It Could Happen Here Weekly 33

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compiletion 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Hi, you welcome to take

(00:27):
it happened here the show where we just spent a
few minutes not recording by accident and also trying to
shoot my cataway so they would stop throwing uh old
grenades off my desk. So that's the vibe that we're
going for today. Okay, and oh do you know what
today is? Today is May Day, famed famed one of
the best holidays. Um so in the Mayday tradition. I'm

(00:49):
not doing my job today, so we're not doing a
real episode. But but don't don't worry. We still have
other content for you to listen to. Uh speaking of
content of the friend of the pod, Marcat Killjoy, Hi,
do you have anything that we can listen to today? No?
Was I supposed to prepare something. Oh oh wait, what
if I released the very first episode of my new

(01:11):
podcast today and what if it was a May Day
themed episode? Would that sound good? That would sound, as
the kids say, very based of you. That would be
so cool because if if you like May Day and
only working eight hours a week, which is still too
many hours, but if you enjoy that as opposed to
more hours, you should probably thank the anarchists. And you

(01:33):
can learn more about those people at Margaret's new show,
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff here on cool Zone Media.
Also featuring also featuring friend of the pod Robert Evans. Yes,
Robert Evans is a guest all that episode, so if
you're familiar with that guy, then you could also listen.
So yeah, episodes dropping every Monday and Wednesday until the

(01:55):
world burns. Yeah, so like three months? Three months? Well?
Actually did they said like what like forties six weeks?
Oh yeah, I math it out. It was nine. Um,
it's nine months that the UN says we have to
turn everything around. But as as my friend pointed out,
we're gonna waste a month of that just trying to
do the math of calculating the weeks in ten months

(02:19):
I do love optimism. Well that does it for us today.
Go enjoy your May Day by not working or at
least just kind of sucking around. And that's what I'll
be doing. And cool people who did Cool stuff is
out now, so check it out wherever you get your podcast.
Oh my god, I just realized I wasn't recording. Oh

(02:41):
we are not doing this again. It'll be fine. It's

(03:01):
like a bunch of different illustrations of dictators all done.
It's like little anime chicks. So they're all hot, so
like pol Pot's this like sexy girl and a throat
of skulls. But Tito they made into a milf like
she's got all of her kids around her. It's the
only it's the only one with kids. Um. I don't
know why they picked Tito for that, but it does
kind of work. This is it could happen here a

(03:23):
podcast about which anime war criminals are hottest. And it's idiomine. Actually,
the idiomine in that book is pretty pretty pretty smoking
as a like wearing black lingerie on a throne of skulls. Okay, nice,
just kissing you make it in no no kissinger all

(03:43):
all like like world leaders. Um, I would. I would
argue that, but he does not make the book. No,
it's sad tragic anyway, this is it could happen here podcast,
Things Falling Apart and other stuff. I'm here again with
my buddy Jay James James, Hi Hi hi one. Which
dictator do you think would be hottest? They were like

(04:07):
gender bit Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I'd have to
go for like one of the old timey ones press
one of the one of the one of the one
of the os. Yeah. I think Kauzar Nikki had nothing
to do but like look hot and he was a
big workout guy. Yeah, big workout, got nice to rip,
nice nice outfits, tight trousers. I think I'd probably go

(04:27):
with him. Yeah, that that scans now which was hottest?
As they were, like, which is the most fuckable war criminal?
That's a tough one. I'd probably have to think about that,
I know. Not a coming to mind. Actually, oddly that
Stalin Pictures of Fake Yeah not not not nearly. Actually
that's sexy. Um Joseph the Stallion, I gotta go. I

(04:51):
gotta go with Saddam Hussein. Yeah, that's true. He has
a sort of lustful mustache and it's good that mustache
Fox James. We should probably talk about something that's not
which dictators are most falcable. UM. Today we're going to
chat about he fat courses uh, and about emergency UM

(05:13):
and particularly like combat medicine, which is a more relevant
topic for a lot of people. In the wake of
a couple there's a mass shooting at a protest in Portland. Uh,
There's been a whole lot of threats made against LGBT people. Uh.
Jack poss O Biak launched a T shirt that was
basically threatening a mass shooting at Disney World. All sorts
of fun ship has been happening. Yeah, it does seem

(05:34):
like we're aspiringing towards the end of times. Yeah, it
certainly seems if you want to be less, you know,
apocalyptic than that. It certainly seems credible to say that
there's a pretty good chance people there are people listening
to this who have not been present at a shooting,
who will be present at a shooting at some point
in their lives. Yeah, And I think given that, it

(05:54):
doesn't make sense. So like I'm joking about the end
of times, right, Like we shouldn't panic and things we
should think about ways we can protect each other and
keep each other safe. Yeah. So what is a he
FAT course because you recently went through one. Yeah, so
he FAT is an acronym right hostile environment first Aid training. Um,
it's a British thing. I think that's the syllabus I
believe is standardized by the government in the UK. So

(06:15):
most of the courses you'll find are in the UK,
clustered around Hereford for pretty obvious reasons, but that there
are there are a couple in the United States, and
there are some in other countries too, And it's for journalists,
aid workers and GEO staff and anyone else who's working
in an environment that would be considered like high risk
or hostile. And to your point, that includes most of

(06:37):
the United States at the minute, right. Yeah, Well, I
mean we are in this funds place where literally any
moment could turn into a situation with the intensity of
a of a low density war zone. Yeah, I mean
we have more weapons and than most war zones, and
also people who think it's okay to kill other people
because they like Mickey Mouse. So it does seem like

(07:00):
you said, it is more likely that we will see
more shootings, even bombings, and that kind of thing like
we can't say for sure, but yeah, now you you
have done some of the same kind of work that
that I and some other colleagues of ours have done,
you know, in in hostile environments, difficult places, prior to
going through this course. Obviously, when we're talking about like

(07:22):
what sort of first aid skill should people have, the
most basic stuff is like how to apply a tourniquet,
which we'll talk about a bit more later, how to
um if it's not because tourniquets are really only for extremities,
you know, you can't really turniquet a gut wound or whatever,
and so for that it's more like packing it but outside.
So I'm going to assume you had your more than

(07:42):
your share of experience with that kind of stuff. What
did you learn new going through this course? Like, what
was the stuff that emphasized that's kind of beyond the basics? Yeah, so, um,
the stuff I've done before has been some of that
basic start the bleed stuff, and then a fair amount
of wilderness medicine stuff. So some of the improvised stretches
and stuff I was for Milliar with. I enjoyed some

(08:02):
of the releases they did, like I'm not talking about
like necessarily like a hand to hand combat or open
hand combat, but like ways to release yourself in a
non violent fashion. I thought that was very good. Ways
to move through crowd I found that very interesting. And
we did a lot around how to move under fire,
how to react around explosives, how to react around indirect fire,

(08:24):
and most of that had already covered, and then some
of the stuff around hostage situations to include a simulated
a hostage situation where you're blindfolded or hooded and sort
of ask questions and poked with a blank firing weapon.
As such, I think it's really good. You can't really
have enough fix what you can have too much experience
for that, but to simulate that and as realistic as

(08:44):
setting as possible I found was super helpful. So I think, yeah,
I think that was probably the most interesting thing for
me now when it comes to what kind of training
people can get, because the heath had courses a couple
of thousand bucks, which is beyond I know we have
some colleagues listening, and I think it's a good thing
for people who are going to do this kind of
journalism to consider, or if you're in you know, an
aid worker or someth someone who is going to be

(09:06):
going into these situations for a living. That's but for
a normal person listening, it's probably more than you're likely
to want to get UM or have the resources to
get So what what people because, because especially in the
wake of shooting is pretty much any time there's a
mass shooting or violence at a protest, I will tweet
about I FAX again. And an I FACT is an

(09:27):
individual first aid kit. It's what like every soldier is
supposed to have on their belt or on their plate carrier.
And it generally consists of what are called and this
is when people ask, like what should I get to
be ready for a shooting UM. Generally it consists of
consists of two chest seals. These are called eclusive dressings.
They're basically like kind of sheets of adhesive plastic. I

(09:48):
would say that you like put over if you get
shot in like the lungs, you your lungs kind of
depressure rise UM and that's bad. I'm not a I'm
not a biology expert, but you're not supposed to have
a whole three year lungs UM. And one of the
things that you do to treat that immediately is you
put this kind of addressing over it, which stops the

(10:09):
lung from collapsing basically. Um, So that's one thing you'll
find in an IFAC. You'll also find what's called a
combat tourniquet. There's a bunch of kinds of tourniquets. Um.
I was doing a stop the bleed course. We'll talk
more about that in a bit, but that's the thing
everyone should do, like in terms of you know, he
fat is kind of more advanced and for people who
are going to professionally put themselves in shitty situations. Um,

(10:31):
stop the bleed is for everybody. And one of the
things I was having a chat with people who were
teaching them, we were doing a little meeting, um, and
one of the things that was brought up people always
talk about, well, I wear a belt in case I
need to make a tourniquet or this or that, and
virtually never works, like close to zero percent success, right, Um,
even when it's someone who's trained and experienced providing tourniquets,

(10:52):
like random ship does not make a good tourniquet. Tourniquets
make good tourniquets. Yeah, They's more that easy to carry.
They down't cheap, right, But on the same you shouldn't
cheap out on them either, right, Like we've I know
we've talked about this on Twitter, and I know like
Amazon Sales M they force had a problem with selling
fakes sor like North American Rescue. I think it's called

(11:15):
emergency rescue. I'll give you something. Yeah, North American Rescue
is really good one of the so, yeah, rescue essentials.
So what a combat tourniquet is, because there's different. Some
tourniquets are just like a plastic band almost almost like
if you go to a gym, those things that people
like wrap around their legs to do squats or something
or lifts. It's kind of like it looks a little

(11:36):
like that. Um and those Yeah, obviously like those can work,
but they're not nearly A combat tourniquet is basically it's
a little um like kind of Nyloni fabric belt thing
that you strap around and you tighten it um and
velcrow it tight and then there's something called a windless
which is basically a metal or plastic stick that you

(11:58):
then twist around. Uh, and that twisting action when you
twist it, that's going to tighten it and that's going
to stop the artery from bleeding. Um, and then you
lock it into place. There's a little place to lock it.
And so when you get a cheap tourniquet, it generally
means the windlass is made out of something flimsy or
the fabric at hearing the windlass to the belt thing
is not very good and it will break when being tightened. Yeah,

(12:20):
and you don't want What you don't want to do
is not have enough pressure, have sort of weird pressure,
because what you're going to do tomorrow, I'm not that
kind of doctor. Right, is you can cut off the
venus return and not the arterial flow, and that's what
you can give yourself compartments in direct right. I just
wanted to backtrack quickly. And we're talking about how expensive
he facts are. If people are listening and they are
in that kind of line of work. The International Women's

(12:42):
Media Foundation is doing free he fat courses for women,
gender nonconforming, non binary people, and I gotta I got
a grant from the Rory Peck Trust to go and
do mind so for journalists. Both those are really only
for journalists and media. I would really encourage people to apply. Yeah,
um and that's that's great information because if you can
even if like your journalism has been sort of like

(13:04):
citizen journalism where you're showing up at a protest and
you know, taking pictures or whatever. UM, give it a shot,
like if you like, the more people who have this
kind of training. UM, as a general rule, the better. UM.
When it comes to stop the bleed courses are generally
going to be much more available. Some of them are
operated as charities and we'll give out an I fac

(13:25):
or something at the end. Some of them have a
nominal fee. It kind of depends on where you are.
I've seen both. Portland has a lot of stop the
bleed courses, which is why when we had our most
recent mass shooting at a protest, UM, more people didn't
die because folks had equipment and we're ready. UM, you're
you should expect to spend about thirty bucks generally on
a combat tourniquet. UM, sometimes twenty, but like the good

(13:49):
ones are all about thirty. UM. I would shoot for
something with a metal windless that's generally assign. Again, there's
like Rescue Essentials and a couple of other brands that
are reliable. But it's called a Tactical Committee on Combat Care,
which is the government finding thing. It's so like if
you let them do the research so you don't have to.
They provide a list of cornic tornic case torn cats.

