It Could Happen Here Weekly 206

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Hi, everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. It's
a very special round table podcast today where we're going
to discuss the United States ongoing campaign of bombing small
boats in the Caribbean. I'm joined by Michael Palberg, an
associate professor of political science at vir Junior Commonwealth University
and a fellow at the Center for National Policy. Hi Michael,

(00:51):
thanks for joining us.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Hi, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
And Andrew is also here. Listeners of the show will
be familiar with Andrew's work. He joins very often. In
this instance, Andrew is talking as someone who is from
Trinidad and Tobago, which of course is very much being
impacted by this. Hey Andrew, Hey, what's going on much? Well,
let's talk about what's going on, because something quite constantial

(01:15):
is going on. What's going on is that the United
States is carrying out a campaign of drone strikes against
small vessels in the Caribbean. As far as we know,
there have been seven strikes. At least thirty two people
have been killed, two people have been detained and then repatriated,

(01:38):
and a number of vessels have been struck. The US
it's bringing its war on terrorism logic to the Western hemisphere.
Rate it's claiming that it's fighting narco terrorism, and it's
claiming that these boats are for the most part carrying
Venezuelan nationals coming out of Venezuela. We've heard from Colombia
that one Colombian national has been killed, the two people

(01:59):
who are detained, and Ecuadorian and Colombian to Trinidadian or
Trinidad and Tobago nationals have been killed as well. And
this has sparked something of a and what it was
a war of words, now it seems to be a
war of more than that, like tariffs and sanctions. And
if Columbia has withdrawn their diplomats from DC as of

(02:23):
today or yesterday, so it sparks significant political turmoil in
the Western hemisphere. I think we have a really good
panel to talk about that. So to begin with, I
guess we should start, Michael, Can you explain their accusation here?

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Right?

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Is that these people are members of TRENDERRAA or potentially
some other cartels that the Trump administration likes to talk about.
We've talked about the prevalence of those groups, but can
you explain very briefly what they are and I suppose
the function that they have in Venezuela or what they're
doing there versus what's been claimed that they're doing.

Speaker 4 (02:57):
So sure, I do research on organized crime in Latin
America and ren de Aragua is a real organized criminal
group in Venezuela and now all over Latin America. It
is a street gang that started out as a prison gang.
It does not primarily engage in international drug trafficking, moving
large quantities of drugs across national borders or across oceans.

(03:21):
It is primarily engaged in human trafficking.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
And extortion rackets.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
And it primarily follows the Venezuelan Niaskara people who have
left Venezuela.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
And at this point it's an.

Speaker 4 (03:33):
Incredible twenty percent of the population over the last ten
years of Maduro's presidency, so nearly eight million people wherever
they go, and they take advantage of them, they extort
them for money. They will also take money to move
them across borders. But they're not a cartel in the
way that we traditionally think about cartels like the Sinalo

(03:55):
cartel or some of the Colombian cartels that that are
engaged in international cocaine trafficking. And so it's highly unlikely
that if the Drum administration is striking boats that they
claim to be vessels transporting cocaine or Vensional, which is

(04:16):
not made in Venezuela. It's primarily made in Mexico using
precursor chemicals from China, and recently it's actually made the
United States. Even that it's a tile synthetic drug, that's possible,
and Venezuela, of course is not one of the countries
where coca is grown and therefore cocaine comes from. If
they are indeed striking drug boats, then they probably wouldn't

(04:37):
be traded Atauga. And if they're striking boats with Brenda ar Aagua,
they would be most likely striking migrant smuggling vessels, in
which case the death count would likely be much higher.

Speaker 5 (04:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, so we should talk about the other Caribbean nations. Now,
I guess I want to talk about trendent Tobago, but
we should probably cover Columbia first, right, because we've seen
significant pushback from Petro, President of Columbia, and then we've
recently seen the President of the United States accused Petro,
who is again President of Columbia, of being a drug

(05:08):
trafficker himself, which is a fairy ludicrous claim on the
face of it. But let's talk about Petro because he
has some background in opposition to organize crime and drug smuggling. Actually, right,
like he's been in this for a while. Can you
explain a little bit of his career and then his
recent stances.

Speaker 4 (05:27):
Yeah, So Petro is a mercurial figure in Columbia politics,
has been for a long time. He is known for
starting his career as a gorilla with a minor anti
government guerrilla movement called the M nineteen Movement.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
Now, this is the.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
Movement which I don't know, maybe Western audiences are familiar
with from the Netflix series Narcos, for having participated carried
out the Palace of Justice siege at the Columbian Supreme Court,
which was a major design during which the Clemian military
went in guns blazing to rescue hostages of Supreme Court

(06:07):
justices and other people just employed in the Palace of Justice,
and most everyone died in a fire as a result.
Petro was not involved in that operation as far as
anyone knows. He was not involved in a violent comportations.
And this organization, unlike the FARK and the LN never
really got on the cocaine money train and therefore didn't

(06:29):
last as long as those other organizations did. They did demobilize,
they did turn to peaceful politics, and Petro began his
political career at the local level Bogota and then eventually
reached the presidency. So he is someone with a long
political career and does have a constituency, does have a base,
and he is the first truly left wing leader of Columbia,

(06:52):
country that has been famously both ruled by the right
and also very closely allied to the US. It's really
the US's top out lie in Latin America, well in
South America, at least specifically on security, given Plant Columbia
and a long history of US giving as much as
ten billion dollars over time to beef up Colombia's counterinsurgency

(07:16):
and counter narcotics fights on our behalf.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yet too, he's a president of being a drug craft
for is fairly ludicrous, like he's been, like even in
his time as a senator, right, he was like I
think he was sharing some like investigations or committees that
looked to drug smuggling, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 4 (07:35):
Yeah, And so I would say Petro has been very
critical of the War on Drugs approach generally, but he
does still inherit this long standing deep relationship with the
United States, and he's not exactly a full on peacenick
when it comes to his own internal security. He did
come it off as promising what he called total peace Possibal,

(07:58):
a platform that was meant to put an end to
all armed in certainties in the country by making a
deal with the remaining combatant groups, namely the ELN, the
dissident bar guerrillas, those who did not agree to the
peace deal signed by Santos in twenty sixteen, and what's

(08:19):
in different terms called the Klandel Gordfo or the AGC.
The guy thamis self defense forces but one of the
largest national narco paramilitary group that descends from the old
AUC and he has failed in that and talks have
broken off with those.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
Other armed groups.

Speaker 4 (08:38):
Colombia has gone back to war against them. The ELN
has engaged in some pretty horrific violence, including a suicide
car bombing the police barracks and the distant farc as
well taking down a helicopter and a drone attack. So
there has been a return to fairly high level, you know,

(09:00):
armed insurgency in Colombia, even if it's nowhere near the
level it was from the late nineties and early two thousands.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Right, Yeah, And all of this is happening in the Caribbean,
which is not a vast ocean, right, It's not a
massive area of space. And as Andrew and I were
talking about before we recorded, this has impacted other Caribbean nations,
nations which are not the target of the Trump administration's
aggression but nonetheless are being subjected to it. Do you

(09:30):
want to talk, Andrew, Trinida and Tobago's in a particularly
interesting the right word, It's not a great situation, right,
because Trinidadian people are being killed at least two indeed,
and the government is apparently completely unconcerned with this.

Speaker 6 (09:48):
Yes, I suppose I should provide some context. So there
have been seven strikes to date and the fifth strike
results in the deaths of two fishermen, the village of
Las Cuevas in Trinantobago being claimed among the victims. The
governments Transpigo has not made a statement about it, and

(10:09):
the families have not really been contacted or providing any
sort of support. Now, for those who are listening who
may not know where Trinantopago is, it is an independent
twin island republic in the Caribbean, and it's actually geographically
an extension of South America. There's a gulf that separates it,
but it's about eleven kilometers away from Venezuela itself. And

(10:34):
our elections that took place this year led to the
removal of the incumbent party and the return of the
United National Congress, the political party led by Camera Posada Prossessor,
claiming the government in a sweep landslide. Really, but despite
that landslide, it wasn't really the result of popular support

(10:56):
for the United National Congress. It was more so the
lack of support for the previous party, the People's National Movement,
which lost I believe two hundred thousand or so of
their usual voters just didn't show up to vote for
them this election, So the opposition party came into power
when the opposition party wasn't the opposition. They in many

(11:20):
ways appeared to just oppose for opposing's sake. They were
in power previously from twenty ten to twenty fifteen, but
they were voted out due to, among other things, corruption,
and since then the party has further evolved into a
sort of personality cult centered around came Pusser Prossessor, and

(11:40):
her politics have also evolved in that time to align
further and further toward the United States position. She's become
something of a Trump Stan you know. She was kind
of towing his line on a lot of issues. She
supported Guido Juan Guido as the president of Venezuela and
actually went so far while she was an opposition leader

(12:03):
to call on the United States to sanction Trinantobago after
the vice President of Venezuela had made a visit to
the country to meet with the then Prime Minister Keith Rowley.
So she has made her pro Washington stands clear for
a very long time and as she's come into power,
she has divoted our alignment with our regional bloc, the

(12:27):
Caribbean Community cara COM and their call for the Caribbean
to remain a zone of peace, and emphasized her continued
endorsement for the US military's deployment outside of Venezuela's territorial waters,
but still very much belligerent in her approach to this issue.

(12:48):
You know, we have gone from a state that was
respected as a non aligned entity that was able to
approach various diplomatic partners from the US to China, to
the eute in Yale to Venezuela as well, and we've
gone from that sort of diplomatic approach to a very

(13:10):
clear pro West stance that has really alienated US from
the rest of the region and really placed US almost
in the position of being a satellite state for US policy.
You know, she's been inviting the US military if they
want to base the operations Auto Turinad. She has opened

(13:31):
our doors to that. She has called for the US
to kill them all violently extraditionally, and stated that she
is perfectly aligned with what the US is doing in
the region, despite its flagrant violations of international law.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, as you said earlier, right that them in this
instance includes at least two of her own citizens.

Speaker 7 (13:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (13:57):
And I will say that this sort of Zone of
East designation for the Caribbean, it is something that I
would this is my personal opinion and consider more of
a hopeful ideal rather than a reality. You know, the
trafficking that takes place in the region does visit a
lot of violence upon people. Is you know, by no

(14:18):
means in reality a zone of peace. Even before the
US's actions in the region. However, though we may not
fit that postcard perfect perception of you know, tropical paradise,
it is still necessary, I think for us to stand
in solidarity as a region, to speak with one voice

(14:41):
when it comes to these issues, especially as a continued
existence depends on the observation of international law. The respect
for the UN Charter as small islands or safety is
really in numbers.

Speaker 7 (14:54):
And for the.

Speaker 6 (14:55):
Prime Minister to deviate from that solidarity in such a
blatant way, it's really quite sad. But it shouldn't come
as a surprise because there have been efforts by the
US to divide Cara con in the past. During his
first term, Trump had pulled some Cara Con countries into

(15:17):
the LIMA Group, which was a US promoted coalition of
right wing governments that was push in for regime change
in Venezuela. And he's not doing the same thing with
trying to get some Caracon governments to facilitate his actions
towards Venezuela. They approached Grenada recently to try and get

(15:39):
Grenada's assistance in basing a satellite there on the island.
And it's really ironic that they would approach Grenada, which
is also quite close to Venezuela, because Grenada is famously
one of the countries that the United States invaded in
October of nineteen eighty three.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
Yeah, I think, I know. I say this a lot,
but if you've listened to the song Washington Bullets by
the Clash, and then you go to the border, you
can kind of join up all the people from all
the countries mentioned there and the outcome of US policy
and what that does to migration over time. We should

(16:25):
talk about the Venezuelan opposition. I guess, Michael, would you
give I've done a pretty in depth discussion of Venezuela,
a place where I have spent a decent amount of time,
like I wanted to see that revolution myself when I
was like nineteen and I was studying political science that
I wanted to see what this like Pink Tide was about.

(16:48):
And I have reported a lot on Venezuelan migrants people
who are in new to the show. I guess the
series I did from the Darien Gap would be where
I would point you for my discussion of Venezuela and
Venezuelan people. I still speak to people of Venezuela almost
every day, but I think people could do myc with
like a high level overview of the Venezuelan opposition. I

(17:09):
guess we can talk about that about prize as well, which,
despite what Donald Trump is saying, was not awarded to
him this year.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (17:16):
So the big news is that Maria Quina Machado, who
is the leader of the Venezuelan opposition as we as
we know it today, was award of the Nobel Prize,
which was a bit of a surprise and from a
very US centric analysis. One idea that has been floated
is that the Nobel Committee didn't want to award Trump

(17:37):
the prize, but thought that maybe awarding it to an
ally of Trump would we be away to modify Trump
also possibly to encourage.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Him to take a more peaceful approach at a.

Speaker 4 (17:48):
Time that the US is threatening armed intervention in some
way in Venezuela, whether that is a counternarcotics operation or
more likely a regime change operation of some kind, even
though it's very unclear how they would get to regime
change from blowing up boats, Wrea can blowing up people.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Maybe we should pause and talk about regime change actually,
because I like it's such a problematic idea. Right we
have attempted regime changes. My career for the last several
years has been reporting on the United States failed attempts
to facilitate regime chams all over the world, right, Like,
it's not something we're very good at. I don't think

(18:28):
that the United States is going to invade maybe do
you think differently? But I think we probably agree that
the United States is unlikely to do like an Iraq
style invasion of Venezuela. Can you explain the like why
I suppose just just for people who you know, think
that that's what's happening in the Caribbean at the moment
with this concentration of forces.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
Well, it's undlikely to happen, because well, it's a very
large country and it would take a lot more troops
than what are currently deployed, which is approaching ten thousand now.
But that's actually that includes all sorts of logistical support.
The actual fighting force, the Marine Expeditionary Unit is actually
a much smaller I've lived in Panama as a kid,
and I was not old enough to be there for

(19:11):
the invasion, but I lived there some years after that.
That's probably the closest analog to this, at least the
way that the Trump administration is promoting this, which is
to say, a regime change operation that is disguised as
a counter narcotics operation. Famously, nor Diega, it was not
a war. It was an arrest of a foreign leader

(19:35):
who was indeed involved in drug trafficking. And we knew
that because he was literally a CIA asset whose drug
trafficking was being protected as long as he was allied
with the US against Cuban backed rebel groups in Central America.
But at some point later he became too much of
embarrassment for the US. Was genuinely a brutal guy. Pulled

(19:59):
off the torture murder of Google Spot offortile, all sorts
of nasty things. But the big difference is at that
time and when I lived there, the US had multiple
military basis in Panama. Panama was the headquarters of the
US Southern Command, the Western Hemisphere, headquarters.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Of the Pentagon.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
We had thirteen thousand troops already there ready to go.
I think they doubled that for the invasion, which was
officially termed Operation Just Cause, usually called Operation Blue Spoon.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
But they had to come with the sex of your day.

Speaker 4 (20:28):
And of course Panama is a tiny country and Venezuela
is twenty times larger than Panama.

Speaker 8 (20:33):
Yeah, it's fuss, so it's very odd.

Speaker 4 (20:35):
It's obviously they have deployed many more troops and a
much larger fleet than it's necessary for a counter narcotics operation. Incidentally,
it's the US Coast Guard that carries out counter narcotics
interdictions and does it very effectively, and incidentally does it
with the cooperation of other countries which coordinate intelligence or

(20:58):
just simply surveillance of suspicious ships or boats or planes
and tip off the US Coast Guard. Even the Cuban
government does that. In fact, it's the Coast Guard that
is the US agency that has the best relationships with Cuba.
It's oftentimes diplomacy kind of starts with the Coastguard's ties
with Cuba. But anyway, that aside, it doesn't make sense

(21:21):
from a counter narcotics standpoint, because look, if you actually
wanted to break up a cartel, what do you do?
I mean, if you are a prosecutor investigator, right, you
capture the smugglers, you seize the cargo, the contraband, which
is evidence. Then you try to flip them up for
immunity for whoever your real targets are. Maybe your target

(21:43):
is Maduro or someone else in the regime. But you
can't do that when you kill everyone on the boat. Yeah, right,
And I think the fact that in I think the
latest boat strike, they didn't manage to kill everyone, and
a couple of them got away, and then the US,
rather than charge them with a crime, they just turned
them back around. And you would think that if the
US is so certain that the people on those boats

(22:07):
are drug trafficking terrorists that they want to kill them,
then you'd think they would have enough evidence to charge
them to prosecute them of them. Apparently not. So this
is all to say the idea that this is a
counternarcocks operation doesn't hold up.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Clearly.

Speaker 4 (22:22):
It is meant to be more of a regime change operation,
but again I don't see how the one leads to
the other. I believe that Trump thinks that if he
just saber rattles a little bit and possibly tries some
decapitation strikes the way that the US did on Soleimani
and Iran, that's somehow the regime is going to collapse,
and that does not make any sense. Maduro has surrounded

(22:45):
himself with the security, a lot of it, including through
Cuban advisors.

Speaker 8 (22:50):
He keeps his whereabouts very secret.

Speaker 4 (22:53):
Even if somehow they were to drone strike him, it's
not as if the regime as a whole would all
because it is an extremely militarized regime that is upheld
by the armed forces who are not going to break
with him. Because they have a hand in every lucrative
business both legal and illegal, in Venezuela.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
They're not going to be.

Speaker 4 (23:17):
Paid off or not be swayed by a bounty that
is currently what something like fifty million dollars. I mean,
there are people around Madula that have made upwards of
a billion dollars in oil rents. So it's not like
you could pay off people to betray either.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, and it's not. Nor is it like a cult
of personality situation, like certainly not. Now, Java has had
something of a sort of charismatic leadership role, but Madula
is not that. So let's talk about the opposition in
Venezuela in so much as like I guess if we
go back to the election last year, right, that start
with the election and explain to people what happened there

(23:53):
and then the subsequent sort of avenues that are now
open or the avenues of that opposition and is now exploring,
if that's okay.

Speaker 4 (24:02):
But there was an election quote unquote that took place
last year. It was broker largely by the US. The
US under the my administration was pushing for some kind
of negotiations between the opposition and Venezuelan government. They convinced
enough people in the opposition to stand for elections under
what was called the Barbados Agreement in twenty twenty three.

(24:24):
And this was meant to be in exchange of partial
lifting the sectoral sanctions that have been in place on
Venezuela for a long time, in which the Trump administration.
The first Trump administration really tightened in exchange for the
Vodora government agreeing to stand for elections, and those elections
happened last year. It was pretty clear from free electoral

(24:48):
surveys and from exit polls and from the vote returns
that were coming in at the time, that the opposite Cacada,
was going to win by an enormous march, by a
thirty five point margin. The candidate was officially in Mundo Gonzales,
but he was candidates mostly because Murray Cornea and Matado,
the now Nobel Prize laureate, was barred from running. So

(25:11):
she for blessing to Gonzales to be basically her proxy,
and people were more or less voting for both of them,
so to speak. But both he and her are much
more popular. Maduro, who by all accounts as an extremely
unpopular leader, especially in contrast to as you said, Ugu Chavas, who,
for all his faults, was a genuinely charismatic yeah leader,

(25:32):
and you know, he did stand for elections and win them,
you know, pretty convincingly.

Speaker 8 (25:37):
Incidentally, oil the.

Speaker 4 (25:38):
Price of oil was about one hundred dollars a barrel
when he was president, and he was able to spend
a lot on social programs, but that is sid Yeah,
it helps. Madudo is pretty unpopular with this point. He
is pretty widely seen as both a tyrant and also
quite incompetent at managing basic state services. So he was
going to lose unless he stole the what he did.

(26:00):
The CNE the Vegetlain and Election Board announced that he
had won with just fifty one percent of the vote,
which is I have to say, I give him credit
for being subtle. I expected them to announce that he
won with like ninety nine percent of the vote.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
Yeah, and a sad margin.

Speaker 4 (26:13):
Yeah, yeah, No one believed it, And I have to
say one of my critiques of the bottom administration is
that I think the whole thing was rather naive. I
think they calculated that somehow Maduro would let himself be
voted out of office. Maduro is we talked about under
a bounty, has a bounty on his head. Many people
in the US politics, of the US Republican in particular,
have promised that they're going to send him to jail.

(26:35):
So why would someone in that position, you know, give
up power. I think, you know, he saw what happened
to Kadafi and he's, you know, he doesn't want to
be jailed or killed. And at the same time, the
stick part of the Karen and Stick mechanism was that
they would simply go back to the sanctions that existed before,
which was called a snapback. And these those sanctions that
the Venezuelan government has weathered for for many, many years,

(26:57):
so it's not really that much of a disincentive. So anyway,
everyone basically admits at this point that he stole the election,
but what are you going to do about it? The opposition,
for its part, has taken different approaches to how to
confront him and is famously very divided. The Venezuelan opposition
has never really been on the same page. They've never

(27:18):
really had an uncontested leader. Bray CORNEYA Machado is about
the closest they have had, but she herself really represents
more one wing of the opposition, the more you might
say hard line wing. For a long time, there was
a hard line wing personify by Lopez, and there was
a more I don't know if you call it a
soft line or liberal or just more willing to talk

(27:42):
to the regime wing led by Capriles.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Who ran against Alto in the first election.

Speaker 4 (27:47):
And it's even within those factions there are there competing personality.
It's a lot of it really is more personal and ideological.
But Marie Corna Machado, she is on the right politically.
She you know, styles herself after Margaret that she is also,
I will give a credit for this, a very good organizer.
She is famously kind of gone into communities that have

(28:07):
historically voted with the Cha Vista left and convinced many
people to leave that coalition. And also to have her credit,
you know, I would say she is a very brave person.
She has remained into the country at a time that
many most opposition leaders, including Amerdo Gonzalez A, plied the country. Yeah,
and she's been in hiding. She knows that the regime

(28:29):
would arrest, if not kill her at its soonest opportunity.
Yet she still shows up unannounced at at events, at
rallies and makes speeches. So she has achieved this kind
of mythic figure and this is something that obviously is
only going to grow with the Nobel Prize. So then
the question is what will this Nobel do. I think

(28:50):
that one calculation is that it will simply keep her alive.
You know, it'll be much harder for the material government
to kill her if you know, if they would be
killing an be laureate, So that may buy her a
little bit more time.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
Try to best them on the first one to kill
a novel laureate.

Speaker 4 (29:06):
I guess, right, right, yeah, But you know, will it
bring peace? I'm not so sure, because Marik Gordon Machaalo
has also been very closely allied and supportive of the
Trump administration, and her side of the opposition has been
encouraging the military strikes, backing sanctions, even though the sanctions
both have done nothing to dislodge Maduro and also contribute

(29:27):
to a great deal of suffering for the Venezuelan people.
And I have to say, look, I'm not Venezuela. I
have no right to give it the Venezuelan opposition advice.
I would say that if they have tried multiple elections,
you know, at least two of which have been stolen.
If they have tried, you know, you might say more
democratic means, and nothing has happened. I can understand why

(29:48):
many people would think that a more radical approach is
the only option left on the table. However, that approach
hasn't done anything either, you know, sanctions have not to
dislodge Maduro. Blowing up boats of possible drug traffickers, maybe
just fishermen has not done anything.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
I think that nothing.

Speaker 4 (30:06):
Appears likely to lead to regime change. But I can
understand the desperation of people living under what is broadly
acknowledged to be an extremely repressive region.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, and just the grinding poverty of everyday life in
Venezuela is so like I've heard so many stories from
so many people of such a difficult existence there. I
can understand people's desperation, Andrew, you know, it's spoken about

(30:43):
it like the Gulf between the government of Trinidad and
Tobago and the people of Trinidad and Tobago right now,
And obviously the same is true in Venezuela.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
It's not the opposition figures living in Spain who suffer
when we have these sanctions, Right, it's not opposition can
to get blown up when they go fishing. It's regular
working class when it's way than people. Yeah, so do
you want to talk about like, I'm not even sure
what we can do by way of solidarity with these
of these nations, But maybe you have some thoughts on that.

Speaker 6 (31:15):
I'm honestly at something of our loss myself, speaking from
a small island, I think the US's superpower status is
almost like into an eltriche horror. It feels like it's
unfathomable how you could even go about approaching Other times,
you don't try to remind myself that people have thought,

(31:37):
and one you know, people have resisted, and one you know,
currently there isn't that much going on.

Speaker 7 (31:45):
There are murmurs.

Speaker 6 (31:46):
They are momas of fair of disdain or disagreement, of distrust.
In terms of grassroots effort, there's a lot still to
be done.

Speaker 7 (31:55):
The leader of the move On for.

Speaker 6 (31:57):
Social Justice, which is a small a progressive political party
in Toronto, Bago, it's a guy named David Abdullah, and
he has been part of this assembly of Caribbean people
who have been signing and issuing a declaration reasserting our
desire for peace, and that has been signed by various

(32:19):
progressive organizations, social movements and figures across the Caribbean. And
there was also an effort last week Thursday, that's October sixteenth,
to organize a regionwide day of action in defense of
the Caribbean, and so different actions were taking place all
over in fifteen countries. We had press conferences, we had

(32:41):
state months, and we had pickets at sit in US
embassys and public demonstrations. It was kind of in the
middle of the day on a Thursday, so there wasn't
that big of its out from Baraiso when I had gone,
but it shows that there is and from the at
least anecdotal experience, there is a desire to keep the
US out of the situation, you know, despite the issues

(33:04):
of the Venezuelan government, despite the issues of our own governments.

Speaker 7 (33:08):
We don't want intervention, you know.

Speaker 6 (33:10):
And right now, all we can really levy is our voices,
you know, our woods and all we can really do.
I think, besides protest, what is going on is prepare
for the worst, to ensure that we have you know,
sit and support systems in place in case, you know,
push comes to shove.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah, that's pretty bleak, Michael. Do you have anything to
add on how people can can be in solidarity with
the people of Venezuela currently.

