to do his job today. But I trust you, Garrison.
You didn't really not trust me to do my job.
I know. That's that's fun. Um. We also we also
Christopher here hey, and and we have uh writer Rebecca Campbell. Hello, hey,

(04:10:38):
and uh what why don't you briefly explain who who
you are and what what's what's going on today? Okay, Well,
I'm a Canadian writer and sometimes I'm a teacher, but
mostly I just write really sad stories about climate change
and coasts and aies and near future stuff like that. Um.

(04:10:59):
This story I'm reading it is called Thank You from
Your Patients. It came out and reckoning for I guess
last year. And uh. It's based on my partner's time
when he was working in a call center and the
kind of nightmares stories that I heard from him every
time he came home from work. But it's also about
me being on the other side of the country from
the part of the world that I love the most,
which is the Pacific Northwest. Um. And you know, watching

(04:11:23):
Fukushima a few years ago and watching wildfires a few
weeks ago, and um, being separated from the things that
are important to you. Um as they're all falling apart. Well,
I'm just excited that this podcast is now two fifths Canadian,
so that's that's the main thing I'm excited about. Oh no,

(04:11:44):
oh my god, I just Tim Horton's cup just appeared
next to me. It's terrible donut I have. I do
have a Tim Horton's kept in my kitchen. Um anyway,
let's uh, let's let's let's start this, start this, start
this reading, Let's eat this popsicle stand as they say

(04:12:04):
a thing, let's continue, Let's let's eat this. Okay, thank
you for your patients. I'm lucky because they replaced a
bunch of chairs last month and I got a new one.
A good chair is important when you spend ten hours
a day in a cubicle talking to strangers about their problems.

(04:12:25):
I've been here three years and worked on most of
Western Morgan's services, which means I can, with no thought,
help grandma set up her WiFi or troublesheet banking software,
or set up your cell phone plan, or help you
with some app designed to find your soulmate that nevertheless
fills you with hopelessness. I can't help you with the hopelessness.
It's nonstandard. But I'm Western Morgan's floater, and Jordi or

(04:12:47):
Kirsty just dropped me where the calls are heavy or
turnover as high. On Twitter, I can answer questions within
five seconds of some asshole in Toronto saying what the
fuck my TV doesn't see the house network, and I respond,
I'm sorry to hear that Toronto asshole. Let's see if
I can help. I'm impossible to rile because I've heard everything,
every possible stupid question, every strange request regarding lapsed policies

(04:13:10):
and misspayments, every paranoid rand, every sort of impotent rage.
The management is shitty and the customers are irritable, but
there's beauty and problem solving. The really bad stuff started
at the end of last month, when I had to
do on one on one majority team lead for the floor.
I've been fielding a bunch of questions regarding a recent
patch that had broken everything. I had this rhythm, hitting

(04:13:33):
my thirty second age and typing without thinking, mark here,
how can I help you? But one on one is
mandated interruptions. So I listened to Geordy brainstorm about improving morale.
They stopped having barbecues because it was too expensive, even
when the burgers were sawdust and soy. Also, no one
wanted to be outside because Detroit was still burning and

(04:13:54):
the PPM up to something like Beijing. Listen to this
Western Morrigan idle Jordi told me, we judge three of
the top right calls, and we have a thing and
someone walks away with a Timmy's gift card like fifty bucks.
Jordy said that like it was a good thing. What
about a key, fop, I asked, we can't get out

(04:14:15):
with what without one? After hours? But only management could
hold or the winner gets to wear Jane's or keep
their phone for a shift. That didn't rate an answer.
The most frustrating thing about Western Morgan is that team
leads have to hold your phone like you're an untrusted
teenager who's been grounded. I feel like I'm lost in
a cave or a space station. When I do a

(04:14:36):
lot of overtime. I arrived when it's dark, and I
leave when it's dark. And while sometimes I go around
the corner for coffee or McNuggets, it always feels like
I'm just visiting the world. I don't know what's happened
if a government's fall on, or if an ice shelf
has collapsed, if Detroit is burning again, or maybe California
or the Great Lakes are dying at a slightly faster
rate than they were before I left for work, never

(04:15:00):
knowing what's going on outside. I sit in my good
chair and say that sounds frustrating to everyone, no matter
who's talking or what they want. Let me see if
I understand your problem. You could judge Geordie, Stead said,
still talking about Morrel. You're impartial. You hate everyone. I
don't hate everyone, Georgy, I said reflexively, though, to be fair,

(04:15:22):
I hate a lot of people here. After my mandated
fifteen minutes with Gejority, I saw that Misty had a
problem with my documentation, which has been rough since they
changed policy on me. She's in the Philippines, where most
of the real work happens. Upper management is all in India.
They only have us because they need Canadian accents on
the phones and they get tax breaks. Bringing jobs to

(04:15:42):
one of the more desolate parts of the country downwind
from Detroit, rampant West Nile and of the province's heavy
metals processed at the plant out by the ball of
the baby is born. Here are girls something to do
with residual b p A Misty is on the other
side of the Pacific in Lagazpi. But you think she

(04:16:03):
was right here considering how aggressively she organizes us. Your
ship at filling out forms mark the right up is
going to kill your rank. We're stack ranked. Every shift
it gets you points you can redeem. You can redeem,
which honestly is worth it for the grocery store gift cards.
Just tell me what I did wrong. Lagazpi. We were

(04:16:25):
in the middle of a rough month. The flu hit
everywhere at once, and no one could afford to lose
the work, So we had a bunch of people come
in sick coughs and juicy sneezes all over the floor,
and half the time you got on the elevator and
everyone was gray faced and weaving. I came in over
the weekend to cover mobile because they lost half their staff.
So I'd been on for eight days by Monday, when

(04:16:46):
Jordy was manic trying to call people in so he
wouldn't have to go on the phones. He always says
when we're smoking outside, and he's pointedly not looking at
the place where the GAM building used to be. It's
not the extra fifty cents an hour. It's the fact
I don't have to deal with people. He hated taking calls.
He offered me overtime, so I started coming in at
six and leaving at ten, and I didn't even notice

(04:17:09):
the weekend. I do remember going home those nights and
thinking how hollow my room felt with my roommates playing
Call of Duty in the living room, and how my
body seemed to vibrate caffeine maybe your pseudophedan. I heard
phantom time warnings and chimes, and when I closed my eyes,
I could see the screen and call after call flooding
the queue. By Saturday, Western Morgan was a haunted house,

(04:17:31):
but I still wasn't sick. That sounds frustrating. Let me
see if I can help. I was dealing with this
woman on Vancouver Islands who couldn't generate invoices. We've been
at it for two hours, and I could feel her
getting upset when I told her to wipe the whole
system and start again. I could help her with that,
but she was like, no, we'll lose two weeks of work.

(04:17:53):
There's nothing I can say to that, so we keep
troubleshooting even though it's pointless. Okay, I said, you can
go back to your root invoice and try. Oh, she
said what? And that was it. I didn't hear anything
but the line itself, which just went dead, that kind
of absence you get when someone hangs up on you.
Are you there, ma'am? I called back, but I got

(04:18:15):
a reorder tone, not voice mail or an old fashioned
busy signal, but the one that means the whole system
is busier, blocked or down. I dropped out of the
queue then, which you're not supposed to do, obviously, and
went looking for Jordy, who was chatting with Kirsty about
Western Morgan idol. I asked if they knew anything, but
of course they didn't. And when I asked if I
could at least grab my phone to see what was happening,

(04:18:36):
Kirsty did a kind of elementary school teacher sigh. Documentation
for three eight zero your overdue mark call you dropped.
I saw that explanation happening across the board. Looks like
the problems at their end. I didn't find out until
Moe came back from break streeked wet in the way

(04:18:57):
you are if you run out into that rain blowing
in from to for it because you don't want it
to touch your skin, saying earthquake on the West coast,
You know anyone out there? I thought about the woman
trying to get the invoice together for a tiny order
of sea salts from some equally tiny place on Vancouver Island.
Her business so miniscule it's still fit into our cheapest subscription.