(14:13):
The one that most people have is that could cat
right combat application tornic. If you get that, even if
it's not the best one or the smallest lights or whatever,
every that's the one most people train with they know
how to use. And I think you've said this before, like,
even if you don't know how to use it, if
you are in a situation where it's needed and you
just say I have this, have a tornic, that someone
might take it and use it. So yeah, and it's

(14:35):
it's like it's okay if you panic, as long as
you get that into the hands of somebody who can
use it. But it's also important if you're going to
carry it to train with it. I heard when I
posted about this recently, someone said that they and their
friends have a game where when they're like hanging out,
somebody will toss a tourniquet at someone else and say, like,
you know, right arm or something like that, right arm

(14:56):
above elbow or something like that, and they'll have to
apply the turn, get and get it on as quickly
as they can in that place, which is a good game.
You're not going to like in twenty or thirty seconds,
like you know, you don't have to like injure yourself
doing it, but you can you can get it on
and get familiar with the motions and build like a
competence with it. Yeah, work out when you're going to

(15:17):
lass through the limb and when you're gonna take it
off and go all the way around. But I think
standardizing one thing certainly among you and your affinity group
or your friends is probably a good move. Yeah. Yeah,
And it's it's one of those things the kind of
injuries that tourniquets are most needed for our like arterial
bleeding um, which is the kind of thing that if
you don't get a TURNI get on that you're dead

(15:41):
um very quickly. Like people will bleed out in seconds
sometimes from like a femoral Yeah, you've seen an arterial bleed,
and I'm sure that I know I have. I'm sure
you have. You know that that person has an arterial
bleed that is a pressurized gushing of blood. It's like
bright the blood arterial bleeding. It comes out in spurts,
and it is like right, it is not. It does

(16:01):
not look like when you cut your finger the blood
tends to unless you're really cutting the ship out of
that figure. Yeah, yeah, you. And one of the things
we did at this course, which is called at You
is they had like a simulated arterial bleeds and a
person was wearing it like a camelback, and then they
had like a hose pipe and it was just gushing
out and then you could actually cinch down on it
right with the strap and that actually stopped. Now, I
mean when it comes to like more advanced bleeding care,

(16:23):
because there's some wounds where number one, if it's like,
for example, too high up in your like crotch or something,
you know, you're not necessarily going to be able to
get a cat up there. Sometimes people will literally hold
the artery closed like that is a thing that and
that is more advanced certainly, um, but it is. It
is also like the physics of this are very basic.

(16:44):
If you can figure out where blood is coming from
and close it, blood will stop coming out, right, Like
that's the principle of all immediate wound care for that
kind of thing. Yeah, there's an acronym that you use,
right Dr March, which we can go over danger right, So,
and I think this is the thing that often gets
forgotten actually, especially if you're doing like somebody's start to bleed,

(17:04):
which is focused on first aid rather than specifically in
kind of combat carib If you get hurt, not only
are you useless to that person, not only are you hurt.
If someone comes to help, now they have to think
about which person they're going to help. Right, It's how
much harder to carry two people than one person? So
don't do that? Uh? And then response right, so, Robert,
I see you've been shot. Doesn't look great? You okay?

(17:27):
And then massive bleed, air way respiration, check head to
toe and then hypothermia. And you know one of the
things that is so like a combat tourniquet, you just
generally you can keep it in like a kit. It's
also fine to keep it loose in your pocket. You
are not worried about sterility when you are applying a tourniquet.
It does not matter if you get shipped in the

(17:49):
wound like, because they will die. They will be dead
in a minute if you don't get the tourniquet on
um anyway, right, Yeah, yeah, you're not putting it in
or whatever like it. So yeah, so that's that's one kind.
And that's again you're talking about extremities, right. You can't
put a tourniquet on the neck because that would kill
the person. Um. You would use an inclusive a lot

(18:09):
of times on the neck, especially if like the airway
gets Again. This is stuff that you would you would
get in to stop the bleed. Course, and I recommend
people for that. So we're not going to go over
treatment outside of like these basics, but we'll talk about
like you should have an inclusive dressing. Two is what
most effects come with. People I know who have responded
to shootings say you want more like four because they

(18:30):
are a lot wind up getting used. Yeah, I think
about I think those specty chest seals and something that
I've been told by people with a lot more experience
than me. It's like when you're dealing with a military setting,
most people will have their chests covered with plates, right,
and plate carries, and a civilian setting most people want
so you're going to see a lot more of those
like a sucking chest wods or penetration of the thoracic cavity.

(18:52):
So yeah, and in that setting, and they are very small, right,
you can put them into back pocket of your skin
cheets and no one would notice. So another kind of
thing that you'll find in an I fact that's useful
is combat gauze. So there's two types of gauze that
you'll get in kits. One is just gauze, which you
know what gauzes um most wounds, if they are not
life threatening, packing with gauze and wrapping is perfectly sufficient

(19:14):
at least for immediate care. But combat gauze is impregnated
with a thing called cell locks, which is our little granules.
You can actually get them, just as the powder. You
shouldn't because it's it's not going to be useful to
you as a random person. Um, you should get it
in gauze, like impregnated into gauze, but it's made from
ground up crustacean shells and it basically makes blood clot

(19:36):
very quickly. Um survivability of arterial wounds in combat, which
was extremely low before cellos jumped to something like or
so like. It's it's pretty remarkable the degree to which
it's made certain particularly like fomoral bleeds survivable um, and
it can be used if you've got, like it's a
serious arterial bleed. It will often be used in conjunction

(19:57):
if it's on an extremity with a tourniquet um. But
you can just use it to pack a bleeding wound.
And if you pack it and apply pressure, sometimes you'll
pack the combat gulls into there and then add other
gals outside of it. Like, but it's it's most wounds
that are bleeding aren't going to require sell off scars.
And it's pretty expensive, but it's another really useful thing

(20:18):
to have if there is like an arterial bleed. Yeah,
I think actually the where we first I think kalin
might be what the stuff is called. I believe it
comes from indigenous practices using it to stop bleeding. But yeah,
it comes in a small package. Quicklot is the normal brand,
and yeah, it's a lot of what we've learned about
stopping arterial bleeds has come from twenty years of war, right,

(20:39):
and they're obviously a lot of town site but yeah,
learning about how to stop those things is one of
the things that It's got a lot better in the
last decade or so. That's another thing. And you can
always buy these kids pre made. A lot of people
make various premate kids. Yeah, you can google i FAC
and make sure it's you know, rated, well dot do
your research. We've mentioned some brands here, but like, it's

(21:00):
not hard to find I Fax. They're they're made constantly
And it's one of those things we talked on this
show about being armed and whether or not people should
should have firearms. And I'm broadly supportive of of particularly
threatened people having guns. But there's downsides to having a gun. Um,
a number of them. We don't need to get into
the statistics, but there are a bunch of downsides to

(21:21):
being armed. There's no downside to having an i FAC
and keeping one in your car, keep one in your backpack,
you know. Um, there's absolutely no way you will have
a negative experience as a result of the fact that
you keep an eye fact on you and it might
save somebody's life. Yeah. I have a little ankle holster
that I use when I'm working in places where we
wouldn't look very you know, it would look off to

(21:41):
have it on my belt, Uh, And I don't want
to carry backpack. Maybe I needed to wrap around my
ankle and it has a tiny combat dressing, which you
haven't really talked about chess seal tornique and it doesn't
have the quick clut. But then the combat dressing has
its own goals. Yeah, we can talk about that in
a second. But like I just have like I have
a up effects but also just in all of my

(22:02):
light jackets because you know Oregon, usually you can wear
some sort of jacket. I just have a bunch of
cats and quick clot gauze packets just kind of scattered around,
like there's nearly always something just in my pocket or
in the center console in my car um in addition
to the actual packed I fax and yeah it's handy. Um,
it's just good to have around. It never hurt to

(22:22):
have more of that stuff. Or you have the means
or you know, if you are in a situation where
something horrible has happened, right like what happened in Portland,
if you in your truck, have three or four of
those and you can just be to go go goes.
Anyone know how to use these? Use these if they're
in your backpack when you're at a protest, like you
could potentially save several lives. So if you have the means,
said give them to strangers, like, it's not like it's

(22:45):
not like a gun, right, Like you can't end your
life with with quick cloth. Yeah, so yeah, I would.
It's a thing that everyone should feel good about having.
We should note again, you wouldn't want to use quick
clot on a wound that was not serious because there's
some concept like it burns, it's it's kind of nasty
stuff in some ways. Um, it can cause some complications

(23:05):
for for like when the e M T s get there, Um,
it's often recommended that you keep the packaging and give
it to them. But if it's if someone is clearly
going to bleed to death like that, then that then
that's when you use quick clot. And if you're questioning
whether or not a wound is serious enough that someone
might bleed to death from it, assume they will, right
like air On the side of that, if you're wondering

(23:25):
is that a deadly bleed, you're probably should probably treat
it as if it is. Yeah, I mean, you're always
better of keeping more blood inside the person, right Yeah,
with that, Yeah, I've been told to take that to
the person. And the same with the tonic gate, where
we should say that there will be blood around, you
can put a T on their forehead with the blood.
It's pretty normal and that works in almost any language.

(23:46):
And then you want to write the time it was
applied to, and again you can do that with the blood.
But I have a half sized sharp that often comes
in those kids. Yea, yeah, And it's one of those
things like assuming. It kind of is depending on your
situation whether or not you'd likely to have the time
to mark that before the E M T s arrive,
But it is one of those things even if it's
even if your first responding is a minute and a

(24:09):
half or two minutes with a serious bleed, that can
be the difference between life and death for somebody. Yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah,
And it's different what you do when carry than coming
to what you do when carries coming. But the first
steps are not right stop the blood coming out of
the person. So we should probably talk about combat dressings
a little bit. Yeah, yeah, there are several types. The
one I've had suggested that I prefer, I think, I
don't know how it's pronounced. It's O L A Y

(24:31):
Slays dressing and has a little eye cup in it
as well, which you can use for eye injuries, Like
find someone more of qualified than me to teach you
how to do that. I don't need to get into that,
but yeah, but it's it's a pad with gores in
it and then a sort of ace bandage, right, And
what it does is provides compression and obviously like an
absorbent goals, you can also pull the goals out. A

(24:52):
fun thing to do is to find an expired one
and pull all that goals out and there is just
an unfathomable amount of gores there. So you can use
that like pack a wound, and practicing packing a wound
is also something that you can do. They're like little
little bottles. Yeah. The team I know who does stop
the bleed courses will take phone rollers and cut holes
in them and use that as like to so you

(25:15):
can and you can do different sizes, right. You can
actually just like get a knife and like jam at
its stab at a bunch and like use those as
different practice wounds. Yeah, it's a good idea. Can you
pack with two fingers? You know more than that even
one finger? People can pack with one finger. So like
what this dressing does is opposite. It's sometimes they're called
is rarely bandages, olas bandages. They often come in like

(25:36):
a tan package, the Israeli ones. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Again,
like I would buy that from a reputable source, and
they come in various sizes. Emergency dressing is another name,
and yeah, those are great for things where you don't
need to use quick clot where you may not need yeah,
significant bleeding, but not like immediately life threatening. Yeah, in

(25:57):
some areas well, like sometimes in the forearm, right, Like
it can be hard because of these bones structures to
get the tornic a to work, so like you might
be able to use that start the you might have
to use quick club, right, but like having those options
is important. And again they're pretty small, probably the cheapest
of the things we've suggested so far as well. And
again they didn't they make giant ones from abdominal wounds

(26:18):
to um and so like, I actually have one of
those in my truck, have a bunch of more stuff
in my truck. I wrote a piece about a first
aid kit for your vehicle, which might leave me look
slightly different, right if you imagine again, Like, and we've
talked about shootings, but uh, car accidents, that's that's when
I the only time I've had to use those dressings.
Have been car accidents that helped pull the fucking dude

(26:39):
out of a truck that flipped on the way outside
of Los Angeles during a rainstorm, and his like whole
fucking like right here in his hand had been gouged
open where like the it was quite a bit of blood. Um.
But yeah, like that, that's a bit. It's not all
just like action movie ship like. It's something you should
keep on you because there's a wide variety of things
that can cause people to bleed a lot, Yes, exactly, Yeah, yeah,

(27:02):
and I think we are we always underestimated risk of
these drivings by the most dangerous thing most people do.
And yet having that in your car, you know, you
don't have to worry so much about carrying it. It
can just always be there. Don't leave it where it's
going to bake in the sun if you're in a
hot place. But yeah, again, the potential for you saving
a stranger's life or a friend's ie, Yeah, it's high. Yeah,
keep it in a center console, keep it in a trunk,

(27:24):
you know, keep it in a trunk alongside a machete
in a golf club. You know, you're always ready for anything.
With that, I'm never ready for golf. But aside from that,
i'd be Oh, I wasn't saying for golfing. Yeah, for
exactly for crime. Medical actually make a read. Yes, they
make a lovely vehicle first aid kit and the very
nice people to so, yeah, that that's want to look into.

(27:44):
And they also do the bags. I have a mystery
runch bag that also clips onto it replaces the hood
or my backpack, and I have that in my truck
and then if I'm going out, especially when I'm going
out climbing, I'll just click that on and have a
slight different kit that I take just for climbing. But
that's one of those scenarios where like, you could hurt

(28:05):
yourself climbing and even if people are coming very quickly,
it's going to take you a while, right and and
thinking another thing, I would be prepared to self rescue.
That's part of why you bring that kind of stuff.
Self rescue a massive part of climbing, right, learn learning
the lots sing the transfer of learning, the ways that
you can get yourself off of one of you hurt
yourself on the wall. And the American Alpine Club actually
publishes a thing called accidents in North American climbing climb.