Speaker 4 (33:40):
Well, I've been calling for people broadly throughout the world
to have solidarity more with people than with states, and
certainly with veness world people as opposed to the Venezuelan state.
I wrote something for the Center or International Policy about this,
and listen, you know, it's not my place to police
the left, so to speak. But you know, as someone

(34:02):
speaking personally who comes from the labor movement, you know,
comes from the Bernie Allied left, so to speak, you know,
I do think it's been a little bit uncomfortable to
observe how certain elements of the global left have have
stood up for the Madu regime, or the very least
been The criticism of it has been taboo. And I

(34:23):
think a lot of that is a legacy of Tapas
Chapas having this strong personal charisma, but also that he
was willing to confront the United States the Bush administration
at a time of the Iraq War, you know, especially
low point in the US's global reputation. Also Venezuela's oil
rants at the time, which we're financing a lot of

(34:43):
not just social programs Venezuela, but a lot of financial
largests to Allied states and movements around around the region.
So a lot of left parties reflexively defended Maduro even
as his repression and mismanagement just ramped up. I will
say that's fading. You know, we were seeing this within

(35:05):
Latin America. First of all, there's kind of a generational divide,
and some of the older generational Latin American left, like
Lula or like Petro, have not been overwhelmingly anti Maduru,
but have expressed skepticism about the electoral results. But then
there's a younger generation such as Borich and Chile, Chile
and Idavolo and Guatemala who have been openly very critical

(35:26):
about Duro and want to just not let him or
his camp so to speak, define what it means to
be on the left. And really the only countries that
have unquestionably backed him at this point are Bolivia, Cuba,
but also outside of the region, Russia, Iran, China. So
I think that we should ask ourselves, like, who do

(35:47):
we think is a more credible arbiter of progressive values?
Is it Borich and Chile or is it Putin, you know,
even not even the commonist part of Venezuela and no
longer that's one of my favorite facts, as he has
had their militants killed, you know, allegedly as well.

Speaker 8 (36:04):
So it's just it's not.

Speaker 4 (36:05):
Helpful to view the world for in this campus lens.
You know, I think that if people, whether they identify
as on the left or or whatever, want to show solidarity,
I think it should be with the Venezuelan people, which means.

Speaker 8 (36:18):
Listening to voices within civil society.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
In Venezuela.

Speaker 4 (36:21):
There are a lot of NGOs, there are a lot
of labor unions, there are a lot of human rights
advocates that are not opposition parties, that are not running
for office. They're not necessarily calling for regime change. Made
them very critical of sanctions, but they have tried to
push for better changes, you know, quality of life, you know,

(36:41):
reforms that might lead to less repression, open up more
space for civil society, and you know, those things are
necessary when people are really living.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
Day by day, you know.

Speaker 4 (36:52):
And I think that if people on the left want
to play the long game and understand care about the
prospects of the future, they need to understand that the
Maduers is the worst model for them to be associated with,
you know. And this has already been taking place with campaigns,
selectoral campaigns around Latin America where Cannon's on the right
run against the boogeyman of you know, Chabbismo, of like

(37:13):
of a Maduro model, and it makes sense. And if
a lot of people on the left are very skeptical
of Maria Croneamachado, like I have skeptism about some of
for policy platforms of you know, privatization and and other
neoliberal ideas, they also shouldn't be surprised if there's been
a decade of people being told that this model of corruption, authoritarianism,

(37:37):
state terror, criminal insecurity, that's what socialism is. Then people
are gonna believe that, and then they're going to then
their vote against whatever that is. And this model has
provoked you know, the greatest refugee crisis, certainly in the region,
eight million people.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
They're all carrying.

Speaker 4 (37:54):
With them stories about why they left right And so
if there ever were to be democratic collections in Venezuela,
it's pretty clear the country would turn to the right.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
And I don't think we should be surprised by that,
you know.

Speaker 4 (38:06):
And I think we should also recognize that many of
the things that Maludor embodies, these strong men politics, are
things that are embodied by other strong men, not just
on the left too.

Speaker 7 (38:18):
You know.

Speaker 4 (38:19):
I would just point out that least according to his son,
Trump has privately expressed a lot of admiration for Madudo.
I read John Bolton's book, and you know, the former
National Security Visor. You know, maybe he has a lot
of reasons to lie, but you know, he did say
that Trump privately expressed a lot of admirasy for Maludor being,
in his words, too smart and too tough to be overthrown.

(38:40):
You know, was really happy to see him sprounded by
what he called all these good looking generals. He disparage
one Guido calling him the Beto Rourke of Venezuela means
you know, so, I think that there is there's something
he said about strong men recognizing strong men, and a
lot of these authoritarian lesson are not limited to one

(39:02):
side of the ideological spectrum.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, definitely. I find that tendency on the American left
or and that sort of Internet left to be massively frustrating.
Like as someone who went there to see the revolution,
who went there to understand it, and who spent masses
of time with Venezuelan people in the Darien Gap at
the border in Venezuela, I'm very fond of Venezuelan people,

(39:27):
and I think, yeah, our sort of direity should be
with them, not with some strong man's state. We saw
this in Syria as well, right Like, it is heartbreaking,
genuinely heartbreaking to explain to people how someone who identifies
as a leftist is also denying that their children were
gassed by chemical weapons in Syria. Right This campus graze tendency,

(39:51):
and the American lefts specifically, is incredibly toxic, and anybody
who seriously considers themselves to be a lest it's massively
undermining any credibility they have when they associate themselves with
regimes which willingly murder their own people. I would like
to see people stop doing that. Perhaps both of you

(40:11):
could finish up by suggesting US coverage of this has
not been great, right like, it tends to focus on
the United States very much, and of Venezuela kind of
appears as a monolithic entity. Turning down Tobago rarely gets
any coverage in the US media. I did see I
think Reuter's or AP had done a piece about how
fishermen were elected to go out. I would like to

(40:32):
see more of that kind of reporting. Perhaps both of
you could suggest a couple of sources where people could
read about this.

Speaker 6 (40:39):
Sure, at least on my end, I suggest looking into
all local news. Now, it's not the best source in
terms of actual interrogation of the issues and the ways
in which some of the narratives just kind of get
repeated uncritically, but you do get at least the occasional interview,

(41:01):
the occasional quote from a non ust Department source. I
would also suggest on Instagram there are a couple of
pages that bring a more radical progressive voice from the Caribbean.
There's a page called Vintage Caribbean and there's another page
called Trinbiago for Palestine, and both of those have been

(41:23):
doing a lot of coverage on this particular incident lately,
So you can look through those as well if you
want to get us sort of a grassroots steak on
the situation.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Yeah, I don't really have any go to sources on this.

Speaker 8 (41:37):
I would say that it's enough of an interaction once
and that all.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
The major news sources you're covering it.

Speaker 4 (41:42):
So you can read really any news source in Latin
America if you speak Spanish Portuguese and see how that
recording is different. Also, incidentally, by in Spain, you know
quotes on the side.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
They do pretty good reporting. Yeah, they've been doing pretty.

Speaker 4 (41:55):
Good reporting and there's lots of blogs as well, and
you know, newsletters check out. I will say, just made this.
I'm biased because I focus a lot on crime. The
site Insight Crime is pretty good in terms of looking
into specific criminal groups, liked Aragua and calling question if
you know, if this really is a you know, it's
something that is controlled by the puppet master from you know, Flores,

(42:17):
you know, Likeldor and some of these, some of these
narratives that are justifying this.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
I'd also just as.

Speaker 4 (42:22):
A recommendation, I would say, you know, maybe it should
be a little bit skeptical too about the timing and
the purposes of these things. I did point out in
a piece that I wrote for the Center for National Policy.
Then the first boat strike happened on the same day
that the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a redacted number
of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. You know,

(42:43):
and I think that there are many reasons why this
administration would I would like to use this confrontation as
a conmane distraction from from other things that they would
rather not be talking about.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Yeah, leak, I think it's probably a reasonable conclusion. Give
them where we're at. Where can people find both of
you on if they want to follow you online on
social media or find more of your writing. We'll start
with you, Andrew.

Speaker 6 (43:12):
Shure, Well, you can find me on my YouTube channel
YouTube dot com, slash Andrew's own, or you could just
call my website for all my other links, Andrew sage
dot org.

Speaker 4 (43:21):
How about you, Michael, I do have a website. You
can look up my name and that should come up.
I haven't updated it recently, I probably should. I'm also
on Twitter x blue Sky as my name m.

Speaker 3 (43:33):
P A A R L B B r G, so
you can look me up there.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
Great, Thank you very much.

Speaker 7 (43:40):
With you.

Speaker 9 (43:57):
Welcome to it up here a podcast where you good
and not everything that is called co op is good.

Speaker 10 (44:05):
Sometimes they're not actually really co ops.

Speaker 9 (44:08):
I am your host, Mia Long, and today we are
joined by the people struggling under the tyrannical fist of
a co op, a thing that shouldn't be possible and
yet somehow.

Speaker 8 (44:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (44:24):
Yeah, So we are talking today with Es and Finley,
who are booksellers at the Seminary co Op in Chicago.
And yeah, we are welcoming the union back to the show.
And dear God, what a disaster.

Speaker 8 (44:41):
What a year it has been.

Speaker 11 (44:43):
Well, it's really great to be found. I wish we
were back with slightly better news or yeah, since we
were last here, certainly, Yeah, because when we last spoke,
we had just sort of theatrically announced to our management
that we were in an organized shop with the IWW

(45:03):
and we were going to be bargaining with them for
better wages and humane working conditions.

Speaker 12 (45:11):
For us all.

Speaker 11 (45:12):
And they were like, yeah, you're a union, we so
recognize that, and then they have sat on their hands
ever since.

Speaker 9 (45:20):
Yeah, so let's roll back all the way to the
beginning and explain a little bit about what the Seminary
co Op is for people who weren't here. How many
years ago was that though?

Speaker 8 (45:31):
That must have been last year.

Speaker 9 (45:33):
Yeah, yeah, it was a while ago.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
I don't know, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 (45:39):
So the Seminary co Op is a set of two
bookstores in Hyde Park. The Seminary co Op Bookstore, which
is a misnomer on two out of free counts, it's
not a seminary anymore. It's not a co op anymore.
It is still a bookstore, although it is a not
for profit bookstore, which is a mysterious category of business,

(46:00):
said that doesn't exist anywhere else, baffling.

Speaker 8 (46:04):
Yeah, briefly, just to enerject, I do think when I
would announce events and sort of give this exact breakdown
for audiences, like I said, not for profit bookstore whose
mission is book selling, right, And when I was hired of,
like about three months before we announced we were unionizing,
the way it was put to me was other not
for profit bookstores, they do a lot with like family literacy,

(46:25):
or like specifically around women's issues. But that was just
like an acknowledgement of the reality that bookstores don't make
a whole lot of money, and what we are providing
is a not for profit bookstore is just the browsing experience.
We kept books on shelves for too long. It just
it seemed like a like a really romantic idea of
book selling that didn't have like a whole lot of

(46:47):
legs underneath it, so to speak. Yeah, so it is nonsense,
I would say, but that's me.

Speaker 9 (46:53):
It's just real library, Like we have this, it's called library,
so they're.

Speaker 8 (46:59):
Really big book store. Just I don't know, it was vague, yeah.

Speaker 9 (47:05):
Baffling, baffling, yes, yeah, And then I guess. I guess
the second part of it is like when they say
it's a co op, what does that mean?

Speaker 11 (47:14):
It means truly and as conspeaks more that it was
founded by Chicago Theological Seminary students and there was a
reason for that.

Speaker 8 (47:23):
Yeah, like they did want to buy corsebooks at the
at the prices that retailers got them wholesale, and so
the thought was, I forget their names, but we have
the pictures of them. It was like a Cavanaugh or something.
But these two guys just you know, if you were
a student at Chicago Theological Seminary, we're even like a
student at one of the other divinity seminaries nearby. You

(47:44):
just put an amount of money and you were part
of like you got your course book cheaper, you know,
and under like a specific manager who came like a
couple decades after that, Like then it really became like
this is the neighborhood bookstore. This is part of, like
as say, like the intellectual sort of cultural life of
the university. But yeah, at one point it was a

(48:04):
cooperative because like you were a member and you got
your course books cheaper because you you know, had a
certain amount of shares in the books. But yeah, it
was a think smarter, not harder kind of scheme.

Speaker 11 (48:15):
And then when they dissolved the like ownership shares and
stopped being a co op. That was twenty nineteen when
they organized as this not for profit. It's not a
five oh one C three, they don't have nonprofit status.
It's this slightly different thing. And so one of the
one things that has happened in the past year is
we had an interim director who got us like basically

(48:36):
a nonprofit sponsor who lends its five oh one C
three status to other organizations and allows you to take
text deductible donations.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
But like, up to that.

Speaker 11 (48:46):
Point, we couldn't do that because we were not a
legitimate nonprofit. We were this other thing.

Speaker 13 (48:52):
Yeah, so since twenty nineteen it's been that, and then
since twenty twenty four, it's been that plus Chicago's standalone
unionized bookstore.

Speaker 11 (49:04):
For now, we're hoping that others follow in la they will.

Speaker 9 (49:07):
Yes, I feel like it is not a great sign
of your business being a well run when you are
doing a thing that like rookie activist campaigns do, when
they're like, oh shit, we got a bunch of buddy,
we need to borrow someone else's five O one three status,
Like yeah, great, great job management, like but incredible stuff.

Speaker 8 (49:33):
And like, for me, part of what's been so like
just mind boggling is like the not for profit bookstore
who's messed this. Book selling does sort of give this,
you know, if we're like a five oh one C
three who often does it they don't turn a profit
or what they do they reinvest it back into the
operations they're doing. But like part of and we can
talk more about this as we get into like the bargaining,

(49:54):
but like store financials have been so obscured, and I
hate from like truly truly hate from linguistic standpoint, just
sort of this subtle like, oh, we must not be
doing well because to me that feels like the rhetoric
that really justifies the pack that I'm paid sixteen ninety
an hour and I have a Master's of Divinity from
the Seminary of the Seminary co Op.

Speaker 9 (50:14):
Yeah, well, and it's and I think it's also worth
noting that, like even from the perspective of capital, like
all of the giant tech companies didn't make money for
like decades and all those motherfuckers were walking off with
like one hundred billion dollar payouts, you know, like they
only ever started making money when they started like reeling

(50:34):
in a bunch of government contracts for like web services
and like defense contracts and shit. And it's like, I
don't know, like this is this is I guess on topic,
but it's just something that makes you really mad. Where
people talk about like running the government like a business
and then like you know, you get like the post
office where it's like, oh, the post Office doesn't run
a profit. It's like j you know, doesn't run a
fucking profit. Uber literally has never brought a profit ever,

(50:56):
not once, yes, no once, right, like no, like like
I'm sorry, welcome, welcome to Welcome to fuck. Twenty twenty five.
Capitalism like companies don't make profits. They either get contact
from the government or their entire existence is either conting
some venture capitalists dipshits out of all of their money,
or it's like peer theel has decided that your like

(51:18):
surveillance camera company is ideologically important to him taking over
the world, so he's going to give you one billion
dollars and it's like, oh, no, I'm sorry, Like our
financials aren't good enough for you to pay you.

Speaker 10 (51:29):
It's like, motherfucker, Like have you seen the rest of capitalism?

Speaker 9 (51:33):
Like shit pay.

Speaker 8 (51:35):
Your workers, Like yeah, oh yeah, God damn well.

Speaker 11 (51:38):
We keep using that one meme over and over and
then it is true, like we're trying to balance the budget.

Speaker 8 (51:45):
It's true.

Speaker 11 (51:45):
The candles drill, thank yeah, yeah, because our management is
so infuriating. And they also in the year since we've
been bargaining having an interim director and spent most of
his tenure searching for an executive director to take over,
that person is being paid one hundred and sixty thousand

(52:08):
dollars a year to our knowledge, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 8 (52:12):
And that's the.

Speaker 11 (52:13):
Offer that we know of. We have yet to get
his contract, even though we did make a formal information
request for it.

Speaker 9 (52:19):
Yeah, which is fucked. And it's also like yeah, like
every time these companies are like, oh, we don't have money,
and it's like, okay, I can find like an unbelievable
amount of money that you have given to someone to
like to give a random, nonspecific example that has nothing
to do with with with any company that is in

(52:41):
any way related to this show.

Speaker 8 (52:45):
Live or Dead.

Speaker 9 (52:48):
By a board Ape Yacht Club NFT.

Speaker 8 (52:54):
Like this is like there's spent three hundred dollars on
Google homes speakers for fifty seventh Street books and I'm like, wow,
my having that three hundred dollars would change my life.
But also like, you're paying that union busting lawyer thousands
of dollars that you could be paid reverse. Yep, but
that's that's capitalism.

Speaker 9 (53:15):
Yeah, they have enough money to make your lives miserable,
but they apparently never have enough money to you know,
like bake your lives not miserable, because they have to
spend that money on making your lives miserable.

Speaker 11 (53:27):
Yeah, and it's so intentional because making us miserable means
that they are wearing down the number of people that
they have to deal with and making the people who
are left so tired and so frustrated and so much
less capable of fighting them.

Speaker 8 (53:43):
Yeah, and that feels like just you know, fens leaving.
We've also had a number of folks like our bargaining
unit that the last time y'all spoke last year was
like twenty five people. Now we're down to eleven and
it's there. They've refused to hire anybody time yeah, of course,
but they've been giving seasonal workers sort of like extra hours,

(54:05):
and that is someone's got to start counting they have,
like unless they work for ninety days, they don't have to.
And because they're seasonal, you know, YadA YadA, they don't
really join our union as kind of what I understand
why they are not considered eligible. But it's like, the
booksellers are the heart of the store.

Speaker 11 (54:22):
The classification of signal workers and particularly of event runners,
has been a point of contention throughout negotiations this whole time,
because obviously, from our perspective, we want anyone who's working
in the store in any capacity to be involved in
the union. We want them to not have this random
scab force that they can deploy at will. Yeah, And

(54:45):
that has always been the point that gets revisited over
and over again. Just when we think we've gotten them
locked into being union members, they'll come back with their
latest count and that's like, actually, I think because of X,
Y and b Z that we just changed, they're no
longer eligible to join your union. But they did just
hire I think three people that they were training at

(55:06):
fifty seventh Street last week. But they've made no formal
announcement to anyone that these people have been hired. Yeah,
I only know that they were like in the stores
because one of them came to the co op by
mistake instead of fifty seventh Street and was like, oh,
I'm one of the hires. Oh, and so it's unclear
if those are the seasonal workers or if those are

(55:26):
new hires.

Speaker 8 (55:27):
Those are i'll say, the most recent member, like part time,
full time member of our staff who's not me. None
of us knew she was hired, and she just came
up took a book right off my cart and I
was like, bitch, what but she But those were events,
those were the seasonal workers at the store. The other day,
like I worked one of the Chicago Humanities events with them,
and it is like, yeah, then they just changed the

(55:50):
qualification of who can be in the union.

Speaker 11 (55:52):
Yeah, it's been very intentional, and it's been just like
over and over they revisit and classified and less down.

Speaker 8 (56:03):
Yeah, we've done I think too. Since you last spoke,
like a couple of work stoppages and then picketed outside
of our store as well. But that I don't know
in terms of like sort of regressive bargaining to attrition
that we're seeing and that like they refuse to hire
other people even though they're kind of shooting themselves in
the foot. But just like our direct action has I

(56:25):
think worked against what they're thinking, which is that we're
tired and that we're not going to fight back and
that we are overwhelmed and we don't know what we're doing.
But there are a lot of folks who do have,
you know, experience with these sort of direct actions, like
a work stoppage, and I think it's why it's great
that we're wildly's but also like I do kind of
like on the work stoppage health flustered and not like upset,

(56:49):
but just how flustered and yeah, just awkward management feels
it's it's empowering for me. Yeah, but it's very much
on purpose. Well, and I think that's one of these
it's too just like a campaign. In the broad sense
of continuing direct actions during negotiations is it is that

(57:10):
chance to connect with your coworkers and re solidify that
you're fighting for something intentional in the face of the
fact that you will probably start being scheduled more sparsely,
you will have fewer opportunities during the workday to talk
to people and like that's just stuff that's going to
happen while negotiations go on. But like making sure that

(57:30):
you stay in touch with your union as best you
can and like show up for all the direct things
that you can helps you internally combat that, which is
really helpful.

Speaker 7 (57:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (57:40):
And I mean, like you know, like I sound like
we ran into organizing cues. We spent like I think
it was two years bargaining for our contract, and they
didn't have the capacity to literally force half the workforce
to quit.

Speaker 8 (57:54):
But like, oh, don't worry.

Speaker 11 (57:55):
They don't have the capacity to lose this many people
are falling seas and they are how few people they
have Yep.

Speaker 9 (58:03):
This whole thing is it's just like a really really
common managerial tactic, yeah, which is just like we're going
to make everything unlivable and try to get as many
people as we can to quit and then just make
everyone else's lives a living hell, which is like this
is I think I've said this before, but it's like
the extent to which the strategy is just the deliberate

(58:26):
infliction of terror.

Speaker 8 (58:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (58:29):
Well, and the strategy is just tank your business, which
seems incredibly conintuitive from their perspective.

Speaker 8 (58:38):
And like there have been events for like it's been
a book about like Karl Marx labor organizing, whether it's
a history or like a like sociology book, and folks
are like, I waited to buy this book here because
it's the union bookstore, And like there is a way
that us being a union bookstore could look given like
that folks on our board are really progressive, people like
Adam Gettichew, like State Senator Robert Peters, who's like running

(59:01):
on a pretty pro labor background. Like us being unionized
could be like we are already at tourist bookstore, like
folks come from everywhere, or like this is such a
famous bookstore. But like it does baffle me. It does
make sense that it's a common tactic. But also there's
so much that could work in their favor if they
were not just like so committed to busting this union.

Speaker 9 (59:25):
We hold on sidebar Ale Gritch, she was my professor.

Speaker 8 (59:30):
Yeah, I talked to her today.

Speaker 12 (59:31):
Wait, she's just part of the management team.

Speaker 8 (59:33):
No no, no, there's okay, so this is part of
it's just.

Speaker 9 (59:35):
Like a different thing. Okay, sorry, sorry, this is okay.

Speaker 8 (59:37):
No, no, no, this is This is where like us
being a not for profit bookstore but not actually like
having any legal standing as a not for profit gets
a little confusing. And like Finn, you can probably speak
more to how this has come up in the bargaining meeting.
But when we I don't know if this was around
before the cooperative was dissolved and shared are basically like
worthless at that point. But there is a board of

(59:59):
direct ors, one of whom like is very very famous
and at least among the folks I know for effectively
union investing employees at Experimental Station on sixty first in
Blackstone when they try to unionize right. And also there
are so many like Hyde Park progressives like RJP, like
I Adam Getta, Chew eve Ewing as well, And these

(01:00:23):
are people I really respect, but like because there's like
this four cabinet, I think of folks who are have
been in and out of bargaining meetings when we've had
employees at other lead for unions who do have a
connection to like for example, Robert Peters. It does very
clear that like this governing board which does govern, they
have terms, But we're also a retail outfit, you know,

(01:00:45):
usually like a not for profit, the board of a
not for profit would be helping with like an annual
fundraising campaign. It's unclear entirely what the board does in
a retail outfit other than, at least in my experience,
like giving advice, writing emails to try to bust this union,
you know, before we unionized, albeit I had a very
short tenure before we had unionized. None of these people

(01:01:07):
none of their names matter to me. But because like
there's so much confusion about is management going to be
representing folks in the bargaining meeting or is it going
to be a board member representative. I've been just who
is accountable to disclose what financial information and when or
just any information and when? Like, yeah, Adam Adam Yettuchu
is not one of our one of our bosses. But like,

(01:01:27):
there is just a lot of confusion that I feel
about what the board is responsible for in bargaining and
with the manage and what management feels they're responsible for.
And I can clear up a little bit of.

Speaker 11 (01:01:38):
That because what we were told when we first unionized
and when the management team was kind of shifting and
reorganizing itself around to the board, was the board is
there primarily to advise and supervise and higher the executive

(01:02:01):
director for the stores. And so there is a financial contribution,
like they're all significant donors. That's part of the way
that they secure their seats is making a large donation
to the stores. But then, at least according to them,
from that point forward, they have no managerial oversight over

(01:02:21):
the operations of the store whatsoever. It is not their responsibility.
They don't make any decisions about the budget, they don't
get involved, they don't want to be involved. And they
were embarrassed by having this attitude when previous management went
off the rails and nearly drove the store into the
ground by buying stock on credit cards. What But then

(01:02:44):
it's a cool thing that we do not have into
But that's.

Speaker 8 (01:02:50):
This is bonkers.

Speaker 9 (01:02:52):
Yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:02:53):
That is to say that somehow that experience did not
act as a wig up call for this board of directors,
and they said, what we will do is hire the
next way man we can find and take our hands
back off the wheel.

Speaker 9 (01:03:05):
Jesus Christ, is this an institution that people like it
would be helpful to put pressure on or.

Speaker 11 (01:03:11):
That's what it's hard to say, because there's this and
I think I talked about it the last time we
were on the podcast. But there's this responsibility carousel between
management who in a bargaining session. Because the other thing
is because we can't tell how involved the board is,
because they tell us that they're not involved at all,
and then they make decisions and we hear about the
decisions that they're making. We have asked repeatedly that they

(01:03:34):
be involved in bargaining and that they send someone to
represent them, or they like participate and have an opinion
on the way that the stores are run, and they
have repeatedly refused those invitations, requests, demands, et cetera.

Speaker 8 (01:03:47):
Yeah, it seems.

Speaker 11 (01:03:48):
Their involvement has been to recommend that our management hire
Jenny Goltz to be their lawyer, and that as about
as much as they want to do she is christ like.

Speaker 8 (01:03:57):
Two things too. Then I think there was supposed to
be a board member president at the next bargaining meeting,
but because our meeting was contingent on having the full
financial information that we requested literally a month ago, and
when we requested that information the next day a board member,
the president of the board said Okay, we'll get this
to you. We got it. I think you might know

(01:04:18):
more about the timing of this fit like at the
last possible minute we.

Speaker 11 (01:04:22):
Got at the day before the meeting, oh god, yeah,
and it was half of what we asked for. Yeah,
and then we said this is not what we requested
and we cannot meet because we said we couldn't meet
without this full information. They were like, we're disappointed that
you can't do that, and we were.

Speaker 14 (01:04:36):
Like, yeah, shocking, Yeah, we are back.

Speaker 9 (01:04:51):
Let's get more formally into like what the marketing process
has looked like. It sounds like it's been extremely chaotic.
They've been not turning over a information. It's deeply unclear
who's making decisions which all seem and I can say,
this is my professional opinion, not good a technical anout

(01:05:12):
life assessment. Yeah, this is why they pay me the
mediocre books.