(04:19:18):
In my unsubmitted documentation for Misty, I had written that
her voice sounded like a hopeful but slightly overwhelmed great
aunt trying to make the remote control work. No one,
how bad like nine point six, the worst since forever,
like for hundreds of years, Jesus, I said, Jesus, Jesus,
I've had similar moments on calls. When the shooting happened

(04:19:41):
in Montreal, not View ma Real, but the one with
the kids ran downtown from McGill and the photographer caught
the girl as the bullet tour at her right kneecap.
I was on the line with this dick wad in
a coworking place on Maisonneuve, who was talking, who was
asking to talk to my supervisor then midwine, he stopped talking,
like he suddenly didn't care about my attitude. I could

(04:20:02):
hear his phone pinging, sir, are you there? Can you
hear that it's happening on the street. I can see
a faint popping voice raised and doors slammed. Then he
cut the call. I kept in the queue, helped someone update.
I did a subscription renewal. The next person, though, needed
a backup, and that took forever, so we chatted about
hockey until she said, did you hear about Montreal? No, ma'am,

(04:20:25):
I said, thinking about the sound I maybe heard before
his phone cut. Firecrackers, backfires. Some guy shot up the
whole downtown. I think it was terrorists, who knows FLQ
or Muslims, maybe Red Power fifty dead, but it was
going up every single time ever fresh the page. She
kept going on like this while we did a backup,
and then I made sure everything worked. And it had

(04:20:47):
been like three hours at that point, and I kept
thinking of the guy and his silence and what was
going on in the streets WHI we talked about his
log in and how unprofessional I was. I don't have
any friends in Montreal. I went there once to drink
when I was eighteen. But that's it. I just had
that guy and the thump of footsteps fleeing the coworking space.
When I took my break, the rain was falling again,

(04:21:08):
the faintly gray kind that runs down the sidewalks and
the gutters, and when it builds up enough, you can
see it's a little milky because it's full of ash.
If you think too hard about what's running into your
eyes as you stand outside smoking until your pack is empty,
you go eat a twenty four box of tim Bits
or six Big Max, or you stop for one beer
on the way home and only leave when they push

(04:21:29):
you out the door. Jordy was outside. I gave him
a cigarette, even though he doesn't smoke either, and he said,
it doesn't seem to be getting cleaner. Wasn't it supposed
to get cleaner. He grew up in Detroit, though he
was already over here when it burned last year. Maybe
it's safer. The ham is worse. I thought the ham
was supposed to go away. When they send in the
cleanup cruise, we watched the warm, ash colored water run

(04:21:53):
down the gutters until it was ankle deep. This city
is a wetland, and there isn't far for water to go,
so it ends up in people's basements. All that ashy,
bony water running through foundations and drains, a constant trickle
in the background, sort of like the fate pop you
might hear while you're on the phone with a guy
from Montreal who wants to talk to your manager. Does

(04:22:16):
it feel Jordy said, and lit another cigarette. What Jordy,
I hate how often he doesn't finish his sentences. Does
it feel like it's happening more now? The sort of thing.
I dropped my smoke into the rain water and I shrugged.
Then I said I wish I knew what to tell you,
which wasn't a real answer, and I used my tech

(04:22:37):
support voice when I said it, because I didn't want
to have that conversation. On my first break after the earthquake,
I smoked and watched the rain and videos on my phone.
Someone live streaming the moment it hit bored talk about
food or weather, than a strange look on their face.
Their eyes dart upward, then the phone falls overhead Footage

(04:22:57):
from helicopters a downtown Vancouver, all those green towers swaying
and falling and the bridge swinging until the cable snap
like rubber bands, the worst in recorded history, worse probably
than the last Mega thrust in seventeen hundred. I just
kept thinking of that woman and the sort of quiet shock,
and her voice, her, oh is that? And then nothing,

(04:23:21):
And I was standing out in the rain, still warm,
when it occurred to me that I might have heard
her last words. I kept thinking about the texture of
the silence after the call dropped, and what had happened
the moment after that, if that had been the worst
of it, the shock of the whole world rumbling, or
if it had been worse for her after that or
right now or tomorrow. I only had ten minutes because

(04:23:43):
call volume was increasing. My throat started to tickle in
the world just suddenly out of nowhere, started to look glassy.
The light thick from the ceiling squares, and my skin
prickled when I ran my hands over my arms, which
were covered with goose bumps. The floor was nearly empty
except for Jority running around supervising and not taking calls,
and the you was packed. My first call was around
way north along the coast Prince Rupert, a woman calling

(04:24:05):
about a password reset. I want Mark, She said he
helped me before. Can I talk to Mark? While I
was documenting, I thought, fuck it, I'm going to tell
Missy what the old woman told me while we were
waiting for the password reset email, about how when you're
that far north you don't notice time passing, and you
feel good in an unimaginable way in summer, luminous and hopeful,
and how in winter all you want to do is

(04:24:27):
die and drink yourself into a coma, so you know
it balances out. After that, I reopened three zero. An
elderly woman, I wrote on a phone, trying to print
invoices for locally produced sea salt, looks over at the
rack of glass jars in which she keeps her stock
because she hears a rattle, then another. Then she says, oh,

(04:24:49):
is that and nothing else, because at that moment, the
force of rashimas lit the Cascadius abduction zone, on which
Vancouver Island rests like a cork in a bottle. Centuries
of continental tension released. I typed that, then I hit send.
Then I added a secondary note on her file. At
eight thirty two p s t A nine point eight

(04:25:11):
hit the Cascadia subduction zone, and Misty was right there
on chad Hive, not telling me it was inappropriate. She
wrote rest their souls, and I was comforted by those
temporary words, which surprised me. My grandparents were on minda
now in the nineteen seventy six earthquake, you got anyone there? No,

(04:25:33):
I heard the hum from Detroit. It was somehow a
relief to know that across the world, Misty was in
a similar room among people evaluating documentation for apps and
I s p s and accounting software, people saying that
must be frustrating. Let's see if I can help. Something
occurred to me. Do you hear anything about tsunamis no

(04:25:53):
word so far? Do you have your phones? You can
get the alerts. They'll let us know we're so bad.
I'm taking call so I won't be fixing your dog
until tomorrow. I wondered if Kirsty would let us know,
or if she would dither about it until all we
could do was climbed to the top floor of the
building and watch a way consume what was left of
Detroit before it swamped us to five more calls and

(04:26:14):
I refilled my water bottle, the one with the slogan
on it, fueling small business with the tools to succeed
that some now lost Western Morgan contract brought in. And
I was looking at my skin reflected in the sink,
which was the color of those pale, lumpy smokers you
see outside the entrance, the color of a raw filet
of fish. I felt adrenalized, like a moment before it'd
been terrified, but I could not remember how or why.

(04:26:37):
I wondered what it was doing to me inside. All
those cells now remade into virus factories, turning to goog
and mah and sloughing off while the virus proliferated through
my system, and I left traces of it on everything
I touched. The water ran over the top of the
bottle clear. So far the ash hasn't worked its way
in through the city's water system, or maybe it has,

(04:26:58):
and it was invisible like the microlo sticks in the lake.
So you're gonna judge it was, Jordy, We're gonna do
it next week. I was thinking that set a time limit,
like five minutes, you and me and Kirsty judge it.
I'll grab a fifty for the Jimmy's card too, man,
I said, Georgie just stared at me. You're getting sick.
You know what you need to do. He went on

(04:27:18):
about ekenesia and flu effects. And I thought about the
tsunami that was or was not traveling across the Pacific,
or just hammer your system with antioxidants to take a
double dose of night quill. Without thinking, I pulled my
phone out of my pocket. You know you can't have
that anywhere on the floor. I was already googling Pacific
tsunami alert and it was rolling rainbows and I stared

(04:27:39):
at it so hard that it seemed to take over
the whole world. And then I shivered. But Jority was
still talking. Don't make me write you up. I don't
want to deal with it, okay, I said. It's about
privacy for our users. They need to know that they
can trust our integrity, our word, and our system. The
poster on the far side of the brake room said integrity,
word and system. I saw that the alert had been

(04:28:01):
issued for Japan. That's when he took my phone. You
fucked the dog. I have to write you up. I
don't want to write you up Japan in six hours,
eight pm, I'd still be on then. While very far away,
a wave crested on the sea coast, filling the river
basins and the car parks. I know you don't have

(04:28:24):
to surrender your phone, even if they can require you
to leave it at home. I know they're not supposed
to lock you in either, or let you smoke within
three ms of the door, even when the ashes falling.
They're not supposed to pay you in points. You can
then exchange for grocery store gift cards, which you need
because the new minimum wage wasn't even covering rent. But
I needed a job. The next call I got was

(04:28:45):
farther south, closer to the epicenter. The first thing I
did was asked about the earthquake. Oh, we felt it,
and there's a tsunami warning. But we're far enough inland
it shouldn't be tsunami warning. So when I go try
to log in tsunami, I keep getting the same error.
It's a my accounts frozen. What does that mean? I
need to do some invoices? And yeah, I just got
the text like half an hour ago. Landfall is like

(04:29:06):
an hour. The account was frozen due to miss payments.
So I pointed that out and the guy insisted no,
he set up an automated transfer, and he kept me
on the line while he chatted with the bank's tech
support on another line to sort out the direct deposit,
and then I reactivated his account. All this time, the
tsunami traveling towards the coast or the shallower bottom would
raise the waves height by narrowing its length, because the

(04:29:27):
last time I'd been outside, I'd looked at a gift
on Wikipedia that demonstrated how tsunami's crest as they traveled
through shallow waters. The last thing he said wasn't thanks,
it was there. It is. The tide's going way out.
I hope everyone's out of downtown. Then he was gone,
and I can imagine it, the water running away from
the shore like a huge exhalation and then collecting into

(04:29:48):
a rising wave that would destroy them all the tsunami
warning I wrote in chat hive, hoping Misty was there.
Kirsty responded instantly that is not appropriate. Chat hive is
for important work stuff. We haven't heard anything, but we
were swamps, so who knows what's going on outside. Chat
Hi channel will only be used for appropriate business related business.
Maybe you should get out. Chat hi channel will only