(28:26):
This okay, this person sunked up by this, and they
did this and this and this, and they were okay,
they weren't okay. So I think that's a very good
practice learning from other people. And with that, a big
thing that you focus on a wilderness medicine is rather
than what can I bring with me, what do I
have to already have with me? And how can I
use that? Right? So, for instance, you need to splin

(28:47):
a leg, right you have a broken leg using a
sleeping pad or something which already has those redid sleeves
to do that. And that's something that like I don't
want to obviously advise people too much. Yeah, I don't
want to, like because again, so the difference this is useful.
People should be thinking about this UM when it comes
to emergency first aid, Like somebody was a broken leg.
If you're not, like, there's no real response that you

(29:10):
should like, that's not what stopped the bleed is for right,
Like UM. One one of the nice things about emergency
medicine like this, like when you're talking about someone is
bleeding to death, is that one of the ways I
guess that you can. You can you can separate the
two kinds of like first responding, because there's the first
responding where you can make it worse. And if you

(29:31):
like somebody like breaks a bone or something and you
can make that worse, yes, but if somebody has an
arterial bleeding, you can't make that worse. There. It's the
same thing with like um chest compressions. Right when you
get trained as an e m T, one of the
things they'll point out is that, like, you shouldn't use
um an a E D on an infant, but you

(29:51):
do because if they're needed, they're dead. And in that case, Yeah,
I think it's important. Also in the thing that I
didn't mention that I found very helpful about its course,
some of this psychological aspects of this is to remember
that if you do find yourself in this situation and
you try and help and that person dies anyway, then
you did your best right and that is of value.

(30:12):
Like I've been in situations where I've tried to help
someone and they've died anyway, and I think just remembering
that like that person hadn't something terrible happened to them,
and that your help didn't you know, like you tried
your best to give that person at the chance it
is not. If you are responding to somebody who has
this kind of injury, there is a pretty good chance

(30:34):
what you do won't matter. Like it's the same thing
if you are giving someone chest compressions. That's very unlikely
to save their life. Like a fraction of the time
when that happens, does it save anybody, But it can't
make it worse if they're not breathing. If they're not breathing, yeah,
they're going to die. Yeah, yeah, And I think you know,
it's not like the movies on television, and sometimes it

(30:55):
doesn't work, but it's important to talk about that in
the context. Yes, actually much probably much more likely the
person survive if you're doing this stuff right, you're slapping
on the torn again, you do it right, you will
stop that person, yes, yes, and and but you know
again it is a lot of times what you might
be doing is keeping them alive long enough to get
to the hospital, and you can't guarantee anything other than
that they don't bleed out right there, right, and then

(31:15):
maybe other injuries. You haven't seen this where we did
the check head to toe, right, and stuff like that,
Like especially in blast injuries, you might not notice injuries
to the back. Yeah, shrapnel as a whole. I mean,
but all you can do is like try to treat
what you can see, yes, exactly, and make sure that
you don't miss anything by going through that doctor March
procedure right which you're learning the course, but yeah, you're
having a procedure that you do where you make checks

(31:37):
so that you don't miss something that you could have stopped,
because then I imagine you will feel bad. Yeah, and
none of what we've said we should probably bring this
to a close should be seen as like the end
all be all, or our attempt to give you comprehensive
training on this is in no way training. This is
advice on number one, the equipment that's necessary for stopping
someone from bleeding to death, and number two the kinds

(31:59):
of training you should get in order to use it,
and you should seek training. You should find a stop
the bleed course. You should take a wilderness medicine course
if you can. If you if you are someone who
is in a field that it's relevant for, you should
try to get a HEA fat course. Um, don't don't
just like be Okay, I listened to a thirty minute podcast.
I'm ready to stop a bleed. Go go get some training. Um,

(32:20):
but definitely get a tourniquet and practice with it. You
can do some training yourself. You can find videos online
by reputable people who are affiliated with different rescue organizations
talking about and showing how to apply tourniquets, how to
apply dressings, UM like that. That's available, and you can
provide yourself with a useful amount of education and some

(32:42):
of the basics that way. Yeah, I think just to
give out some resources on how you can get the
education right to stop the league to org should be
free almost anywhere you are and you'd like to get
more training. Most community colleges have an E M T
course that is very affordable. Yeah, a heat fat course
can run you a couple of grand if it's not subsidized.
The last time when I took my impute training, it

(33:03):
was a thousand dollars. Yeah, I think it's less than
that now. I know people don't have many students who
are going through empty training, and it's pretty affordable free
often enduring California, it's often free. The other things you
can do are wilderness medicine that is expensive. The American
Alpine Club has grants, like more and more diverse group
of people should apply because all of the outdoors could

(33:25):
do with a lot more diversity, and encourage people to apply. Yes,
so for all of these training there are grants, and
I would encourage more people to apply to them. But you, yeah,
you can learn a lot for free or online. You
can and should try and educate your friends. Like we're
saying is some of this stuff is hard to funk up.
And even if you don't feel confident, confident using stuff

(33:46):
rescue essential with North American Rescue, Chinnook Medical there's a
places where you can buy a pre made I fact
carry that around and someone else can use it. And
again for talking about like the benefits of this versus
the cool looking tactical gear and guns and stuff, it's
entirely possible to have a bunch of military equipment that
is worse than useless if you don't know how to

(34:07):
use it, is actively a danger to other people. If
you have a bunch of medical gear and you don't
know how to use it, but you have it on you,
you can always shout like I have a tourniquet, I
have like a combat dressing or something like, does anyone
know how to use it? No one is going to
make fun of you in the mike of a mass
shooting for trying to hand off your gear to someone
who knows how to use it. Yeah, exactly. And like
you don't have to carry around a little green multi

(34:28):
camp out or something like. You can get a bum bag,
put it in a fucking purse, like whatever, it doesn't matter. Yeah,
it doesn't matter at all. They have a very small,
very compact and like a bumbag or family pack is
very handy because you can switch it from the back
to the front get to all your stuff. So, yeah,
you don't have to be all like tactical fucking Sammy savior.
Just be sensible and safe. Yeah, even if you don't,

(34:49):
even if you panic or whatever and can't be the
one to use it, you can still help save somebody's
life by fucking having the ship, because it's it's irreplaceable
when it's not there. Yeah, I would just to encourage
people to not use to the elastic cornicate. Yes, don't
go and buy Nils up stuff because you know you
can probably pay the same price to get on that's

(35:10):
not expired and to yeah, just be conscious buying from
those reputable people. They often have sales, especially around holidays.
You can you can hold out and wait for those. Um.
They were pretty good resources on Reddit as well. Actually
there's a tactical medicine subreddit where people will sort of
list their kits and often posted as a sale. So
sometimes worth cruising that. If this is something, yeah, do

(35:31):
some research. Um you may find right now, especially from
places like Rescue Essentials. It is harder to get combat
tourniquets because the war in Ukraine has caused a shortage
of the good ones. But you can still find them.
You just may need to search around a little bit. Yeah.
What I found was that because you've posted about this
after New York shooting, was that they were out of

(35:52):
the straight tornic it, but they were not out. They
wanted to go with the pouch. Pouch cost like six
or eight dollars. I know that that that's more of
an expense if you can. If you can afford that,
then getting that's not a bad idea anyway, because you
can put on your boat, put it and have one
of my backpack hiking right, So that's definitely something that yeah,
all right, well that's gonna do it for this episode. James,

(36:12):
you want to plug anything um anarchism? Oh good, yes, absolutely,
um yeah, go uh to find a hierarchy and like
throw a rock at it. Yeah. Just look after other
people and don't resort to the state to do it.
Be kind to each other and uh get getting MP
training if you can. Oh yeah, that's a beautiful sound.

(36:53):
This is it could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. I'm Robert Evans.
I'm here again with Dr James Stout. James say, hello,
hi people. We are in an undisclosed location. Is that
going to get you in trouble with your immigration stuff? Yes? Yeah, okay,

(37:14):
well let's just bleep out the rest of that, but
keep the thing with me asking if it's gonna get
him in trouble with this immigration officer, that'll be fine.
This is a podcast that all too often, as Garrison
and I say, winds up us being like here's a problem, goodbye,
um and telling people about problems is important, but it's
also important to talk about solutions. Now there's been a
discourse not just on the Twitter but on the subreddit

(37:35):
for um. It could happen here repeatedly over the last
few months of people talking about like how would anarchists
handle things like large scale distribution of food, UM, an
industrial base, you know, how how would anarchists? How would
anarchist society handle infrastructure in any meaningful capacity? Um? And
I think there's kind of a wide spread idea among
some people that like, you have to have intense centralization

(37:57):
UM to do that. UM. Now, James, you are I
wasn't joking about the doctor thing. You do have a PhD.
In Your specific area of specialty is the Spanish Civil War,
that's right, Yeah, even more specific than that, actually, my
h my very specific area of a specialty is the
second republics of a period before the Civil War and

(38:18):
really like the first week of the Spanish Civil War.
But yes, Catalonia specifically, like revolutionary Catalonia. And I guess
my thing is the anti fascist Popular Olympics in six
but more broadly Catalonia and Catalonia before and in the
Civil War. Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting
about this period is you did have one of the

(38:39):
fairly rare times in history where a significant number of
people were living in an industrialized Ish nation UM with
with anarchists under anarchist principles UM and a number of
things were done in an anarchist fashion, including the production
of armored vehicles, the maintenance of large amounts of agriculture,
you know, power and whatnot. Um. So yeah, how how

(39:02):
how do how do James? Yeah, how do anarchism? Let
me tell you? UM? I should start by saying like,
I'm not like a big, big theory guy and more
of a sort of doing things guy, um. Person. But yeah,
so if we look at what we had in Catalonia
right in six, the Spanish Civil War, if you're not familiar,
starts on the nineteenth d N six with a coup. Right, Um,

(39:25):
some of this will sound familiar. Maybe you should listen
to our podcast about Me and mar But we have
a military uprising against a leftist democratic government that has
just been elected in nineteen thirty six after two years
of a right wing It's called the Biennio Negro, like
the Black by any and the you know you've lived
through the Trump Ship, you understand. Um. So we have

(39:47):
this coup that happens and in cities across Spain, the
coup is largely stopped the differentiating factors we talked about
this in our podcast is where the people are armed,
the coup is stopped. Where the people are not armed,
where the government says, then we weren't released weapons to
you the coup, the coup succeeds. Right now, in Barcelona,

(40:09):
the coup is stopped almost entirely by the anarchists, with
a little bit of help from the police. Actually, oddly right, Um,
the one classic allies and the police fighting it together.
I mean it is also a very different kind of
situation with the I mean yeah, culturally, like how does
that happen? How does that happen? Well, in Spain, you

(40:31):
have various police forces, right, and some of them are
created by the Second Republic, So they are police that
exist really to protect the republic from things that would
attack it. That does not mean that they do not
attack for workers, right, the Republic was often called the
Republic of order because they violently put down strikes and
the anarchists killed them. But in this instance they remained

(40:54):
loyal g the cops. Yeah, that's that's a pretty steady thing.
But in this instance, the Republic was under attack from
the right, right, from the military, and in some towns,
the police split for the military, but in Barcelona they
largely did not. Write. We have various police guards, police

(41:15):
groups in Spain, federal and local, but the assault guards
and the civil guards in Barcelona largely remained with the
republic right. And it's important to maybe if we if
we step back a second to explain the concept of
a popular front, then we can understand them more easily, right,
And we do for more detail on this. We talk

(41:37):
about a decent amount of this in our Behind the
Insurrections episodes on the Spanish Civil War and the popular fronts,
which aren't just a Spanish thing. They exist in France,
they exist in a number of other countries. It's the
thing that gets tried on several occasions, often successfully, at
least from an electoral standpoint. Yeah, yeah, it's very successful
at this time, right. And it's important to understand that
the r C, which translates his Catalan Republican left, had

(42:00):
more or less been on popular front since nineteen thirty one,
and a popular front is basically this thing we keep
talking about, where what if everybody on the left could
get on the same page about stopping fascism. That's the
basic idea is like, you've got your libs, you've got
your commies, you've got your anarchists, you've got other weird
junks of the left, and everybody agrees, let's all work
together to deal with this specific right wing threat right now. Yes, yeah, exactly,

(42:23):
like we can put our differences aside and move forward. Um.
So that's what you have in the Second Republic is
explicitly called the Popular Front right, and so that is
why the police in Barcelona split with the anarchists. Now,
what happens in Barcelona is that the military march into
town from outside of town and just pretty much get
get they their ship pushed back in by the anarchist right.