Speaker 11 (01:05:16):
Well, I think you were just so well informed, yes.

Speaker 8 (01:05:20):
Journalistic insight.

Speaker 11 (01:05:21):
Yeah. So the way that we set it up on
our end when we entered into negotiations was we had
a core team of three people who were going to
be our core bargaining unit who would attend every meeting,
and then we had a small team of like three
more people including myself that were like alternates in case

(01:05:42):
something got scheduled on one day that one of the
core team couldn't be there, and we made sure that
we would always schedule one person who was not negotiating
to be at the meeting and take notes, so that
like none of the people who were negotiating, you had.

Speaker 8 (01:05:56):
To do that at the same time.

Speaker 11 (01:05:57):
And when we first started negotiating, the management team was
sending Dan Meyer, the interim director, and name Kanno, who's
our deputy director, who is basically the one person on
the management team who is not she's not supposed to
be a direct supervisor. She has not actually let go
of the people that she was supervising, but she's like
in that middle space between like supervising management and like

(01:06:20):
director management. But she has since stepped down from negotiations
because of the way that she's been involved in the
rest of store operations. She was like, I can't come
to the table anymore. And so the latest meeting that
has been rescheduled is going to be with Kevin Bendle,
who's the new executive director, and then one other name

(01:06:42):
that I forget who is either a board members as thinks,
or I'm not sure well, she would be, but.

Speaker 8 (01:06:50):
It is it is a board member, and I think
it is Tira Goldstein. Is her name Tia Goldstein?

Speaker 7 (01:06:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (01:06:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:06:57):
Every so often in niotiating sessions, Dan or Nai would
make some reference to like a financial decision that we
were trying to bargain about being like not their choice
and being something that would be up to the board,
and we'd be like, so take it to the board,
and then we'd be like, okay, and then we would
never hear anything about it ever.

Speaker 9 (01:07:16):
Again, incredible, incredible work. Seems like a great tactic to
never address anything you're supposed to be addressing.

Speaker 11 (01:07:27):
And so the way that we were negotiating, we were
trying to come to terms on things that didn't affect
the finances of the store first so that we could
land some easy wins and like feel like we were
making progress and then address the stuff that we expected
to be thorny or later. But then what that ended
up being as meetings went on and on was them

(01:07:51):
asking us constantly like, but what is it that you
guys really are like prioritizing, Like what is the thing
that matters the most to you that like you have
the least give on and We're like, it's wages. You know,
it's wages. It's been wages this whole time. And they're like,
but like, what if we were like asking you to
give up all your benefits to get it's just.

Speaker 9 (01:08:09):
That you want.

Speaker 11 (01:08:10):
And we were like, Okay, that's not how negotiating works.
And then, in an email that labeled it their best
and final offer, which is language that they have yet
to take back, they sent us a version of the
contract bargaining agreement that we hey, let me just back

(01:08:30):
up for a second. When we first started negotiating, they
asked us to draft the entire first draft of the
collective bargaining agreement ourselves, what which is incredible well standard,
And we were like, that's fine because that gives us
a leg up in terms of like studying the initial terms.
I guess we'll do it, but like, yeah, incredibly nonstandards,
super stupid, not a thing that we should have had

(01:08:52):
to do.

Speaker 9 (01:08:52):
Yeah, I've never heard of that before.

Speaker 11 (01:08:56):
But so when we drafted it, we drafted a three
year term collective bargaining agreement with a bunch of stuff
about procedure and wages and benefits that we wanted done,
and so zooming back forward to that best and final offer. Suddenly,
the draft that they've sent us back of the collective
bargaining moreement is a two year term, and up to

(01:09:17):
this point, all of the offers that had gotten anything
close to our ask on wages were in year three,
and everything in year one and two was still like
twenty five cents fifty cents increases. And so suddenly year three,
which was always the only year that made any improvements
for us, is gone, and you did not improve any

(01:09:40):
other parts of the contract to make up for that
unilateral decision.

Speaker 9 (01:09:45):
So that's just regressive bargaining.

Speaker 8 (01:09:47):
Yeah, it is.

Speaker 9 (01:09:48):
It is, which, by the way, okay, do you want
to explain to our dear listeners what regressive bargaining is
and why you're not allowed to do it.

Speaker 11 (01:09:57):
Yeah, regressive bargaining is is a dirty negotiation tactic where
one side, without making any sort of give and take
concessions like they should to balance a big move, just
unilaterally decides to change a term, especially a large term
like wages, contract term, et cetera. And so it is

(01:10:23):
taking something that has been tentatively agreed upon and like
in good faith taken as a part of the contract
that will stand and acting it.

Speaker 9 (01:10:32):
Yeah, and you are not allowed to do this is
this is under the under the terms under the terms
of the National Labor Relations Act, which you know, who knows.
But by the time this episode goes out, there is
a small chance it won't exist anymore. A bunch of
provisions of it are under attacked right now.

Speaker 11 (01:10:49):
But like that is like, we have a few unfair
labor practices filed with the NLRB since the terms of
Negotia have been in effect, and they are not, in
fact progressive bargaining charges, but issues of status quo where
they're trying to change the way that they do scheduling,

(01:11:10):
change the way that they do like absence discipline, which
are topics that are covered in bargaining and should only
be changed in bargaining while bargaining is active, but they're
trying to change them and then say that these have
been the policies all along, and so.

Speaker 9 (01:11:27):
God literally gaslighting, yeah, like actual, actual, straight up. You
could pick up the gap the psychologue the psychology textbook
plight to it, like oh.

Speaker 11 (01:11:38):
Yeah, just pick up that whole lamp well, and we
have their words in writing of every step of the
way where you can see the language change and be like, no,
you are the person who said before that it was
this other thing that was you. Yeah, so we filed
unfair labor practice about those things, and you can in

(01:11:58):
fact not track them anymore because since the government shut down,
you can find a little PDF that explains, yep, that
all ulps are going to be pending indefinitely, and that
is all you can find.

Speaker 9 (01:12:10):
Yeah, and it's also fun because Trump I legally fired
one of the Democratic people on it, so I don't
have a korum any on the board of the National RELATIONSIP. Boys,
they don't have a korum anymore, which is a shit show.
And snaking any NLRB like attempt to get anything done
to the NLRB really annoying.

Speaker 6 (01:12:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:12:27):
Yeah, I think the direct action has been helpful where
like just that reality where just they just it would
drive me crazy. And it is it is gaslighting. This
is traumatizing. If her boyfriend does it to you, it's
a red flag. But when your boss does it to you,
you know, it's like, yeah, the public's fine with it. Business, Yeah,

(01:12:48):
it's a cost of business.

Speaker 7 (01:12:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:12:50):
It is just the continuous, non stop onslaught of regressive
bargaining tactics that like from the minute we started, despite
the fact that like I was sitting next to the
director when we say reunionizing, it was like a split
second before she said, yep, we recognize it. And so
our direct action at the workstoppage. I remember our first workstop,
if you sat for half an hour, management was very

(01:13:11):
cool with that. The second time we did it, we
did it for an hour. We should have done our
homework better because we didn't know that you can't, like
like leaf live it on store property because the US
Chicago is our landlord and kind of like not store property.
But I put on my clerical collar. I put on
a T shirt that had like given to Caesar what
is Caesar's and also like a little footnote about you know,

(01:13:32):
run me my money. You know, there's a lot obvious
instruction from Jesus out of Luke that's like pay the
work or their wages. But I was wearing my clerical car.
I set up the PA and I and I was loud.
There was a Hyde Park Harold reporter who you know
took my comment who I remember him walking over to
Nien and I think asking her for her comment. I

(01:13:53):
had a bluetooth speaker that was Dan's right playing never
never fight a man with a perm by Idol and
I will not forget. I will not forget. The way
our the deputy director approached me, she was like, Okay,
this is fine, this is all fine. I just want
to let you know this is fine, but can you
please turn the music off? And it took me about
twenty minutes to just turn the buttons down slowly, But

(01:14:15):
like that we were reprimanded.

Speaker 15 (01:14:18):
Yeah, we got a very very email the next day
Elevet illustrating what the consequences would be if we tried
to do a similar action again in that manner.

Speaker 8 (01:14:29):
And so we picketed outside their store. That was the
next direct action that we did. But like I do
think our most impactful direct actions have been the ones
that have been noisy, that have been incredibly visible. When
we picketed last it was on the first day of classes.
We sell like a lot of core core course books
for the college at the university, and so there were

(01:14:51):
students like that. We we were like, hey, do you
have the bookseller who sold you that book to have
a living wage? And students like nineteen year old are
so outraged by the end of money I make as
a grown person.

Speaker 11 (01:15:02):
I heard so much eat the rich that day from sillennials.

Speaker 8 (01:15:06):
Hell yeah, hell yeah. But it's it is clear that
when the public is made aware of what's happening at
a store that a lot of people love just so much,
like it is a part of the community, and I
think so much a part of people's even like my
own before I work there, our experience of being in
this fight knit bizarre community, and folks are upset like

(01:15:29):
they and I think rightfully so, and that's just I think,
really the beauty of direct action is not just that
it empowers u f but it really just like in
a sort of spectacle way, says this is what this
is what they're doing. You want a place that you
love to run this way and to treat people like this.

Speaker 11 (01:15:45):
So and I think they're really effective for that reason,
especially because people are really like on our side when
they talk to us, but they're also really surprised because
like part of the instant recognition thing, part of the
being cool with us having union buttons on the register.
Part of all of that is the fact that management

(01:16:07):
is benefiting from the illusion that they're on good.

Speaker 1 (01:16:10):
Terms with us.

Speaker 11 (01:16:11):
And so like one of the reasons that we held
that picket was to be like, hey, just because they
are not stopping us does not mean they have done
anything to improve the material conditions that we have been
organizing around this whole time.

Speaker 8 (01:16:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:16:24):
Well, and also to be incredibly clear about this, like
it's so obvious it has to actually directly be stated,
which is that all of the things they are doing
our union busting tactics, because their strategy here is to
do a recognition and then go for the second place
where unions was commonly collapse, which is once you're recognized

(01:16:45):
as as a bargaining the second place they fail is
getting the first contract, and that that's what they're really
obviously trying to do. And yeah, the fact that people
don't understand that they're just running a thing that like
I'm trying to think of how to even disc it
was like like that bookstore was like like it was
treated as like something that was as an institution that

(01:17:07):
was like part of the university. That's like the way
it was like treated culturally was this is like our thing,
and these people are running it into the ground because
they don't want to pay their workers like enough money.
To survive. It's is just hideous.

Speaker 11 (01:17:20):
And that's really all it comes down too when you
look at what the facts on the ground are is
the decisions that they are making are directly tied to
the fact that they feel like they have no money,
which is directly to the fact that they are paying
the executive director too much, which is directly died to
the fact that they want to have an excuse to
not pay us anything.

Speaker 3 (01:17:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:17:42):
Yeah, it's like, oh, wow, we don't have enough money
because we're spending like one hundred and sixty thousand dollars
on an executive director. Have you considered you can simply
eliminate this entire expense by turning this into an actual
co op. You could do it in like one day,
and you suddenly would not have the administration expenses because
those people wouldn't be there. You could do this yeah,

(01:18:04):
really easily.

Speaker 11 (01:18:05):
Oh well, And as the like movement in and out
of that position over the past year demonstrates, it has
no effect on the operations of bookstore. The thing that
has any effect on the operations of the bookstore is
the fact that seven people have left, not been replaced,
and all of their work has been redistributed across like

(01:18:25):
increasingly siloed positions to the people who are left so
that you have no help on your particular assigned task
that is now yours and yours alone, and you just
feel terrible in your little hole by yourself.

Speaker 9 (01:18:38):
Which there's is something like I know for a fact
that like multiple people on that board know what a
speed up is, Like, that's a speed up. I know
for a fact that you know what this.

Speaker 11 (01:18:51):
Is, and most of them who know what it is
have written against them.

Speaker 8 (01:18:57):
Yeah, just kind of like expanding a bit, like or
the staff at the Museum of Science and Industry has
also unionized, and they were outside of their store, you know,
threatening to strike and so like I loved on the
picket line, like I had a sign that said fire Jenny,
and I went to explain to the Yeah, I want
to explain to the UI employee who Jenny was. The

(01:19:18):
UI employee who worked at the Graduate Students United at
U Chicago, and she went, oh, I know who Jenny is,
and that's I don't know. Just yeah, it's sick that
like somebody can make their living making my life worse
than a that's that's capitalism. And also be like I
she has been involved that lawyer and like a number

(01:19:39):
of like she busting you, trying to bust unions at
U Chicago on successfully and also representing Northwestern in a
case where one of their employees accused them of sexual
harassment and discrimination. You know. So it's like you're you're
really this this is this is the person that you're
working with. This is the tool that you're using, you know,

(01:20:00):
is it who you would rather pay? Yeah?

Speaker 9 (01:20:03):
Yeah, yeah. And it's also it's like that that's the
thing where this this whole metaphor of like the boss
acting as an abusive partner is suddenly getting very literal
in terms of who they're who are the people that
they are employing do for their other ship, which is
defending those people. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's almost like
there's a structural connection between management and patriarchy. Wow, who

(01:20:26):
could possibly who could possibly have done this?

Speaker 11 (01:20:28):
Between systems of abuse?

Speaker 9 (01:20:31):
Yeah, Like who could possibly have written about this? Check's notes?

Speaker 10 (01:20:35):
Looks at the books that were written by the members
of the board. Yeah, like, yeah, I'm so mad about this,
Like we'll nicking after Empire is really good?

Speaker 8 (01:20:46):
It is? Yeah, And I like I don't know how
much I can like hold those individual board members responsible,
and it seems like so many of them are like
just now finding out about it. Yeah, that's some abuse.
One on one is to make sure that the person
that you are exploiting, that you were, you know, taking
advantage of that, they don't feel like they can say
to people who could help them, this is what's happening

(01:21:08):
to me, and that like the people who would be sympathetic,
could you know, go and take the initiative to help folks.
And ungrateful that we have a meeting with Robert Peters
coming up soon. It was supposed to happen that has
not yet, and I appreciate how dedicated he is and
his staff is to making sure that our union sits
down and talks with him.

Speaker 11 (01:21:29):
But it is also like there's a deep irony for
him accepting an award from another union and rescheduling a
meeting with.

Speaker 9 (01:21:35):
Ourskay do it?

Speaker 8 (01:21:36):
No, no, no, no, no, it's because we have Jacob, I
always say it incorrectly asked me. Yeah, the BigInt. But
that's also like part of the other great community support.
Like I mentioned that UE employee, but you know, there
are other union employees who just because they love the
bookstore so much, will show up to every outreach event
that we have. He was one of the first people

(01:21:57):
to have a yard sign, and it's funny he was
right now to this guy from my church who also
has a been no sign, and that's why I found
out they were neighbors. Yeah, it's really cute. But like,
I'm proud that we're Wobbley's because there is a really
long tradition of you know, being in Chicago, a lot
of radical organizing that I think fits our spirit and

(01:22:18):
also like the seminary co op spirit. It has been
hard that we don't have a lot of resources towards bargaining,
but like we're good at direct action and we also
have I'll give it the ask Me Award. I'll give
it a pass because Jacob's been so and other community
members have been so helpful and just giving their time
and their skills and their expertise.

Speaker 11 (01:22:36):
So yeah, yeah, the MSI Union, the grad Students' Union
in particular, have been incredible allies to us and have
been they were huge like presences on our picket because like,
because we did an open store running picket, we had
only about half of our actual union members available because
everyone else had to be on desks in the stores

(01:22:56):
keeping them running. And so the majority of the people
who were like collecting signatures to get Jenny Goltz fired
and otherwise improve our wardening conditions were people from other
unions who were just out there being wonderful, awesome, solid
argy with us.

Speaker 4 (01:23:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:23:11):
So my first picket line, I mean, I think it
makes its last episode, but my first picket line ever
was the grad student picket line in twenty nineteen. Those
those the first time I was ever want a picket
and it rocks. Yeah, and yeah, it makes it really
happy to see that the whole base of sort of
union organizing from that has like you know, it's it's
this thing that like I remember when this was like

(01:23:33):
you know, like I was there and like one of
the big pushes everyone. They finally won, and it's like
they're still around helping people because workers workers fucking fight
together and.

Speaker 11 (01:23:42):
Well and then they'll always be like, hey, one thing
that we know about Jenny GOLs is she likes to lose, and.

Speaker 8 (01:23:47):
We're like, thank thank you. Then it's not that she
likes to use the quote, is she's very good at
losing which that's true. Even better. Yeah, like what you
were saying about GSU, I don't remember what I think,
Like two thousand and eight. Two thousand and seven was
like when they said we starting organizing for unionizing the

(01:24:09):
graduate students. I had a roommate who was like a
twelve year PhD student who was around when that shit started.
You can just count hanging out with your wife in
Australia as a field research, I guess.

Speaker 12 (01:24:23):
But.

Speaker 8 (01:24:25):
Well, she's just doing postdocs. You're just hanging out. But
we had a baby yesterday anyway. Oh but yeah, like
I was around he came back to finish his PhD
like about the time, like when the contract was ratified,
and I just with what is it, sixteen seventeen months
of bargaining no contract in the name of my blessed

(01:24:46):
Lord Jesus Christ. Like Jesus Christ. GSU has had, like
has such a wealth of knowledge because they've been through
just like heaps of bullshit and it's years.

Speaker 9 (01:24:56):
It's like, okay, I will like you the the fucking
gs you think they had a whole thing when I
was there, like in like twenty nineteen, the whole the
whole thing was that and like Jenuay. This is like
one of the most admirable things I've ever seen a
union do, which was they refused to take their their
case because the university was refusing to recognize them, and

(01:25:17):
they they refused to take their case to the NLRB
because they knew that if they did it, there was
there was a pretty good chance that the old Trump
n l RB was going to like bust every single
graduate school union in the country. So instead of trying
to win for themselves, they fucking didn't do it and
just like fought on picket lines instead, and it fucking rocked.
It was case like that they rock. They're they're great,

(01:25:41):
Like yeah, yeah, shout out, shout outs shout out to GSU.

Speaker 8 (01:25:44):
Yeah, shout out to GSU.

Speaker 11 (01:25:46):
Well, And they are a great, great, great example to
us all in terms of like how to persist on
a fight through attrition, because one of the things that
like you try so hard as a management team to
do is just wait until ever and gets tired and leaves.
And like it seems like Grand Students would be the

(01:26:07):
perfect population just just wait out because they rotate out constantly.
But like just the way that they have managed to
maintain energy through generations and generations of organizers and get
it over the line at long Lives is so encouraging.

Speaker 5 (01:26:23):
Yeah, there's the thing I remember from I think the
last place I read into it was like one of
Mike Duncan's things about the French Revolution.

Speaker 9 (01:26:41):
But like one of the things he talked about was
like the ways in which part of what caused the
French Revolution was that like they spent a whole bunch
of time teaching all of these kids these like incredibly
radical enlightenment ideas and then they were like, wait, we
live in like the most absolute water key that has
ever existed. What the fuck?

Speaker 11 (01:27:00):
I hate this?

Speaker 8 (01:27:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 9 (01:27:02):
Yeah, yeah, Like wait, hold on, And it's like there
is obviously always sort of contradictions between like the number
of people I have seen write books about labor resistance
and then like go bust unions is pretty large. But
there's a reason why everyone from like Pinochet through like

(01:27:22):
the Trump administration, I mean back through like the original Nazis.
It's like one of the first places and you know,
I mean like the Greek riot plays had this thing
where it was like the first place you go when
there's discontent is like you must stop the workers from
from allying with the students. You must do.

Speaker 3 (01:27:38):
This or you're fucked.

Speaker 11 (01:27:41):
Yeah, But the workers and the students love each other.
They're all kissing. Yeah, And we're the.

Speaker 8 (01:27:47):
Same person sometimes, you know. Yeah, so often.

Speaker 9 (01:27:52):
Yep, yep, yep.

Speaker 8 (01:27:54):
All my comrades a kiss on the forehead, y ah.

Speaker 11 (01:27:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:27:58):
And I think like that is I think like the
filment of all of this is like the way that
one campaign winning can transform the lives of everyone else
around you is so astonishing. And I've seen it happen
in so many places where like one shop wins and
suddenly everyone else is like, it could be us, It
could be us.

Speaker 8 (01:28:19):
Yes, it's possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:28:22):
Well, and I think that we're trying to capitalize on
that and trying to make sure that we can be
the next person to like capitalize on GSU's win and
help ms I do the same. But like, as much
as we have really suffered from the at the table
bargaining uhiating process and been really sort of beaten down

(01:28:45):
in the past year on that battleground, I think we
have learned so much about the allies that surround us
and the people who like want to do more than
just email our board members, and we're like, we don't
know what else you can do because we don't know
who makes these decisions for you to yell at. But

(01:29:06):
we have so many people who have like signed up
for an email list with us, so many people who
are like ready to go as soon as we figure
out what we need them to do.

Speaker 12 (01:29:13):
Yeah, and that's.

Speaker 11 (01:29:14):
Been really encouraging and bolstering, while management continues to like
just not acknowledge us when they feel too cornered. Like
they simply never spoke of the picket because it happened
outside and so they couldn't be mad about it, so
they didn't have to tell us all about it, but
they also just didn't speak of it.

Speaker 8 (01:29:34):
Yeah, this is Chicago is a motherfucking union town, and
that's what. Yeah, I'll admit I'm angry when I go
into work. They don't care enough to get the mold
and the dust remediated, you know, and the DUTs, and
I can't really breathe when I go into work. And
I also don't have health insurance right, oh my god, Well,

(01:29:56):
I do have health insurance, but I have to pay
for like, you know, I have to pay for my
own premiums through a marketplace there. Yeah, and that's that's
not really affordable. And like, as frustrated as I am
like coming into work, it is it's the people you know,
And I think that's for a lot of folks who
have stayed at the bookstore. I don't know how much
you relate to this then, like it has been like

(01:30:18):
other booksellers, the folks that we've gotten to know through
the community, who like who do make a difference at
least for me and whether or not I stay. Oh, absolutely, yeah,
this is a good fight.

Speaker 11 (01:30:29):
The union crew that we have is a incredibly worthwhile
team to be on. It is a group of people
that I feel very solid standing shoulder to shoulder with.
I think that is, like, without question, one of the
things that like keeps the stores a place that you
can work, even if it's not a good.

Speaker 8 (01:30:48):
Place to work right now.

Speaker 11 (01:30:50):
Yeah, yeah, And honestly, I think that would have sustained
me a lot longer if you were different, you know.

Speaker 8 (01:30:57):
Yeah, yeah for sure.

Speaker 10 (01:30:58):
Wait, okay, sorry, could ripole back to the part where
you can't breathe because there's I feel like because there's
bolds I feel like you just dropped that very quickly.

Speaker 9 (01:31:07):
It was like, oh, yeah, that's like a normal bar
of the work.

Speaker 4 (01:31:10):
What the thought.

Speaker 11 (01:31:12):
Well, so for a very long time you've been allowed
to request that you only work at the co op
because there is a known mode problem at fifty seventh
Street that they can't afford to or can't get the
landlord to ameliorate. But there is also at least in
our lung experience some sort of growth issue in the

(01:31:33):
venting at the seminary.

Speaker 8 (01:31:34):
Come up, Yeah, it's it's very dusty at beast. And
like I when I wear like like a kN ninety
five for a little bit, like that helps a little.
I take like five bena drill usually and then that
je's that kind of that kind of helps. And that's
more just I think, like I mean not more. That
is in part like my own health. But if I

(01:31:55):
had the resources too be able to take care of
my health and get what I need, maybe I could
withstand the mold and the dust and the ducks a
little bit easier.

Speaker 9 (01:32:04):
But like that well, but also like like as an employer,
it is your responsibility to not have your workplace poison
your employees, Like I'm sorry, like that part yeah, yeah, yeah,
that also make them pay for the medical care to
treat medical problems that they're having because you'd poison them
with mold.

Speaker 10 (01:32:20):
Like what that's yeah, what Jesus Christ, it's so evil.

Speaker 11 (01:32:26):
Well, and we had a couple of pauses in our
first draft of the Collective Bardnaining Agreement that included demands
regarding mold remediation at fifty seventh Street, and I do
believe th clauses have been struck in subsequent round.

Speaker 9 (01:32:44):
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's a thing that you
could ask people to do, which is go ask people
to complain about the fucking mold. Like it seems like
a thing you could do.

Speaker 8 (01:32:54):
Yeah, that's another direct action. I also noticed, like people
in the store, like they cough when they enter. Yeah,
you know, and like, oh god, this is where the
like the snake eats its own tail. The wheel turns
inside the fucking wheel, right, because like maybe, like if
I'm giving them good faith benefit of the doubt, management
would have if they weren't overloaded with so many tasks

(01:33:16):
that they have to take on, you know, sort of
more supervisory management. If y'all didn't have to do all
these tasks, maybe you would have time to If there
are more people hired in the bargaining unit, perhaps you
could yourself have more time to improve the conditions for
the store, not just for your workers, but also for
the people who enter the stores.

Speaker 12 (01:33:35):
But because people.

Speaker 8 (01:33:36):
Hire new workers until there's a contract, you are just
so overworked and you can't and it's just like this
this turns until the boss decides that it doesn't, and
it's like this is their responsibility to to bargain in
good faith and to treat their workers correctly, Like this
is an active decision that they could make that they
are not making.

Speaker 9 (01:33:55):
So yeah, I gotts say that that might be the
single wildest thing I've ever heard, like an hour into
an interview, is oh, yeah, they're poisoning.

Speaker 11 (01:34:03):
Guys in the mold, just the mold. It's just also
just like prove that this is the craziest place to work,
because like that doesn't even land on our radar anymore
because we've been just like banging our head against walls
for a year.

Speaker 9 (01:34:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I keep going back to
the abusive relationship metaphor, but like that is one of
the big things about the beusive relationships is that because
of the information control and because of the way that
your world gets condensed down into a really really tiny,
narrow set of experiences where you're isolated and you're only
interacting with like one person who was controlling everything about

(01:34:40):
your life. It becomes really difficult to see things that
are very, very obviously wrong the moment you step out
of it. Yeah, and you know, I don't know. Maybe
it turns out having absolutely hierarchical relationships of control is
an extremely bad way to run literally anything, especially the
thing that your livelihood depends on, that you do most
of your time.