(04:30:11):
be used for appropriate business related business. I'd been there
for sixteen hours, and I couldn't remember the last time
I slept a full night at home when I hadn't
been buzzed on cold pills in exhaustion and the sound
of call of duty from the living room. That week,
when I did sleep, I kept saying, this is Mark
from Magnicore, or this is Mark from wherever I am

(04:30:33):
right now, and heard explosions and the way voices carry
over for the river from Detroit, the screams and the
crowds and the gunshots. Or maybe I was never actually asleep.
Maybe I was just off my head. I shouldn't have
washed the pills down with beer. But there's that thing
that happens when you stop in for a beer after work,
and the inertia of the whole thing, the job, the
shitty beer, and the fact that a person brings you
food even if you can't afford it. It sticks you

(04:30:55):
to your seat. It was bad last summer when we
couldn't afford to run the a C. But the bar
on the way home could, and it was full of
familiar guys, broke and lonely and trying to avoid looking
at what was left of the Detroit skyline, or the
gray green clouds boiling to the north, and the hail
and the lightning storms every afternoon like clockwork. The summers
are definitely hotter, and the mosquitoes are definitely worse. And

(04:31:17):
the last summer I noticed that the birds don't sing anymore.
All their whistles and like video game lasers. I stepped
outside for another cigarette and realized the door had been locked.
And I don't have a fall because I don't rate
a fob. Jordy was there too, setting up his stupid
Western Morgan idol piles a bright pink and green and
blue post it. Now it's all over his desk. I

(04:31:39):
need to go out. The doors are locked for the night.
I need to go out. We lost another girl from online.
You'll have to take over social media if we lose
anyone else. Take your break here. I just kind of
stared at him, and my skin prickled, like all the
suit of apedron I had taken had rushed to the
surface and was blasting every single nerve ending in my body.
I need to go outside. You can't, like you physically can't.

(04:32:04):
I kind of stood there, and I'm ashamed to say
I wanted to cry, like a little kid who isn't
allowed to use the bathroom, who just wants to sit
with his dad but keeps getting dragged away by unfamiliar relatives.
The kind of crying you see on the bus at
rush hour when some little kid coming back from the
mall loses it and lies in the aisle wailing, cramming
road salt in his mouth, and you just think you

(04:32:24):
and me both. I didn't actually cry. I hate myself
because I just said begging, can I please have my
phone back? Please? Jordy looked at me like I was
an idiot him in the middle of all the post
it notes that read congratulations and You're a winner and
Western Morgan idol. I didn't say anything. I left at first.
I just sat in the lunch room, shivering and nauseated,

(04:32:47):
staring at the plastic solo cup left over from the
barbecues they used to give before the ash. There will
be worse moments in my life, no doubt, more pain,
more sadness, but I can't imagine anything so wide ranging
in its desolation as that moment. The only thing I
could focus on was telling miss Ty to get her
phone back and watch the horizon and be ready to escape.

(04:33:10):
A girl from online staggered through, sweaty and pale, and
I knew that Georgy would be there in a minute
to ask for another eight hours overnight answering stranger's questions
so perfectly that they treat me like a shitty customer
service AI built to serve. There aren't a lot of
choices in life, are there. You can choose to have
kids or not, to leave your hometown or not, or
to stay in a terrible job you are, for some reason,

(04:33:32):
very good at. But other than that, what is there?
Just a lot of compliance and non compliance. This moment
didn't feel like a choice. I said to the girl,
we need to get out of here, and she nodded.
Then we headed down to the lobby. The doors were
locked and no one caring a key was in the building,
and the girl just looked bad. But when I went
to the fire escape, she still said, no, no, we're

(04:33:52):
not supposed to. We need to get out. They'll fire us.
And I could hear the fear in her voice, and
I wont heard how badly she needed this job, that
she was here in the middle of the night, so
sick she could hardly stand. Tell them I did it,
I said, and hit the bar, only it didn't move
because the fire escape was locked too. The next thing

(04:34:14):
I did was stupid, but I don't know what else
I could have done. I walked back to the lobby
and picked up a garbage can and began slamming it
into the glass door behind me. She was coughing and
coughing and said maybe stop, stop, but so faintly I
could ignore it. Then we were out, and she was
staggering towards the emergency room on wilette and I was
alone in the rain water the same temperature as my blood.

(04:34:35):
Then I went looking for a pay phone, because the
only way to sort this out was to call in.
But I couldn't remember which of Western Morgan's departments Misty
was assigned to. So when I finally found the city's
last pay phone in the bus depot, I called them all,
all the sad voices of men and women here and
on the other side of the world. Welcome to Kyphus

(04:34:55):
Business Systems. Jane speaking, Can I help you? Welcome to
Tesla Mobility. Can I help you? Welcome to ross Common
Account Services. Welcome to Lighthouse Mobility. I'm looking for Misty.
She helped me before. I'm sure I can help you.
What's your user number, Misty, Misty knows, I said, my voice,
queer less and elderly, put on Misty. I could hear

(04:35:18):
the exhaustion in his silence than the compliance. One moment,
I'll transfer you, Hey, Misty, I said, Misty, Misty, you
need to get to high ground. What who is this?
Just promise, Kay, there's no tsunami warning. It's on its way.
It's passing Japan and Hawaii. It hit the Allusians California.

(04:35:38):
I hope she didn't mistake me for what I felt
like right then, a crazy old man mad with loneliness,
longing to hear a voice in the void, even if
it was only to harangue them for the weakness of
their service and the terrible nature of their product. Mark,
another six hours to landfall. I know you'll still be
on shift, promise. I waited for her to disconnect, which

(04:36:01):
was okay, because at least I told her then. I
think maybe she said thank you, Mark, or maybe it
was just the noise in my head. I held the
line another moment that hung up. I felt okay because
I got through, Because I wasn't in a cubicle anymore,
because I could walk home and enjoy the silence before
call of duty, marathons in the living room, enjoy the
ashy rain falling across my slowly cooking skin. I walked home, Misty.

(04:36:29):
I walked home, hoping. Misty said, thank you, Mark. It
felt like I was slipping through a gap in the
world between noises, a kind of silent passage, the way
kids slip along the abandoned rail easements in town below grade,
the corridors of grass and rats and squirrels and birds,
between the noise of the phones and call of duty,

(04:36:51):
between heartbeats, between crusting waves, the silence you hang onto
for just a moment when someone hangs up, before you
go on to the next call, because there is to
primarily a respect from the tyranny of the queue, the
silence after a bullet connects or a wave hits on
the other side of the world. I just hope harder
and harder and harder that Misty would insist they unlocked

(04:37:12):
the doors and break the windows, and they would escape
before the wave arrived to wash the rest of us away.
I don't know how to add a clapping sound effect
without it just sounding horrible in the audio airhorns you
know what, danial um already straight seconds of air horns
or or or not? Um. I think with the air

(04:37:35):
horns are good. It was beautiful. Yeah, that was wonderful.
It's really incredible, Thank you so much, and particularly relevant
now Yeah yeah, unfortunately yeah, yeah, it's with what happened Yeah, yeah,
that is extra extra the whole time, what happened in
the past week. Yeah, yeah, that is a it sucks mhm.

(04:38:06):
If people want to find more of your work, or
if there's anything you'd like to plug, now is the time, okay. UM.
I have a website. It's called where is here dot
c a UM and I have jeez links to a

(04:38:27):
bunch of my different short stories there. I have a
novella coming out next year. A few years ago I
put relished a novel UM. But if you're interested in
the climate change stuff, there's probably one I'd recommend called
UM an Important Failure that was in Clark's World. It's
available to read online. It's been translated into Polish. It's

(04:38:47):
in a couple of different collections. UM. And if I'm
allowed to brag, which it won the the the Sturgeon
Award last year, which is a science fiction award handed
out by UM, an academic organization in the US. SO
and it's about it's about climate change. It's all set

(04:39:08):
on Vancouver Island. In Vancouver. I've heard you. I've heard
you also have stories about ghosts. Yes, I have a
genre I'm trying to establish that I call obstetrical horror
that I started writing when I was pregnant. Yeah, giving
birth is just such body horror. So ghosts, childbirth, all

(04:39:31):
that stuff. Yeah, I read a lot about ghosts as well.
You can find, like I say, a lot of that
stuffs on my website and links to anything that's available
for free online. So yeah, where is here? Dot c
A and I'm on Twitter a um at Canadianist, but
I don't really use it that much. So I am
excited for the combination of climate change fiction with horror fiction. UM.