(42:46):
All around town, gunfights breakout. In one instance, um, the
anarchists are able to persuade the soldiers manning a machine
gun that their class solidarity is more important than their
obedience to their offices, and then they turn the machine
gun on their offices and or their officers instead. Unbelievably,
this exceptionally fucking cool. Right. The Spantis Civil War has

(43:07):
all these amazing stories like that, but that that's one
of my favorites. Right, doesn't happen often. It's great when
it does. So what we have by the end of
the first week of the Spanish Civil War is a
situation where in Catalonia the city is in the hands
of the anarchists. As this meeting that happens between the
President of Catalonia and the anarchists, it may or may

(43:28):
not be apocryphal, or the exact words may not be apocypal,
doesn't really matter. What happens is that the anarchists go
to the President of Catalonia and they he says to them,
you're in control of the city. The city's in your hands.
I've been he actually the president. He was liberal, but
he'd been a lawyer for the anarchist when they kept
getting fired. Um, he said, if you want me to

(43:51):
be another foot soldier in the fire, will quit my job.
I'll just be another fight. But if I can be
useful to you as a politician, I will as well. Right,
So it's a submission, amission and from an elected Borgeo
politician that like, the city belongs to you, now, to
the people, and it's up to you what we do next. Right,
what they did was they founded this. They didn't actually
sort of go right, it's all anarchists right to salient

(44:13):
anarchist groups of the CNT and the f AI, the
Anarchist Federation of Iberia and the National Confederation of Labor.
He didn't they didn't sort of be like, okay, you
were on anarchist control. They found out the People's Committee
of Anti Fascist Militias and they said, this is an
anti fascist catalonia, right, And then they began to control

(44:37):
the industries according to the principles of anarcho syndicalism, right,
which is the idea that the way to move towards
a more libertarian society under moving from industrial capitalism is
through industrial unions, right. And they were extremely effective. I
see this discourse a lot on Twitter or on Reddit
or on places where where um, I don't want to

(45:01):
just like dismiss people as tankies, but where we're because
like you know, maybe there's people can can listen and
we can talk and we can understand each other. But
where people go on the Internet to talk about politics
and say that like it's impossible for anarchists to do
supply chain, it's impossible for anarchists to do logistics, right,
And sometimes I think they think of anarchism as like

(45:22):
like only able to work in groups of five people
or something. There's this broad spread attitude in part because
of like some social attitudes among a lot of American anarchists,
certainly American anarchists who are very online that like anarchism
is when you live on a farm with four of
your friends, right, like that that it's very pastoral, it's
anti industrial, and a decent amount of American anarchists are.

(45:43):
It's not uncommon to find people who are like anarcho,
primitivist or whatever, um. But it is important to note
that there's a very long anarchist tradition as we're talking
about now that's deeply industrial. Yes, and like the anarchist
a right, the anarchist symbol that we all see that
comes from America. Right. The industrial workers of the world
come from the United States. The raised fist popular salute
comes from the IWW goes to Spain. Right, we have

(46:06):
this long tradition. But yeah, I think a lot of
American anarchists because it's easier to live and work cooperatively
in a small group somewhat detached. But what we have
in Catalonia that we don't have here is the majority
of the working class committed to an archo syndicalism. Right,
so people return to work and work very effectively when
they're not also volunteering also fighting in something like a
Druti column. Right. Um, these anarchists malicious with which we

(46:29):
can also talk about because I think they're very interesting. Um.
So for instance, one example they like, the site is
the Hispaniol Sweet factory right Spain, Swiss. It's just an
automobile manufacturers like the GM factory within three days after
the revolution. And bear in mind that most of them
have been out shooting at soldiers for most of that time. Right.
Big thing that they had to deal with was the

(46:51):
soldiers often us of churches. They would burn the churches
so like it was an extremely vicious urban battle. They were.
They had converted their facility to go from producing automobiles
for rich people at the time right now everyone had
a car to producing technicals armored cars. Right. And you

(47:12):
can see them if you google c Anti technicals the
anti Arca because she's amazing like a Hodgepodge technicals that
they had, well did these things on and they were
able to turn those around and produce weapons for the front.
Another good example to see as castle pistols right to
us Castle is a famous anarchist leader. Um and Askasso

(47:33):
was killed in the first day of the revolution when
they were fighting the Coupe. There weren't there wasn't much
weapons manufacturing in Catalonia, right, and we're very familiar with
that from our work on Miamma. And what they did
was they set up a factory in Tarrassa to make weapons.
They made copies of ruby pistols actually, but then they
named them after us Casso, so you can still buy them.

(47:55):
I sure you can google them, you can find them,
but these they set up a weapons actory, right, and
then under anarcho syndicalist principles and the principles of sort
of unions controlling this production system, unions controlling the supply
chain system, which let's be honest, they do largely anyway, right,
Like it's not Tim Apple who buys a circuit board
for your phone, it's someone else. This is slightly more

(48:18):
globalized system with with Apple phones. But um, the the
unions were able to set up and change their production right,
not just keep doing what they were doing, but also
pivot without the need for people exercising authority over each other.
This important understanding because you asked like, how how would
anarchists contende industrial production? And it's like, well, have you

(48:41):
ever had a job that it had you work in
a factory on an assembly line or in some sort
of other industrial way. Have you ever been a contractor
and had a boss who sucked? Would it have worked
better if that boss hadn't been there? That's the basic
that's like the like, it's entirely possible for large groups
of people to coordinate in a way that is not
a capitalist system where you're accountable to a shareholder. Right, Like,

(49:02):
there's there's a number of different ways to do that,
but there's a long tradition and and in fact, some
corporations that are still around today and quite large. You
can look up the mon Dragon Corporation in Spain that
have a lot of anarchist principles in their organizing. Um,
not that like it's an anarchist company or whatever, but like,
but there's significant, like significant amounts of anarchist theory and
why that operates the way it does and has been

(49:24):
significantly successful. Um. There's some other examples, and I think
it's Brazil. Um there's a large like steel corporation and whatnot. Um,
But yeah, like there's there's it's not. There's nothing about
anarchism that means you can't have a factory producing armored cars.
It just means you're not producing armored cars for the

(49:44):
profit of the Lockheed Martin Corporation or whatever. Yeah, you're
producing on the cause because you are fighting in a
conflict that you hope will liberate other people, right, And
that is agraby a more important motivation. And then wage labor,
and certainly they in some cases increase activity, but they
were able to sustain all the functions of an industrial society.

(50:04):
And Catalonia was very industrialized, much more so than the
rest of Spain, right, And that's perhaps why anarchism was
so so important there. And and yeah, Verry, it doesn't
require the arbitrary exercise of authority for that to happen.
And like you said, there's plenty of examples of that.
I think both of us really enjoyed David Grabe's book.
But this idea that we move from one phase of

(50:26):
society to another and that necessitates a different form of
political organization just isn't borne out by the historical record.
And I think Catalonia is a really good example of that. Yeah.
And a further example of that is in a pretty
similar time frame you're talking earlier, but not but maybe
like less than twenty years earlier, you have an esther
mack No and mack Nova in Ukraine, this kind of independent,

(50:48):
autonomous anarchist society that is extremely successful in war that
the Soviet Union does not exist without mock No fighting
the whites. Um as as successful easy didn't stopping in
advance on on Moscow. And that's a rural that were
not industrialized, and in fact their anarchism was very much
based in kind of the traditional methods of organized rural

(51:11):
societies in Ukraine. UM. And you have that a lot
in other like you have a lot there are a
lot of areas in which anarchism is common in rural
areas and it's more of like a state socialism in
industrialized areas. But you can have you also have this
deep history of industrialized anarchism and there's uh, it shows
that there's a capability for anarchist principles to function with infrastructure. Yeah.

(51:35):
And if you want to look for rural anarchism, and
you can look in southern Spain, right is um If
you want to look at a small case study of
the anarchists of Casas Vias is a great example of that. Right,
people can find I'm sure it's free online. Is a
pdf now, um, But yes, it doesn't have to just
exist in urban or rural society or between the two, right,
like whether Druti column went south? Okay, the drug column

(51:58):
is an anarchist column. There are a number of other
anarchist columns, but this one is the sort of the
pre eminent one, the one that was most successful because
they tended not to get bogged down as much in
fighting in rural environments where they were not skilled, but
they were extremely skilled, much more so than the military,
and fighting in urban environments, right, So they were very successful.

(52:19):
They went to Zaragotha and then fought there. While they
were there, they were collectivizing the farms, right, And I'm
sure some of that collectivization was forced. I don't want
to be like everything was rainbows and unicorns, but it's
a war. There's no side in a war whose handstake lane, right,
Like that's not minimizing or ignoring it, it's just stating that,
Like you you have to sometimes talk about the broad

(52:40):
strokes of what's going on with without pretending to whitewash
the fact that I'm certain ugly things happened there as well.
Yeah yeah, and like yeah, you say, ugly things happen
in war, and I think if you if you want
that not to happen. Maybe I don't know you live
on the internet, but like, um, the dirt decorum then
goes to it right in the seat at Madrid, which

(53:01):
was the also the first conflict in the International Brigades,
the first battle of the International Brigades fourteen. It was
a very successful battle for the Republic. It was a
bottle that allowed the republic. If we look at the
two battles that allow the Republic to exist, right, it's
conflict in Barcelona, the battle for Barcelona, the first days
of the Civil War, and it's a battle in Madrid
right now. Madrid is not as much of an anarchist city,

(53:23):
is a city with anarchism, but it's also more salient
other socialism. Um. So when the Drouty column arrives right
and takes part in the combat there, because they have
been successful, because they're very good urban warfare, and a
lot of the people in the Druty column didn't want
do Routy to go, but he decided it was important
to go as part of this popular front, right to

(53:44):
fight this this huge push of Spain's most professional soldiers. Right,
and that's where Derouty. You can read. I know somebody's
working on an unlike a graphic novel about him. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and you should give them your money if you have
some but able path. His book about Druty is very good.

(54:04):
It's an amazing book because you turn out the line
of notes and he's like, oh, yeah, this book has
taken me a long time to write because I was
involved in a resistance against Franco and spent twenty five
years in jail, solitary confinement. But what a chad. But
so you can read about Druty there, and Druty dies
in the Battle for Madrid. But it's also kind of
important to look at Spain is effective anakast, Spain is

(54:28):
effective in fighting fascism. Um, what stops it being effective?
To my mind, it is not anarchist principles military organization.
The other thing that was that was impressive about Druty
Column was that they had embedded army loyal army officers
and they listened to them and they learned from them
and they said, Okay, we don't good at some stuff,

(54:48):
not good other stuff. We will learn. Other anarchists didn't.
It didn't tend to do as well. Yeah, this is
a common misconception because the anarchists are very much against hierarchy, um,
which doesn't mean being against professionalism or competence, right. Like,
it's the idea that like the hierarchy, For example, that
led several million young boys to get machine gun in

(55:09):
World War One because the people who were in charge
of them had not learned how machine guns functioned. Um,
is was a problem. But if you've got someone who
has been training their entire life as a soldier and
understands very effectively how artillery functions and how machine guns function,
and because they have professionalized in that, it's not against
anarchist principles to listen to that person in a gunfight. Yeah, yeah, expertise,

(55:32):
it's not a it's not Yeah, it's not incompatible with liberty, right,
and so yeah, they were very willing to listen to that.
And in the same way they would be in a like. Again,
these people have worked in factories, right, they understand that
you don't know how to use a lathe and you
exert your liberty to use a lathe, and your hand's
gonna end up in a lathe when I when I
go to a doctor and say, I'm am, I have
gotten this horrible infected wound. What do I do about it?