Speaker 11 (01:35:00):
Just to thought, wow, well, and it also just like
means that you are too busy to actually interface in
any meaningful way with your workers. Like, yeah, if I
tell you that it took me two thirds of the
day to schedule a fifteen minute conversation with any of
four managers who were on site to quit, I would

(01:35:22):
not be lying.

Speaker 9 (01:35:23):
Jesus Christ. They can't even take your resign, bitch.

Speaker 11 (01:35:30):
They at one point tried to reschedule that conversation which
I was attempting to have on Friday to Monday, and
I was like, I think you want.

Speaker 9 (01:35:37):
To know this. Yeah, it's like managers, you two are
getting you too, are getting.

Speaker 10 (01:35:43):
Strewed over by by understaffing.

Speaker 8 (01:35:46):
Oh my god, I do think that's starting to take
a toll to on management, which is a little encouraging.
They're losing it. Yeah, they are not feeling well, and
because like for me, I don't know, I'm not gonna
trust a boss like I just stated, for three months
in the nineteen ninety seven UAW strike like that's oh yeah,

(01:36:08):
bosses are canceled. Yeah you know, I know how that ended.
But I remember one of the supervisors who who we've
had one point in her like her previous career had
been on a picket line for a very long time,
had been on strike, and she like immediately took one
of our little sabocat reed pins put it on her backpack,
and is otherwise like, as far as I can tell,

(01:36:30):
generally supportive of the union, but also man lady, I
wish she would make a stink mm hmm.

Speaker 11 (01:36:36):
Because here's the thing. I think she only talks to us.
I feel like the other managers do not speak to her.
I yeah, am I crazy.

Speaker 8 (01:36:44):
Yeah I could just talk about that for a very
long time, and I don't think we have the time.

Speaker 9 (01:36:50):
So yeah, yeah, before we get into what can people
do the help? Is there anything else that you want
to make sure that you get to.

Speaker 11 (01:36:56):
I think the big thing that we should emphasize too
is as much as we are complaining and frustrated about
the process, we know that this is not impass and
that we are so sure that like there is still
negotiating to be done, there is still conversation to be had,
and that like we have been emphasizing that at every
opportunity to management as we have to. But like, just

(01:37:20):
because we are tired and frustrated means nothing in terms
of us giving up, because this is a fight that
is going to continue.

Speaker 8 (01:37:27):
Yeah, yeah, And like to that point, Finn, we're doing
this because we love the stores. Like the stores were
a really important place for me, just putting down roots
in the neighborhood. And I think when you love something
a lot, like you got to be brave enough to
wrestle with it. And that our unionizing is the right thing.

(01:37:48):
It is the thing that will like hopefully create an
environment where the people who make that bookstore run, who
sell the books. In the long run, it will make
the institution healthier, do believe, and just that we've been
talking about like this metaphor as the boss of like
as an abusive partner. I think for so many folks
when they are whether it's something like domestic violence, or

(01:38:12):
it's in a union campaign, or you're speaking out against
you know, your neighbors being abducted and shot and killed
in the street, there is such an expectation that I
have to sit by and be quiet while this happens.
And part of that, I think, what does prevent and
at least in my experience as someone who survived, you know,
particular kinds of violence that Yeah, I wasn't sure I
was doing the right thing, but us unionizing is absolutely

(01:38:35):
the right thing. It is the right thing for the stores.
It is the right thing for the community and for
the workers. And I just as much as I'm frustrated,
like I know myself and my fellow booksellers are doing
this out of love, Like it is absolutely love for
the stores in the community we serve.

Speaker 11 (01:38:50):
So yeah, we're never going to feel bad for continuing
to fight for what is the right.

Speaker 8 (01:38:57):
Thing to do. Yeah, I'm too broke to feel bad.

Speaker 9 (01:39:00):
Yeah, don't be poisoned by bold. Every time you go
to the bookstore, support the union.

Speaker 11 (01:39:08):
Yeah, wear your mask at seminary co op. Yeah, take
a sab acap pin.

Speaker 8 (01:39:14):
Yeah. Ask to talk to a manager, make it a
long talk.

Speaker 11 (01:39:18):
Yeah, honestly, see if you can get one on the floor,
we'll help you.

Speaker 7 (01:39:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:39:21):
So how can people help support y'all? And do you
have places where people can find more information about the
campaign and follow updates?

Speaker 8 (01:39:29):
We have a change dot org petition that I think
if you can link it somewhere in the description.

Speaker 9 (01:39:35):
Yep, yeah, we will link in the description.

Speaker 8 (01:39:37):
Yeah. So that that does ask folks to sign off
and support the termination of Jenny Goltz, their union busting lawyer,
as well as releasing like the full state of financial
information too. So there's a change dot org petition. You
can also follow us on Instagram at some booksellers union
We've got the little icon with the sabocat sign up tian.

(01:40:00):
There are also some action items on some of the posts,
such as emailing the board and management about the release
of financial information and also the termination of Jenny Golts's employment.
You can also emailed those emails on that post about
the mold too. If you want me to breathe at work.

Speaker 16 (01:40:17):
Yeah, I'm so glad about this.

Speaker 10 (01:40:20):
This is I am going to lead the description with
they are poisoning you, because like, I'm so angry about this.

Speaker 8 (01:40:28):
Thank you, I'm too tired to be angry about it.

Speaker 11 (01:40:31):
I'm so glad at this woman the French perspective has
remembered that the mold is totally bogus, because I had forgotten.

Speaker 8 (01:40:39):
It's crazy. Yeah, it's so bogus. It's also like it's
in such plain sight, like if you're in fifty seven
Street Books and you look to the right of the
air conditioning unit and room one, you see that shit
growing on the walls, and it's like, but I also
feel like if I talked to management, which I tried
about this, it just is a got a priority. My

(01:41:01):
breathing not a priority. Yeah, it is wild. Thank you
for reminding me.

Speaker 9 (01:41:06):
That someone one day, when you win, someone's going to
write a paper by necropolitics in this or something like good.

Speaker 8 (01:41:13):
Lord, jeez, yeah some shit. Yeah, sign the petition, follow
us on Instagram, help us make our.

Speaker 11 (01:41:22):
Ruckus and come talk to us and our managers at
the bookstore because we love to talk to people while we.

Speaker 8 (01:41:29):
Saw them books. Yeah. Yeah, I'll take any good will
we can get, so very much.

Speaker 9 (01:41:35):
So hell yeah, Well, thank you to both so much
for coming on and just for doing this and I
don't know, like a place that was really special to
me when I was yeah, when I was there for
a long time.

Speaker 8 (01:41:48):
Thanks for your help, Thank you for following up with us.

Speaker 11 (01:41:51):
Of course, it's really nice to have this platform every
so often.

Speaker 8 (01:41:55):
Yeah for sure.

Speaker 9 (01:41:58):
Oh yeah, well, hopefully we'll have you back on when
you fucking win.

Speaker 11 (01:42:02):
And yes, very round.

Speaker 8 (01:42:07):
I'm buying I'm personally buying the cool Zone media team
around at Jimmy's. When we win our contract.

Speaker 11 (01:42:17):
I will come back to my park just for the celebration.

Speaker 8 (01:42:22):
Change everyone's oil while you're down to yeah, yeah, yeah, no,
don't take that long.

Speaker 11 (01:42:27):
I won't be ready for a second.

Speaker 9 (01:42:31):
Yeah, this is, this has been. It could happen here,
and you too can resist both your abuser and your boss,
even when they're the same person, and.

Speaker 17 (01:42:39):
You should, ay man, get them and welcomed.

Speaker 7 (01:43:00):
It could happen here. I'm Andrew's age.

Speaker 6 (01:43:03):
I run andrewism over on YouTube, but I'm here on
this podcast with the one and only.

Speaker 9 (01:43:09):
Mia Wong, who does this podcast most of the time.

Speaker 6 (01:43:14):
Exactly exactly, and I think you and I both have
something in common, which is that we are people, and
we are two people, but the world has a lot
more than just two people. It's a really convoluted way
of saying that. For this episode, we're going to be
talking about population. You know, how many of people there are,

(01:43:36):
and how many of them there will or will not
be in the future, and all the different conversations that
end up happening around.

Speaker 9 (01:43:43):
That, most of which suck. So it's a time truly.

Speaker 7 (01:43:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:43:50):
I mean, every single one of us humans is a
product of billions of years of reproduction. But for most
of that reproduction, population growth was pretty slow.

Speaker 3 (01:44:01):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:44:01):
The world's population is.

Speaker 6 (01:44:03):
Estimated at around five million in the eight thousand BC.
So five million is like the population of New Zealand
right now, or Costa Rica, or Ireland or Norway, but
spread across the entire planet. Can you get so many
people who are alive in the year one? See though,

(01:44:26):
thirty million that's actually an underestimate. It's one hundred and
eighty eight million, jeez, right, So that's between the current
population of Bangladesh and the current population of Brazil, which
are at one hundred and sixty nine million and two
hundred and thirty million, respectively. But that's spread across the
entire planet. So I mean imagine that, you know, a

(01:44:49):
whole world of people so spread out. I mean they
were concentrated into innarios, of course, but you had all
this vast forest land and plains and entire content ccidents
that barely had people compared to today. And the reason
the population grew so slowly was really because, I mean,

(01:45:09):
humans have always been doing the do you know, but
death was kind of a very present phenomenon.

Speaker 7 (01:45:19):
You know.

Speaker 6 (01:45:20):
You had famines, you had plagues, you had the occasional war,
and you especially had a lot of infant mortality. Yeah,
and that's what really kept populations in check. You know,
I remember hearing I don't even remember who it was,
but this one person had like nineteen children and only

(01:45:41):
eight of them survived to adulthood.

Speaker 9 (01:45:44):
Yeah, they honestly did pretty good, like by those metrics, Like, yeah,
then infant mortality rate was unbelievably high.

Speaker 7 (01:45:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:45:53):
Yeah, So families had a lot of children, but only
a few of them made it to adulthood. Thanks to
the industrializations, were able to change a bit. You know,
we improved agriculture, we invented refrigeration, we got better fertilizer,
and most importantly, we developed advancements in sanitisia. You know,

(01:46:14):
doctors were actually washing their hands. You know, we developed vaccines,
so children were dying of measles and mumps.

Speaker 7 (01:46:22):
Imagine that, good Lord.

Speaker 6 (01:46:24):
And we also had an overall improvement in medicine. You know,
one of the greatest inventions of humanity, I think is
the vaccine. And it's such a wonderful thing that there's
not this massive movement of people who challenge it's very
legitimacy in this day and age, and threaten all of

(01:46:45):
our lives as a result.

Speaker 7 (01:46:46):
You know, imagine being in that world.

Speaker 9 (01:46:49):
God.

Speaker 6 (01:46:50):
So we eventually hit one billion in the year eighteen
oh four, which is just below the current population of China,
and things began to accelerate from there. We end up
creating something called a Jacob of exponential population growth thanks
to like I said, the decline in infant mortality and

(01:47:11):
improvements and fertility and food production and the other billionaire
milestone started rolling it. By eighteen oh four, Kiti had
just gained its independence. Napoleon the First was crowned Emperor France,
and Lewis and Clark had begun their expedition across America
in nineteen twenty seven. As one hundred and twenty three

(01:47:32):
years later, we hit two billion people. You know, by
then we had Trotsky being expelled from the USSR, which
had just been founded. We had Charles Linnenberg completing the
first solo non stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. And
then also in nineteen twenty seven, we had the release
of the first feature length film to feature synchronized sound

(01:47:55):
for dialogue. Quite the time to be Alive. The fast
forward to thirty three year later, nineteen sixty, and we
hit three billion people. By then, Nigeria had just gained
it independence. GfK was in the White House, ham the
Chimpanzee went to space, and the FDA approved the first
ever both control pill. But the birth control pill didn't

(01:48:17):
really kick in in terms of, you know, hampering our
growth for some time. By nineteen seventy four, fourteen years later,
we hit four billion people. By then, Nixon had resigned
to He had invaded Cyprus Portugal overthrow its dictatorship. The
Godfather Part two came out, and Aber was still at
the top of the charts. Nineteen eighty seven, thirteen years later,

(01:48:40):
when we got five billion people. That's when we had
most of the major colonies around the world gain the
independence or having already had gained the independence. You know
Thatcher was beginning her third term and The Simpsons first
appayed on TV. Twelve years later in nineteen ninety nine,
we had the Y two K panic, the Impeach Month,

(01:49:01):
the SpongeBob premiere, the introduction of the euro, and six
billion people made their debut on planets twenty eleven. Twelve
years later we hit seven billion people, and that was
in the midst of the Arab Spring, a tsunami hit
in Japan, the Occupy movement, the premiere Game of Thrones,

(01:49:22):
and really the beginning of smartphones and social media taken
over the world. Finally, by twenty twenty two, which is
eleven years after twenty eleven, we hit eight billion people.
Amidst Russia invading in Ukraine, the growing popularity of TikTok,
and Elon's purchase of Twitter. So from eighteen four to

(01:49:47):
twenty twenty two we went from one billion people to
eight billion people, and the un expected to grow by
about one point nine billion between now and twenty one hundred,
so we'll end up breaching from eight point two billion
people to ten point two billion people, and population is
projected to peak at ten point three billion in twenty

(01:50:09):
eighty four and then decline to ten point two billion
through the end of the century. So with this rapid
population growth, there has been a lot of fayars surrounding overpopulation.
Particularly in the late twentieth century and early two thousands,
there was a lot of conversation around, you know, this
population bomb, this worry that there were too many people. Now,

(01:50:34):
at least early on in the population boom, I think
it makes some sense to have concerns. You know, there
had never been this many people on the eighth at
any point in time prior. You know, if you're watching
the numbers climb and climb and climb, you might have
thought we were headed straight for a planet covered in
cities and some kind of collapse. But even before we

(01:50:57):
even hit a billion people. Yeah, idea of overpopulation being
a significant problem wasn't new. In late seventeen hundreds, Thomas
Mauthus argued that population would always outpace food supply, and
his prediction was that there'd be tw many people, not
enough resources, and a decline into famine, disease and mass death.

Speaker 7 (01:51:21):
Now he was.

Speaker 6 (01:51:22):
Obviously proven wrong, but in nineteenth century Britain, Marthus's ideas
helped justify the harsh wealthare policies that that government ended
up implementing, like the spread of workhouses around the country. Also,
we speak about faminis if it's this natural phenomenon that
can't be helped, that is just almost like a hurricane

(01:51:46):
or a tornado. But famines are usually not actually the
result of not having enough food.

Speaker 7 (01:51:53):
You know.

Speaker 6 (01:51:54):
Amartya Sen found that famines usually happened despite food surpluses.
He was usually distribution and not scarcity, you know. A
famous example being you know, during the Irish famine, Ireland
was still exporting tons of food to feed its colonial overlord.

(01:52:14):
So we fast forward to nineteen sixty eight and the
biologist Paul Erlich publishes The Population Bomb. He describes visiting
Delhi and feeling the crush of overpopulation, convinced that massterviation
was imminent in the nineteen seventies. Now, I think that
book that he published was one of the main influences

(01:52:35):
in the widespread panic around overpopulation. You know, governments started
to scramble about a lot of policies were born, likely
from people reading that very book. You know, some of
these policies were fairly benign. You know, you promote family planning,
you improve access to contraceptives, you improve education for women especially,

(01:52:58):
But other approaches were very harsh and brutal. You know,
you had sterilization campaigns, forced sterilization campaigns taking place in
India and Puerto Rico and in the United States. China's
one child policy also gets a lot of attention, but
it was only one example of a widespread brutality around

(01:53:22):
the impositions placed on women, especially in that time, the
fear of too many people and that anxiety leading to
the control of women and their bodies. And it's a
scary prospect, especially if you were a minority in this time,
if you were a cultural, racial, or religious minority, Because

(01:53:43):
it made very ordinary human activity, things like moving around,
having children, just existing being it seemed like an existential
threat to civilization, to humanity that needed to be dealt
with by any means necessary. So they had some positive outcomes,

(01:54:11):
of good positive outcomes of the overpopulation concerned. You know,
you had pushes foreman's empowerment. You had the proposal of
improved urbanization to reduce the sprawl of human activity. You
also have people proposing things like extraterrestrial settlements, which you know,
it's not really realistic as a solution for a multitude

(01:54:35):
of valid reasons.

Speaker 7 (01:54:36):
Yeah, I think it's really.

Speaker 6 (01:54:38):
Funny, you know, whenever other people push that sort of yeah,
humans are destined for the stars kind of narrative. You know,
it's a story, a really powerful story coming out of
science fiction, and it's good that it has inspired people
to learn more about space, and you know that their
lives to the study of the stars and that kind

(01:54:59):
of thing. But this idea that would to be shipping
off like millions of people off planet to settle on
other planets, I think is pretty safely in the realm
of science fiction.

Speaker 9 (01:55:11):
Yeah, that's a full Like get back to me. In
a thousand years, we could baby start talking about moving
like thousands of people.

Speaker 6 (01:55:20):
Yeah, even thousands or hundreds of people. I mean, we
don't have those those massive generationships. We can't even get
those off the ground at this stage in our spacecraft.
And we also have a lot of issues to resolve
on Earth before we spread our problems across the galaxy
as far as I'm concerned. But Beyond these solutions, the

(01:55:41):
ideas and public discourses around population have also boothed a
lot of conspiracy theories. You know, I'm sure you might
have heard a few of them in your time.

Speaker 9 (01:55:51):
Oh boy, yep, this is one of the big Alex
Jones things. For example, So he's convinced that there's like
a giant plot by the globalists to kill off an
enormous part of human population to stop over population or something.

Speaker 6 (01:56:06):
It's yeah, yeah, Honestly, any combination of conspiracies can be
smushed together to fit that kind of narrative, and they
can talk about all the vaccine sterilizing people, the chemtrails,
the five Gita was, the Bill Gates, microchips, they are
even the food supply, all these things allegedly being used

(01:56:30):
to sterilize people. I'm not to say that there isn't
validity to any claims of the things that we consume
contributing to lower fertility. The fact that we clothe ourselves
in like polyester. You know, we still have a full
idea of the impact of microplastics on our bodies. You know,

(01:56:53):
there's valid concerns about some of the consequences of the
ultra processed foods that you know, fill out grocery shells.
But that's just the sad thing about conspiracy theories. You know,
they have some kleinos of truth mixed in to boster.
They have validity, but then they mix it up with

(01:57:14):
a bunch of garbage about you know that's a nonsense. Yeah,
And then of course, I mean some of these consciracy
theories are kind of benign.

Speaker 7 (01:57:23):
You know, like if you think it's.

Speaker 6 (01:57:24):
Five gitas, I guess you'd put a I don't know,
a tinfoil hat on your junk.

Speaker 9 (01:57:32):
But I mean, to be fair, there was one of
the five g guys who did like blow himself up
at a giant car bomb.

Speaker 7 (01:57:39):
I did not hear about that a couple of years
ago down.

Speaker 9 (01:57:42):
Oh yeah, luckily he only killed himself, but giant giant
car bomb in the middle of I wanted to say
Memphis or something down Yeah. But yeah, so like every
once in a while he gets some real oh boys
stuff from that.

Speaker 7 (01:58:00):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:58:01):
I mean, honestly, people could take even the simplest things
and turn it into a threat to themselves and others
if they're not in the right headspace. So they haven't
been given the right sports sad rely and obviously like
none of the conspiracies of A nine. I mean, if
you have people rejecting vaccines, you know, it's almost like

(01:58:22):
we're in the world that I alluded to earlier, you know,
where we have our residence and measles.

Speaker 7 (01:58:28):
For example.

Speaker 9 (01:58:30):
Yeah, Jim O'Neil, who's the Deputy Secretary of Health and
Human Services and the acting director for the CDC literally
on Monday, called for splitting the MMR vaccine it's multiple vaccines, like,
which is basically which is just straight up the Andrew
Wakefield I think, like I've said this on seven podcasts
on this show now, but this is literally just straight

(01:58:53):
up the Andrew Wakefield anti vaccine thing from the original
giant anti vaccine panic in the nineties.

Speaker 7 (01:58:58):
That was the autism seeing thing.

Speaker 9 (01:59:01):
Yeah yeah, like and this is this is this is
the guy who's currently running the CDC. It's just being like, no, yeah,
you should do this thing.

Speaker 7 (01:59:07):
That's yeah, yeah, you guys are cooked.

Speaker 9 (01:59:10):
Yeah again, this thing that was developed specifically so that
Antie Wakefield could sell his own vaccine.

Speaker 7 (01:59:15):
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean that's that's the thing.

Speaker 6 (01:59:19):
If I was conspiracy brain, I would say that actually
the popularization of vaccine conspiracies on social media sites contributes
to exactly that kind of population control that those same
conspiracy theorists famonga about. But that's if I was conspiracy brain,
which I'm not.

Speaker 9 (01:59:38):
God, So someone someone believes that somewhere, absolutely, there is
someone who's like, the anti vaxxers are a conspiracy to
call them goal population or something like.

Speaker 6 (01:59:49):
No, because I mean, we have this very straightforwardly effective
human invention and one of the best in the history
of humankind. And you're telling me that a couple of
people on Facebook and are responsible for the entire government
rejecting the effectiveness of vaccines and you know, jeopardizing the

(02:00:13):
healthy entire population.

Speaker 9 (02:00:15):
Come on, yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the true believers are
in charge now.

Speaker 6 (02:00:24):
Indeed, indeed they are true believers, and of course people
who stand to profit from the dip in the sales
of paracetamol and whatever else. So they're those conspiracies about population.
And then there's the typical far right Nazi conspiracies about
great replacement, right, the idea that shataway elites orchestrating falling

(02:00:48):
blue rates among white populations while encouraging immigration from the
population boomen global seuth. I mean, of course, not all
the global self is woomen population wise, a lot of
please there's also experience in decline. It's a global problem.
But we're going to get to that. Unconnected, of course,
to those great replacement times. So you have the eco

(02:01:09):
fash with their worries about the environmental impact of population,
and their twisted belief that environmental collapse could be solved
by reducing the number of people, which usually ends up
target in marginalized groups, which is exactly the kind of
thinking that inspired real violence, like with the Christian shooter
in twenty nineteen. And of course the actual drivers of

(02:01:31):
ecological collapse are not poor families in India or Africa
having too many kids. It's the over consumption of the
global norse. You know, if you actually wanted to reduce consumption,
reduce the impact of population on the planet, are you
going to start with fewer people? Are going to start
with fewer billionaires flying private jets. You know, it's not

(02:01:54):
about the number of people they head count, it's about
their lifestyles and the systems that support what those lifestyles.
You know, believing population is a very cheap, simplistic and
cowardly get out of jail free code for the rich
minority that drive this systemic crisis.

Speaker 3 (02:02:13):
Yep.

Speaker 9 (02:02:14):
The thing about this, obviously is that if you believe
that you need to reduce the human population, that it's
your obligation to go first.

Speaker 6 (02:02:21):
Yes, well, we are going to talk about those types
of people in the next episode. But you know, speaking
of the overpopulation, I think nowadays at least an opposite
concern that is dominating the headlines. You know, in wealthier,
more developed countries, fertility tends to be lower, and that's
tied to things like back to education, more women working,

(02:02:44):
urban living, greater choices, greater access to contraception, et cetera.
But in less developed countries, fertility is usually higher because
children are often seen as both help and hands and
future caregivers, and education and access to both control are
more limited. But the global fertility rate is now steadily
dropping due to that increasing development, greater access to birth control,

(02:03:06):
creater education of women's rights, And there's a fair nowadays
where there won't be enough people to support the system
as it has been built. Remember, capitalism is predicated on
endless growth. When its population starts to decline, naturally, everything
that is building towards in terms of the amount of consumers,

(02:03:26):
the amount of infrastructure, the amount of workers. Those are
not going to be there anymore, especially as more and
more people end up dipping out of the workforce as
they age. So in twenty three, the global average had

(02:03:50):
dropped to just two point three children poor women, which
is less than half of what it was sixty years ago.
According to the United Nations, fertility will keep fallen throughout
the century, and by the year twenty one hundred, the
global average is expected to dip the low replacement level
of two point one to about one point eight children

(02:04:11):
poor woman. Now, some countries are already there. Japan sits
at a one point two children poor woman, Italy, Spain,
and much of Eastern Europe are well below one point five.
South Korea is famously a demographic outlier at zero point
seven children poor woman, which is the lowest facility rate

(02:04:31):
in the world. And that means obviously that on average,
Korean women are having less than one child each for
very valid reasons, I might add, considering the economic and
cultural conditions in that country. Now, I don't live in
Eastern Europe or Southern Europe or East Asia, I live

(02:04:53):
in the Caribbean.

Speaker 7 (02:04:53):
I live in Trinan, Tobago.

Speaker 6 (02:04:55):
But speaking anecdotally at least, which obviously is not representative
of the full picture, I can count, maybe had one hand,
the number of people I know my age who think
that they'll be able to bring children into the world,
whether they want.

Speaker 7 (02:05:10):
To or not.

Speaker 6 (02:05:12):
You know, very few people I know actually want children,
or if they do want children, they don't think they'll
be able to afford to have children. But maybe that's
a selfishness. What do you think.

Speaker 9 (02:05:24):
I mean, I don't know, like I am not interacting
with a representative example of the population. But no, yeah,
I mean it's a lot of people who are like no,
and it's too expensive. It sucks, I don't want to

(02:05:44):
deal with this. But again, like, not not a representative
sample here.