(04:39:54):
And by excited, it's like half half actually excited, half
dreading because a lot of it's gonna probably be horrible
in terms of people being like, you know, what's scary
climates change and you're like, okay, but yeah, but oh sorry,
go on. I don't know, but I think there definitely
is a good way to combine the the exsential elements

(04:40:16):
of both of those things to something that actually is
really impactful, that plays on human fears and emotions and
how we can get over those fears and move towards
something useful. Yeah. And it's also that horror going back
for well, however long you want to, we've been telling
stories has given us a series of structures to kind
of process that. UM. And I think that's really valuable

(04:40:38):
that their patterns we can use to work through. And
I mean writing climate change fiction for me, I just
finished another novella UM that's specifically about like near future
stuff and about the wildfires a lot um. But you know,
having a story to tell about it as a way
of processing all the research I was doing, UM was
really valuables. It's super useful. Yeah, and just um, I mean,

(04:41:02):
you can call it therapeutic if you want, But I
don't think it's that. I think it's organizing information in
your head that is just simply too large for you
to actually grasp. I mean, I can't actually grasp this stuff.
But no, you can't. It's it's too bad. Yeah, exactly
exactly trying to mean, Yeah, horror does that probably better
than almost any other genre. Yeah. I mean, look what

(04:41:24):
it horror does with adolescent anxieties or um, you know,
all sorts of different the fear of dying, the fear
of aging, if your illness, and stuff like that. So yeah,
I think we have structures in place with horror fiction,
um and with sort of science fiction horror that kind
of are gonna let us start to process things that
are otherwise just too intellectual or not intellectual. But to

(04:41:47):
abstract it's too it's too. Yeah, abstractors, I think is
the right term, because I mean, like, I guess my
fear of that is that, like climate change fiction is
just gonna resort to like the disaster story and it
has very like glamorized weird versions of like apocalypses and
disasters and like collapse and very like big ways that

(04:42:11):
impact everything around you. When in actuality, the effects that
they have are very localized and small and are still horrifying,
but the way that they're framed is always frustrating. In films,
and you look at like, you know, a typical like
you know, like apocalypse themed movie, I think is I'm
afraid that the bigger you know, if you turn turn

(04:42:32):
talking about like big movies, how it's going to frame
it that way instead of these more kind of personal
stories of like the horror of being trapped inside a
warehouse as a tornado comes and you're not allowed to leave,
which is a way more horrifying than Oh, look, all
of New York City is crumbling because of this pseudami,
which is so big and like possible, I guess, but

(04:42:54):
like that's so big you can't feel that. And what's
more like going to happen is people getting trapped in
buildings and not being allowed to leave. And that's that's like,
that's actual horner. Yeah, and it's intimate too, write like
it's not it's not in distant idea. It's intimate. It's
the particular consequence of something for a community, for an individual,
for relationships. And if I can go on on this um,

(04:43:17):
there's an entire genre of apocalyptic fiction that kind of
comes out of the early Cold War, and they're always
these weirdly cozy apocalypse is where one white guy survives
and in the new world he builds this kind of
feudal fantasy. So I've actually this one fills the last
Babylon where a character says, of these two spinster ladies

(04:43:39):
that were miserable before the nuclear war, after the nuclear war,
they're really happy because their lives have meaning now. And
it's this, it's those are the apocalyptic stories that we've had.
We need a new kind of story, a new kind
of horror that I think, um that does exactly what
you're talking about, that doesn't default to that weird heroism
and one guy surviving kind of thing. There's a wonderful

(04:44:01):
Corey doctor short story that that I think pivots off
that idea nicely. Um in his his book, uh, what
is Unauthorized Toast? I think Bread an authorized Bread is
one of the stories in it. But the book is
as a different it's a collection of his short stories.
But there's um a post apocalyptic story that kind of

(04:44:25):
follows a bunch of tech bros trying to do the
traditional like survive the The apocalypse makes everything you know
better for me, I get to be a cool warlord
thing and it's it's good. It doesn't end well for them. Um. Yeah,
I I think the I think the thing that is
important to do is like focus on the horror of

(04:44:48):
the little things, like the little things on like a
global scale, Like, like the thing that is so frightening
about climate change is that all of these the terrible
things it's bringing are going to hit the same way
mash shootings do, where it is a calamity for a
community and people fifty miles away try to pretend it
didn't happen and get to doing like their their daily stuff.

(04:45:12):
Like that's what's that's what's so scary about it. It's
not like you said, it's not the buildings in New
York collapsing from a tidal wave. It's the birds stop
singing and you still have to go to work. I'm
I'm I'm writing a script right now for probably the
show about how climate change is hard to think about
because it's because how how big it is. And one

(04:45:32):
of like the models that I'm trying to draw a
comparison from this, Like it's almost like climate changes is
like a type is like a type of Cathulhu in
terms of the way it affects you, but you'll probably
get by it's it can affect your neighbors, and you
can watch it and you can watch it have other people,
but like it doesn't mean that your life is going

(04:45:53):
to end this way because it's so it's so big
and uncaring. It can attack so many places at once,
but you don't know how like how big this effects
are and how and what what what what the scale
of them will be on your local area. So it's
like this, it's this thing that is way more existential
than anything else because it it does not, it does

(04:46:14):
not care, it has it has no morality. It's it's
not it's not out to get you specifically. It's this weird,
this weird thing that's just getting imposed upon us now.
And that type of horror in fiction, I think is
something that at least I want to explore in my
next few years of writing. And I'm excited to read
other people's work who kind of covered that similar side

(04:46:35):
of horror and combining with like climate change and the
small ways it's going to start affecting us in places
around the world. I think, Um, that what you said
and isn't isn't there someone who talks about the Catholic scene,
I don't know. Yeah, that's Donna Harroway. Donna Harroway, that's it. Yeah. Um,

(04:46:59):
But but also just how weak some of our previous narratives,
like you can't you can't bring in you new Judeo
Christian apocalypse is to this kind of thing, because we can't.
There's not you can't. We can't have that kind of
moralizing in it um that we need. And that's honestly,
Cathulo is really handy for that cosmic horror because it

(04:47:19):
forces you to, as you say, face something on an
existential level. Um that how you feel and who you
are and your individual experience does not matter. So it's
like a lot of people, like you know us, we're
watching what's happening in Kansas right now, and like, I'm
not in Kansas. I don't know anyone in Kansas. I'm
looking at this calamity and it's so distant from me,

(04:47:40):
but yet it's also very close. And that's a weird
feeling to deal with. UM. And I can see, oh yeah,
corporations are contributing to this specifically like climate change as
in general, but like like Amazon trapping people inside inside
inside these warehouses. It's like, I can there's ways to
fight extensions of this, but you can't fight it. You

(04:48:02):
can only fight its extensions. And that's and yeah, it's
it's it's a super it's a super interesting thing that
I'm gonna I think, Yeah, we we are going to
see you know this, this idea get dealt with more
and more as these things start happening more and more.
Um and yeah, I mean climate change, cosmic corps maybe

(04:48:23):
maybe the way to go. Yeah, yeah, I think that's
I think that's a good line to end on, or
at least a good thought to end on. Well, thank
you so much, Rebecca for coming on and sharing your story.
Would you mind plugging your website one last time since
we extra like fifteen minutes. Oh no, no, no, no,

(04:48:44):
that's that's the reason people may not have noted it
last time before the conversation. We should give him another chance. Okay,
so the website is where is here dot c A
so w H E er I s H e r
E dot c A excellent. All right, Well, thank you

(04:49:05):
very much, Rebecca. Um, until next time, everybody lose your
mind with the cosmic horror, something something, anything, any kind
of cosmic harror that cons to to your your mind
to scramble and you to begin worshiping in the dark
corners of the world. Any anything that does that is good.

(04:49:26):
So well, thank you so much for having me. It's
an absolute pleasure, very very happy to have you. When P. T.
Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in eighteen

(04:49:49):
sixty five, what rose from its ashes would change the world.
Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into
the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. Where our inaugural season,
we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always
complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American
Side Show. So come along as we visit the shadowy

(04:50:11):
corners of the stage and learn about the people who
were at the center of it all in a place
where spectacle was king. We will soon discover there's always
more to the story than meets the eye, So step
right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and
Mile Presents now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at

(04:50:33):
Grimm and Mild dot com Slash presents It could happen
here to Welcome the Evans Robert podcast. End of the
World at the beginning of news. Yeah, I think we

(04:50:54):
did it right. Evans Evans, Evans Robert, who's here with us? Uh?
That would be kill Joy, Margaret and Victorman Sophie. I
like this MS Keeping Victim and Comma Sophie kill Joy,
Comma Margaret, Um Margaret Commas. I could also Attorney's general
you kill Joy's Margaret. One of my hobbies is anytime

(04:51:20):
I pluralize something, attorneys generally it Um, Margaret, how are you?
How are you doing on this beautiful December day. I'm good.
I just got my booster shot and the negative effects
haven't kicked in yet. That's good. Um. How does it
feel to have, like as your internet sped up now
that I have a boost? Yeah, I'm making the same

(04:51:41):
fighting that everybody makes, because it's easier than thinking about
the fact that, oh, Macron looks like it's going to
be a real, real nightmare and the world's never going
to go back to you know, it's not going back
to normal. I miss It's it's being able to walk
into a bar and not worry that I was going
to catch a new variant of a plague. Yeah that's

(04:52:06):
a yeah. Yeah, how are you doing with the plague?
I live completely alone and isolated, so which I you know,
I'm not sure this is how I would have built
my life if I hadn't done it during a plague. Yeah,
I mean, well, I dream about interacting with humans. Yeah,

(04:52:27):
just like hugging a person that that you don't know
all that well and it not being like involving both
of you risking your life. It's like a blood pact. Yes,
we're going, Doug, and if we wind up in how
we'll scream at Satan together. Come U, you have written

(04:52:51):
another story. I mean you wrote this a while ago,
as you did with the last one. But we're doing
We decided we one of the things we wanted to
do to close this year out was a little bit
more fiction, because fiction, I think plays an underappreciated role
in revolutionary practice in kind of every aspect of being

(04:53:13):
someone who envisions the different world. Um. So we we've
always I mean, it could happen here. From the beginning,
there was always a strong kind of um uh focus
on fiction. Um. And I'm really happy to be presenting
another one of your stories today. Thanks. You want to
introduced this piece, sure. This piece is called The Free

(04:53:36):
Yorks of Cascadia. It was first published in Fantasy and
Science Fiction, which is the name of a magazine. And
this one was also really important to me. Because Fantasy
and Science Fiction F and s F was one of
the magazines that my my dad had a subscription to. Yeah,
they go this a while. Yeah, this was a very
um um and it was a very important piece for
me that it got published there. Yeah, that's awesome. Um well,

(04:54:01):
let's uh, let's let's let's take a take a hop
in a publicly funded bus and roll down to Storytown.
Speaking of taking one's life in one's hands. The story
is called The Free Orcs of Cascadia. You all know
the first part of the story. The song ended in blood.