(55:54):
I am not yielding to a hierarchy. I am. I
am accepting their expertise, you know. Yeah, yeah, I think
sometimes people. I think your listeners are much better informed
than this Germany. But people confuse anarchism with a predilegtion
for chaos and violence, and it isn't that right. It's
just it's a desire to to be more free and
to not be controlled. And I have a boo on
your neck. And but to to wind up that thought,

(56:16):
like the reason that Spain that the Republican Spain starts
to lose is not because there are anarchists. And you
will definitely see this discourse on the internet. Many people
will tell me that I'm mistaken about it. It's my
fucking degree, But um yeah, I would argue that it's
because the whole Western world that did quote unquote democracy

(56:37):
is at the end of them, right, Yeah, this is
like there's there's this. We talked about this a bit
in the episodes we did on it. But like there's
this whole argument that I'm sure you'll get into more
between like the socialists, the communists, you know, and the anarchists.
But a huge part of it, probably most of it,
is that, like the fascists are getting guns from other
fascists and tanks and aircraft often flown by professional ash

(57:00):
just pilots who are training for what's going to become
World War two, whereas Republican Spain has some old bulk
action rifles that got smuggled in through France. Yeah, and
some mosens. It was sold by America to Russia, from
Russia to Mexico and then from Mexico back to Spain.
Right like um, and and yeah, these old mouses are
all well talks about that are rusted and they can't

(57:20):
open the bolt after they fired them and they reload
their ammunition and it's ship. But yeah, and on the
other side, right, like the coup doesn't work. How does
the Army of Africa get from Africa to Spain. It
doesn't swim, right, how do these generals get from Africa
to Spain airlifted by other fascist nations? Right? We don't
see that, right, Actually, France wanted to sell planes to

(57:42):
the Republic and the early days of the war that
Britain pretty much put the kibosh on it. And there's
an interesting parallel with what you're seeing in Ukraine right now,
because in Ukraine you have a republican government, um, in
a military that has a fairly wide selection. Jake camerhanters
posted like a vegan at streamist who's fighting on the
front lines of the because it's like, yeah, there's a
whole bunch of different ideological tendencies fighting on behalf of

(58:06):
the broadly Ukrainian side. They're including some very nasty ones. Um,
but you're kind of seeing what happens when a fascist
power invades a country like that to stop a republic
and democratic powers send them the most advanced weapons on
the planet, right, which is all it would have taken
to roll back fascism in Spain. And then perhaps you know,

(58:27):
there were a lot of German Italian exiles fighting in Spain,
right because the Second Republic had relatively liberal, silent policies
and they knew the only way to stop fashion Italy
in Germany was to roll a bank in Spain and
keep going right. I often have this, and I've had
this as we've reput it on me an more, this
weird thought of like I'll be reading about the Spanish
Civil War in my office and I'll look at my
gun collection. Although if I took every if I had,

(58:48):
if I could go back in time with everything I
have in my house, all of the m O and guns,
there are a couple of battles that might have been
turned around by just that. Because while for one thing,
because modern semi automatic arms are much more effective than
bold action rifles. But just like the level of armament
that those people had was um that there were eighteenth

(59:09):
century armies better equipped for combat. Yeah, I mean you
see people with muscle loaders and stuff in the Spanish
Civil War, right, And then the only place they can
term for arms is the Soviet Union. Right. And they
don't just get arms, they also get these generals, right,
who are quote unquoite advising. They're not, they're commanding units.
There's a lot of Soviet politicking at play, right, and

(59:30):
as much as anything. And you can read like um,
like Peter Carroll's book on the Abraham Lincoln Brigades Brigade
UH Battalion. Sorry, they want a brigade that will give
you a better idea of like exactly how this strict
authoritarian communist control really sacked the spirit out of the

(59:53):
republic Um. And you can see this in May of seven, right,
which is what which or Well writes about in his
book Right the May Day. When we see a conflict
between the non Stalinist communist they weren't Trotskyist to pum right,
very often portrayed to trot to Trusky himself, like you
can see the letters that he wrote to them where
he had thrown disagreements with them if you care to look. Um.

(01:00:14):
But we see this conflict, the shooting war right between
the anarchists and the non Stalinist comunist Understanish communists. And
what comes out of that is this idea among people
on the libertarian left, its broad spectrum of libertarian leftism
that we saw in Spain, but it's not really worth
fighting for the republic or for the fascists, because either

(01:00:36):
way we're just going to have the boot on our neck. Right.
The secret police, I say, were like the secret police
spent far, far, far more time going after anarchists in
the Republican Army than they did after spies. Oh no, really,
the authoritarian left spent more of their time fighting anarchists
than the fat wild. Yeah, crazy is it? And it's
never happened again. We learned from it. We moved on,
we've become better people. Yeah, yeah, it's great, We're we're

(01:00:58):
fine now, we've fixed it. For a lot of the
people fighting for the republic, Right, what are you fighting for?
And I think that's important that we remember that even
in times when things are bad, right, you have to
think about what things should be like you have to
try and model that in what you're doing now on
an economic level, when you're talking about like they come
in they collectivize these farms. There's like anarchists, like the

(01:01:22):
anarchists in large chunks and like in Catalonian in particular,
are kind of running what at the time as a
fairly modern industrial economy. How does that? How does that work? Like,
do do you have any kind of like overall state,
like during the period of time where you know they
had reasonable control and also weren't completely overwhelmed with the fighting,
How did it function? Yeah? You kind of have a state, right,
you have this sort of people's committee anti factism, militious

(01:01:44):
but Uh, not really, because things things are somewhat chaotic.
Rights on the states, we would maybe understand it now.
So what we have instead is is anarcho syndicalism. Right,
these unions going to other unions and organizing among themselves. Right,
Like you know, the steel workers need X from the miners, right,
the miners, then the the tube makers need extra the

(01:02:06):
steel workers and the gun company need X from the
from the tube makers, right, And so organizing along industrial
union levels allows things to continue. That allows the trains
and trams to continue, allows them to continue manufacturing munitions. Right.
So it's it's an archo syndicalism, it is. It's a

(01:02:26):
type of libertarian leftism. And then we see these collective
or sort of cooperative I should say, farming arrangements, right,
where again people people are farming, people are sort of
joining together their industrial small holdings and then delivering those,
contributing those to the city to the war effort. And
there's something, as you see in Ukraine right, relatively special

(01:02:50):
that happens in these times of conflict where people are
I think more willing to just step aside from the
a and I think that's always been that was a
thing for the Spanish working class for a long time.
But to step aside from the accumulation of stuff, right
from the accumulation of individual goods and wealth, and to
say like, yeah, well, let's all get stuck in together.
And I think that helped to allow that to happen,

(01:03:12):
helped to allow it to continue. But yeah, these organizations
between unions and collectives worked, right, they functioned. You can't
argue that they didn't work. The Republican Army didn't starve
in a week or ran out of fuel and things, right,
These these anarchist columns were able to travel from Barcelona
to the Agostina and from the Agossa back to Madrid
like that. That that doesn't happen if if you're incapable

(01:03:33):
of organizing. Right. So in the factories, these people had
already been organizing together, right, They were on strike often
right there. They knew how to. They had an existing
system for organizing things because they already organized to pay
strike funds. They already organized to look after other union
other parts of the C and T when they were
out right, they organized to have policy statements on various things.

(01:03:55):
So they had these existing means to organize. They just
didn't have or alretis told people what to do. They
knew how to what to go to the side, what
to do. Yeah, I had this beautiful moment during the
uprisings where I was in a city, UM, and I
was hanging out with members of a medical collective and

(01:04:17):
the building that they were in there was a couple
of thousand square feet of they were producing by assembly
line kim wipe's for clearing mace out of your eyes. UM.
They were producing like I fax medical kits. They had
racks of body armor that had been donated or purchased
with donated funds UM. And it was all it was
a substantial amount of equipment that was being and and

(01:04:41):
respirators and stuff that was being organized as symboled, put together,
UM distributed, putting people's hands, put in the hands of
people who were going out and utilizing it on a
regular basis. UM. And it was being done like with
within the principles of kind of like like a number
of things can be organized that way. It's it is
it is handling the collection, the distribution um of of

(01:05:04):
of equipment and the collection disbursement of funds like for
potentially like thousands and thousands of people. Um, that's perfectly
doable under anarchist principles, and anarchists have done that kind
of thing a number of times in the world. Yeah,
Like if you look at the example of the soup
kitchens right at proletarian dinas or restaurants they called them. Right,

(01:05:24):
So in in Barcelona, a Madrid, they took over the
writs right and and sourced food from rural anarchists to
to feed people, right, rather than saying like, oh you
know you have to buy feard, you have to buy food.
You have to buy food. You come here and anyone
can eat if you're hungry, right, and yeah, you see
people doing that. Look at the unit that we we
spoke about Miama, right, the Crenny generation c Army. They

(01:05:48):
those guys they didn't have like you know, no one
was wearing rank right now one was a general or
a captain or or a sergeant. Right, they talked and
to our point before by expertise, some people we found
out are the person we were talking to, Zara who
was who was killed. Um was seen as a commander
by people because of what they wrote about him after

(01:06:10):
he died, but he never talked about himself that way. No.
In fact, he told us, right that if some people
knew more, they've been in the fight for longer, they
knew the terrain, and then we listen to them and
they have a bit more way in that conversation. But
we all just decide together what we what we want
to do m and that that works, right, Like, because
those guys were very well respected right among the the

(01:06:31):
anti coup forces in Mihama because of their willingness to fight,
their effectiveness, and those guys have a good battlefield record
against the government troops. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, And like
it wasn't just again, like it's not just five guys fighting, right,
it's also they were able and and in Mihama we
still see this with like the underground and they called
the Development Committee LS and the people who are they

(01:06:52):
were the people who did the shield walls and that
kind of thing. And people will be familiar with the
George Floyd uprising for them, they went underground of their
developing ways to make weapons now, right, so they're the
people you'll see making three D printed guns. So the
people you'll see making improvised explosive devices, fertilized bombs, working
out how to make handmade to two rifles we've seen

(01:07:12):
right like and again they don't. They don't need someone
in charge for that, right And in times of difficulty
we revert to taking care of one another and getting
things done. We we don't contrary to I think what
what we're led to believe, sort of revert to we
don't need like a strong leader, dear leader. We are

(01:07:32):
capable of looking after one another outside of authority in
the state. Yeah. And it also stands to the point
that like accepting the authority of someone with expertise in
certain situations, like the fundamental way in which effective military
is organized tends to involve the existence of an n
c O corps, right you, Every military that is good
at fighting has it in c O core. Part of

(01:07:53):
why Russia has acquitted itself so unbelievably poorly and the
fighting in Ukraine is that that that does not functionally
exist in the Russian military. Um. It is absolutely the
basic idea of an n c O COREP is that
with among fighting units, there should be dudes whose job
and I say dudes in the non gendered sense, there
should be people whose job is to make the functioning

(01:08:14):
of that fighting unit be their whole life, and they
stay at that job for a long time. They don't
just like move up and ship. They're just they're there
to keep that unit functioning. Um. And from the perspective
of like someone who is an anarchist, I mean as
an anarchist who's been shot at a number of times.
When I'm hanging out and there's like some grizzled ass
fucking veteran in the unit I'm embedded with, I'm gonna

(01:08:36):
do whatever that fucker says, right absolutely, because you're crazy,
not too, because that's just good sense. It's the same
thing as like if you're in deep bush or whatever
with somebody who knows wilderness survival and they tell you
don't eat that plant, or they tell you know, this
is a bad place to camp for this reason or whatever.
You listen to them, like that's again, and you know,
factories function the same way. Having been on building sites,

(01:08:59):
they function this same way. Somebody tells you don't do
that it's a bad idea, and they clearly have been
doing it more than you. You listen to them. That's
not accepting that you have a boss. That's accepting that
you have people who are more experienced and competent in
certain things. Yeah, And if you look at what ineffective
armies sometimes have, it it's it's it's it's in the
office of core. Right, it's people who are in charge

(01:09:21):
but maybe you ought not to be, but it's because
of their status with their wealth or something else. Right.
And you see like very effective fighting in the anarchist units, right,
with men and women, and actually people who would were
non binary as well, or people who would call non
binary didn't call themselves out then. Um, but um, we
see that because they were willing to elect officers, right,

(01:09:42):
but then listen to them. And it wasn't it was
listened to not obey, right, But but that was an
extremely effective way of doing things. Yeah. I was having
a conversation with a body of mine who was a
marine and saw some very heavy combat in Iraq years
ago about like the way in which certain anarchist units
had worked over time, and talked about the fact that
they elected their leaders. And he was like, well, we
didn't do that obviously, but there were people you knew

(01:10:05):
you shouldn't listen to and people you did, and you
understood who you wanted calling the shots when bullets were flying, right, like,
regardless of what the actual hierarchy was. It's just like
you know, in the U. S. Military, you have a
platoon leader who was an officer who has been to college,
and you have a platoon sergeant, and they do somewhat
different things. But every reasonable person who has interfaced with

(01:10:26):
those units will agree that like any good platoon leader,
even though they're an officer and a higher rank, it
is gonna listen to whatever the fucking platoon sergeant says
because they've been doing that job a lot along. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
you're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't right,
and the arrogance will find you out during it in
a difficult situation pretty quickly. So yeah, I think it's
important to look to look at those anarchists militaries, right.