Speaker 6 (02:05:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean you could just look at
the economy. Things have been getting wood for my entire life.
You know, there hasn't been any point in my life
where anyone in my generation could look around honestly and say, yeah,
you know, this is we be cooking. You know, it's
time to double double it. You know, let's have a child.
You know, the housing situation has gotten worse. The cost

(02:06:14):
of living and as a whole has gotten worse, child
care costs have gotten worse. And of course, outside of
that economic stuff, there's also cultural attitude shifts and people
realizing I don't need to have a child to be fulfilled,
to find meaning. You know, people are able to pursue
higher education, and also they're more educated about the process

(02:06:36):
of child bearing in general, including the very valid medical
concerns surrounding that whole process. I mean, if I were
a woman, I would not want to have a child.
You know, the consequences on their bodies, on their minds,
and their health, the risks to their very life are

(02:06:58):
not something that can be swept aside as it was previously.
People are aware of it now, people are talking about
it now, and they are empowered to make decisions that
be right for them. You know, a lot of people
are also very much focused on their careers, either by
choice or because they don't have any other choice but
to focus on putting food on the table. You know,

(02:07:18):
people are also getting married later and as a whole,
we have shifted to what a more individual society. So
you know, in the past you did have the extended families,
the closet communities that made raising children a bit more manageable.
But today it's a bit rarer to find, and you

(02:07:38):
send to see a lot more nuclear families or even
just individuals going at it a loonan you know, less
support and more isolation, and so it makes it very difficult.
And then there's the existential angst of it all. You know,
I can't forget the fact that there are multiple wars
waging around the world. You know, there's a lot of
political instability in much of the world, and of course

(02:08:00):
the biggest issue of all climate change, which makes it honestly,
it makes it feel it responsible to even think about
bringing a child into this mess. So a declining fertility,
a decline in population, it has the government's panicing. You know,
China went from having decades of a one child policy

(02:08:23):
to now desperately trying to encourage people to have more babies.
They're offering cash bonuses and housing books and extended parent
to leave. But it's not really working. You know, as
populations are aging, there's a lot more elderly people to
care for and fewer workinish people to support them. So
that is you know, a recipe for pension crises and

(02:08:44):
labor shortages and spiral and healthcare costs. So some governments
are even trying to raise the retirement age, which, as
France and their protests have shown, is not going to
go over well with much of the population. Nobody wants
to work extra five years and extra ten years more
when they've already put so much of their lives to

(02:09:06):
these dead end pointless and you know, mentally and physically
dreaming tasks that really just line the pockets of their bosses.

Speaker 9 (02:09:17):
It is worth pointing out the last year there was
a pretty massive raise in the retirement age people in China.
That's being phased in a way where're going to take
over the course of fifteen years. It goes up gradually
to sort of like spread out the anger over it.
But yeah, it is worth noting that China's is like
significantly increased or is going to significantly increase over the

(02:09:40):
course of the next fifteen years.

Speaker 7 (02:09:43):
M Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:09:44):
And then on the other side of things, there is
in the retirement age now, but the young people who
are working today are more than likely not going to
get any kind of pension.

Speaker 7 (02:09:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:09:56):
Yeah, I've rather the world of my sixty don't look
like the world of my twenties, that would be my preference.
So I would rather that we've reached a point as
a society where pensions are not the necessary band aid
that they are right now. But until then, you know,
there's quite the powder keg.

Speaker 7 (02:10:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:10:19):
We also have in Eastern Europe, you know, you have
countries rolling out pro natalist policies that tie financial support
directly to family size. I'm going to get a bit
more into pronatalists in the next episode. But there's also
the darker side of that pronatalist push in terms of

(02:10:40):
the policies meant to reverse the population decline. Some governments,
instead of making life better for potential appearance, are criminalizing
They're turning to anti choice policies. They are strict in abortion,
and they're limited reproductive rights. They're demonizing child free lifestyles.
Russia actually recently criminalized what they called child the free propaganda,

(02:11:04):
you know. And then this is also part of a
broader conversation about population where they have the immigration concerns
as a political flashpoint because a lot of wealthy countries,
because of their population decline, are starting to rely more
on immigrants to keep their economies going. But as a
flip side that tends to fuel backlash from the farhad

(02:11:27):
groups who are able to frame it as a threat
to national identity, and because the system of the states
and capitalism is not interested in actually taking care of people,
those immigrants become a very useful scapegoat.

Speaker 7 (02:11:41):
You know.

Speaker 6 (02:11:41):
Obviously, I'm in support of people moving and living wherever
they want to move and live as they please. I
don't believe in borders, especially as the climate consequences are
hitting those of us in the global South boost. But
I also I'm not a fan of the way that
some progressives end up talking about immigration, where they act

(02:12:01):
as if, you know, the global sealth is like a
population bank that wealthy countries could tap into and you know,
pull population from, regardless of the consequences on the home
countries of these people. You know, it's like, let immigrants come,
and I'm all for that, But then it's also like,
your your government is destabilizing their governments, your your system,

(02:12:24):
your economic system, and the global economic systems beaking life
in those countries unlivable. And I think the priority also
needs to be on dealing with that issue and not
just shrugging and saying, well, you know, not. At least
immigrants are able to help our economy stay aflut even
as their countries languish and suffer. So to kind of

(02:12:47):
wrap things up, where does this all leave us? You know,
for centuries we feared having two many people, and now
we're signed to fair having too few people, and both
anxieties are shaping policy, feel and racy theories and sparkan
culture wars. And whether the future holds overcrowded cities or
ghost towns really depends on the direction of politics, economy, culture,

(02:13:11):
and urban designs.

Speaker 7 (02:13:12):
Teak.

Speaker 6 (02:13:13):
On the next episode, I'm going to be talking about
the ideas around the population, the pro natalists and the
anti natalists. But until then, I've been Andrew Sage here
with Mia Wong on it could Happen Here.

Speaker 9 (02:13:28):
This.

Speaker 12 (02:13:49):
Trigger Trader, I heard ah, Hello, Welcome to It could
Happen Here? The Spooky Special. I'm your host, Garrison Davis.
Once again, there has been far too many important world
events taking precedents that we here at the show are
unable to provide listeners with an entire spooky week's worth

(02:14:11):
of themed episodes. But I know how important Halloween is
for many millennials, so I've taken it upon myself to
produce two spooky episodes to book and the Holiday, this
episode that you're listening to right now, as well as
another that will release Monday morning or Sunday night. As

(02:14:32):
the world is becoming an increasingly spooky, scary place, I
needed to up the ante to exceed the weird and
eerie fright that comes from living in America and the
world in general in twenty twenty five. So last week
I traveled from New York to Brussels, briefly caught up

(02:14:53):
with my close personal friend and colleague Hinton, and then
took the train to Germany. Very scary indeed, once in Germany,
I was confronted with seemingly occult words and symbols. People
spoke in odd incantations. I came across a map that
appeared via my black scrying mirror the iPhone, which, upon deciphering,

(02:15:15):
led me to an old power plant warehouse in East Berlin.
I entered this dark, looming building and inside the air
was thick with smoke and incense. Figures dressed in all
black emerged from the fog, Witches, wizards and magicians. I
followed them into a candlelit room. Where hooded occultists conducted

(02:15:37):
a ritual welcoming us to the twenty twenty five A
Culture Conference. A Culture is a by yearly conference that's
once every two years, focusing on the intersection of occultism
and culture, pop or otherwise. This is arguably the most
prestigious occultism conference in the world. I have been wanting

(02:16:00):
to attend four years, and I was finally able to
go this go round on the condition that I make
four podcast episodes. The two that I'm releasing this week
and next will cover some of the core magical and
topical currents throughout the conference, mostly via a panel discussion
between myself and three other attendees, and then before Christmas,

(02:16:24):
I'll have two fully scripted episodes interrogating these concepts further
and discussing the use of occult practice in twenty twenty five.
So to start, let's meet our panelists. I should introduce
my magical travel team for this conference. Let's start with Delta,

(02:16:47):
a Belgian magician and artist which I recruited to join
me in this wacky adventure. Delta Sahi, Hello, what do
you do, Delta? What's your magical specialty? I suppose well,
it's kind of into the microphone. It's kind of a
mix of things where.

Speaker 18 (02:17:07):
Part of it is.

Speaker 12 (02:17:07):
Just into the microphone. I'm sorry, how you can you
can you can get you can get prety close to.

Speaker 19 (02:17:13):
It, Okay. It's a kind of a mix of things
really between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical like weird
theory stuff like Mark Fisher and the CCRU adjacent things.

Speaker 12 (02:17:27):
We talk a lot about Mark Fisher, some landstuff, metafiction theory, fiction, hyperstition,
Delta myself talk about magic through the Internet quite a
bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is
relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left.

Speaker 18 (02:17:48):
I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan.
I practiced the Vasriana, a Greco Egyptian magical practice, and
also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that,
I was also an academic for a good period of
time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy,

(02:18:10):
and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide
and varied.

Speaker 12 (02:18:15):
We've been making a lot of Hegel jokes this weekend,
so many Hegel jokes our last crew member, which people
may have heard before on various shows him.

Speaker 20 (02:18:25):
My name is Elaine, and I make art and research
a lot of Renaissance script mark magic, and most of
the things I do are a lot of idiosyncratic practices
and based on various folk magic and chaos magic and

(02:18:45):
Balkan folk magic.

Speaker 12 (02:18:47):
Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests,
let's start by discussing the word a culture, the namesake
of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the
word ac cult and culture, and it describes how the
two influence and possibly undermine one another. To read a

(02:19:09):
quote from the person who originated the term, quote, a
culture is a word that was inevitable during the hyperactive
phase of the Temple of Psychic Youth in the nineteen eighties.
We were casting around for an all embracing term to
describe an approach to combining a unique, demystified spiritual philosophy

(02:19:30):
with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible.
At any given moment, our sensory environment is whispering to us,
telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue
between every level of popular cultural forms and magical conclusions
is what we named a culture unquote. That is from

(02:19:53):
genesis b Puurage a musician, magician, artist, a cult leader,
and hashtag slightly problematic queer icon. In the seventies, they
started the band Throbbing Gristle, pioneered industrial music, and later
started the Chaos magic organization, the Temple of Psychic Youth
and its associated band Psychic TV. Though a culture did

(02:20:17):
not just describe this sort of personal spiritual movement, it
carried a strong offensive element targeted against society and perceived
systems of control. Through their many projects, including Throbbing Gristle
Psychic TV in the Temple of Psychic Youth, Purage utilized
art and magical practice to conduct a quote unquote war

(02:20:38):
on culture. Similar to another figure that will soon get
to william S. Burrows, a culture describes a process of
cultural osmosis. The occult bleeds into and morph's culture, affecting
everything from pop culture to politics and philosophy. But as
a part of this osmosis, the occult becomes increasingly commodified, knowable, safe, territory, marketable.

(02:21:06):
The hidden occult loses its very essence of being hidden
despite its use as a tool of attack against mainstream culture.
Like most countercultural forms, the occult has been largely recuperated.
Even creative works which our genuine explorations into the occult

(02:21:27):
fall into this recuperation herodigm. They get turned into products
consumed by mostly secular audience, like the works of Dueling Wizards,
Allen Moore and Grant Morrison. Now some occultists rejoice, knowing
that this wide exposure will influence more people to become
interested in or adopt occult practices of their own, while

(02:21:50):
others bemoan this dilution and commodification of what to them
is an important spiritual practice. As the modern occult revival,
along with a heavy helping hand of scientific advancement, de
territorialized Christian hegemonic religion. Now the occult itself has been
re territorialized, which is not to say that the occult

(02:22:13):
is no longer a field of play, which is what
this conference attempts to assert. Let's go back to the panel.

Speaker 18 (02:22:21):
In terms of the conference itself, as we'll get into later,
the term a culture very specifically seems to be focused
on the study of the interrelation of magical practice and
the material aspects of occult culture and its influence and

(02:22:42):
appropriation by wider society. So in terms of political projects
or social projects, you can probably relate this. I think
that it would be fair to say that it's something
like culture jamming if we're looking for some familiar concepts
for people to map onto. That is to say, a
focus of way from simply solitary practice in the ways
in which occult elements influence broader aspects of our society

(02:23:07):
or are appropriated, whether that's through consumerist forces or through
various artistic practices, or even the production of for example,
film television movies. So I think that's a fair assessment
of the impacts of a culture.

Speaker 12 (02:23:23):
And relevant to our discussion later. It's influenced in the
tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current
manifestation of has some heavily occult origins regarding around a
whole bunch of people in the nineties who were writing
about AI as this as this occult project, and that
influenced many a AI engineer and coder who are now

(02:23:45):
building this stuff and it's becoming an ever present part
of our lives, and the occultists now are trying to
incorporate it into their own practice, which we will discuss
in a sect. Any other notes on a culture as
a concept or what this conference is doing with the concept.

Speaker 20 (02:24:01):
I think a culture is a concept is something that's
basically been around as long as there's been magical practices,
just looking at so much of things, like you know,
the concept of the British Empire being invented by John
d because of conversations he was having with angels. So
I think that naming it and calling it something is

(02:24:25):
also very much felt like an attempt to sort of
regain control over the ways that magical practice and greater
society seem to influence each other, as opposed to a
more unintentional way that they have been going back and
forth for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Speaker 18 (02:24:47):
There may also be one other aspect that's important for
our American audience is given that we're recording this in Deutschland,
this conference varies significantly from other American equivalent, or something
that might be an American equivalent formerly Pantheaicon in and
around San Francisco and San Jose specifically, or Paganicon in

(02:25:08):
the Twin Cities, which specifically has much more of a
new age neopagan reconstructionist, and so most academic discussion is
viewed with some suspicion. And I'm hesitant to say that
there's an anti intellectual trend because I don't necessarily think
that's true. However, there is a resistance to the kind

(02:25:29):
of academic styling that we saw very prevalent at this
conference to talk about the occult more generally as an
area of study in addition to just idiosyncratic practice or
part of a larger social neopagan movement, which is again
very much the focus of most US based conferences.

Speaker 12 (02:25:50):
As an editorial note, when we're talking about magic, to clarify,
we're not talking about stage magicians. We're referring to magic
with a K. That is, rituals and practices based on
occult knowledge. It seeks to cause change in accordance with will,
whether that's changed within yourself or in our consensus reality.

(02:26:14):
Occult magical practice can also serve as a form of spirituality, mysticism,
an alternative religious practice or an alternative to religion, with
its beliefs in practice largely influenced by historical esoteric orders,
mystery traditions, paganism, witchcraft, herbalism, astrology, hermantic philosophy, and alchemy,

(02:26:35):
and all these things are influences. I'm not saying that
the actual historic manifestations of these things are the same
as the modern occult practices that are influenced by these things,
because often these can be wildly varying, especially when you
talk about things like witchcraft and alchemy, which have been
misinterpreted or reconstructed into completely new forms than what the

(02:26:58):
historical manifestation of them actually contained. But a lot of
modern day ocultism has manifested as an individually mediated spirituality
containing some of the group ritual or ritual aspects of
something like Catholicism, but with the individuality of Protestantism. Many
conferences have an opening ceremony, and as I previously mentioned,

(02:27:22):
a culture had an opening ritual. This accomplishes a very
similar goal to any opening ceremony, to get attendees in
a certain headspace, prepare them for the rest of the conference,
and set a certain mood in which the rest of
the events will kind of follow suit. The a culture
opening ritual called upon the attendee's demiurgic capacity. How they

(02:27:46):
are part of creating the reality of what this conference
is and how it will continue for the next few days.
Back to the panel. The framing of the ritual was
a blindfolded woman holding the scales of balance, and each
person put a intention for the week, or for the conference,
or for themselves into a stone, which was handed out

(02:28:08):
to each person who entered the ritual, and at certain
point these stones were placed on to the scales of
balance to create an equilibrium between the two sides of
the scale, along with the you know, chanting, meditation, and
a lot of incense.

Speaker 18 (02:28:24):
A significant deal of incense given that we were in
a former German forge warehouse. The you know, billowing smoke
that existed throughout the conference, from fires to incense to
various other inflammatory items was rather impressive. But in terms
of actual ritual design, it met several elements that I

(02:28:46):
found to be rather impressive. One, it was encompassing of
all of those elements that we would later expect to
see in the actual body of the conference itself. In
terms of like the artistic performances, the musical you know,
metal golf music that was played, but also a very
practical and open approach to ritual. It was highly inclusive.

(02:29:08):
Everyone who was there participated. It did an exceptional job
I felt of actually bringing setting intention and adding to
I don't know, at risk of sounding to new age
the vibrations that we all felt as we engaged and
were present. The theatrical quality, I have to say, was
also very much.

Speaker 19 (02:29:27):
Dark and spooky.

Speaker 18 (02:29:28):
Dark and spooky, but something to be admired.

Speaker 2 (02:29:30):
They did a very good.

Speaker 12 (02:29:31):
Job, definitely one of the more high effort rituals of
the weekend in terms of the performative aspect, with there
being little less than a dozen hooded cloaked figures stationed
at different points, either holding specific positions in a meditative
state for probably over half an hour, standing still in
a decision that would become uncomfortable, and swinging, swinging incense,

(02:29:54):
or holding torches or lights. Setting intention specifically is usually
you talk to these people. The first step of any
kind of magical working is setting your intention for what
the work is supposed to do or accomplish in you
or out into the world. Mirroring the opening ritual, Culture
twenty twenty five little booklet has a few paragraphs on

(02:30:16):
the concept for this conference, talking about the cosmic craftsman
as the demiir to shapes matter and spirit alike who
embodies creation and transformation, revealing both the light and the hidden,
the shadowed face of the divine, as well as having
cosmic balance and balancing destruction with creation and order and

(02:30:38):
chaos and the hidden and the scene. The last paragraph
in which I will read I think relates specifically to
this show and the cultural political aspects quote. In the
age of relentless acceleration, the craftsman becomes a figure of resistance.
His patience and ritual discipline reclaims sacred time, restoring a

(02:31:00):
them beyond the acceleration of modern life. A Culture twenty
twenty five invites us to dwell in this threshold where creation, intuition,
and the hidden divine converge, and with that we converge
on an outbreak. Welcome back to the it could happen here,

(02:31:27):
Spooky Special On the A Culture Conference. The figure name
dropped the most throughout this conference might surprise some people,
because I'm assuming most do not consider him to be
an occultist or really a serious occult figure. The most
discussed individual, at least in my experience of the conference,

(02:31:50):
was not Alistair Crowley, John d someone like Lena Blovotsky,
but in fact william S Burrows. And now we'll return
to the panel to discuss the Burrosian current. Let's talk
about what I would argue was the strongest current throughout

(02:32:14):
this conference, what I'm gonna call the Burrosian current, relating
to writer, beat poet, and mystic and occultists in his
own right, William S Burrows and the magical technology that
he either invented or popularized in the second half of
the twentieth century and played a significant role in influencing

(02:32:36):
successor movements such as chaos magic and even the work
of the CCRU and Land and Fisher. The very first
talk that we attended was specifically on Burroughs, and Burrows
ghost haunted the remainder of the conference thereafter and introduced
a few of the key tensions throughout the rest of

(02:32:58):
the conference which we will discuss as specifically technology in AI.

Speaker 18 (02:33:02):
So our first talk by castro Opstrop, who I believe
was Swedish, one of those.

Speaker 19 (02:33:09):
He was working at the University of Copenhagen.

Speaker 18 (02:33:11):
The University of Copenhagen certainly Scandinavian of some flavor of variety,
focused on William S Burrows and Brian Geyson, I think
that it's important, and I appreciated this claim on the
outset that they argued that both Geyson and Burroughs are
actually closer to the late Surrealists rather than to the
beat poets generation which we typically associate them with, which,

(02:33:35):
interestingly enough, I made both of these figures far more
compelling to me my understanding of them. I mean, despite
my familiarity with the cut up method, and you know,
several of the things that Burrows had written, I always
considered them far more beat and therefore less less of
interest to me specifically. But this proximity to the Surrealists,

(02:33:56):
especially the late latter Surrealists, I found particularly compelled, and
I think that brings us to the real focus of
this talk was Burrows's cut up method and another book
that he published on the Third Mind, which gave way
to the latter discussions on artificial intelligence and large language models.

Speaker 12 (02:34:15):
So Burrows definitely popularized the cut up method, which Geyson originated,
but Burroughs changed its different forms of manifestations to various
mediums of art like the tape recorder and his own
writings and just words and language. And I guess the
reason why I think talking about this current is important
to start. Is also revolves around this idea of magic

(02:34:36):
as this form of like resistance or this like a
culture jamming practice, which Burrows framed his own work in
his like a you know, work that could we could
just describe as like esoteric or inspired byesoterism or achieving
esotericals is specifically for this cultural infusion to to disrupt
mainstream culture in some capacity, to go against the one

(02:34:59):
God universe, sometimes in an anarchic way, sometimes in a
libertarian way. There's a mix of a mix of like
motivations that play here, same thing with like Robert Anton Wilson,
which I'm sure you've heard Robert Evans talk about before.
These were contemporaries. These guys were friends and operating under
like similar goals of disrupting culture through these techniques which

(02:35:24):
they thought literally like disrupted the linear flow of culture
or the mechanisms of control such as like language and
linear time, which later gets developed on by Land and Fissure.

Speaker 20 (02:35:38):
Yeah, I think looking at some of my notes, some
of the things that stuck out to me, especially in
view of the fact that the other classes going on
at the time began with Alistair Crowley, but we're diving
into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions.
Was that language can shape reality, which is something that

(02:35:59):
would also be held by a lot of the classical
magical ideas that sound and image have a cult power,
which is very true in a lot of magical traditions
dating back to the Pickatrix and more ancient texts, and
that tech available at the time can be a magical instrument,
which the tech available currently and for William Burrows is

(02:36:22):
very different than classical tech, but is something that has
been done for a very long time as well. What
really changes is stepping out of the idea of a
linear representation of it and into something that could be edited,
cut and reprogrammed, specifically using technology that allowed that as

(02:36:44):
opposed to something that you're trying to control solely through
say more spiritual magical acts. It's something that you can
do with a tape recording.

Speaker 12 (02:36:53):
And this is like you know, based on forms like
social engineering and the manipulation of the reproduction of reality,
which Burrows believes language plays a key role in, even
though I might disagree with him in a few ways
on like the nature of like a language as a
as a human concept versus this like alien concept which
it's like infected to human delta. You should explain what

(02:37:15):
the cut up method is.

Speaker 19 (02:37:18):
Yes, well, the name itself kind of is self explanatory,
but the idea of being essentially too thick any form
of texts or writing, cut up the words or pieces
of sentences, jumble them up in a hat or a
bucket or whatever, and then kind of like play a

(02:37:39):
jigsaw puzzle with language, reshifting sentences into new ideas and
new forms of poetry, especially which I'm just looking at
my own cut ups right in front of me.

Speaker 12 (02:37:52):
To force like randomized combinations of the word that you
would not choose to combine on your own volition, and
seeing why that sort of thought that generates what're kind
of meaning can be constructed through that combination exactly.

Speaker 20 (02:38:06):
We're on some of the first cut ups done with
books and just making holes, cutting out words and seeing
the other words that would appear underneath, and if new
meaning would arise through the surprise combinations.

Speaker 12 (02:38:19):
Words from like the future or the past presenting themselves
into a current present within the book.

Speaker 7 (02:38:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 19 (02:38:25):
I think one of the Boroughs quotes is when you
cut into the present, the future leaks out, which.

Speaker 18 (02:38:29):
Is related to the concept of time sorcery that was
talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think
another element to the cut up method that's important, especially
as it was framed in this a culture context, is
as the we quoted from the or as I wrote
this quote down from the actual lecture itself. Reality is
made of words, images, and vibrations, and sounds and images

(02:38:52):
have occult power, and therefore these sounds and images and
words can be marshaled or used, edited, cut through, rearranged
for the purposes of reprogramming. It's fascinating because I think
that this really is something that carries through to the
whole conference, and not just the Burrow's method, but what

(02:39:16):
this Burrow's method or the Barosian current of the conference.
It seems that there was a problematic I mean, we
started basically with Dari Da, and we ended with Dari Da.
We with discussions of like critiques of the master narrative
that we get from you know, Deluze and Leotard and
Baudriard and these people. But the goal of this cut
up method was to rewrite the master narrative. So again

(02:39:40):
back to that concept of culture jamming. As Ger said,
this concept of the one God universe, this cut up
method is meant to interrupt the linearity of words of language,
that is a process of control. So I issue with
this concept of language as a virus because that implies

(02:40:04):
that it's a foreign body, and I mean it's true
post structuralists. I guess that I am there is no
outside to language, and I think that that's actually something
that shines through in this third mind concept.

Speaker 12 (02:40:15):
As two people work together on something, there's a composite
mind that like emerges and affects the work is the
concept there.

Speaker 18 (02:40:24):
So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence
communicates with you through the revelation of the new that
was already present. And I think that that's really important
to point out because it's not as though there's this
outside thing. The implication is from this method is that
the new reveals itself through this process that's already present

(02:40:48):
in language. Because this is a question that I had
throughout is that if language is this foreign entity that
dominates us through control, and the method itself is language,
then how are we not just re I mean, I
guess it's a kind of inoculation. If we have a
you know, a theory of language that is based in
you know, what what do we call this? What is

(02:41:10):
it that we all just got during COVID kevin fever? No, no,
the things that we inject into our body that created
the indo vaccines? There we go, that's the ticket inoculations.

Speaker 12 (02:41:20):
Not all, not all of us got vaccines.

Speaker 2 (02:41:23):
Okay, care.

Speaker 18 (02:41:25):
You heard it here first vaccine did not know where
was it going with this? Okay?

Speaker 12 (02:41:31):
Speaking of methods of speaking of methods of control.

Speaker 8 (02:41:35):
I mean a lot of it.

Speaker 18 (02:41:35):
The new just came out there. Wait just one moment, Sorry, Elane.
I likened this to this process of dialectics. But that's
because I couldn't shut up about Hagel the entire time
we were there, because I don't think enough occultists are
talking about Hegel. Why is no one talking about Hegel?
Everyone should be talking about Hegel.

Speaker 12 (02:41:58):
I mean, as fun as it is to think about this,
like third mind as like an egg grigor figure, which
we've we've mentioned before, is like it's like a group
thought form, like a being or a force that is
generated through through multiple people believing in it. You make
up an imaginary friend in a way, that's what of

(02:42:18):
a severtre, but true in a grigoras as a is yeah,
of a form of thought that they gained its own,
like an autonomy and becomes kind of, you know, like
a like a little tiny.

Speaker 18 (02:42:31):
God, I guess.

Speaker 12 (02:42:32):
Or they also combined the third mind idea to like
network consciousness. The one last thing I will say on
this before we get to like the AI aspect, I guess.
On this culture jamming nonlinearity is the concept of the
circuit jump, which was playing back words from from politicians

(02:42:53):
in different contexts as a sort of like a Uno
reverso psychic attack, which I don't know if that actually
works considering the current's political situation, but this is certainly
a tactic to which I have employed many such cases,
and we see a lot of people attempt attempt to

(02:43:13):
do this, and I think there are certain figures who
have their own very strong magical force field protecting them,
which has been pretty evident through the past ten years,
including the President of the United States. But as a
as a circuit jump is playing something from the wrong
the wrong time in a different context as a as

(02:43:34):
a form of attack. The most famous conversion of this,
which isn't necessarily for political ends, so this was for
personal ends. It's the Burroughs cafe incident, which I've been
a fan of for years, in which he was slighted
by a cafe so then he started recording.