(04:54:23):
It was two years ago in the summer. Rick Green,
the singer of Goblin Forest, crooned in his osbornesque voice
to fifteen thousand Goblin metal fans. A short man wearing
green body paint and brown leather, stepped out from backstage,
drew a sword and cut the singer down from behind.
The last lyrics Green ever sang were take me Back,
take me Back, take me back to the Misty Mountains.

(04:54:46):
The man with the sword, of course, was Golfin Bull,
the rhythm guitarist for Crumpatool. The opening act. He and
his bandmates escaped in the ensuing chaos and remain at Large.
To this day, neither band has released a song or
played a show since the rest of Goblin Forests decided
to call it quits. Without Green and crimp Atool, no
one knew what happened to Crimpatool. Fans deserted the genre

(04:55:08):
and droves, and overnight Goblin Medal went from stadium rock
fad to a niche interest of the obscure Canadian orc
cults were originated. It was no longer hip to be Green.
If Golf and Bull had been trying to take the
Goblin Medal throne, as it were, he failed spectacularly. Rumors
have flown about motives and locations, but there have been

(04:55:28):
no arrests and no public statement from the band. All
we've had to work with were rumors until now. Earlier
this month, Orc Folk act Ulsith listed Golf and Bull
as the harpist in their liner notes of the single
The Gray Fog of a Ruined Forest lst was as
obscure as Crimpatool was infamous. The band had never done

(04:55:49):
an interview, not even a photo shoot. Like everyone else
these days in countercultural music, their videos featured only masked performers.
I've been casually used with post civilization culture ever since
the Communicate from the Junkyard Rats of the Rust Belt,
and I've been covering music of pretty much every secessionist
movement and subculture I could sink my teeth into. Since

(04:56:10):
after I saw those liner notes, I put out feelers
to friends and friends of friends, and I waited, and
last week I was invited to go to an orc
village hidden away in the burned forests of Cascadia. I
was invited to be the first person to tell Golf
and Bull's story hell Fire Harriet Exclusive. Usually I post
full interviews for everyone, but reserve my travel diary for
the patrons of my blog. This time, though, I'm foregoing

(04:56:33):
that this story is too important, so I've interspersed to
the two below. All I knew before I went with
what everyone else knew. Three years ago, a bunch of
metal heads and hippies and burners and nerds all decided
to dress up like orcs and goblins, and some of
them took it too far and decided to distance themselves
from the rest of society. They got really famous one summer.

(04:56:54):
Then that fame died in a single bloody act, and
who knows what kind of weird ship they're up to. Now,
before you get worried, no, I will never offer a
platform to a fascist fascist. Fascism, as it turns out,
is the furthest thing from golf and Ball's mind. What
he's into is a lot weirder than that. Still, it's
sort of lucky that I survived to write this story.

(04:57:16):
So you killed a guy, Yeah, I killed a guy.
We stared in silence at one another for a while.
He wore rawhide and fur, and not much of either.
He wasn't painted up, but his skin was sort of
natural olive. His lower teeth were filed down to fangs.
Like any serious works, there was still something unassuming about
him that I have a hard time describing. You're waiting

(04:57:39):
for me to tell you about it, aren't you. The
interview was not off to a good start. Are you
worried about how your words will sound in court? I
killed Rick Green on stage with a sword in front
of thousands of witnesses. Talking to the media isn't going
to make anything worse for me at this point, and
I don't respect the authority of the U. S. Government
to hold me accountable for my actions. I will not

(04:58:00):
go to court, So why do you do it. The
old world is dying. My world, the Free Orcs of Cascadia.
We're not going to replace the old world, but we
will be part of its replacement. In order to do that,
we have to take ourselves seriously. An element of that
struggle is the struggle to create meaning, to create a
new sacred. I killed Rick Green because he was defiling

(04:58:22):
something mint to be sacred. How so we share an aesthetic,
But he didn't understand what it meant to be an orc.
You killed him because he was a poser. I guess
you could put it like that. So the lesson here is,
don't be a poser. Don't be a poser. You heard

(04:58:43):
it here first. Kids, don't be opposer, or golf and
ball will literally murder you. They picked me up in
the parking lot of grocery outlet in northeast Portland. That's
a mundane detail, I suppose, but perhaps the single most
remarkable thing about my trip was the ever present contrast
between mandanity and bizarre. I bought a case of coconut
water while we waited. Works might like coconut water. Who

(04:59:06):
doesn't like coconut water? They showed up in a mid
teens Honda Civic sedan, and I've been hoping for something
out of mad Max. The two women who got out,
one cis one trans, both white, were dressed in clean
gray tank tops and leggings, like half the women who
live in Portland. To be honest, I only noticed them
in the parking lot at all because the trans woman
was cute. Hell Fire this, this woman asked. She was

(04:59:28):
tall and severe, with the fierce but almost trustworthy look
of a loan shark or, as it turned out, an
Orchis enforcer. That's me, I said, Fenrik. This this woman
offered her name, but no handshake, fist bump or hug.
I nodded. Norinda, the trans woman said. Like a lot
of trans women these days, she didn't bother to feminize
her voice. Her name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it.

(04:59:50):
How is this going to work? I asked. We're going
to drive around back where no one can see us.
Fenric said, We're going to take your phone and laptop
in any electronics and put them in a fair day
in the car. Then we're going to put you in
the trunk and drive out to the forest. Will provide
you with a recorder and notebook when we arrive. You'll
get your stuff back when we leave. I nodded, I'd
pretty much expected this. Dindi is the bathroom. Nor In asked,

(05:00:13):
have any medical conditions we should know about? No, and no,
I said, either of you want a coconut water? Gobland
forests sang in English. But Crimptol's lyrics were all in
Tolkien's Black Speech dark Speech. Our lyrics were in dark Speech.
Tolkien referred to the language as black speech. Tolkien meant well,

(05:00:34):
but he was about the most influential unconsciously racist author
of the twentieth century. All his villains were either Green
or Middle Eastern. When you engage with the work of
historical authors, especially when you make derivative works a century later,
you have to adapt to one's own social context. Calling
the language black speech today is at best wildly misleading.

(05:00:55):
Its name is a translation. Anyway, It's possible that dark
speech is just as accurate it. Besides, Token didn't write
the language. He only wrote like sixteen words or something.
We wrote the rest. Most of us prefer to translate
the name of it as dark speech. Since where murderers
pc my status as a person who has ended the

(05:01:16):
life of another person carries no implications about my personal
ethics other than that I clearly believe there are circumstances
under which it's okay to kill someone. Imagine being at
the Renaissance Fair when the apocalypse hits and you're stuck
trying to recreate society, surrounded by swords and minstrels and
these and thous. You know how that sounds like either
heaven or hell, depending on who you are and also

(05:01:38):
who you're stuck there with. That was my first impression
of the village of Graymorrow. The fires out west have
burned forest after forest and small town after small town,
and no one tries to deny that pretty much every
bioregion on the planet is going through transformation right now.
It's in the worst spots, these dat ecologies that the
post civilization movement has found its roots, like wildflowers growing

(05:01:59):
up between paving stones or rat's hiding in the walls,
I guess, depending on who you ask. Gray Morrow sits
in the scorched graveyard of a Douglas fir forest, halfway
up a mountain, occupying the remains of an evacuated town.
Slab foundations are all that remain of the original structures.
A seasonal creek runs through what was recently a river
bed at the edge of the village, and long abandoned

(05:02:21):
train tracks skirt the ridge above town. Even armed with
all of that information, you'd still have at least seventy
or eighty possible spots to search. Satellite imagery would help,
of course. I can't imagine that the Big Six texts
or the U. S Government don't know where Gray Morrow is.
The residents of Gray Morrow in general, and Golf and
Bole in particular, had an awful lot to lose by

(05:02:42):
letting me write this report. Nourenda let me out of
the trunk, and she smiled when she saw me. Her
bottom teeth were filed. That should have been unnerving, but
I've always been a sucker for face tattoos or anything
that really shows someone is going for broke. Fenric just
stared at me severe. Being severe was pretty much her thing,
as far as I could tell. She took a sip