(01:10:47):
And then there are lots and lots of accounts of
the of the anarchists and the Spanish Civil War. Julian
Casanova's book is one of my favorites that people want
to read one and married book Junichurse has written to
the Spanish anarchists as well, so they're there are lot
of books you can read about, and some of them
micro case studies are really fun. Right, if you want
to look at like what is it like to live
on an anarchist farm in ninety six in rural Catalonian

(01:11:11):
Yale or something like that, like, and I would encourage
people to read them with an open mind, and I
understand that like the world was different than than it
is today, but to look at those historical examples and
realize that, like, what people were doing them was fundamentally
the same. Right, they were trying to take care of
each other and make the world better for their children,
and they didn't want the boot on their neck, and

(01:11:32):
they were all prepared to work together to do that,
and that that was an extremely functional way. And what
didn't work for them was being controlled by people from
the SO Union who maybe didn't understand their struggle because
they often volt it wasn't worth fighting anymore. And that's
true for communists to actually, right, Like if you look
at the American communists who went and fought, and they

(01:11:53):
were overwhelmingly Communists who went and fought for the for
the International Brigades. The International Brigades were not the public's
army per se. They were the comm Interns army. And
if there is one group of people who was hated
more than anyone else. It was commissars, right, these people
who were sort of there to enforce this very strict
interpretation of what they saw as Marxist Leninism. So even

(01:12:16):
those people right who were communists might have had a
more slightly more libertarian understanding, didn't really take that well
to being bossed around and lost a lot of their
wills what they were fighting for because of that. Right.
Cecil Lbis book is another really good book about that.
If you want to read that, well, I think that's
going to bring us to an end here, James, you

(01:12:36):
have a book about the Spanish Civil War that you
should probably plug here. Yeah. Yeah, it's called The Popular
Front and the Learner Olympics. It's about the anti for
Olympics that were held as an alternative to the Barslona Olympic.
Tics explains how the Popular Front used sport to build
an anti fascist identity in Catalonia, and it used sport

(01:12:57):
to bring together anti fascists from around the world. The
Olympics actually happened on the nineteenth of July, which is
the same data civil War startists, and they never they
never occurred, but many of the people who went to
take part in the Olympics, decided to stay and fight,
and so that's what my books about. It's quite expensive
and you can I understand that people can't afford it.
That's fine. I keep saying I'm working on another book,

(01:13:19):
but I'm not working very hard or very fast. Yeah. Yeah,
look it up and someone's probably bootlegged it. Actually, the
book is often free at universities and other libraries. So
yet to go to your library and I'll see them
to get it. And uh where else can people find you?
On the internet? At James Stout on Twitter, same thing

(01:13:39):
on Patreon. Those are my two main things. You can
find my writing a muck rack to google my name. Yeah,
and again help us, Daniel, please bleep that out for
the sake of James immigration cases. And yeah, that's good.
That's that's an episode. Yeah. Despite it being past midnight,

(01:14:12):
you can still see through the dense forest. The moonlit
sky combined with the urban light pollution, make traversing the
messy woods easier than you thought. You relieve that you
don't have to use your head lamp, which could have
drawn unwanted attention. The company of a few of your
queer friends makes the walk through the confusing woods less intimidating.

(01:14:33):
Dressed in gray and camo, you make your way through
overgrown trails and hop over a small creek. Save for
the occasional train, all you can hear is the croaking
of frogs and chirping of cicadas, crickets, and grasshoppers. The
night air you breathe through your mask is noticeably cleaner
than the air from downtown that you spent months riding

(01:14:55):
in during not even counting the tear gas in the air.
As you and your pals slowly trek through the forest,
your feet squish into the grassy, wet ground. You avoid
the area's caked and clay and stick to the cover
of trees, brush and the soft wetland. After a short
walk and with only a few wrong turns, you reach

(01:15:16):
an artificial break in the embrace of the forest. You
look at your masked up friends, and for a brief
moment during the moonlight night, you can't quite tell who's who.
Which is a good thing, you suppose. Everyone exchanges glances,
but no one says anything. Everyone already knows what to do.
As you approach the barren mound of dirt, you get

(01:15:39):
angry a jarring crack in the beauty and mysterious allure
of the forest. You're no longer in the woods. You're
at the site of destruction, a clear cut that seeks
to expand its radius. Without the tree coverage, you can
see the harsh blue light of LEDs in the distance.
There among the mounds of dirt and fallen trees are

(01:16:02):
several unguarded machines of destruction. With no cell phones in sight.
You and your friends get to live in the moment
your agenda becomes the sound of shattering glass in the
cold night. Hammers meet windows and serrated knives cut the
inner tubing of bulldozers and excavators. The undoing of the

(01:16:22):
mechanical monsters that have violated the forest has begun. No
tool of the evil doers goes unharmed. Rattling cans of
spray paint leave antagonistic and proclamatory messages with rebellious hiss
for those who intend to continue destroying the forest. Defend
the forest, no cops city, no Hollywood dystopia. In little time,

(01:16:45):
the light, pollution, moonlight, and distant LEDs are accompanied by
a bright orange blaze emanating from the machines, lighting up
the area around the sad mound of dirt. A splash
of gasoline acts as the extension of the blood that
fuels the burning fire in your hearts that became a
light with the rage felt at the sight of the

(01:17:05):
decimated woods. By the time the fire department took notice,
you've already disappeared into the night, like a specter, fading
like the curling black smoke that drifted into the midnight sky.
As you exit the forest, you go about as if
what happened tonight never did. You never tell a soul,
You never talk about it with your masked up queer friends,

(01:17:28):
since they were never there either. Details fade in your
memory like a dream, but deep down you still remember
the feeling, the peak moment of true freedom. When the
fire engulfed the machines. It was upon broken, uneasable machines
that the fires were extinguished, laying incinerated the excavators and

(01:17:48):
bulldozers who are rendered immobile worthless. Piles of trash. Fires
are only temporary and can be undone. But the connection
between those who live in a forest, who breathes air,
and who drink its water filtered through its wetlands, is
not so easily broken. Any further attempts that destroying the forest,
we met with a similar response. The forest was here

(01:18:10):
long before us, and we'll be here long after. You
and your friends, among many other anonymous strangers will see
to that. Welcome. Took it up in here a podcast
about things falling apart and how we can put them
back together, And today we'll be spending that entire spectrum.
I'm Garrison Davison. The story I just read isn't merely

(01:18:31):
a fictional one. It was inspired by over a year's
worth of communicators and report backs coming out of the
Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia. So excuse the
pretentious poetry of anarchists and speak. In early one, it
was real to the public that mainly four entities, namely
the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, de Cab County,

(01:18:53):
and Black Hall Studios, had dual plans to devastate two
complementary sections of the South Atlanta for Rest. The City
of Atlanta and Police Foundation plans are to turn the
area of the forest known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm,
into the largest police training facility in the country, complete
with a mock city helipad and bomb range. Meanwhile, Entrenchment

(01:19:16):
Creek of a public forest land will be traded by
de Cab County to Black Hall Movie Studios to clear
cut the land on which they plan to build America's
largest sound stage. This project lies at a horrific intersection
of police militarization, gentrification, copaganda, and exasperating the local effects
of worsening climate change by clear cutting hundreds of acres

(01:19:39):
of forest. In the last year, activists, ghosts like saboteurs,
and open source researchers have vultraals together into an anonymous
and diverse movement that's brought the plan to destroy the
forest out of the shadows of secretive, backdoor corporate deals
and into the public spotlight, forming the Defend the Atlanta

(01:19:59):
Forest move mint that's consistently been able to get ahead
of police and media by breaking news about the forest
destruction plans and setting the terms of engagement and what's
deemed as acceptable direct action, all well being able to
foster relationship with the woods that they are defending. I've
been really interested in this project since I heard about
it last summer. Along with the intersection of police militarization

(01:20:21):
and climate change on the flip side. There's this unique
intersection of urban city protest and classic forest echo defense.
The mix of tactics have produced a movement unlike anything
really seen before here in the States. Not to get
ahead of myself, but ever since last fall when the
Atlanta City Council approved the plan to build the largest
police training facility in the country, dubbed cops City by

(01:20:44):
activists due to the plans to build a mini version
of Atlanta within the facility to practice urban combat. But
I figured that I would eventually find myself inside the forest.
So this last April, when an opportunity presented itself to
travel to Atlanta, stay in the wood and talk with
some forest defenders, I couldnot pass it up. I packed

(01:21:04):
a tent, sleeping bag, and some microfilms and made my
way to Georgia. The first thing I noticed upon arriving
in Atlanta is that when they say Atlanta is a
city in a forest, they really do mean it. The
amount of continuous tree coverage throughout the city was astonishing,
and that's coming from someone who lives in Portland, Oregon.
As it turns out the city of Atlanta actually has

(01:21:26):
the highest amount of tree canopy of any city in
the United States. On top of the citywide tree coverage,
there is the South River Forest, which makes up the
largest continuous section of woods and serves as Atlanta's first
line of defense in the face of rapidly accelerating climate change.
The forest in southeast Atlanta is said to function as

(01:21:46):
the lungs of the city. The canopy offers shade and
traps carbon, with some of the more heavily forted areas
acting as wetlands that filter rain water and prevent flooding
by collecting runoff. It's Marsh is one of the last
breeding grounds for a lot of amphibians in the region,
as well as an important migration site for wading birds,
and serves as a home to a lot of local wildlife.

(01:22:10):
Nearly five acres of this forest is under threat by
the Atlanta Police Foundation and Black Hall Studios. If plans
succeed to develop this precious strip of forest into the
massive police compound and adjacent movie sound stage, the entire
metropolitan area will face much harsher effects of climate change,
including worsening floods, higher temperatures, and less clean, tree filtered air,

(01:22:33):
Not to mention the increased police militarization and gentrification. Speaking
of the second thing I noticed once I arrived in
Atlanta is how much gentrification is currently underway. The amount
of hideous five of our one apartments that are being
built was impossible to overlook. And as we'll see, the
way police feed off gentrification, which feeds off the corporate

(01:22:54):
and movie making sides of Atlanta, is not merely a coincidence.
Last fall in of view to Jamal from the Atlanta
chapter of the Community Movement Builders, a Black lad collective
of community residents and activists serving poor, working class Black communities.
They focus on responding to encroaching gentrification, displacement, and over policing.
Here's what Jamal had to say on the intersection of

(01:23:16):
issues owering around the Cops City and defend the Forest project.
Just to piggyback off of that, I think it's extremely
important for us to recognize the connections between all these things. Right, Like,
Cops City is a perfect blend of UM environmental justice issues,
uh just flat out racism, police brutality, and also gentrification. Right,

(01:23:39):
it's not a it's not a mistake that they're building
this Cops City right at this moment when UM Atlanta
is also becoming the for the first time. And I
don't know how many decades, um non no longer majority
black city because neighborhoods like pittsburgher we're located out of
and all across Southwest and West Atlanta have becoming more
like the black people have been being displaced from me,

(01:24:01):
from our communities, right UM. So a perfect example is
that with my organization, Community Movement Builders, we UH purchased
we've we've been doing work in the pittsburghighborhood for a while,
but we purchased a community house in the neighborhood about
six years ago. Right at that point, we purchased the
house for fifty thou dollars, right UM. Pittsburgh has been

(01:24:21):
historically uh poorn working class community. It was uh it
was founded as a black community, which is different from
a lot of other other neighbors in Atlanta. Was founded
as a black community from UH freed Africans UM who
were trying to escape some of the more rural areas
of the South and found work in Haven in the
Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta. And it's been a poor and

(01:24:43):
working class black community ever since. But now UM, because
of the gentrification has been going on. How a house
just sold, maybe about a month and a half ago
for seven dred and fifty thousand dollars, So the person's
house at fifty thousand dollars six years ago. A house
just sold, um, just a few walks away from that
house for seven fifty thousand dollars. Now, it's not every

(01:25:04):
house is selling for that amount, but that just shows
you the rate of gentrification that's happening. And then and
we know that cops are on this necessary part of
being able to defer to displace people from gentrifying communities.
They play an integral role within gentrification. Yeah, I'm just wondering,
does any of you have anything like even like anecdotal
experience with like basically Marvel and Men, tons of other

(01:25:25):
industries like invading Atlanta. How is that like affected specifically,
Like you already talked about how how you know, increased
the increase in the film industry and other things. Has
you know, has made more gentrification? But like, how has
that even affected just like like other types of stuff,
including like policing, Like has has this type of like
growth um affected people or people you know in in

(01:25:46):
other ways? Yeah? Absolutely. So I think a lot of
this kind of got I won't say it got started,
but a lot of it went even uh you know,
escalated when Tyler Perry Studio opened up in East Point. Um,
and a lot of people, you know, we're praising. It's like, oh,
look at this. Uh you know, it's a black man.
I was able to move down and be able to

(01:26:06):
start this thing within Hollywood. But no, it's all that
is one of the things that also spurred the gentrification
in East Point, which is you might not be familiar
with Atlanta, but East Point is like literally right next
to Atlanta, so it's a lot of it's it's really
close proximity. And so that also spurs over to the
gentrification here in the city as well. Um. Property values
have gone up since that point, even more. Um. Even

(01:26:31):
my tax bill has gone up a thousand dollars a
year per a year um for the past like three years. Right. UM.
So it's yeah, it's it's definitely we definitely see the
effects and you know, and just talking to you know,
we do we do do a lot of work around gentrification. UM.
And I think this is in tandem with you know,
because we have COVID nineteen out here now with the

(01:26:53):
eviction moratorium which has now been you know, denied um
with by the Supreme Court. Um. But even when there
wasn't vision moratorium, there were still people that were getting
invaded from their homes. And I think all of this
in tandem when Atlanta specifically has already been going through
a gentrification crisis and um with COVID nineteen where people
have been losing jobs left and right, or not been

(01:27:15):
able to go to their jobs that they've had um
and loo and having us salaries cut. People have been hurting,
and the response from the city has not too been
that has not been to provide more resources to people.
It's been too fund cops city to be able to
get more police out who are the ones that execute
the actual evictions themselves? And I think it all, it all,

(01:27:36):
it all is connected in that in that type of way.
I arrived in Atlanta a few days before the Muscogee Summit,
a weekend event where the original indigenous people from the
area of the South River or for the native name
of the said land, the Ulandie Forest, traveled back to
their ancestral homeland to discuss indigenous environmental philosophy what land
back and rematreation means in theory and practice. Several Indigenous