Speaker 20 (02:43:50):
All that happened was they changed their menu and he
couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day.

Speaker 12 (02:43:55):
There's been some menus that have changed that I would
consider us using this tactic where he recorded sounds from
from outside of like people talking or arguing, or walking
by or plates dropping, and then played them back outside
of the cafe for a series of months until the
cafe closed. And this is like the funniest, the funniest

(02:44:16):
form of this sort of magical obsession, because this really
is just a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front
of a cafe until they close. I mean it worked,
of yeah, playing back sounds of you know, arguing, fighting,
plates is smashing, which would probably create a negative aura
around around this building. But that is that is the

(02:44:39):
most most funny of Burrows the circu jump moment. Although
I mean burrows life is full of these humorous and
sometimes worrying anecdotes.

Speaker 20 (02:44:48):
There's one other thing that stuck out to me. Given
what a lot of the other talks in that space
ended up dealing with, along with AI and stuff, was
really the speaker talking a lot about the fact that
for Burros and Geyson, the reproduction of reality is how
control occurs. And so the goal was to manipulate the

(02:45:11):
reproduction of reality, because if you can manipulate the reproduction
of reality, you are also manipulating reality itself, which I
don't think anyone went into nearly as much, but is
something that we're seeing with say even the Republican Party
releasing deep fake videos of Democratic politicians.

Speaker 12 (02:45:30):
Yeah, and this is something our materialist friend does talk about,
is how there's a quote from some neo cons about
how like Democrats just have to kind of like you know,
react to reality versus the Republicans who generate it, and
they like decide what reality is. And you can see
this with all of the sort of moral panics which

(02:45:50):
have spread across the United States and around the world
the past few years, whether that's gender ideology, with it's immigration,
whether that's this non existent crime wave, or it is
a genuine like creation of reality. And then this this
this goes into you know, the Burrows ideas later get
developed by a group of academics and occultists that formed
the c c r U. This included say Plant nick Land,

(02:46:14):
who then turned to the dark side, and uh the
since past Mark Fisher, who put a name to some
of this sort of phenomenon called the hyperstition, which is
Robert has talked about before in the show. But it
is it is a self fulfilling prophecy. It is a
fiction that becomes true through the creation of the fiction

(02:46:35):
and the dissemination of this fiction. And this is part
of how reality can get formed, is through these falsehoods
that that through through repetition and dissemination, become self manifest.

Speaker 19 (02:46:48):
The thing about that, though, is that the high perstitional
model itself requires to the acceptance of the idea that
everything is a fiction.

Speaker 12 (02:46:56):
Yes, like well yeah, I mean a lot of those
things go through a process like this, yes, yes, yes,
but doing doing such a thing like intentionally and like offensively, right,
which is which is the idea that we're discussing here
in like a political context. Is this this this offensive
reality formation where you literally decide what is real and

(02:47:18):
like what isn't. And you know, if you have hundreds
of millions dollars in like a news company at your disposal,
this can become easier.

Speaker 20 (02:47:26):
Are you saying that media companies are currently cutting up
reality to shape it in the image of the people
who fund them.

Speaker 12 (02:47:33):
Yeah, yeah, I mean they are. They are much. It's
it's funny because like occultists, I think, are the people
who are often.

Speaker 20 (02:47:41):
The clips are you going to use from the conference?

Speaker 12 (02:47:43):
And I will later in my written work, But I
think on that note, I think occultists are a class
of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic,
because the people that are really good at this sort
of thing are perhaps way better at the occult element

(02:48:04):
of hiding their their you know, awareness of what they
are doing, because they at a lot of them know
what they're doing. That you just actually keep it a
more cultic, whereas the magicians will not shut the fuck
up because there's always a there's always a new book
to sell.

Speaker 18 (02:48:18):
That was an excellent segue to an ad break, Laye.
Thank you for that, and now a word from our
sponsors on this note, though, Gary, I agree with you
completely As a former academic and just a healthy level

(02:48:40):
of skepticism going into any magical conference. I sat down,
I listened and I've been to enough conferences listening to
magicians attempt to map on rather poorly magic onto a
cultural figure, and I think Burrows is really unique here.
But my academic pretense was to sit here and to

(02:49:00):
listen and think about, you know, language as a pharmicon,
think about darry Da Delouze, Baudrard Leotard when they're discussing
the master narrative or rewriting the master narrative. But what's
unique about Burrows and why I gave up that you know,
academic mapping of philosophy and asking myself, why are we
having this conversation. We could just go read these texts
they talk about similar things. But the point is is

(02:49:22):
that those texts talk about similar things. And what's unique
about Burrows is that he's actually doing the doer. He's
a doer. This is fundamentally the difference between the vida
activa and the vita contempt the taiva. Like I'm thinking
in terms of philosophers. And it took me half of
this talk to be like, no, he's actually doing shit.
As soon as we get out to like, you know,
him actually standing out in front of the cafe and

(02:49:43):
doing this. He's not just developing a method, but by
virtue of the fact that he's inviting other artists, like
the slides upon slides that we saw of him, you know,
working with new machines that he was creating and trying
these things. He was actively involved in this practice, which
again makes them far more magical than most occultists. Don't

(02:50:06):
come for me absolutely.

Speaker 12 (02:50:08):
AI specifically be discussing debates and uses of generative AI
in this conference because the last A Culture conference was
in twenty twenty three, as these large language models and
image generation platforms were just just starting to gain popularity
and now they have a stranglehold over at the stock

(02:50:28):
market and many people's imagination. The first, I guess real
debate around AI happened as the three of you stayed
to listen to a panel after Willie Mesburrough's panel, as
well as a Austin OsmAnd Spare panel, a proto cast
magician from the twentieth century. It was a contemporary of
Alistair Crowley. I left to go listen to a mathematical

(02:50:53):
thelemic ontology talk, which was probably less interesting than the panel.
Hear you guys talk about the debates around AI and
how they emerged in this panel, and then also juxtasing
that to the different forms of like AI in discussions
or an AI that dominated a large part of the
rest of the conference.

Speaker 20 (02:51:12):
Well, actually AI came up because the initial discussion question
for the panel was what does it mean to talk
about art as magic in the digital era? So everyone
was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between
the creation process is magic when you can use AI,
when you can use large language models to just generate things,

(02:51:33):
and if the generative method using AI was at all
related to say, the cut up method or other things.
So that was the initial conversation that began that whole panel.

Speaker 18 (02:51:46):
Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged
by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss.
The Austin Osman spare was about automatic drawing. So this
conception and of you know, this drawing that is coming
from the outside, coming from the subconscious, coming from within,

(02:52:07):
with all within one line. But more than that, it
was a very traditional kind of European nineteen seventies lecture.
You know, you had a lovely Italian man who stood
in the front that was ready to smoke a cigarette
while trying to get through, you know, a very well formulated,
well argued essay, while a series of images presented to

(02:52:27):
us behind him that covered an overview of artists that
are doing very similar things. He argued, exists in a
similar kind of vein and the occurrences of not just
magical tropes, but cultural influences that happen independently, so artists
all over the world. The third talk by I believe

(02:52:49):
Kate Lady, Yeah, the ritual transformation and hybridity in Leonora
Carrington's Judith, which was a stage production which happened in
Mexico City, I believe so he had a few pictures
of this, but Leonora Carrington's art very specifically has to
do with this like hybrid of like animals and mythical
figures and creatures, and the stage production was incredibly intense.

(02:53:12):
I really appreciated this talk a lot. But then focus
on talking about you know, generative artificial intelligence and these
large language models and the role of art or what
it means to do art in this era was related
to this idea of the third mind, of automatic drawing,
of this concept of hybridity, of this like transformative or
this discovering of the new through a synthetic putting together

(02:53:37):
of different elements or images, words, sounds, costumery, these kinds
of things, so that it was a natural question to lead,
but the audience members took it in a very strange
direction that I would like you all to talk about.

Speaker 20 (02:53:53):
I mean, the initial question was really that people started
asking after the panel was proposed, was so, what did
the panelists think about ai art? Do the panelists think
aiart is magic? Do the panelists think that ai art
is channeling? Do the panelists think that, you know, putting

(02:54:13):
a prompt and a language model is the same as
doing some sort of trans state automatic writing. There was
a lot of variations on functionally that all of the
panelist's reaction was no, it's not, and a lot of
them did not immediately really want to even dive into
that topic. And we're very annoyed at the question.

Speaker 18 (02:54:33):
That's actually not true because I got triggered almost immediately
because it was our first speaker that responded not to
that first question, but to the second question. And the
second question had to do with the role of technology
and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools,
you know, as a technology, a techne in magical practice,

(02:54:55):
and our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and
give us a tentative yes to the tech, to the
tech that's core to AI.

Speaker 20 (02:55:05):
They were like, their initial rerection was still also no.

Speaker 18 (02:55:08):
But yes they they indeed got there, but it was
unclear at first, and I was a little raw about it,
given that seemed completely contrary to the talk that you
know that he had mentioned before. There was a question
about NFTs. Do you remember this question?

Speaker 20 (02:55:25):
Oh, I tried to put it immediately out of my head.

Speaker 1 (02:55:29):
Yes, that was the fact.

Speaker 20 (02:55:30):
That it started with, like, well, NFTs failed because people
like weren't ready to embrace the blockchain as a generative
idea for making art, as opposed to the fact that
why would I own an NFT if I can screenshot
the picture?

Speaker 18 (02:55:46):
Yeah, Well, it was this idea that like NFTs themselves,
were part of this breaking up of the control process,
the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it
was related to the cut up method. It was one
of those questions that was a narrative before it finally
got to your question that really just invited the readers

(02:56:07):
to respond. There were others that talked about this too,
and related their own personal experience to the generative AI
process that you know, they approach AI not with the
expectation that will provide sense, but it'll almost have this
oracular or again this they related it to the third mind,
this idea that again you and the AI come together

(02:56:30):
and somehow reveal the new which I at this point
was absolutely seething.

Speaker 11 (02:56:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 20 (02:56:35):
I think the closest actually that we had to some
really like someone even trying to approach it was asking about,
if you're making this art, if you're generating these new things,
does it matter that corporations are controlling the algorithm by
which you're doing so, which started to touch on some
of the problems, but still was definitely relying on the

(02:56:58):
base assumption that using a large language model to produce
stories or art, that you're interacting with something else that's
actually capable of creating at all.

Speaker 18 (02:57:08):
And to her credit, my girl Kate Lady, who was
talking about Leonora Carrington, the one that seemed to be
kind of tangentially separate from the other two but the
hybridity really made it was the one that just gave
us a great straight Marxist answer of like, no, this
is bullshit. Let's actually look at the material implications as
to where this is coming from and the environmental costs

(02:57:30):
of running these programs of server farms, the destruction of
space of you know, liveable areas throughout the United States.
That these are questions that we need to ask and
are not separate from these questions of magic. So I
really shout out to her. I appreciated that response because
it was instant, and it was it was heated.

Speaker 19 (02:57:51):
It is also, like I mean, from my perspective, it's
also a labory she write, because these large language models
and generative AI just scrape like so much data that
that's like writing from real artists and created by real.

Speaker 18 (02:58:09):
Like painters and whatever.

Speaker 19 (02:58:11):
And it is the appropriation of human labor to shit
out some advertising. Essentially, that is like my main well,
aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it,
it's like very much that labor angle to it that
frustrates me.

Speaker 18 (02:58:32):
Well, in the context of the talk, it's really important
to then ground And this is the comment that that
I made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with,
although I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree
with me. I mean, you're right, Thank you.

Speaker 8 (02:58:47):
Go on.

Speaker 18 (02:58:49):
So this Burrow's concept of the third mind, this book
that he wrote, right, when two minds collaborate, a third
mind or intelligence communicates with you, again, not about creating
the new, but about revealing itself in what was already present.

Speaker 12 (02:59:08):
Yes, but the idea is that you have to have two.

Speaker 18 (02:59:12):
Minds in order to get this dialectical third mind that
was inherent in the conditions, the situation, the language of
the two. When one interacts with any form of large
language model or chat GBT, I in my mind and
with what I carry sit in front of a computer

(02:59:34):
and type my input. That's one mind. Can you tell
me where the second is?

Speaker 20 (02:59:42):
Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a
mind in the book. There's a story, there's an actual
thing there, there's a thing that you are interacting with
that were thoughts that were produced by someone that you
are cutting up. You are not just scraping the toilet
bowl of humans production.

Speaker 18 (03:00:02):
But even if we're going to be generous and say
that these large language models are the ones that are
doing the cut up process and you are secondary or
tertiary or even further down the line to it, I
mean it doesn't involve a human intelligence at that point.
So just in terms of the you know, the Barosian current,

(03:00:22):
it's just not a third mind. It's the material conditions
are such that it is not and cannot be a
third mind.

Speaker 12 (03:00:32):
Where I would like to take this discussion is actually
the very next talk that I attended as part of
a three talk series called the Politics of Taro, and
the specific one that I think continued on this line
of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was from
Icon to Index by Thomas Leak, the Generative Logic of Taro,

(03:00:53):
in which he discussed I will have to check his
name later, but discussed an author in the eighty who
was trying to use Taro as a way to remove
the human element of writing, try to create an automatic
story using the tarot archetypes assembled in a randomized shuffling
to generate a story based on the linkages between each

(03:01:15):
of the cards and remove his own agency and directing
where the story goes except for trying to bridge each
card one to another. And the presenter was was discussing
if this bears any similarity to like generative text models.
The presenter said no. Presenter said, no, this actually is

(03:01:37):
not like llms, which purely operate on a people pleasing
probabilistic capacity to follow one word after another in accordance
with whatever the prompt of the person who's operating the
AI wants it to generate. Though the presenter stated that
this author who was using Tarot probably would have loved

(03:01:57):
using an LLM to try to pomplish this goal of
his trying to access kind of like a form of
automatic writing similar to Mike austn Osman's Bear, but without
human input. The shuffling of the cards and forcing the
human brain to make connections between these archetypes still contains
a creative human process based on randomness in the shuffling
of the deck versus the people pleasing probabilistic generative text

(03:02:21):
that lms produce. This concludes the first episode of My
Culture twenty twenty five coverage. In part to releasing Sunday Night.
The panel will discuss digital technomancy, traditional magical practice, and
why people are doing occult practice in twenty twenty five.

(03:02:45):
See You on the Other Side.

Speaker 2 (03:03:03):
No, Yep, yep, it's it could happen here.

Speaker 12 (03:03:08):
Electile Disorder Executive Disorder, which is our weekly newscast which
we've been doing all year, so we should we should
know what it's called by now.

Speaker 2 (03:03:19):
Yeah, that's why I'm so good at doing it naming it.

Speaker 1 (03:03:23):
Yep.

Speaker 12 (03:03:24):
This show covers what's happening in the White House, the
crumbling world, and what it means for you and me
and everyone else. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined
by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Maya Wong, and we
are covering the week of October twenty second to October thirtieth.

Speaker 3 (03:03:39):
Yep.

Speaker 9 (03:03:41):
So I think we should start off the bat by
but the same thing we started off last week with,
which is that as you're the Halloween. Yeah, well that
so on the upside, Halloween woo spooky. On the downside,
like forty million people lose, lose, there's no benefits the
next day on Saturday.

Speaker 2 (03:04:00):
Yeah, but what's spookier than that. Look, one thing you
can't say about the government is that they're not failing
to celebrate the holiday.

Speaker 1 (03:04:09):
I am scared of the consequences.

Speaker 12 (03:04:12):
Yeah, stock up on the trigger, treater candy. I guess,
steal as much candy as you can.

Speaker 2 (03:04:19):
You're going to need it to stay alive.

Speaker 1 (03:04:21):
See a group of children you run past him.

Speaker 2 (03:04:23):
Tick them. Oh they're kids. They can't stop you.

Speaker 1 (03:04:26):
Ye, hold it above your head. They can't reach it.

Speaker 12 (03:04:28):
No, it is. It is extremely grim, and there seems
to be no indication from the Republicans of the Trump
administration that they are going to work with the Democrats
to resolve this without sacrificing healthcare for millions of Americans.

Speaker 1 (03:04:43):
Yeah. So, Gavin Newsom, a friend of the show, has
deployed the California National Guard to assist food banks in
the state.

Speaker 9 (03:04:52):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (03:04:53):
Yeah. Like, Look, the thing is, when you participate in
the largest crackdown and protected First Amendments speech in recent history,
you don't get to show up and hand out snacks
and feel good. And many food banks, including some in
the Bay Area, have refused the help of National Guard members,
right because they have this very obvious concern that some

(03:05:14):
people might be reluctant to go to places where the
soldiers who are standing right next to all the different
immigration agents in la are now working. And so this
will have the opposite of a positive effect in those instances, right,
people who are afraid to go to food banks and
going to remain hungry. The consequences of this will be negative.
The issue I don't think is a lack of person power.

(03:05:37):
The issue is a lack of funding. The state has
mobilized eighty million dollars in funds, but millions of Californians
will be going hungry. And because of the failure of
state authorities to stop federal authorities deploying the National Guard
to LA and to other areas where immigration enforcement was happening,
this stunt that Newsmen is going for could have very

(03:05:59):
negative consequences for for food banks and for Californians who
are hungry. Something sick and cool you can do if
you have the means and the time is to pick
up food from food banks for people who need it.
A lot of people might be concerned.

Speaker 12 (03:06:12):
One of the biggest problems is how much food banks
get food also through these programs, yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:06:17):
Yeah, yeah, I mean support. Yeah, food banks themselves are
going to be struggling right now. So like I actually
I did a thread on lib on blue sky. Where
were you going to say? Lived Twitter and then corrected
to blue Sky. I was going to say lib Sky. Yeah, yeah,
I fact checked myself. It's blue wave Sky.

Speaker 2 (03:06:38):
There you go.

Speaker 12 (03:06:39):
You cannot get that past me. I could pick up
on what you were doing.

Speaker 1 (03:06:42):
I garitone Davis like a viper struck. Yeah, at the
core of my thought process. Yeah, So if you're on
if you're on Skeeter, then you can you can find
the threader made I link in the show notes with
food banks that are looking for donations, and you can
also had to find a food bank in your area
if you're interested in that. But yet, this is a

(03:07:04):
serious problem. The should be the biggest news story. I'm
thinking particularly of those folks in Alaska right who found
themselves as climate refugees due to this storm right which
flooded their villages, and now not only facing the loss
of their villages and their homes, but also all their
cased food. These are people who often would have hunted

(03:07:24):
or fished or relied on storing food for the winter,
and now finding themselves unable to access federal benefits.

Speaker 2 (03:07:34):
Doing the thing that like. There's a representative. Clay Higgins
of Louisiana made a tweet today blaming Snap recipients for
not stockpiling a month's worth of food.

Speaker 1 (03:07:45):
Does he understand how this works?

Speaker 2 (03:07:46):
He said, Try to get your head wrapped around how
many pantries you can stock with forty two hundred dollars,
which is what people get on average per year. If
he says, with Snap benefits in properly shopped groceries, any
American who's been receiving forty two hundred dollars per year
of free grocer reason does not have at least one
month of grocery stock should never again receive Snap because wow,
stop smoking crack.

Speaker 12 (03:08:05):
That's inhumane.

Speaker 2 (03:08:06):
Dealing with the shit that they talk about is almost
pointless because they're all liars. But like, as like what
you said, Like people are on Snap for a wide
variety of reasons. They're largely employed. They're just not getting
enough money to actually like survive and feed their family.
And like the forty two hundred dollars a year for

(03:08:29):
a family is not in fact enough to stockpile a
huge quantity of food.

Speaker 1 (03:08:34):
No, it's not like it's remarkable how totach the people
who make our laws off from Yeah, the working class experience.

Speaker 9 (03:08:42):
There is no way that guy knows how much of
banana costs, No way, zero, Well.

Speaker 2 (03:08:47):
He has no idea. That man isn't shopped for himself
in fucking twenty years.

Speaker 1 (03:08:50):
Yeah, yeah, that guy does not know how much it
cost to buy mac and cheese for your kids.

Speaker 2 (03:08:55):
And obviously you know we hear we talk about storing food,
about canning your own food, and there are things you
can do even on a budget when you don't have
much money to build a stockpile. And that's why I
encourage people to pay attention to things like prices at
the grocery store when things are a lot cheaper because
they're in season, and learn how to do things like
pressure can right and pickle different foods you want it,

(03:09:17):
because there are ways that you can. And this is why, right,
it's not because you should be doing that irresponsible, it's
because we even when it comes to the social safety net,
you know that we have what little of one that
we have. You can't rely on it because at any
given point it could become a fucking fucking football for
Democrats and Republicans to fight over and go away. Right, Like,

(03:09:41):
none of this stuff is reliable, which is why people
ought to, if it's at all possible, be doing stuff
like that, right, not because they should have to do that,
but because you cannot rely on the government.

Speaker 3 (03:09:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:09:54):
And I don't say that as like a critique of
people or to like shit on people. It's just like
it's a it's a fact. It's the fact that people
need to increasingly accept because this is not going to
be getting better in the long run. Yeah, let's talk
about Graham Platner.

Speaker 1 (03:10:07):
All right, Oh god, I do so to touch politicians.

Speaker 2 (03:10:12):
A couple of weeks ago, James brought up Graham Plattner,
who is running for Congress in Maine, and some ads
that he had put out which were really and I
still think are really good ads, good ads in terms
of they were effective objectively. He raised a lot of money.
He was leading in the polls prior to us. We'll
talk about a bunch of scandals coming out. He's no

(03:10:33):
longer leading, but he was doing very well for a while.
So his campaign, the strategy that he was following, which
was largely a mix of talking about and really pushing
investments in social programs and particularly healthcare, and attacking the
billionaire class in very stark terms. Talked about they need
to effectively get rid of that as a group of people,

(03:10:55):
like tax them out of existence. That's a popular you know,
and a good thing to campaign on. And the success
that he had early on is evidence that there's a
lot of legs to talking about that kind of stuff,
and the way that he didn't he talked about in
a very combative way. Right, this guy was a former marine. Yeah,
some sort of fisherman. I think whatever kind of he's
like fish. I think it's an oyster farmer or some

(03:11:17):
shit whatever. They have a the nonsense State, Sorry Maynites.

Speaker 1 (03:11:22):
They called maniacs. Technically I think they're called maners. That
copy right Garrison.

Speaker 2 (03:11:27):
So he was coming across as a very like blue
collar guy, right, like a very and kind of crude,
but crewed in a like I'm a straight talker sort
of guy. And that worked. That that was a good campaign,
and we highlighted that because I think it struck you know,
James is the one who brought it to our attention,
but I think it struck all of us as, oh, yeah,
this is a guy who was kind of doing talking

(03:11:48):
to voters in a way that we wish more Democrats
were right. And then in the last couple of weeks,
oh god, so many scamps come out about this guy.
The most well known of them as that for the
last twenty years of his life he has had a
totin cough tattooed over his pectoral that is the Death's Head. Now,

(03:12:08):
it dates back before the Nazis. It was a niche.
I don't know if this was the very first use
of it, but the very first prominent use of it
in military history was as the insignia for a unit
called the Death'shead Hussars, which was an elite German cavalry unit.
I mean, I'm sure I think they did still exist
in World War One, but they were that was well
past their prime. And it was then adopted by the SS,

(03:12:31):
and it was worn by a number by a lot
of guys in the SS, but it was specifically the
insignia of a unit called the totenkof SS, which existed
to guard concentration camps and death camps. So having one tattooed.

Speaker 1 (03:12:43):
On you bad, Yeah, not cool.

Speaker 2 (03:12:46):
Platner has said, basically, it was a dumb tattoo I
got when I was young and just joining the Marine Corps,
and I didn't know what it meant. And I am
willing to believe that like a nineteen year old who
joins the Marines would make a bad tattoo decision, because
I have a lot of friends that were in the
Marines and they all have bad tattoos, right, none of

(03:13:07):
them have Death's heads.

Speaker 12 (03:13:10):
So you got it well in like Croatia drunk.

Speaker 2 (03:13:13):
Yeah right, and he was, he was hammered.

Speaker 12 (03:13:17):
And yeah, the probability of walking into a tattoo shop
in Croatia and coming out with a Nazi tattoo is
extremely high.

Speaker 2 (03:13:23):
Sure, Yeah, it's not low.

Speaker 1 (03:13:25):
Yeah, Yeah, they're on the flash seat for Friday the thirteenth.
They probably are.

Speaker 2 (03:13:31):
If it had just come out that he'd had this
for some period of time, being like, yeah, I got
like I was hammered in Croatia and I got a
fucked up tattoo and realized it and got it covered.
I had it been like not a story, right, like
man gets bad tattoos, dumb kid. But number one, he
kept it until he got it covered in like the
last week or so.

Speaker 1 (03:13:50):
Yeah, let me tell you that was a real piece
of odd that he covered.

Speaker 2 (03:13:53):
It with, which is a wild choice to just keep
it for that long. But also he and I had
no idea until it like came out as a story
because I forget what outlet, but some news outlet found
out that he had it and was going to publish it,
and I.

Speaker 1 (03:14:08):
Think his team told Pod Save America when he went
on the PUD Save America pod.

Speaker 12 (03:14:14):
Yeah, yeah, but he had heard that there was opposition research.

Speaker 9 (03:14:18):
Yeah, yeah, because he had sent out to like another
thing that he went on, like a picture of him
with his shirt off, and they were like, wait, what, Like.

Speaker 1 (03:14:28):
There were a few of them floating around.

Speaker 8 (03:14:30):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (03:14:30):
If you've lived that kind of life, there's going to
be pitches of you with the shirt off, you know,
like the refusing to acknowledge.

Speaker 2 (03:14:37):
Yeah, I knew earlier in my life that it was
a death's head and like there's reports from people who
knew him that he called it a tote gough and
joked about it.

Speaker 1 (03:14:47):
I didn't know that. I'll be clear.