(05:03:02):
from her coconut water. Three other cars filled a makeshift
parking lot. The village itself was surrounded by a wall
built from black and logs, set upright and buried in
the ruins of the road. My escorts had changed clothes
and route Fenrick looked like a bandit out of Skyrim,
complete with iron pauldron on one shoulder and a hand
axe strapped to her belt. I won't lie, it was

(05:03:23):
a good look. I'm no fashion reporter, but I figure
half the magazines in New York would love to get
someone out here and take pictures of Orcs like her.
Nornda wore a simple, modest dress of undyed wool. Imagine
a Viking kindergarten teacher who also wears a rather large
dagger horizontally on her belt at the small of her back.
My crushing on her intensified. She handed me a spiral

(05:03:43):
notebook in an old fashioned digital recorder, and we walked
into the village. A lot of people say that you
killed Rick Green because you're jealous of Goblin Forest's success.
That the orchi Is code insisted that if you wanted
the throne, you had to kill the reigning monarch. Golfing
Bull stopped fidgeting and stared directly at me, his dark
brown eyes boring into me. That's bullshit. I'm sorry, it's

(05:04:09):
like three layers deep of bullshit. He was still staring
at me. I was starting to regret this line of questioning. Okay,
to start, there are pretty much two ways to interpret
the Orcish Code of Honor. It's not written down anywhere,
but there's some strong central themes, like an interdependence between
individual sovereignty and collective identity. We value strength, but the

(05:04:31):
idea is that everyone develops their own strengths, whatever they
may be, for the benefit of all. One should be
as self reliant as one is able to be, both
for one's own sake and again for the community's sake.
I cared deeply about this. That same basic idea, though,
can be interpreted two different ways. So there's a split
in the orc community. Damn right, there's a split. The

(05:04:53):
free Orcs are matriarchal and the or Seene are patriarchal.
Golfin Bull produced a cigarette from god knows where, consider
and how little he was wearing, and lit it with
a lighter from the same mysterious origin. It wasn't tobacco,
it wasn't weed, maybe mugwart. The matriarchal way of interpreting
those tenants is roughly anarchist. It's anti authoritarian, an anti nationalist.

(05:05:14):
At the very least, we respect the wisdom of elders,
children and women self identifying women. But the hierarchy is
anything but rigid, and the guidelines are anything but laws.
Most importantly, our sense of community or tribe is fluid.
Gray Morrow is a free orc village. Go fifteen miles
southeast and you'll find a larger village lonely mountain there.

(05:05:35):
Or Seen. The patriarchal way of interpreting Orchish tenants is
roughly fascistic. Authority is absolute. Rank within the hierarchy effects
every aspect of one's own life. It's not racialized, but
it's nationalistic. There are very specific considerations of who is
and isn't a part of any given social grouping, and
definitions of strength tend askew toward boring shit like physical

(05:05:58):
size and power. So you tell any doubters that you
weren't trying to claim the goblin throne, because your faction
of Orcs doesn't work that way. No orci Is culture
works that way. Even those fascistic ships don't work that way.
Among the or Seen. If you kill your superior people
aren't going to just suddenly start kissing your ass. They
will literally flee you and turn your skin into a

(05:06:18):
battle flag. You advance in rank by demonstrating your capacity
to lead. This isn't some fucking Hollywood bullshit. Evil is
a lot more banal than that. I didn't have the
heart or maybe the courage to tell him that to
me too, pretty much, any outsider Hollywood bullshit is exactly
what the whole place looked like. When you say battle flag,
what do you mean? Who do they do battle with us?

(05:06:41):
The free Orcs? Are you at war for the very
soul of our culture? How'd that start? When I cut
down Rick Green the Mountain King? You killed him because
he was the leader of a rival faction, then, not
because he was a poser. They weren't a rival faction
until I killed him, But shure he was a poser
though all fascists o posers. Did you go on tour

(05:07:04):
with Goblin Forest specifically to murder him? Yeah? Probably? What
do you mean probably? That's a very specific question about
a very specific intention. I mean, I guess I had
been thinking about killing him for a while. It was premeditated,
and it wasn't you know? No, I don't know, because
I've never killed anyone. So it's like I've known Rick

(05:07:26):
Green almost five years. He and I and maybe thirty
other people. We started this whole thing, Goblin Metal of
the Orcs. All of that. Rick Green has always been
a fucking bastard. I figured I'd probably kill him one
day for being kind of a Nazi or whatever. Then
we go on tour together and I tell myself, Hey,
if this goes badly, I can always just kill him
on stage. You've got to understand, Orcus culture wasn't even

(05:07:47):
a year old at that point. We weren't split into
the Free Orcs in the ore Seene yet. There were
only maybe five villages total. We were just starting to
explore what it meant to be ourselves, what kind of
culture we could build the in. While we were on tour,
I hear he's got himself crowned the Mountain King. And
this isn't a game. I don't know how to get
that through to you or your readers. This is our life.

(05:08:10):
It's one thing to put on a silly hat and
pretend to tell people what to do in some larp somewhere.
But Rick Green had gotten himself corornated for real dictator
over actual people. So I killed him. The Free York
split off, the or Seine closed ranks, and we've been
at war ever since. Am I safe here? He didn't
answer me, at least he didn't stare me down again.

(05:08:31):
He just looked off into the distance, maybe towards Lonely Mountain.
I've been to laps before, where when you show up,
they make you put on garb. That is to say,
they make you wear period appropriate clothes, or whatever weird
interpretation of period appropriate that particular group of Larbers had
come up with. As I met the denizens of the village,
they all came out to the parking lot to introduce themselves.

(05:08:53):
I realized they didn't insist on anything like that because
they weren't LARPing. Pretty much, every one of them was
dressed like either a Viking reenactor or fantasy game villain,
but it wasn't an act. About thirty adults and eight
kids lived there, running the age gamut from six months
to seventy eight years. They told me their names and pronouns.
About a third told me she, a third he in

(05:09:14):
the third day. Many of them were white or past
as such, but a significant minority were black. Nourenda told
me later. There are Orc villages with substantially higher proportions
of people of color. That might be true, but I
got the impression she said it to convince herself or
me that the free Orcs aren't a specifically white phenomenon.
No One, no one decent, likes looking around their community

(05:09:34):
or scene and seeing only white faces smiling back. After
everyone introduced themselves, immediately forgot all their names. There are
only so many fantasy names like Lazarre and Demlin that
you can hear before they all just sound the same.
Nourenda and Fenrik flanked me as we walked through a
gate in the wall into the village. It's strange to
say village in America. We don't really have villages here,

(05:09:56):
but in some ways Graymorrow isn't the United States. And
to be certain, it was a village, maybe ten or
fifteen houses crowded together along either side of a single
potholed street. Two architectural styles reigned, junkyard shacks built out
of railroad cars in regular cars, and traditional American log cabins,
many of them were adorned with solar panels. At the

(05:10:17):
end of the street, near the black Palisade, the beginnings
of a stone tower stood fifteen feet high. I wasn't
sure if I was impressed or not. On one hand,
the village couldn't have been around longer than three or
four years, and they had already done so much. On
the other hand, it was filthy. Everyone was filthy. I'm
kind of obsessed with the post civilization movement, so I
wish I could tell you everyone looked well fed and happy.

(05:10:39):
They didn't. People looked proud, and they didn't look miserable.
But there was an intensity in everyone's eyes you simply
could not mistake for happiness. A trash pile needed tending
near the front gate, and some of the animal hides
stretched for tanning had begun to rot. Everything looked like
it was about to fall apart, both physically and metaphorically.
What now, I asked when we reached the central school air,

(05:11:00):
a stone cobbled chunk of what had been once an intersection,
now decorated with poorly tended gardens and rustic benches of
dubious quality. You're here to interview golfing Ball or you're not,
Fendrick asked, I am golf Ball doesn't live here. I
waited for her to elaborate, golfing Ball lives in the
forest with the rest of his band. He's on his way.
You'll meet him a bit outside of town. I'll take

(05:11:21):
you to him when he gets there. Someone near the
gates shouted, and both of my escorts flinched bodily and
turned to look. It was just a kid chasing another
kid with a wooden sword. Fenrick and Narindo were on edge.
Something was about to happen. Tell me about your new band, Ulcre.
What does the name mean? Alsirith is the dark speech

(05:11:44):
word for the phase of the moon on the last
night before the new moon, the last sliver of light.
Ulsareth is a holy day, a day of self reflection.
Our band's music attempts to capture that spirit of self reflection.
On Alcyreth, we listen to our naysayer and think about
ourselves and our community your naysayer. Free Orchish villages don't

(05:12:06):
have leaders, We have naysayers. Two years ago, we tried
rotating leadership. It was ineffectual. We didn't need leaders. We
stuck with it anyway because we felt like we had to,
because those were the rules we had come up with.
Then one person said, basically, this is bullshit. We don't
need someone to tell us what to do. We need
someone to tell us what to stop doing. We need

(05:12:26):
someone to tell us what we're doing wrong. Every new moon,
every village picks a new naysayer. That person spends the
month picking up heart group structures, observing what's happening, being
critical on Alsareth, We fast and listen to the naysayer.
They don't offer solutions necessarily, but instead bring our problems
to light. Does that work surprisingly well? Except about a