(01:27:59):
authors were present and led workshops, including Indigenous feminist, scholar
and community planner Laura har Joe from the University of Oklahoma,
author of Spiral to the Stars Muskogee Tools of Futurity,
and Dr Daniel Wildcat of the Haskell Indian Nations University,
who wrote the book Read Alert Saving the Planet with
Indigenous Knowledge. In the less academic portions, there were forest walks,

(01:28:23):
community meals, and singing of old Muscogee songs, including ones
that are performed two centuries ago during the Trail of Tears.
Muskogee Creek attendees also gathered around a sacred fire to
perform a stomp dance, recreating rhythms heard and sensed in
the forest long ago, to rekindle the relationship with the
Earth and connect back to the ancestral presences. This was

(01:28:45):
the second ancestral migration the Muskogee Creek title members have
done since being forcibly removed two centuries ago and displaced
to Oklahoma. The first one took place just this last November,
and both times the particular section of land they gathered
on in transparant Wee Park is one of the areas
under threat of being ecologically destroyed and clear cut. Over

(01:29:05):
the course of a few days during my week long stay,
I sat down in the woods to record with two
groups of forest offenders, one group sitting around a campfire
at night next to a high security child prison and
the other group during the sunny bird chirping day outside
the Black Hole Studios movie plot. So if you hear
campfires or bird sounds in the background, just embrace our

(01:29:27):
forest punk aesthetic up front. I think it's really important
to first talk about the history of the land that
is under threat, because, on top of issues regarding gentrification
and the plans of this police training facility as a
response to the George Floyne Uprising and the false manufactured
crime wave media narrative intended to rejusify American policing in
the wake of the uprising, that the fact that the

(01:29:50):
Atlanta Police Foundation shows this plot of land in particular
is particularly gross. The history of this small section of
land in the South River Watershed is deeply scarred and
desperately needs time to heal. There are centuries of oppression
and state violence tied to this particular spot of land,
and now we're seeing that trying to be continued with
this Cops city plan. Local tribes were expelled for millions

(01:30:13):
of acres in the southwest region of what is now
known as the United States during the early decades of
the eighteen hundreds. Forced removal and displacement of the Muskogee
Creek people began in the region in eighteen twenty one
through a series of treaties, which then eventually led to
a quote melee of removal. More on that from one

(01:30:33):
of the force defenders I spoke to, and I'll note
we'll be using a mix of voice distortion and voice
actors combined with other audio distortion to help protect the
identities of the forced defenders that I spoke to against
possible state repression. So enjoy our our our cool voice
distorted audio. Yeah. I think it's important because a lot

(01:30:57):
of our comrades musk of the comments and extended relatives
that are identified as Muscogee that we're pushed off as
lands in the early eighteen hundreds. They a lot of
them did not go quietly in the night. I think
that's important to remember because I feel like a lot
of people are just like the Trail of Twos or
like they were pushed out, but they're they fought against

(01:31:18):
being pushed out, and then when a lot of them
were pushed out or killed off, then it was used
to incur story and house mostly black people. So we're
taking it back. That is most of the people that
I have seen involved. It is a diverse group of people.
It's not just like white anarchists in the woods. That
is a misconception. There's all kinds of folks, which really

(01:31:39):
I think is interesting and makes the struggle unique and important.
But there is also a lot of like white anarchists
that are using their privilege to help take the land
back for our comrades that want to see it back,
and it feels things feel like they're in a good way. Um,
there's good relations that are existing between like the anarchists
and indigenous alliance down here, where like obviously no one

(01:32:01):
person speaks and represents any one group, but the alliances
that we do have are very informed of the variety
of activities that have happened down here, including the arsons
of machinery, and we were positively told to quote unquote
keep on going, so that feels empowering and it feels beautiful,

(01:32:25):
and it feels important to note that some of the
comrades that have ancestral ties to this area such a
dark history and they're still here. Is something that they're mentioning,
and they're excited the people that were close to obviously
they're not close to all of them. They're excited that
people are choosing to use their privilege to help make

(01:32:47):
sure these facilities don't get built. Continuing with the scarred
history of this land, shortly after the lands of the
South River Forest were stolen from Muskegee Creek people, plots
were distributed to white settlers in the Fourth Georgia Land
Lottery of eighteen twenty one, which made available landlots of
two hundred and two point five acres. Many of these

(01:33:08):
white settlers established slave plantations on which cotton and other
crops were produced through slave labor. Through archival records, we
know of at least twelve plantations that were on this
land that existed from the eighteen forties up until eighteen
sixty five, and then in the early nineteen hundreds, the
very same land started being used as a prison farm,

(01:33:30):
now known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. The Old
Atlanta prison Farm was originally bought in nineteen seventeen to
incarce rate prisoners of war, but this plan was abandoned
within two years and the land was converted into a
prison farm where inmates including moonshiners, public drinkers, and just
loiterers and really anybody were sent to and forced to
perform unpaid agricultural labor. This shift from plantations to prison

(01:33:55):
farm marks the rebranding of slavery into for profit prison labor.
This labor in fluded washing cows and arsenic laden water,
which led to the early deaths of countless prisoners. The
facility ran up until in which it was shut down,
and then two child prison facilities were put on the
adjacent land, and the Atlanta Police Department already currently uses

(01:34:18):
sections of this hollow ground as a firing range tear
gas canisters and bullet casings from found throughout the forest.
From where on that, here's some other parts that might
sit down with the forest offenders. And then I guess
like fast forwarding a little bit from this land where
indigenous people lived to the prison farm um, and then

(01:34:43):
how this has like a long incarstral history and history
of being tied to policing, both with the child prison
that's still here, the prison farm, and then now trying
to build this militarized training facility that just like continuing
on this legacy of state violence, which is like other
massive aspect in terms of like they're trying to take
this very like land that needs to heal from the

(01:35:06):
centuries of violence and just tear it all down and
build more of that. Um. I know, there's like there's
the firing range that we've been hearing shots from. Uh,
there's it's like just this never ending thing. It just
like just keeps happening. It's a pretty weird, surreal experience.
Makes me feel like we're all like an endangered species

(01:35:28):
living in like the last part of the forest and
fucking South Atlanta. I remember, and I was explaining to
one of my relatives, are like I was reading the
internet about the family Atlanta forest and not sure quite
what's all going on, but sounds like you're living in
hell there between two different chapters and Sons of High
Security was as security, a large massive power land cut

(01:35:50):
and old Prettison farm and two sides of the road
at least three different police firing rangers and always wider
treatment plant. The doubles as a firing range and super
training facility for the police. Another interesting facet is this
particular piece of land where they're trying to build uh

(01:36:11):
Top City is like a really important turning point in
history of slavery in the US. And like this is
where a lot of things went from like shadow slavery
um and transitioned into what we now have as prison slavery.

(01:36:33):
And as we're sitting here on what was literally a
prison farm, even people in pretile detention were here and
used for unpaid labor, even people who had not been
convicted of any time. And so it's kind of like

(01:36:55):
it's like I like very like visible, like Dane on
the like history of of like what you used racist policing,
but it's harder to cover up and harder to like
pink wash um and so like even as there is
like a place where children are locked in cages over

(01:37:21):
they're not yards from me, so too, is this a
place where people were brought for being used as slaves
and like died and were buried in unmarked graves? Yeah, Um,
can I talk a little bit more about that? This

(01:37:43):
was the transition, This is like the intermediitary intermediate transition
between child slavery and mind by prison slavery. UM. And
it was like especially horrific, Like there is two lakes
on the property, but where at one point said to
be filled with arsenic um where beyond slates were not

(01:38:08):
only watching cattle um with the arsenic to remove them
like bugs, but also in those in those lakes and
like suffering horrible diseases and like dying from this. The
reason they present, I'm actually that closed down was because
of the amount of people going in and out of
the reason why this city proached to close it down

(01:38:30):
was because of the amount of UM people being sent
to the hospital week after weekenday after day, like a fish,
like actually overloading the medical system in the area. UM.
That's like publicly recorded information. UM they closed down like
the eighties or nineteen nineties UM. And like during the

(01:38:54):
Civil War, escaped prisoners from here would be are sorry,
escaped slaves are from here would be h like going
across battle lines and feeding information to a Union side
in order to like serve their informs of liberation. I
mean we like this land also exists right next to

(01:39:17):
a major or like major road that serves as a
car serral center. Um. It has not both like the
Metro h reentry Metro Reentry facility, the Metro Youth Detention Center,
and like a couple other buildings. Um uh. And like

(01:39:40):
it's not just like the eighty lands of a plan
to clear cut here, it's also the like three hundred
that they plan to continue with the car serial legacy
of terror and horror. Um from going from like chattel
slavery and indigenous displacement to um be inter intermediary UM

(01:40:06):
poor that the prison firm was, to this new legacy
of like cover up of it all and then and yeah,
the continuation of this land being used by the state,
by police, by um all these like oppressive groups to

(01:40:31):
further their causes. A really interesting aspect of des and
for going to prison farm and then police trying to
now turn it into a militarized police training facility. UM yeah. Yeah.
So first I think, um, you know, this is mimiscogy
land and it's during the Scurgy summit. It's cool, you know,
miscry people have any were displaced for the most part,

(01:40:53):
and there trying to participate in this migration back. And
so they're on the land right now, and it's been
very special to have them UM here and to be
able to express solidarity and like work together with them
has been really amazing and learned a lot and it's
yet it's cool to understand that. And you know what

(01:41:15):
you're saying, that interaction of like UM settler colonialism displacing
people UM, like early slavery, prison slavery, and this this
specific land has always been UM a place that I
feel like has been almost like the vanguard of how

(01:41:36):
like policing has and like such a settler colonialism, UM
has experimented with how to reproduce itself in sustainable ways
UM with like just in general domestication of humans and
the domestication animals. And that's like what APD is trying
to do on this land. And it's a direct reaction

(01:41:57):
to the George Floyd uprising, which caused a cry assist
and policing is it actually been back with serious power,
and so they're trying to figure out and experiment with
ways of reproducing policing for the future in the exact
same way that when slavery took a serious owl, they said,

(01:42:17):
how can we recuperate and how can we reproduce this
in a way that's sustainable, and that why we have
a modern prison system that lives on to this day.
And that's why they're realizing as Pepper gaining and threatening it. Oh,
we have to do something good and this lamp has
always been a site for doing that. If it's they're
an keep tracking. Atlanta is a heavily corporate city. It's

(01:42:42):
been dubbed the Silicon Valley of the South by people
who surely must be insufferable to be around, but it
is true that Atlanta and Georgia's economic policies have attached
a swath of corporations to either start to grow or
migrate to the city. It's home to Coca Cola, Delta Airline,
Bans Ups, home Depot, Chick fil A, and multiple media conglomerates,

(01:43:05):
as well as having headquarters for like Google and other
tech companies. As well, the city serves as a massive
transportation hub. In fact, Atlanta the city started off as
a train hub, and now it boasts the world's busiest airport.
Recent tax credits for the film industry have made Atlanta
and Georgia the new hot place to shoot high budget
Hollywood movies. There's a whole effort to make the city

(01:43:29):
effectively the new Hollywood. But like all economic growth, uh,
this comes with some heavy consequences, most often affecting those
at the bottom. Atlanta is also the most surveilled city
in the United States and the city with the most
wealth and equality. All the corporations and film industry stuff
moving to Atlanta has indeed created jobs, but many of

(01:43:51):
those jobs go to workers from out of state. On average,
less than one third of new film industry jobs have
gone to people who were already living in Atlanta. The
result of this out of state economic migration boosts cost
of housing, cost of living at Bush's lower and middle
class residents of Atlanta out of their neighborhoods, disproportionately pushing
out to black people. And this is all while the

(01:44:13):
increasing corporatization and gentrification is actually pitched as quote unquote
providing opportunities to the city's black population, which is certainly something.
Because the state of Georgia has the fourth largest incarceration
rate in the entire world. If you put a U.
S States on the same level as like every single
other country, the other top three states or countries with

(01:44:35):
the highest incarceration rates are Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. So yeah,
but Georgia's number four. Those in Atlanta's top income bracket
make nearly twenty times those who are at the bottom.
And if you map the wealth disparity onto the layout
of the city, it's a one to one match for
the city's old segregation lines. The entire city runs on

(01:44:59):
these like reignite newliberal policies, but under this mask of
woke identity politics. And who enforces that wealth and equality
and gentrification. That's right, police, which leads us to the
origin of this plan for so called cops City. I'm
gonna quote a crime Thing article that came out last
month called the City in the Forest, Reinventing Resistance for

(01:45:21):
an age of climate crisis and police militarization, which recommend
you guys read I'll I'll have it in the habit
in the source notes. But yeah, here's the quote from
Crime Thing quote. The government of Atlanta has developed a
few tentative solutions to the dilemmas they face. To follow
through on their commitments to their backers, city politicians need
to continue sacrificing public assets on the altar of the

(01:45:42):
economy in order to attract more major investors to the region,
especially the film industry and technology companies. To maintain control
in a period of rapid displacement and rising cost of living,
with chronic tension between the conservative state government and the
liberal city administration, they need to funnel more resources towards
law enforcement throughout the region. Finally, to appease the increasingly