Speaker 2 (03:14:49):
I don't actually think that Graham is a secret Nazi
sleeper agent. I really don't. I think he's a guy
with really questionable judgment, which is where he's and you know,
to be very critical of his campaign. And yeah, I
take a lot of issue with how he's responded to
this because rather than again just kind of doing a

(03:15:09):
MEA POPA, he's gone on the this is my enemies
in the Democratic Party trying to silence me thing and
a very weird coalition has propped up kind of around him,
trying to argue that this is a circular firing squad
kind of deal. Like there was a Jacobin article being
like it's fucked up that people are going after Graham
and the pod Save guys are defending him, like it

(03:15:31):
is a weird coalition that's circling around this fella.

Speaker 12 (03:15:35):
What do you think that Joe Rogan of the Left meant?
Vibes essays.

Speaker 1 (03:15:41):
We wanted a guy who took loads of steroids and
didn't have problematic opinions.

Speaker 2 (03:15:46):
I'm never gonna say this in any other instance about
Joe Rogan, but he wouldn't have gotten that tattoo because
he knows what a death said.

Speaker 12 (03:15:54):
I don't know if he knew in like two thousand
and seven or what. I think there's a very strong
innate world where two thousand and seven, Joe Rogan is
traveling at accidentally gets a god tattoo.

Speaker 2 (03:16:07):
It's not impossible. You're right, You're right. I guess I'm
just assuming he's watched enough World War two documentaries to know.

Speaker 12 (03:16:14):
Yeah, but watching those while like smoking weeds, so he
doesn't remember anything.

Speaker 2 (03:16:19):
That's fair. These are fair points. You're making Garrison. So
a couple of surprising things about this, and this is
not the only scandal that's kind of come out about
him recently, but at number one, it did not immediately
take a strong hit to his polling. This seems to
be primarily just because a lot of voters aren't aware
of it. Because in poles where they at where they
informed people that he had a Nazi tattoo, his support

(03:16:43):
drops dramatically by like thirty points. That said, he was
leading until like two or three days ago, I think
was the most recent poll that came out that had
a main governor, Janet Mills, in the lead above him.
We're not talking about the main race. This is we're
still in the primary, right, so he's challenging Janet Mills
for the primary.

Speaker 1 (03:17:02):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (03:17:03):
And yeah, at present, according to so called strategies who
did a pole very recently and it's the most recent poll,
Mills has forty one percent from likely voters and Platner
has thirty six percent, although about a fifth of respondence
are undecided. And yeah, this is a pretty dramatic upset
because prior to the whole Nazi tattoo news coming out,

(03:17:24):
Platner was leading Mills by about thirty four points. So
this has gone from Platner looked to have it in
the bag to it's pretty close. Mills is ahead, not
by a lead that's so commanding that it's a definite thing.
You know, a standard polling error could have them basically
be neck and neck, and we all should know at
this point how frequently that kind of stuff happens.

Speaker 1 (03:17:45):
Yeah, polling never wrong.

Speaker 2 (03:17:48):
But yeah, so I don't know. It's one of those.
Somebody got angry at us on the subreddit, being like,
I can't believe they're hiding that like this has happened,
you know, with this guy that they endorsed like we
did Endor seven Uber two like this, this shit was breaking.
When we were recording the ed last week. We made
like a reference about it, but not much had come out,
and there certainly hadn't been time for us to really

(03:18:09):
look into what was going on here. And it's not
this is a main Senate primary, and this is not
like the very top of our list of crucial things
to hit the second it happens. We can wait on
something like this to see how stuff's shaking out.

Speaker 3 (03:18:24):
A little bit.

Speaker 2 (03:18:24):
No one's voting yet, so It's not like we're influencing
the election by not coming out or whatever.

Speaker 1 (03:18:31):
Yeah, like we only get to coup so much. We
have one hour of like News round up show a week,
and the Blue Sky Twitter drama about Grand Plannery is
not as important as the fact that millions of people
are losing their food this week.

Speaker 3 (03:18:44):
Now.

Speaker 2 (03:18:45):
One thing that is interesting, and I do think this
is an important race just because of kind of what
it says about what sort of strategies are working now
and igniting the base, and what kind of stuff does
matter in terms of scandals. I think there are some
things that are really relevant here. One thing that is
interesting to me is that, according to a poll, very
recent poll the article came in October twenty sixth, twenty
twenty five, majority of young Democrats still back Graham Platner

(03:19:09):
even after the whole tattoo thing. And this is really
interesting to me because the data shows that in general,
among likely voters, his potential support plummets when people are
made aware that he had the tattoo. But young Democrats
are by far the group most likely to have become
aware of it as soon as the story broke, because
young people are much more online than older people, and

(03:19:30):
among young people he's still well ahead, which I really
just do think speaks more than anything to the strength
of the rhetoric he has been using. The platform that
he came out the gate with. It's and the rhetoric right,
his combative rhetoric is really attractive to young voters, especially.

Speaker 1 (03:19:46):
Explain your generation to us Garrison, why you like this.

Speaker 12 (03:19:49):
I mean, there's a lot of stuff that the Zoron
campaign kind of like ignited around.

Speaker 1 (03:19:54):
Yeah, you're right, exactly absolute rhetoric.

Speaker 12 (03:19:56):
And then you know, Sanders and AOC had their anti
oligarchy tour, which I mean, we don't need to like
debate like the use of like that term. But no,
there isn't a huge frustration at the geriatric Democratic Party,
and this sort of populist rhetoric is very popular among
young people as it as it has been since the

(03:20:18):
Sanders campaign in twenty sixteen. This isn't like new a
revolutionary information. The fact that this guy has gotten to
this point has gotten either past scandals or it's navigating
through it. Despite his like you know, very questionable background
and military and uh military private contracting, his like misogynistic

(03:20:39):
Reddit posts which were unearthed as as like an attack
against him, which I think he actually handled that scandal
fairly well, using it as a parallel to chart his
own political journey. So yeah, I can understand why a
whole bunch of young people who are reading about this
aren't gonna actually care at all about any of these

(03:20:59):
stories and still vote for him because of what he's saying.

Speaker 2 (03:21:02):
Yeah, and I want to be clear, I didn't bring
this up because it's bad even that, like young people
are still supporting him. I think this is something that people,
especially in the Democratic Party, who care about winning, And
I think it's people on the left who are trying
to look at what can we do to get more
progressive and combative candidates who are going to do something

(03:21:23):
both about the right and about the billionaire class. What
can we do to actually like win. You should be
paying attention to this because this this rhetoric works.

Speaker 12 (03:21:34):
Yeah, and because surely there's one other guy who can
say these things enough. You can find one person who
could use rhetoric, is good on camera and has not
had a totalent CoV tattooed on their chest for almost
twenty years.

Speaker 9 (03:21:53):
Yeah. And also the most wild part about this, I
don't even think is that it's that this guy was
in Blackwater, like so Eid's constell Us, but he calls
it Blackwater.

Speaker 1 (03:22:05):
He was, yeah, that's the other scandals. Please, let's let's yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:22:10):
He deployed to Afghanistan for Blackwater in twenty eight their
first shrug administration. No one at any point in this
process went, hold on, wait, this guy went to fight
in Afghanistan, like in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 16 (03:22:28):
Like, yeah, they prosecuted the guys from Nisar Square, Yeah,
from the Sour Square massacre. Yeah, after the square, Like
those people got prosecuted four years before that.

Speaker 9 (03:22:40):
And he joined Blackwater in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2 (03:22:43):
And to be clear, because this is something James brought
up when we talked about this in our chat previously,
he didn't technically join Blackwater because Blackwater has changed its
name and I think merged for a couple of countries.
It was a culprit.

Speaker 1 (03:22:55):
But to be fair to me, yeah, he got all
that Blackwater. He said, I worked for Blackwater. There's a
way in which like, I'm okay with people fucking up
if they acknowledge they funked up, right, Like, I'm okay
with him saying I did this and it was wrong,
So I left and I regret doing it.

Speaker 12 (03:23:14):
I mean that that is what he's saying, though it
was specifically after this deployment. Yes, this is where he
says that like this marked his like political coticalization or
like yeah, during the path of like how he viewed
his life in politics specifically was negative experiences during this deployment.

Speaker 2 (03:23:30):
Yeah, yeah, And I guess that is something I have
really complicated opinions on because I'm I'm not and I
really have a lot of issues with folks on the
left who are like anyone who was ever in the
military is forever and deeply like I think that's yeah, deeply,
deeply unseerious and incredibly counterproductive. And I don't I think that,

(03:23:52):
like it's good that someone can do something as fucked
up as joined Blackwater and realize that they did a
harleble thing and change. Maybe doing it in twenty eighteen
is too recently for me to want him in Congress
as a progressive.

Speaker 8 (03:24:08):
I don't know.

Speaker 9 (03:24:09):
Yeah, it was like that was it was like a
decade after like he was one of the so he
wasn't one of the like the torture guards. But no, no,
like when he was a marine. He guard, He was
like one of the guys he was like assigned to
guard Aubu Grab. Yeah, I think, yeah, the torture scandal.
But it's it's like it took you, it took you
like a decade after that. Yeah, is that maybe the

(03:24:30):
thing I'm doing is bad? Like I just I just
oh god.

Speaker 2 (03:24:32):
Well yeah, And that's that's kind of like the because
I don't, you know, I don't think having been stationed
to guard a place where horrible thing like war crimes
were committed necessarily damns you forever, because like you don't
choose where you're stationed. A guard who knows when he
became aware what was going on in the place he
was guarding, But at some point he did and that

(03:24:55):
wasn't like the moment where he was like, ah fuck,
you know. And I again, I have a lot of
friend I have friends who were with the very first
infantry unit into Iraq, one of whom, as they were invading,
was like, you know this is criminal, guys, right, you
know we're breaking you know this is fucked up. You
know this this war's bullshit. Pat Tillman was saying that, right,

(03:25:15):
like Derd.

Speaker 9 (03:25:16):
The invasions, this guy ship out in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2 (03:25:20):
Yeah, that's like it took him.

Speaker 9 (03:25:23):
I would it took him, manutes, it took him reasonably
long time. And also when you read his interviews about it,
he's like, I did it because it was.

Speaker 2 (03:25:29):
Fun, which is just like, that's that's honest.

Speaker 9 (03:25:31):
Yeah, it's honest. It makes me insane.

Speaker 2 (03:25:35):
Look, I mean, that's that's why people join the Marines,
is they like money and or they're adrenaline jokies.

Speaker 1 (03:25:41):
Right, I'd rather he was honest about that shit. Actually,
like I I am. It is just like distressing.

Speaker 2 (03:25:48):
I actually like that. And again I do kind of
like because there's not a there's not a perfect answer
as to like, well, when should you have had a
change of heart about something like this before you can
like be trusted as a political leader on the left.
And I actually don't really know. I think I would
be inclined to be like give him the benefit of

(03:26:11):
the doubt on that stuff more if it weren't for
the not.

Speaker 9 (03:26:16):
Yeah, play shift out with plug eighteen.

Speaker 2 (03:26:21):
Yeah, all those things together are kind of sketchy.

Speaker 9 (03:26:25):
Maybe do a couple of tours as a dog catcher first.

Speaker 2 (03:26:28):
Like, you know, I'm seeing a lot of because there's
a whole lot of like, well, no one else who
has a chance of winning in Maine is supporting the
progressive policies he is. You know, you can't have it
all be perfect or whatever he's you know, we should
at least hope that he gets in and he does
the things he's saying. And I guess, like, if he
does get elected, and it's not the most likely thing

(03:26:50):
right now, but it's certainly not impossible, I guess I
hope he does the good stuff he says that he's done.
I just have a lot less faith in that, given
both what's coming and his reaction to it.

Speaker 1 (03:27:01):
Right, it's his reaction to it. It was really disqualifying, right, like, right,
there's a world I guess I didn't know that he
told people it was a total golf that's pretty fucking incriminating.

Speaker 12 (03:27:10):
But yeah, there's reports from people who have said that
it's it's unclear.

Speaker 1 (03:27:14):
Okay, there's reports, got it.

Speaker 2 (03:27:16):
We don't know objectively, but people have talked to the
press who knew him and said that he described it
as a total cough to them several years ago.

Speaker 1 (03:27:22):
Okay, Yeah, if his response had been like, oh fuck,
I didn't know let me get that covered up immediately.
That's his response was so bad. To defend it and
to be like there's a conspiracy against it. Really bad.
It's that failure. And it also just shows like a
lack of judgment and lack of ability to like be
critical of his own actions, which is worrying.

Speaker 2 (03:27:45):
It shows the kind of Trumpian fancifulness that really worries me.

Speaker 1 (03:27:51):
Yeah, demnic Augay kind of thing.

Speaker 12 (03:27:53):
A lot of populists are like this, like this is
this is a part of populist Yes, yes, I don't
think you can fully decouple.

Speaker 2 (03:28:01):
That's probably true, Garrison. Yeah, that's probably true, But I
I don't know. I'm not gonna tell you how to vote.
I've made a habit of never telling people how to vote.
So if you're in Maine, enjoy your mc lobster and
do whatever your heart tells you. It's the right thing
to do, my friend. But also, please don't eat a
mc lobster there. It's clearly poisoned, you know. Avoid avoid

(03:28:25):
a mc lobster's at all costs.

Speaker 1 (03:28:27):
Yeah, buy an oyster ins to it.

Speaker 12 (03:28:29):
The strongest endorsement Robert Ethans can make, is it not
by a MC lobster.

Speaker 2 (03:28:36):
Avoid a MC lobster at all costs.

Speaker 1 (03:28:39):
If you're on the West coast, avoid shellfish, and in
some months it will costs because you can get paralytic
shellfish poisoning.

Speaker 2 (03:28:44):
Oh yeah, I mean some people, that's just basically getting
free muscle relaxers.

Speaker 12 (03:28:48):
James's let's do it ad break for muscle at excerpts. Okay,
all right, we are back. Can I do my Halloween

(03:29:11):
ice Nazi? Sure Bevino segment? Is that how you say
his name? Bavino?

Speaker 3 (03:29:17):
Greg?

Speaker 1 (03:29:19):
Yeah, Greg Green?

Speaker 12 (03:29:20):
It looks like a Bavino to me. So we're gonna
talk about him playing dress up and how border patrol
disrupted a Halloween parade. So last weekend, while conducting an
immigration enforcement range, border patrol disrupted the root of a
children's Halloween parade in Old Irving Park in Chicago, using
tear gas and arresting several people, including two US citizens.

(03:29:42):
A crowd gathered around after a border patrol arrested a
thirty five year old construction worker who has lived in
Chicago since he was four years old. Jesus neighborhood residents
said that federal agents then deployed tear gas without warning
that following Tuesday, the ARC attacked of Operation Midway Blitz.

(03:30:03):
Greg Bavino appeared in a federal corps a part of
a lawsuit alleging excessive force and violations of a tro
restricting the use of tear gas and crowd control munitions.
Bavino seems to be flagrantly violating this tro as he
was photographed personally throwing a tear guest canister into a
crowd in October twenty second during a raid on a

(03:30:24):
laundromat and home depot. The DHS says that protesters were
throwing rocks and Border Patrol issued warnings, though this account
is contradicted by video of the incident. US District Judge
Sarah Ellis told the Border Patrol chief quote, kids dressed
in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose

(03:30:44):
an immediate threat to the safety of law enforcement officers.
They just don't, and you can't use riot control weapons
against them. Unquote. This tro requires that crowd control munitions
may only be used as someone pose as an immediate
threat to law enforcement agents instructed to give two verbal
warnings before tear gas pepper spray can be deployed, and

(03:31:05):
to wear body cams, badges, or visible ideas. This order
was issued on October ninth to get an idea of how
closely this is being followed. Lavino himself still is not
where a body cam and told Judge ellis quote, I
have not received a body worn camera nor the training unquote.

Speaker 11 (03:31:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:31:23):
Body of Troll agents have generally, just to give some
context here, not worn body worn cameras for a number
of reasons. Firstly, they just don't want to. Secondly, no
one's making them. Thirdly, they believe that it is possible
for people to detect the bluetooth signal that the camera
gives out and thus find them. This is something that

(03:31:45):
is theoretically possible as best my research can tell. You
can make your own judgment as to which those factors
is weighing most heavily on their choice not to wear them,
but that they have never been required as a group
to wear body worn cameras all the time.

Speaker 12 (03:31:59):
Now this judge is trying to force them to. They're
just refusing to follow the order. Even despite Bavino saying
that ninety nine percent of agents have these cameras, which
is bizarrely specific claim.

Speaker 1 (03:32:13):
Yeah, like, is he the one percent?

Speaker 9 (03:32:17):
Like, I guess it's like he's just so obviously lying.
It's just oh god.

Speaker 1 (03:32:25):
Yeah, it's it's just it's lying. We I think we
that should be enough to say. Yeah, I don't know
if I said they never wear them. To be clear,
they have gone forward and back on wearing them. But
it was earlier this year that the specific security risk.

Speaker 12 (03:32:39):
They have access to the cameras. Yes, yes, they're just
refusing to follow this order.

Speaker 3 (03:32:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:32:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:32:44):
Now.

Speaker 12 (03:32:45):
The same complaint that alleged that Vino threw a canister
with their justification into this crowd also details an incident
from the next day, October twenty third, where agents without
wearing identification as required by the order, shot a protester
in the neck with pepperball from five feet away, and
while driving away, pointed a pepper ball gun and I'm
gonna read from the complaint quote and then a real

(03:33:07):
gun at declarant Chris Gentry, a combat veteran who was
lawfully standing on the side of the road voicing his
opposition as agents were driving by in their vehicles. The
agent who pointed the real gun at mister Gentry's face said,
quote bang bang, you're dead liberal unquote great, cool, anyway,

(03:33:28):
plaintifs have requested bodycam footage of this incident, which has
yet to be provided.

Speaker 9 (03:33:33):
Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that, I mean,
they do this every single time there is any kind
of protest, they do stuff like this. They've been pointing
guns at people the entire time they've been here.

Speaker 12 (03:33:42):
They've been putting a lot of guns the past few months,
as we have reported.

Speaker 1 (03:33:46):
Yes they have.

Speaker 12 (03:33:47):
Yeah, they they kill people, two people.

Speaker 1 (03:33:49):
They've shot more than two people. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:33:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:33:52):
Saying something like this is insane.

Speaker 1 (03:33:55):
Yeah no. Yeah, it shows obviously like a complete lack
of concern for accountabit right now, like like absolutely no
thought that you could be held accountable for this.

Speaker 2 (03:34:04):
Yeah no, And it also shows a desire to kill liberally, yes, yeah,
which liberals need to be aware of.

Speaker 9 (03:34:10):
Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:34:12):
You can't let this organization continue to exist, nor can
you let the people doing this stay free. If you
ever take power again, there has to be accountability, and
there has to be an end to their ability, to
the ability of any law enforcement agency to exist knowing

(03:34:33):
that they are unaccountable and cannot be punished for the
violence that they do to civilians.

Speaker 1 (03:34:39):
Yeah, I guess I'll take this point to mention that
we've covered CBP and DHS's previous shootings in previous years
and the internal review process they have for those, which
has led to a lack of accountability even when compared
to other law enforcement officers.

Speaker 3 (03:34:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:34:57):
During this hearing this last Tuesday, the judge declined to
alter the tier row to ban the use of tear
gas completely, saying that she believes Baveno quote understands where
I'm coming from. End quote. I don't know that we're
gonna see a whole lot of tear gas being deployed
over the next week. Unquote cool, great, amazing stuff, jumping

(03:35:22):
out an our traditionary.

Speaker 1 (03:35:23):
Greg's picking up on the vibe. So we should be
fine now.

Speaker 12 (03:35:26):
Yeah, this Buffdo guy seems incredibly trustworthy. Though Judge Ellis
did instruct Blevino to meet with her every weekday evening
throughout Operation Midway Blitz till the next hearing in November
to provide instant briefings on use of force, though just
one day later, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked

(03:35:47):
Judge Ellis's order requiring these daily reports. In some other
Bovino mows Earlier this week, news broke that top ICE
field office chief are set to be reassigned and replaced
by senior Border Patrol and CBP officials with the goal
of netting more arrests to boost deportation numbers.

Speaker 1 (03:36:11):
Yeah. So the role of Border Patrol Germany is into
patrol the physical border and to do enforcement in that
one hundred mile border zone. Right. Their role of ICE,
the majority of ICE agents are not the people that
you see out there, yea, jumping out of cars and
doing these these smashing grabs. Right. The majority of ICE

(03:36:31):
agents people who will work in the office, who will
check in with migrants through their intensive supervision program, which
is one of their quote unquote alternatives to detention. Right.
Both of these agencies, you know, are relatively aligned with
what I'll call like Donald Trump's agenda. But Border patrol
particularly has made a name for itself, like Bevino himself

(03:36:53):
and other Border Patrol chiefs were there was a time
and it looked like they were going to force Veino
to retire, and that time was twenty twenty three read
briefing against it by an administration, Right, Brevino has been
kind of particularly emblematic of this new border patrol approach,
and it is particularly BP that has been aligned just

(03:37:14):
with with a lot of things that you know, they had,
they had issues getting people vaccinated, right like with this
whole kind of political social media that is representative of
the modern right we see with isoations. Like some of
these people, I'm not going to say they joined like
looking to help, you know, maybe like make the word
actually a happy place, but like they they are reasonable

(03:37:36):
civil servants, right Like, Like I've talked to plenty of
migrants who have gone to there and you and you'll
hear from some of them in a scripted series next month,
gone to their ice check into been like, that was fine,
that person was professional, that they seemed genuinely concerned for
things I'm facing, and you know I was not unduly harassed,
made to feel uncomfortable, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 12 (03:37:55):
Now the border patrol agents are like particularly brutal.

Speaker 1 (03:37:59):
I have not heard that's same. That was a reasonable
professional about border patrol agents from migrants. Yeah, border patrol
also has a pretty high churn, right as you know,
so that they have a lot of people who have
joined since let's say the first Trump admin.

Speaker 2 (03:38:14):
Yeah, and that may kind of change things because those
people are joining specifically because they want to fuck with migrants.
And while that's always been a thing for Border Patrol,
a lot of people join the Border Patrol because it's
the easiest way to become technically a federal agent. Yeah,
and it can be a path to becoming a better

(03:38:35):
kind of federal agent.

Speaker 1 (03:38:36):
Sure, you can be.

Speaker 2 (03:38:37):
A career thing, which is why part of why there's
so much ch part of why.

Speaker 1 (03:38:41):
BP just to like characterize some of the issues the
organization has had, right has consistently offered waivers the academic
qualifications other agencies would not offer waivers for they have
a problem, a serious problem with sexual assault, not just
of migrants, but of women in the Border Patrol. They
call the women in the Border Patrol the fierce five
percent because this is an agency that has not succeeded

(03:39:01):
in getting more than five percent of his agents to
be women. Like it is an agency that has I
guess for one of a better term radicalized, even even
you know within DHS agencies.

Speaker 12 (03:39:14):
Yeah, I mean all of the most brutal incidents have
used forced in like Portland in twenty twenty that came
from FEDS was Border Patrol.

Speaker 1 (03:39:22):
That was Bortech, Yeah, boord Tech. Yeah. I would encourage people,
if they want to get a sense of how Border
Patrol sees itself, to go to the social media page
that Baveno curates and has created for a while to look.
And again he was my understanding, like hemmed up for
his social media posts in the Biden administration. He's obviously
not being restrained in that way. Now, go and look

(03:39:42):
at I think it's called Border Patrol Special Operations Command
or DHS Special Operations Command, which includes Bortach. Go and
look at their pages. Right, Like these guys they see
themselves in the realm of like a military branch or
a paramilitary police.

Speaker 7 (03:39:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:39:58):
And and that is what they are doing in Chicago.

Speaker 7 (03:40:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:40:03):
NBC is reporting that the White House has approved three
assignment of at least a dozen directors of ice Field offices,
with sources telling Fox News that the cities will include
Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Philadelphia, El Paso, San Diego, Seattle, Portland,
and New Orleans. This is almost half of the ice
Field offices in the country. This turnover is being orchestrated

(03:40:24):
by DHS Secretary Christine Nome and DHS senior advisor Corey Lewandowski,
with some of the replacements being hand picked by Bevino.
This is like Bevino began to shape ICE how he
sees fit using his border patrol like background, and these
changes are reportedly motivated on differing views on tactics across

(03:40:48):
agency leadership with the ICE strategy like the Tom Holman
strategy of focusing on targeted removal of known criminals or
immigrants with pre existing deputation orders versus the border patrol
of doing these large sweeps and roundups around places like
hom deepos, laundromats, restaurants, neighborhoods, urban centers.

Speaker 1 (03:41:09):
So Bavino like has been on this for a minute,
right like, and I'm now realizing we need to cover
his his career in more depth. But like I've seen this,
Oh where did Bevino come from? Stuff? In twenty ten,
when he was out of at the Blithe Border Patrol
station I believe Blyza, California. For those not familiar, Bavino
was part of a raid on bus and train stations

(03:41:29):
in Las Vegas, right like, these these broader kind of
dragnets have been something that he seems to have been
a characteristic of his career, right, so that would make
sense for him to be the guy advocating for this now.

Speaker 12 (03:41:43):
The official statement made by DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin
at this point says, quote, while we have no personnel
changes to announce at this time, the Romme administration remains
laser focused on delivering results and removing violent criminal legal
aliens from this country. And she followed up this statement
with a tweet naming a whole bitch of people involved
in all of these news stories, including Bavino and like,

(03:42:05):
praising them for their patriotism. Let's take a look at
two pictures of Boveto here for his courtroom attire. Who
wants to describe what Bavito is wearing here?

Speaker 1 (03:42:18):
It looks like a statue of Stalin.

Speaker 2 (03:42:20):
He looks like a guy in the SS is dressing
as a guy in the SS for Halloween.

Speaker 12 (03:42:27):
I don't think it's very Stalin. I think it's very German.

Speaker 9 (03:42:31):
N Actually, that.

Speaker 2 (03:42:31):
Is an ssque looking coat. I'm sorry, it's intense.

Speaker 12 (03:42:36):
He has the little is little stars on his collar
and yeah, this this like boxy wool trench coat. It's
very with the like shaved sides of his head. It's
very clear what he is trying to evoke. This is
a little bit koy, but like come on, come on, dude,
and to follow this up, like DHS is really is

(03:42:57):
really pushing Bavino now is like the face of this,
this mass deportation push and they're making fucking like fash
wave pype fash wave hype edit reels.

Speaker 1 (03:43:09):
Of show it. God it's mass.

Speaker 12 (03:43:13):
And I will I'll play the whole thing, but really
it's the first two seconds that demonstrate what's what's going
on here.