(05:12:48):
third of the naysayers end up leaving after their month.
Some go to other villages, Some go to live in
the forest, like Narinda Alsareth singer did, but most leave
the woods. As we put it, most go back to civilization.
That's why Narenda's name sound of familiar when she didn't.
She introduced herself. To be honest, I saw your name
list in the liner notes and didn't pay much attention

(05:13:09):
to the rest. That's an argument for me to take
my name off our next release. If there is one,
why did you put it there in the first place,
Why did you agree to this interview? And what do
you mean if there is one? I told you we're
at war. Yeah, we're losing that war. He took a
deep breath, trying to keep himself calm. He didn't strike

(05:13:30):
me as a man who was afraid to cry, but
he was clearly trying to keep his composure. There's no
way that Gray Morrow would have let you talk to
me here if any of us thought that Gray Morrow
had a future. There's no way I would have talked
to you at all if I thought I was going
to be alive to see another alster. Why are you losing?
Why are you going to die? It's not a question

(05:13:51):
of military efficacy, or of bravery or strength or any
of that ship. It's just a question of numbers. We're
seeing society as a military society. Every member fights. As
far as we can tell, They've got fift hundred warriors,
We've got five hundred, so use guerrilla tactics. Golf and
bull shook his head. Striking Rick Green down from behind

(05:14:13):
was a cowardly action. I can justify it almost by
the fact that Green had declared himself my monarch. But
the Orsine warriors are my peers. They would not stalk
me in the night. I will not stalk them. That sounds,
I know how it sounds. So this interview, I want
to be remembered. I want the free Orcs of Cascadia

(05:14:34):
to be remembered. I put my name on the liner
notes so that someone like you, an anti fascist music blogger,
would talk to me. I leveraged my own infamy to
draw attention to what we're doing, what we've done. I
fucking hate the tragic utopian trope. What like seriously like
fuck you? Okay, I know I'm here as a journalist,
but I'm not gonna write your fucking obituary. I don't

(05:14:56):
think I've ever turned on an interview subject like that before.
I get it. Hopeless causes are beautiful, but as I
understand it, the whole goddamn point of holding onto your
honor more firmly than your life is because the world
is a better place for everyone if more people did that. Right, Okay,
the world isn't a goddamn better place if you let
your subculture. And I'm sorry, I know it's very serious
and I'm not trying to downplay it, but that's what

(05:15:17):
this is. A musical subculture be taken over by fucking Nazis,
and I respect that you're going to fight them for it.
That's cool. But if you consider buying some guns, maybe
a few drones, they'll come in here with spears, right,
and you'll fight them off with other spears. It's man,
there are fucking Nazis everywhere. If you don't give a
ship about going to jail or dying, then fucking shoot
the Nazis. We're trying to kill you. You don't understand,

(05:15:40):
You're fucking right. I don't, if I'm being honest. Most
of the time I was waiting, I spent flirting with
Norenda and avoiding talking to Fenrich Horenda asked me to
keep our conversation off the record. We didn't talk about
Gray Morrow or the orc thing much. Anyway. Everything I
learned about the village and its culture I learned by observation.
Only An elderly and came by and offered us cold

(05:16:01):
tea and wooden mugs steeped BlackBerry leaves sweetened with juice
from the berries. He said, no caffeine, no other particularly
strong medicinal effects. The three of us took cups from
his bladder, and he continued down the street passing out drinks.
No one else approached us. I watched people go about
their lives, though the tension in the air was thick.
I saw a few people look at cell phones and

(05:16:23):
spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to decide
if that was hypocritical and or bad ops sec. Eventually
I gave up, because frankly, it wasn't my business, and
one of the most interesting things about all the post
civilization groups is all the bits and pieces they choose
to carry over from mainstream culture. Finally, after an hour,
Fenric stood up come with me. I followed her to

(05:16:44):
the other side of town and through a smaller gait.
On the other side, a box truck that had seen
better days sat on a road that had to We
skirted around the truck and up into the black forest.
The scorched hills looked more like meadows than forests, with
green grass and undergrowth broken only by black spikes of
burned trees. We followed the path this way and that,
and soon I was lost. Soon after fog set in,

(05:17:09):
I was further through the looking glass than I had realized.
I imagined us lost a mile from a town full
of people who gave a double meaning to the word stranger,
and probably at least an hour's drive from civilization. My
guard hadn't shown me much in the way of kindness,
and I was on my way to meet someone I
knew to be a murderer. It's the kind of shift
I live for. If I'm being honest, I love my stupid,
fucking weird job in the stupid fucking weird world we

(05:17:30):
live in. Thank you, my readers for making that possible
for me. Be sure to check out my Patreon page
if this is the first thing you've read by me.
Lots of members only content over there, including a few
snippets of orc song from Narinda. The only thing I
saw in the distance was a single black spire, thicker
than the dead snags around me. As we approached, it
came into focus as a boulder jutting up into the
sky like an angry finger. Sitting at the base of

(05:17:53):
it was a short man with a sword across his lap,
golfing bull. I'll leave you too to it, Fenrick said.
She left me alone with an arm murderer. I sat
down across from him, took out the notebook and recorder
and asked him questions. All right, convince me we can't
fight them dishonorably, because you can't protect an idea by

(05:18:14):
defiling that idea. We don't want them to destroy our
way of life. But we don't want to destroy our
way of life ourselves either. The basic problem with your
scene is that they're interpreting your code of honor to
mean might makes right. Yeah. Yes. By facing them an
open battle and nobly dying or whatever your goddamn planet is,
you're just letting them make m right. You're letting their

(05:18:36):
superior numbers dictate what your cultures to look like. It's
like majority voting, but even dumber because more people die.
I expected him to double down on his position. Most
men would. What do you suggest instead, Fuck? I don't know.
Don't be here when they attack, Go somewhere else, stay
on the move, build your strength. Oh ship, That's what
Rick Green was doing, wasn't it. Huh Goblin Forest singing

(05:19:02):
in English, a stupid name like Grick Green All. That
ship was designed to make Goblin metal more palatable to
the masses, to get fans, to get recruits for his stupid,
fucking fashy goals. Yep, do that. I mean, don't become
fascists or change your name or make your music worse.
Everyone knows Goblin Forest and have shipped on Krimpotzool. Just

(05:19:22):
don't be obscure for the sake of being obscure. Fucking
advertise you have a decent thing going here. People are
abandoning mainstream society left and right, no political pun intended.
Make it easier for them to get here. Make it
so that when you fight the fashion your epics, swords
and spears, Viking deathmatch, you win better. Yet, make it
so they don't even want to funk with you because
they know they'll lose. I don't know whether that would work. Yeah,

(05:19:45):
but dying doesn't work either. The Eark way of life
isn't meant to be some revolution. It's not meant to
supplant the mainstream. It will never appeal to the mainstream,
not without losing its soul. Would you live like this?
Would you want to? You're right, I'm obsessed with you
weird subcultures, but I wouldn't want to live like you.
We both stared at each other in silence. It wasn't

(05:20:06):
an uncomfortable silence. We're both just thinking, okay, scrap that.
You're never going to get big numbers. You don't need
big numbers. You don't want big numbers. You don't need recruits,
you need allies. What would that look like god damn dude,
all Orcish men note, actually listen to women's ideas. I'm
used to guys just talking over me and shutting down completely.
If I get mad free Orkish men, I would hope

(05:20:30):
know how to listen. Guns break the spell and the
spill you're casting here. It's powerful, it's good. So no guns.
Other people have guns, though, Let those people stand guard
or make their arm presence. Note outside or seen camps,
other people have access to, say, dock singe. How many
recruits are the or Sine going to get if every
time some want to be forced Nazi dude joins, someone

(05:20:51):
tells his mother what they're about for access to the media,
How many recruits are going to join if everyone knows
the or Sine or posers putting out substandard, watered down
goblin metal just to try and lure an impressionable military
aged men to fight their holy war. You'll write those stories.
I'm not gonna write you any propaganda, but sure I'll
tell the truth. How do we get allies? But at

(05:21:13):
another single, maybe a full length The gray Fog of
a Ruined Forest was the best ship of hurtin years.
You're redefining folk music. Just like you redefined metal without
ship like that, and I'll cover it, talk to more press,
maybe someone other than you. Not everyone's going to be
sympathetic to what you did, even if that fucking guy
was a fucking tree Nazi hunting horn cut through the
fog and through our conversation, and my subject's face fell

(05:21:35):
into despair for a half second before determination took over.
What's that interviews over? I thought there would be more
time another day. At least, we have to get you
out of here. Turns out Fenrik had taken us on
a purposefully circatuitous route into the woods. It wasn't a
quarter of a mile straight downhill before golf and bowl

(05:21:56):
and I reached the box truck at the back entrance
to Graymorrow. Noriinda and Fenrick stood there talking with a kid,
maybe fifteen, who was out of breath. She was dressed
in scraps of fur and leather and cloth, like you
might imagine a medieval beggar. It wasn't until I noticed
all the twigs and sticks and moss tangled up in
the fabrics I recognized it as camouflage. I saw about
thirty the scout for that's what she was said about