Speaker 1 (03:43:19):
This will be linked in the notes. I didn't realize
it was Hampster Dance Coldplay on the soundtrack, Like I
I had never listened to that.

Speaker 2 (03:43:36):
Yeah, that's a choice.

Speaker 12 (03:43:38):
We're not gonna play much of that audio, garretson, We're
gonna play we are not playing thirty seconds of copyrighted audio,
but just the first literally the first two seconds of
him doing what is very clearly a se kyle and
then transferring it into like military hand signals, but like

(03:43:58):
come on, dude, and then throughout throughout this the rest
of the little fash wave edit, it's like pictures of
him and his like uh, you know, tactical gear, and
then pictures of him in what you I would describe
as an SS inspired military dress uniform with the little
you know, the stars, the trench code. It's like very
clear what he's doing. The DHS Twitter account has been

(03:44:20):
doing these little cute Nazi posts for a long time.
Now they know what they're doing. It's yeah, but specifically
this now being like the the new kind of face
of this of this whole operation, both by playing a
hand in restructuring the leadership of ICE and deploying to
the forefront of paces like Chicago as he leads and

(03:44:41):
orchestrates the mass deportation operation like Operation Midway Blitz like
blitz really do blitz yest interesting, interesting, unfucking believable that
the fact that this guy was not canned by any
previous Democrat administration, like like about like abolishing ICE is

(03:45:01):
is obviously like not enough here, because as we're talking
about the way that like border patrols actually been the
ones leading the most brutal of these raids, I think
like there is a specific focus on like ICE because
that's like a safer target. I get like it feels
like because people know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (03:45:19):
All of DHS, we need to get rid of.

Speaker 9 (03:45:22):
Yeah, the fact that this guy wasn't fired is going
to be looked back upon in the same way that
like Allende promoting Pinochet is looked back on.

Speaker 1 (03:45:32):
Just yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (03:45:35):
It's yeah, what how else do you describe it?

Speaker 9 (03:45:38):
Yeah, Like, if there was going to be a free country,
all of this shit, all of the DHS agencies, all
of this needs to cease to exist as a minimum,
and these people need to be like haled in front
of a neurobird tribunal, and that's that's the minimum viable.
There might be a democracy after that.

Speaker 2 (03:45:54):
We need so many Neurembergs.

Speaker 1 (03:45:57):
Yeah, yeah, And like it's not but I don't want
to burn a bloat about this. It's not hard to
have seen this coming. We have talked about this four years, right, Like, yeah,
this began in the nineteen nineties with Operation Gatekeeper, Operation
Hold the Line. We've documented this extensively. We've documented the

(03:46:18):
fact that under the Biden administration there was virtually no oversight,
right that they were able to detain people outdoors without food, water,
or shelter and deny that those people were detained. This
is all stuff that we've covered. If it wasn't in
your news diet, then you should question the news sources
that you were using. But like, it was very easy

(03:46:38):
to see this coming, and as Mia said, very little
was done to prevent it during the last four years yep.

Speaker 2 (03:46:44):
And somewhat more amusing news during the ongoing trial over
the different federal agents deployed to Portland and the necessity
of that federal deployment and potentially the mobilization of National
Guard troops in Oregon being sent to Portland, which is
still being fought over in the courts. Portland police were

(03:47:05):
brought up on the stand and testified that during one
night out at Ice, federal officers gassed Portland police and
fired pepper balls at one officer. And when Portland Police
confronted federal not ice, sorry but these are these are
federal FPS agents outside of the ICE building.

Speaker 3 (03:47:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:47:25):
And when Portland Police confronted the FPS agents afterwards, they
responded help or get out of the way.

Speaker 4 (03:47:32):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (03:47:32):
And this is simply there's no actually, there's no there's
no rules of engagement, right, rules of engagement for you know,
soldiers in the like are supposed to be stuff like
you don't fire until a certain standard of danger exists. Right,
you don't. There are rules at which point you are
allowed to engage with which kinds of weapons, right your

(03:47:55):
r Oh, we may say one thing about using a
night stick or and it will say something else about
using dear gas or whatever. There's no actual ro for
these guys. They're allowed to just kind of fire whenever
they want, and they're not well trained. They're not very
good at what they do. Most of them have not
actually had the kind of draining I've been supposed to
have with these weapons systems they're using, and they're just

(03:48:17):
kind of firing willy and illy, which is why they've
been heading cops repeatedly.

Speaker 1 (03:48:20):
Most FS agents are contractors. They're not full time law
enforcement officers.

Speaker 3 (03:48:25):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:48:26):
Talking of things that it would have been easy to
see coming, I want to talk about ICE's facial recognition app.
So I've seen a piece of four four media. Four
and four media is the most annoying outlet to read
pieces in because they will send you seventeen emails a day.
Four A form media suggests that ICE is claiming a

(03:48:47):
facial recognition match in its app mobile Fortify is a
definitive determination of somebody's status. They're quoting here the ranking
member of the House Home Land Security Committee, Benny G. Thompson,
as saying, quote mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in
the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens a
risk of detention and even deportation. He also said that

(03:49:08):
quote ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric
match by mobile fortifier is a definitive determination of a
person's status, and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence
of American citizenship, including a birth certificate, if the app
says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile
biometrics app in this way, in ways its developers at

(03:49:30):
CBP never intended or tested, is a frightening, repugnant, and
unconstitutional attack on Americans rights and freedoms. Thompson is misguided
if he thinks that like this is new, it is new,
and that's that its impacted US citizens. Yes, this article,
for reasons I cannot explain, does not mention CBP one right,

(03:49:53):
and as is often the case some immigration reporting that
we see now, it's completely lacking in context. The context
here is at CBP one is an app developed in
the first Trump administration. It's often referred to as a
Biden app because the definitive political question of our time
is who was present in twenty twenty.

Speaker 12 (03:50:13):
There's just no way to know.

Speaker 2 (03:50:14):
It's impossible to say you can't do data on anything
happening that far back.

Speaker 1 (03:50:20):
Unfortunately, I have a new one which is more recent,
which we're going to talk about next.

Speaker 12 (03:50:24):
Groc This is real.

Speaker 1 (03:50:27):
But CBP one was effectively determinative for migrants, right. We've
covered this in great detail here. There were some public
records about CBP one that I've looked at extensively. There's
sort of too long didn't read. Version is app did
not work well on Android phones, especially previous generation Android phones,
which are very common among people coming from the Global South.

(03:50:50):
The facial liveness scan. So what the facial liveness scan
does is that let's say Robert is coming to the US, right,
they wanted to check that the phone is being held
by Robert, that it's not been held someone's not holding
up a photograph of Robert in front of the camera, right,
So you sort of move it around. Then it determines
that it's a real three D face, not a photograph.

(03:51:12):
It really struggled with black faces. I've seen this firsthand.

Speaker 2 (03:51:17):
I've all this stuff does that's the same thing with
like how there have been like motion activated fossets and
stuff that wouldn't recognize dark scale.

Speaker 1 (03:51:26):
It's a data set that they put in right to
my understand Yeah, the results of those scans were determinative
for migrants, right. It could determine their ability to make
an asylum appointment and therefore to enter the US and
make a claim for asylum. This caused people to remain
in various very dangerous situations. It has probably led to
people dying. It's another example of why we have to

(03:51:49):
pay attention to the border if you want to know
what's coming down the pipe domestically, and talking of shit
that is coming down the pipe from the border domestically.
I want to talk about public lands again because Utah
Senator Mike Lee is back on his bullshit. This time
he has another bill. People will remember that Mike Lee
tried to insert in the budget reconciliation bill a massive

(03:52:12):
sell off of public lands, right. And what Lee does
is he uses whatever terminology he thinks will make people
support this crusade he has against land zone by the
public for if we want to access In the last time,
he tried to wrap it up a language about affordable housing.
If you read the bill, you would have seen that
there wasn't going to result in any affordable housing. This time,

(03:52:34):
he's wrapping it up in the language of border security.
And this is where I'm where We're going to return
to the defining political question of our time. Who is President?
Because Lee, who introduced the bell in October of twenty
twenty five, said, and I quote, Biden's open border chaos
is destroying American's crown jewels. Families who want to enjoy

(03:52:54):
a safe hike or camp out are instead finding trash piles,
burned landscapes, and trails closed because rangers are stuck clearing
up the fallout cartails are exploding their disorder, using these
lands as cover for their operation. This bill GIFs land
managers and border agents the tools to restore order and
protect these places for the people they were meant to serve.

(03:53:16):
Diligent observers will notice that Biden is no longer the
president of the United States, and further diligent observers will
notice that many people currently working for the federal government
on public lands are being laid off or furloughed due
to the government shutdown. What Lee's bill would do is
allow dhs to identify illegal roads in public land areas

(03:53:41):
and then to upgrade them to navigable roads. This is
important because the nineteen sixty four Wilderness Act doesn't allow
motorized access to wilderness areas, and what Lee is proposing
is that they would identify these illegal roads within one
hundred mile zone. But he is proposing a blanket change

(03:54:02):
to the nineteen sixty four Wilderness Act to allow the
construction of roads, which would completely change the nature of
wilderness in the United States. And sometimes a sliperslow argument
can also be a fallacy, but in this case, building
roads into the wilderness will permanently change the nature of
their wilderness and will lead to other losses of protection
on public land. Lee makes the argument that it's important

(03:54:26):
for search and rescue and for border access. There is
already mechanized access for search and rescue. They give search
and rescue helicopters, for instance, can access wilderness areas that
they have agreements in place with land management agencies which
allow them to do this already when there is a
risk to human life. The bill also talks about removing

(03:54:47):
invasive species and reducing fire risk by removing fire fuels
down by the border. Again, I'm guessing what this would
do would be This would I mean if you fire
fuels like look at the souther border near where I live, right,
like think of the California sage brush chaparral. Like, clearing
fire fuels there would completely change that landscape forever. It

(03:55:09):
would remove much of the value that this wilderness has
not as untouched. Right, people have lived in this area
for tenths of thousands of years, and that they have
touched that nature, and they have lived alongside it and
worked with it. But it is an area that is
significantly less damaged than most of the United States.

Speaker 3 (03:55:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:55:30):
The bill would also inventory fires and damage to wilderness
caused by migrants. I guess this is just an attempt
to say another bad thing about migrants. It also prohibits
any housing of migrants on federal lands unless it is
in a prison. It's Lee taking this border hawk stuff

(03:55:50):
and trapping it onto this crusade that he has been
on for a long time to deprive people in the
United States and people visiting the United States have access
to their public lands and eventually to sell those lands
off to the highest bidder. He introduced it on October second.
It's in the committee stage right now. This probably is
one of the things that folks could call a representative

(03:56:13):
about and suggest it's a very bad idea. Talking to
bad ideas. My daughter has announced the formation of an
international brigade to defend his incredibly corrupt regime in Venezuela.
I say this is someone who has been to Venezuela
and written a PhD about the Spanish Civil War. This
is a very bad idea. Don't do this.

Speaker 17 (03:56:34):
This is.

Speaker 1 (03:56:35):
Maduro does not need your help. Fuck that guy talking
of things that don't need your help. Here are some adverts.

Speaker 12 (03:56:55):
I can't believe you're throwing the People's Republic of Venezuela
under the bus like that, as there facing down war
with the United States of America.

Speaker 1 (03:57:04):
Right now, standing in the breach against imperialism. Yeah, I
read a lot about it.

Speaker 12 (03:57:07):
What happened? Does hashtag solidarity? Jane?

Speaker 1 (03:57:10):
I'm sorry. I read about it on the Gray Zone
and I'm changing my opinions, having spent more time than
I'm sure half the staff the Gray Zone in Venezuela.

Speaker 9 (03:57:18):
Speaking of Spooky, the ship Trump's getting is part of
terraff negotiations who.

Speaker 21 (03:57:28):
Jazz, jazz rock, jazz rock, jazz bo.

Speaker 9 (03:57:40):
All right, So, as we talked about last week, Trump
has been in East Asia to do a bunch of
meetings for conversations already happening. And this is where terrificagotiations
have been being handled. This has been being held in
South Korea. South Korean President Lee JM Young presented Trump
with South Korea's highest honor and also gave him a

(03:58:02):
giant golden crown. Have you all seen the giant golden crowd?

Speaker 12 (03:58:06):
It's that easy, folks. All you gotta do, it's all
you gotta do is just these little stupid things, and
then he loves.

Speaker 9 (03:58:14):
You, giant gilded crowd.

Speaker 1 (03:58:17):
I haven't seen the crown. I'm gonna look at the crown.

Speaker 9 (03:58:20):
Look up the crowd. I am beseeching you all yet.
I however, big you think this crown is? It is
way larger than that it is.

Speaker 1 (03:58:29):
Oh wow, yeah, no, it's Jesus wow.

Speaker 9 (03:58:36):
It's like the size of all fire hydran. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:58:38):
Yeah, maybe they directly they directly took the one that
they took from Prince Andrew for being a nonse and
melted it down.

Speaker 9 (03:58:48):
It's really something now, now, Lee J. Meung is a
name you might recognize because he's the guy who was
famous for that video of climbing over the fence to
stop the coup last year. And one year later he
is giving Trump what I think might be the largest
crown I have ever seen. Now, this crown is being
described as quote a gilded replica. So I don't know

(03:59:09):
how much of this is actually gold. I suspect it's
gold paint or whatever. I don't know. I do not
have confirmation on it. But you know, great great things
happening in sort of like a revolutionary anti coup movement
which has giving Trump the giant golden crown. Yeah, and
apparently and they got like a kind of favorable, sort

(03:59:31):
of okay ish kind of trade dealt out of out
of giving the President of the United States giant golden crown. So,
in terms of tariff news, while in China, Trump had
his long awaited beating Lustijian Ping, they struck a deal.
Trump decreased the quote unquote fence andyl tariffs to ten percent,

(03:59:53):
which leaves the teriff right for all Chinese goods at
forty seven percent, down from its previous fifty seven percent.
China has a reed to not do Rare Earth's mineral
restrictions that we talked about last week, and has also
pledged by US soybeans. Again, it's deeply unclear how much
of this is actually going to happen. I think my
guess is that they probably won't do the harshest of

(04:00:16):
the mineral restrictions, but I will believe the soybean purchases
when I see it, and I haven't seen it yet.
There's also been some interesting US out of the Senate
where there's been a couple of symbolic votes against some
sets of tariffs. The Senate voted fifty to forty six
to end the state of emergency that supposedly allows Trump
to do the Canada tariffs, and also voted to block

(04:00:36):
tariffs against Brazil. The four people who voted against both
of these, who voted with the Democrats are Mitch McConnell,
Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Morowski. Which it kind
of makes sense because Collins and Morowski are supposed to
lead the two moderates. Rand Paul is like just hates tariffs. Yeah,
he's a free trade hardliner who whenever I talk about this,

(04:00:59):
I will say he has had as much as all
of this is his fault, he has had one great light, ever,
which is I have a trade deficit with my grocery store.
Actually really good.

Speaker 12 (04:01:11):
Is he like an Austrian like economists, like libertarian type,
Like I know he's like a libertarian guy. I'm just
trying to figure out what specific flavor.

Speaker 9 (04:01:19):
He's like an he's like one of the Austrian like
gold standards, but also like those people are still free
trade people, like really hardline.

Speaker 12 (04:01:26):
Last time I heard Charlie Kirk talk in person, he
was debating like five Austrian economists the most annoying people mean.

Speaker 2 (04:01:35):
To Like, honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. That
sounds like that sounds like why would you agree to
do that, especially if you're already rich. I don't understand that.
I don't understand it.

Speaker 9 (04:01:50):
Now, Okay, it's just also word doating though that despite
these votes, none of this is going to take effect
because the House right now effectively does not exist as.

Speaker 2 (04:01:57):
A legislative body.

Speaker 9 (04:02:00):
Yeah, it doesn't exist in general because they keep not
calling sessions because every time they try to call a session,
the Democrats in the one political theater thing that like
is kind of a good idea, but they're so bad
at it. They keep being like, you have to release
the Epstein files, and the Republicans keep being like, no,
so we kind of don't have a House of Representatives.

Speaker 2 (04:02:19):
I keep thinking about that one scene from Mars Attacks
with the presidents, like, you've still got two out of
three branches a government, and that ain't bad.

Speaker 12 (04:02:28):
Yeah, we basically have one branch of government.

Speaker 9 (04:02:32):
We have one branch of Yeah, we have one branch
of governments, and like.

Speaker 2 (04:02:35):
But that doesn't work as a Mars Attacks Joe.

Speaker 3 (04:02:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (04:02:39):
But and also it's worth noting the House voted to
not allow any tariff legislation until March twenty twenty six,
a thing that it could apparently do. It is totally normal.

Speaker 1 (04:02:48):
Sure, Oh well, yeah, you.

Speaker 9 (04:02:49):
Know so, and speak of things are totally normal. We're
gonna close this with Trump getting mad at Canada because
we saw an ad they were running, Oh my god,
yeah series that God it was.

Speaker 12 (04:03:01):
It was.

Speaker 9 (04:03:02):
It was a bunch of clips of Ronald Reagan being like,
tariff's bad because Reagan Reagan's domestic protectionism took the form
of currency devaluations and not tariffs, et cetera. Et cetera.
But like, yeah, so and and and Trump saw this,
lost his mind, said that it was Ai. There's a
whole saga here about him claiming that it was like

(04:03:23):
also unauthorized usage of footage, which is a fiasco. And
then also all of the terror negotiations that have been
happening to the US and Canada have been called off
and he just put another ten percent terriff on them
because he was mad about it. Goje, which yeah, totally,
you know, I I totally absolutely a thing that like
an elected head of government does and not a a

(04:03:46):
guy who just received it a massive golden crown. Ah garousaid,
that's not a blue Jay's hat, but.

Speaker 12 (04:03:52):
You know this is a blue Jay's hat. Mia, How
fucking dare you try to? Uh, she'splain my own, my
own country, myself.

Speaker 2 (04:04:02):
Yeah, it's Toronto's team.

Speaker 1 (04:04:04):
Garrison's wearing a hat for those who are not working
for coolers own media.

Speaker 12 (04:04:08):
It's the Toronto Blue Jays. Oh my god, yeah yeah yeah,
in Toronto blue.

Speaker 2 (04:04:12):
It was the Toronto Blue Jays.

Speaker 1 (04:04:13):
Yeah, but there's not.

Speaker 3 (04:04:14):
A J on it.

Speaker 12 (04:04:15):
Why well no, it just has the map, but.

Speaker 1 (04:04:17):
It's only three points. It's not a not a traditional
maple leaf.

Speaker 12 (04:04:20):
James, are you gonna Are you gonna she explain my
own country.

Speaker 1 (04:04:25):
To me, Garrison when it comes to birds and leaves,
I am.

Speaker 9 (04:04:28):
Going to Canada explain to you it rocks. Yeah, but
that's fun. That's just how tariff policy is set. Now,
is you pissed off the king and he decided to
put a teriff?

Speaker 8 (04:04:42):
This is.

Speaker 9 (04:04:44):
I don't know, I don't really know how to do
analysis of the fact that we just have a child
king setting tariff policy. It's it's great.

Speaker 12 (04:04:53):
Look quick, fact, Jack, do you read can you read this?

Speaker 11 (04:04:56):
Oh?

Speaker 8 (04:04:56):
Wow?

Speaker 9 (04:04:57):
It does say Blue Jays.

Speaker 12 (04:04:59):
Read this genuine m LB merchandise. Okay, wow wow wow.

Speaker 2 (04:05:05):
Yeah. They one would ever put that in fake MLB merchandise, Yeah,
wouldn't be allowed.

Speaker 1 (04:05:11):
I've never seen any genuine MLB merchandise in markets in
a Rocks for example.

Speaker 2 (04:05:16):
Yeah, Hey, I'm the owner of a proud Fixing Gan
shirt that I bought at a market in there.

Speaker 12 (04:05:24):
All right, all right, all right, everybody, Okay. I think
it's politically important for the Blue Jays to win the
World Series and contribute to the American Century of humiliation.

Speaker 2 (04:05:36):
I still have my my Tumberland boots that I bought
in Syria.

Speaker 1 (04:05:40):
Yeah, I have a five dot one dot one jacket.

Speaker 2 (04:05:45):
Oh and I've got it. I got a greater Adotus
track suit when I was in Istanbul.

Speaker 12 (04:05:49):
Do you want to do this fallection right now?

Speaker 1 (04:05:52):
And yeah, let's do it now. Let's talk about talking
of things which are not as they seem. California Attorney General,
look at that Charason. That is why they pay me
the medium bugs. California Attorney General Rob Bonter is warning.

Speaker 2 (04:06:08):
Such a fake guess name.

Speaker 1 (04:06:09):
I'm sorry, sorry, Garrison is wearing that hat for those
not watching this podcast. On top of the head in
the fashion of affairs, California Attorney General Rob Bonte is
wannering about election interference by the federal government. The federal
government has sent monitors to California to a number of

(04:06:30):
different counties in California in order to monitor the elections
that are happening here on the fourth of November. To
be clear, federal monitoring is not uncommon. The Biden administration
did it in more than eighty places in twenty twenty four,
for example. But BoNT seems convinced this monitoring is going
to lead to election denial. Elector interference. Here's Gavin Newsom

(04:06:52):
talking on X about this.

Speaker 22 (04:06:54):
So today the trop administration announced they're sending election monitors
to five specific counties here in the state of California.
They have no business doing that, they have no basis
to do that. In fact, we have a state wide
election for a statewide constitution. This is about voter intimidation.
This is about voter suppression, period, full stop. And it's

(04:07:16):
a pattern, isn't it. It's consistent with what they've done
with the federalization of the National Guard and the intimidation
of the chill that that's created. They'll do that right
around election day as well. Same thing with ice and
Border Patrol.

Speaker 7 (04:07:27):
Mass men watch that space showing up.

Speaker 22 (04:07:30):
In and around polling booths and voting places. But this
is a bridge too far, and I hope people understand
it's a bridge that they're trying to build a scaffolding
for all across this country and next Novembers election. They
do not believe in fair and free elections. Our republic,
our democracy is on the line. We all need to

(04:07:50):
wake up.

Speaker 1 (04:07:51):
I met Monkencerne with the stuff around that. I think
he's probably right that we will see like more federal
agents around polling places in election time. What California was
doing in response is assigning monitors to monitor the federal monitors,
which will be interesting and it seems unusual, right for

(04:08:11):
the federal monitors be monitoring. Think that one of the
things that's on the ballot this year is Prop fifty right,
which would redistrict California. It's jerry mandering, so jerry mandering proposition.

Speaker 2 (04:08:20):
To it's revenge gerrymandering character Jerry The bill is specifically
we not we're going to do this, but we're going
to do this if the there's redistricting in Texas.

Speaker 1 (04:08:32):
Yeah, yeah, it's yes, it's an attempt to rectify the
very obvious gary mandering Texas.

Speaker 2 (04:08:38):
It's kind of mad. Mutually asserted destruction is applied to
Jerry Man.

Speaker 1 (04:08:43):
Yeah yeah, yeah. Neither of these things are great. That's
here we are. I think that's what I had on
this Actually cool.

Speaker 3 (04:08:52):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (04:08:52):
I think that's that's U E eisode. That's where we're at,
all right, everybody.

Speaker 12 (04:08:57):
Well, until breaking autism news, God Texas is suing Thailand
and all specifically a pharmacytic company Johnston Johnson for marketing
tile and all the pregnant women and failing to disclose.
But a turny general can Paxton calls quote a significantly
increased risk of autism and other disorders unquote.

Speaker 1 (04:09:15):
They don't market it to pregnant women. Like Geremany.

Speaker 2 (04:09:19):
It says like if I'm not mistaken, it says on
the bottles, don't take if your nurse you're pregnant.

Speaker 1 (04:09:25):
We covered this in a previous episode. But like Germany,
drugs are not very few drugs are marketed to pregnant people, right,
be the women or otherwise.

Speaker 7 (04:09:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:09:33):
No, the only thing you're supposed to take is a
pregnant woman is cocaine, and you got to make sure
it's pure.

Speaker 9 (04:09:38):
Non Binary people thought you can take anything.

Speaker 2 (04:09:39):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you're If you're not pregnant, it's
okay to do whatever.

Speaker 1 (04:09:43):
Yeah, if you are pregnant, not a woman, it's okay,
go right.

Speaker 2 (04:09:46):
Hell yeah yeah sure, yes, wait, no, I don't think
that that's how it works.

Speaker 9 (04:09:52):
Transmasting double yeah yeah, yeah, true.

Speaker 2 (04:09:54):
I think if you have a fetus gest dating in you,
you're only supposed to do cocaine.

Speaker 12 (04:09:59):
Definitely the least autistic for people, non binary people. Yeah,
definitely definitely. They can just take whatever or do or
do take whatever.

Speaker 1 (04:10:08):
Yeah, too many drugs like like they'll they'll say that
you should consult with it with your doctor.

Speaker 12 (04:10:11):
Consulted doctor.

Speaker 1 (04:10:12):
Yeah, and none of them are risk free. But it's
it's it's a cost benefit analysis, right.

Speaker 12 (04:10:16):
We covered this the autism and Thailand all like correlation
versus causation based on that one Sweeter s this is.
I'm interested to see how Johnston and Johnson argues this
in court and if that will have effects across you know,
the rest of the Trump of administration's anti Thailand all push.
If they're able to successfully defend their product against Ken

(04:10:37):
Paxton so critical support sant Thailand. All, I guess.

Speaker 2 (04:10:41):
Welcome to the resistance, Big pharma Jesus.

Speaker 1 (04:10:45):
Yeah, if people listen to more and that we can
get back and find out previous episode.

Speaker 2 (04:10:50):
All right, everybody, until next time, try not to be
on a fishing boat anywhere south of the US southern border.
It's not safe right now.

Speaker 12 (04:11:02):
Good luck trick or treating. Happy Halloween.

Speaker 2 (04:11:04):
Yeah, good love trick or treating. It's not safe right now.

Speaker 1 (04:11:07):
Oh yeah, don't be trick or treating in a boat.

Speaker 12 (04:11:08):
This year we've reported the news that sucks.

Speaker 21 (04:11:13):
Yeah, we reported the news.

Speaker 12 (04:11:21):
Hey.

Speaker 2 (04:11:21):
We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 23 (04:11:26):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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