(05:22:19):
Fenrick asked, exactly thirty ten with pikes, ten with tower,
shields and swords. Five archers, two scouts, two command one
non combatant. I'd guess a surgeon, but I couldn't promise
how far away I asked. Fenrick glared at me for interrupting.
Five miles Norenda said, probably three and a half by
now down hill. We have time to get you out
with the children and the elders. The scout had just

(05:22:41):
run five miles up hill because she was too stubborn
to use a walkie talkie or a cell phone. We
should evacuate everyone. Gulfumbule said what Fenrick asked. We've got
walls and almost even numbers. Fuck them, this is our home.
I wanted to shout at her, I wanted to shake her,
to tell her this wasn't a fucking game, that it
wasn't the twelfth century, and that killing people or dying

(05:23:03):
over some squatted chunk of nowhere was somewhere between stupid
and reprehensible. It didn't. Though I'm a good journalist, this
isn't the place for us to debate this, Norenda said,
and all four of them walked through the gate and
left me standing by the truck. That was why the
gardens were untended, and with the trash was piled up
and the hides were left to rot. They were expecting this.
They'd lost their will to pretend like their lives were

(05:23:25):
going to continue to progress forward. I'm not the first
to suggest that nihilism is the dominant effect of society today,
with climate change destroying communities and bioregions all over the map,
with the economic crisis deepening and the wealth gap widening.
I think all of us are guilty of forgetting to
tend our gardens. All of us have a hard time
figuring out why it matters whether or not we deal

(05:23:46):
with our trash. All of us have proverbial or literal
Nazis marching on us. The Nazis the free Orcs of
Cascadia are dealing with are the literal variety. Some cosplaying
fascist was about to stick a sword between Norenda's ribs
by Ale rose in my throat. I don't know I
believe in love at first sight or any of that ship,

(05:24:06):
but I just couldn't handle the idea. I fucking hate honor.
I will never be an orc. I got lost running
through solutions to the problem of hypothetical arrows and swords
that were going to interfere with Nourindo's continued existence. Most
of those solutions involved assault rifles, which I didn't have
access to. Cars, though were available. What's thirty warriors of
medieval armor versus one station wagon driven by an angry

(05:24:29):
wound with a lead foot. I put the odds in
my favor. I wasn't going to do it though. Instead
I waited to evacuate. I don't think that speaks well
of me. Individually and in groups, people came out through
the gate and loaded bags and baskets onto the back
of the truck. Noarinda returned with a simple backpack sewn
from raw hide. Most of her belongings were probably wherever

(05:24:50):
she Engulfingble and the rest of Alsyreth lived. She handed
me my phone, I didn't have service. I wondered whether
or not she engulfing Bule were dating. It wasn't relevant
to the present moment exactly, But my mind always is
a way of thinking about bullshit to avoid thinking about
impending doom. Another important effect of our generation distract ourselves
with disaster with petty things like love and jealousy. I

(05:25:13):
don't know what you said to Golf and Bullnerando said,
but whatever it was worked. He just convinced everyone to
evacuate everyone, I asked, shocked, everyone except him and Fenric
and Gorn. Which one's Gorn, the man who brought us tea?
Do you remember him? He's old as ship, though, I said,
because I have no fucking manners or common sense. Yeah,
he's old as ship. He's a linguist by training. His

(05:25:34):
main hobby is writing morbid poetry and dark speech, and
when he can't figure out how to say something, he
just makes up new words. He developed about a third
of the language. Did all that ship before orc culture
was even around. He's also a widower three times over.
He doesn't give a shit about dying. His last chat
book was called Soon I will return to the Earth. Oh,

(05:25:54):
Gorn is going to die today. Golf and Bull and Fenric,
they're going to hold the wall as long as they
can in the fall. Back to the woods and you,
I asked, I'm driving us out of here to another village.
Then I'll take you home after that. I don't know, girl,
I don't know. If I signed up for this, I
might leave the woods, go back to being a vet tech,
I just nodded. I was too biased to offer objective

(05:26:16):
life advice. Oh, and golf and Ball said to give
you this, He said, it's in case he dies. He says,
you're right. You shouldn't have to write his obituary. So
we wrote his own. She handed me a piece of paper.
I piled into the back of the box truck with
forty other people, many of them in tears, many of
them in shock, and we drove away from Graymorrow. None

(05:26:37):
of the three free orc survived the battle. Goren died
and paled on a spear while holding the gate. Fedric
was killed by an arrow that struck her in the
back of the neck as she and golfing Bull ran
Golfing Bull. Fenric's lover turned and stood his ground over
her body. I didn't know any of that yet. I
found out when Nearinda found out two days later. Maybe

(05:26:57):
all three of them would have survived. If I hadn't
in her ear, and they had all fought with equal numbers,
maybe more of them would have died. Maybe I can
forgive myself, Maybe there's nothing to forgive. In the back
of the truck, by the light coming in through a crack,
in the steel wall. I read Golf and Bull's Note
all my life. I didn't give a shit about anything.
I liked weed and metal in whatever counterculture trend was

(05:27:20):
big in a given year, but my heart wasn't in it.
I just went through the motions until I became an ORC,
saying I'm an orc and meaning it. Isn't like a
trans man saying he's a man and meaning it. Gender
is a social construct that goes back as far as
I understand, to the beginning of humanity. There has always
been gender, and there have always been people who transgress
the roles assigned to them at birth. An orc is

(05:27:42):
a social construct that we just fucking made up. I mean,
I guess the orc is an archetype too, but it's
a fantasy archetype. We know what's make believe. Make believe
is what gave my life meaning. I promise you that
for me. The day we decided we were orcs was
the first day that the sun shone benevolence upon the world.
It was the first day that color radiated from everything

(05:28:02):
I saw. It was the first day that the rain
on my roof tapped out codes of meaning. It was
the first day of my life, my real life, my
first Also, I fell in love with the world. Everyone
finds meaning in different ways. I found meaning by believing
in some ship we made up and letting that be real.
I was born Jason Sanchez. I died gulfing Bull. I'm

(05:28:25):
not sorry. That was great that I mean, not my narration,
the story. The story, not my narration. Mm hmm. The
second way finished, we all just got that little smirk
on our face, like that was delightful. Yeah, Margret, you're
the best. Yeah. I mean, if I were going to

(05:28:47):
be an orc, there would be rifles but problems. Yeah,
this is absolutely This is like a really good example
of what I mean that when I write utopia in
fiction or like fiction about other societies, I'm not saying, hey,
everyone go do this, or like this is what people
should do. No, I mean I liked that. I like

(05:29:08):
I like that I've had that experience in other cultures,
you know, places like slab City and different kind of
encampments and whatnot that I've spent a lot of time
and as a journalist where it's like I'm fascinated by
and I respect aspects of this, but like, I also
think some of these things are that you're doing or
dumb or I don't understand why you do it, or
this isn't like you know, but you don't. Your notes

(05:29:30):
don't matter. You know, that's not your job, although actually
having an impact in that way is is kind of Yeah,
I don't know. Somebody go, somebody go make an work village. Yeah, yeah,
I'll go out there, I'll report on it. We'll go.
It'll be fine. Don't take the band name all sort

(05:29:51):
though I already stole that. Yeah, there's a number of
dope band names in here. People should make orc folk.
I'd be really excited to hear make orc folk abandon
civilization to live as fantasy creatures. Um, fight fascists, all

(05:30:15):
that good stuff. Yeah, Margaret, is there anything you'd like
to plug? Well? I do have a new book out,
or a reprint of an older book called A Country
a Ghost, that is a more directly utopian book. It's
out from a K Press. Came out last month, and um,
I think that's it. That's the main thing. Oh, you

(05:30:35):
can support me on Patreon, although it's no longer supporting
me on Patreon, it's supporting a publishing thing that I'm
starting back up with people called Strangers and Entangled Wilderness
and it will publish fiction and memoir and like the
kind of like more culture side of radical politics and
less the like theory and stuff. What's the patreon patreon
dot com slash Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness? Because why

(05:30:57):
would I pick short names for things? Ye do that? Yeah?
And we have we have a live show coming up right, Robert, Uh,
that doesn't sound like us. It's a virtual live show
of for Behind the Bastards. Put our friend prop that's
on Thursday, February allegedly moment House dot com slash Behind

(05:31:19):
the Bastards. I can't confirm or deny that. Okay, you've
gotta a lawyer on here before you can. Sure. Yeah,
let's get Moira on the horn and where come on
the horn and tell us if we're actually doing this thing? That? Yeah?
Are we? Also? Are we alive? That's another question? How

(05:31:42):
I texture that most days? Um? All right, well, thank
you Margaret, and thank you all for tuning in in
the first year of the rest of the next year. Hey,
we'll be back Monday with more episodes every leek from
now until the death of the universe. It could happen

(05:32:05):
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(05:33:32):
new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob
run Chicago. He bribed judges and even helped a hit
man walk free, until one day when he started talking
with the FBI and promised that he could take the
mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure
out why he flipped and what he was really after.
Listen to deep Cover on the I Heart Radio app,

(05:33:53):
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