(01:46:03):
rebellious lower classes, they to frame this process of restructuring
and repression in the language of black empowerment, social justice,
and progressivism. The bureaucrats are not in a good position
to handle this. Decades of tax cuts and deregulation have
created infrastructural failures and breakdowns of all kinds, among other concerns.
Atlanta lost the bid for the second Amazon headquarters because

(01:46:24):
the public transit one of the least funded in the
United States. It was not even operable when the corporate
scouts came to visit at the same time. It's precisely
the low taxes and absence of regulation that attract capital
to the state of Georgia, so cultivating a social democratic
governing strategy may now be impossible without creating a flight
of wealth to other parts of the country. It seems
that the current plan is to give over as many

(01:46:46):
public contracts and resources to private developers as possible, to
allow them to incur the costs of social disintegration and anger,
and to use police to control the blowback, and to
use images of Martin Luther King Jr. To preempt any
meaningful resistance. Thus, the plan to transform a wild space
into a police training compound is dubbed the Institute for
Social Justice. That's right, the plan to make the country's

(01:47:11):
biggest militarized police training facility. They're planning to call it
the Institute for Social Justice. Ignore the bomb range and
uh urban combat mock city section anyway. Um here is
Jamal again from the community movement builders. I think one
thing that's also really significant is that so my city

(01:47:34):
council person for his District twelve, Joyce Shepherd, um District
twelve is where Pittsburgh is, where Summerhill is, where several
of poor and black working class neighborhoods of Atlanta are located.
There are also the areas where they're the most gentrifying
areas of the city as well, and it's in and

(01:47:57):
city Council District twelve. Joyce Shepherd she is the person
who brought this proposal forward, right, she is over the
quote unquote public safety. Um, you know they aren't keeping
it safe quote unquote public safety. Um, you know, commission
and Um, she brought this forward. And she has been

(01:48:18):
since she's been in office, she has been a even uh,
she's been a champion of gentrification. Right, she's been a
champion of over policing as well. Um. And I think
it's it's a tie between even our city council or
even our representation has in their interests of being able
of of gentrifying the city because that gives them more

(01:48:39):
tax stars. It gives them a way to be able
to say that they are decreasing their crime rates except
and all those all these different types of things when
it's really just dep deplacing poor folks. Um. And so
I think that's an important about talking about how this
kind of was established. That's an important topic to be
able to address, is that even and she's a black woman,
right so even um, you know, even how like when

(01:49:03):
people when when people might you think they might be
in representing your interests, when they get to be in
these positions, we have to recognize that they are not
necessarily for the people. In the aftermath of the George
Floyd uprising against police violence, the city responded by striking
down any police reform measures and restricting opportunities for republic input,
while increasing the police budget and upping citizens surveillance. On

(01:49:26):
a national level, a media manufacturing crime wave narrative has
been used to rejuify American policing in the wake of
the uprising, and the City of Atlanta is using that
narrative while wrapping their increased militarization plans in a nice
woke social justice package, i e. A militarized police training
compound being dubbed the Institute for Social Justice. Heading up

(01:49:48):
this effort is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a
nonprofit police advocacy organization that claims to have quote united
the business and philanthropic community with the Atlanta Police Department.
It's a It's backed by an array of Atlanta area
corporate donors, including Delta Airlines, Upstrick fil A, Cox Enterprizes,
which owns the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which is like the

(01:50:10):
city's biggest newspaper, and they were formally formally backed by
Coca Cola. They Coca Cola dropped out this last November.
A leak promo video for the Institute for Social Justice
details some of the features of the Atlanta Police Foundations
quote world class training campus. With an estimated cost of
ninety million dollars. The space will provide a place for

(01:50:33):
recruiting training, mid career education, and practice with new technology
and equipment for police and fire department personnel. The renderings
show the campus will house a quote mock city for
real world training, a canine training center, and forty horse
stalls for police horses. Twelve acres of forest land are
slated to be converted into an emergency vehicle operations course,

(01:50:56):
and the whole compound will be located across three hundred
and the acres of the old Atlanta Prison Farm, which
is a city owned but technically outside of city limits,
located just east of the city in unincorporated Dekapp County.
The Police Foundation has proposed funding the training center through
a public private partnership, which will leave taxpayers to pay
an estimated thirty million dollars for this out of city

(01:51:20):
police training facility one, which is one third of the
early estimated cost. According to the land Use Ordinance. The
property will be leased to the Police Foundation by the
city for ten dollars a year for fifty years. It's
almost four acres of forest land for ten dollars a year.
The grund lease will quote provide that the city will

(01:51:42):
be able to have input or approval on the stages
of construction along with the development of the property, and
will allow waving of certain code requirements. Such a facility
would be three times the size of the New York
Plice Department's training facility and four times the size of
the l a p d s and worth noting that
the NYPD and l a p D are the two

(01:52:04):
largest police departments in the country, while Atlanta is the
only the nineteenth largest. Yet they'll have a facility that's
like three times the size of New York's. According to
the Mayor of Atlanta during the time of the facility's announcement,
the massive training complex would quote raise morale among officers
and hopefully bring more recruits to the department. And importantly,

(01:52:27):
the whole project was initially supposed to be totally under wraps,
approved through backdoor deal making the social justice something socialist
justice I believe in the promo video specifically, which was
not likely even a public release. And this is like
very much designed to be under the table, pushed through

(01:52:50):
as fast as possible of the public, whereas it really
supposed to know about it. The videos that existed were
only meant to be UM the Sponsors Boardnembers unders of
the Atlantic Police Foundation UM and MIGHT. The Police Foundation,
unlike most like police unions, is a foundation made to

(01:53:13):
final corporate money into the handsOn police. The Cops City
side of things is just one part of the Defend
the Forest project. The other big aspect of this is
pushing back on the movie studio Black Hall from being
able to clear cut more forced to expand their sound stage.
Projects shot on their current lot include A Godzillak of Monsters, Venom,

(01:53:34):
der Van Hansen, HBO's Lovedcraft Country, and Amazon Primes The
Tomorrow War. On the east side of the forested land,
the part that's referred to as Entrenchment Creek Park was
bought by Hondy Booko founder Arthur Blank and the early
two thousands with a plan to combine UH that section
of land with three acres at the Prison Farm to
create a five hundred acre park, a project that never

(01:53:56):
came to fruition. UH and now the park is currently
under control of the Cat County. On top of the
heat insulation and air filtering that the tree canopy provides,
Entrenchment Creek plays a crucial role in maintaining the South
River Watershed, being a partial wetland and marsh that mitigates
flooding in South Atlanta. Quoting that crime thing article again, quote,
the plundering of public assets from the benefit of a

(01:54:17):
movie company and real estate mogul is described as an
opportunity to create quote good jobs for local Atlanta's, not
as a criminal expropriation of infrastructure. The clear cut that
Blackall Studio has planned to trade in exchange for a
section of forest is to be renamed Michelle Obama Park unquote.
So yeah. That also clearly demonstrates the type of gentrification

(01:54:38):
wrapped in this nice woke package by doing this really
sketchy land swap and then building a park on it
and calling at Michelle Obama Park cool stuff, guys. Black
All Studios is currently a hundred and fifty acre complex
about ten minutes south of downtown, and they seek to
add over half a million square feet of sound stage

(01:55:01):
two hundred thousands square feet of offices UH four hundred
twenty thousand square feet for warehousing square feet of catering space,
according to a filing made through the States Development of
Regional Impact Program UH. The d r I s are
filed when the projects size is large enough that it's
likely to impact the infrastructure of neighboring communities. The De

(01:55:23):
Cab County Board of Commissioners in October voted to approve
the land swap deal with Blackhe Studios. As a part
of the planned expansion, the county would give approximately forty
acres mostly wooded land around the South River Forest, and
then in turn, Black Studios would give the county around
fifty acres of nearby land as well. The project has
faced some legal and construction issues ever since then, and

(01:55:45):
we'll discuss the details of those shortly. Also worth noting
that Black Hall Studios was sold to a private equity
firm in l A just last year, and this last
February announced that they purchased another one thousand and five
hundred acres in Newtown County, Georgia, which is about forty
miles east of downtown Atlanta UH, and they plan to

(01:56:07):
shoot productions there for an upcoming quote action oriented streaming
service dubbed black Hall Americana, which sounds horrible. Um, here's
a here, here's a quote from black Hole CEO Ryan
millsap quote. This is the kind of space we need
to fly in black Hawk helicopters and drive humpies at speed.

(01:56:30):
We have lakes, we have swamps and rivers and forests
and fields and hills and dales. That's the nice thing
about one thousand and five hundred acres. Yep. So look
forward to uh, black Hall Americana, the new hit streaming
service coming out of Georgia. Um, destroying the forest for

(01:56:53):
Black Hall Americana. Oh boy, but yeah, if if, if,
if this project succeeds, it would cement Atlanta as the
new Hollywood, along with like Tyler Perry Studios and all
of the other movie studios moving to Atlanta, and it
would continue the skyrocketing cost to living in Atlanta and
accelerate gentrification at a even more horrifying right. So, Um, Actually,

(01:57:14):
the black Hall side, but in as like being defended
as well, is also in the Welining Forest, which is
like what's been escaping name for the South Atlanta forests. Um,
And it's actually right across the road from where we
currently are. Um. So the and it's like I want

(01:57:37):
to believe three or four acres by itself. Um, and
that is actually under imminent threat as well. They're waiting
on the land destruction permit to pass, and that can
happen any day or any week on on what you
were saying about the gentrification issue. Um, that's something that's
been really noticeable to anyone that lives in Atlanta and

(01:57:58):
has for any amount of time just looking around them,
like the filming that is just regularly happening here and
all all these kind of new companies popping up around it.
Black Hall was sold maybe a little over a year
ago now to a hedge fund out in California. They're

(01:58:19):
getting funding for all of these projects. And the rent
here in Atlanta, I'm sure across the country, I'm not
sure what the trends are elsewhere, has been skyrocketing. Like
you'll see homes that sold during the financial crisis for
like eight thousand dollars two dollars selling for like half
a million dollars today. And you know, I'm not like

(01:58:43):
a fucking economist, but the way that the film industry
has been exploding and other industries like Google and Microsoft
have been building these massive, expensive new headquarters while people
literally go out on the street because they can no
longer afford to pay rent here, and people just get displaced.
It's like the opposite of white flight back into the suburbs,

(01:59:04):
when you know, folks are moving into the city for
economic opportunities that only very wealthy people can get. I mean,
it's it's difficult not to see Black Hall as ushering
in just another huge wave of gentrification. Yeah, black making
movies to support the American way of life, but Black

(01:59:26):
Hall explicitly says they're making movies to support the American
way of life. We hear gunshots from the police firing
range all the time, and we hear almost as many
gun shots from the Black Hall filming sides. Um. And Yeah,
it's very much about creating propaganda that makes people think
they need police. Um. And that's like a huge part

(01:59:47):
of kind of what they're doing. A life of film
and all the gentrification thing. Like even just driving to
the city the past few days, I've noticed so many
places that used to be wooded, uh, totally towards down
and they're putting up these horrible quote unquote luxury condos
which are like, you know, two thousand dollars rent from
on for a tiny studio. UM. And I've even seen

(02:00:10):
things that were used to be secretionated housing turned into
luxury condos. Like it's it's been absurd driving through the
city and watching so many places that used to be
wooded just turned like so much like active construction sites
building these exact same like these identical apartment complexes that
are the most hideous things you've ever looked at, and
completely unaffordable for any for anyone who's not like someone

(02:00:33):
who's working for a tech company. Like they are like
destroying a section of Atlanta called Park and it was
like a large green space that was largely unmaged in Lakeland.
UM and creating quote affordable housing, which is really just
the legal term for they have a certain amount of

(02:00:57):
available housing, like like like taking units in like a
like one unit thing is affordable house. Like affordable just
means market value or like like the medium market value.
Low income is things that people that aren't like average
money makers come for, right And I think one of
the like I think it's has kind of kind of
gotten lost about the struggle about the actual defending the

(02:01:19):
Atlanta force struggles like not specific to just cops of
your black hole is actually the entire forest as a city, UM.
And that like part of the reason why it has
been so focus is because of like how pressing these
currents um things are and how like stretched thin people

(02:01:39):
kind of a who are working on this um and
that like yeah, Chosea Park is an example. There's also
an area and that's like near Grant Park and like
the Zone three old Zone three precinct, and there are
like the zoo they were like actually in the same
property area. UM. They kept the pigs near the zoo. UM.

(02:02:02):
And like it was an entire forest land like absolutely
mouth of every app every clear gardner doing disgusting condos
all along the rod um. And it's it's a continuation
again of a distinctive political pattern in Atlanta. Back when
Mayor Jackson was elected as the mayor, he at first

(02:02:24):
tried to build like affordable not affordable, like low income
housing and do community projects and stuff. But the business
end of Atlanta fought back against those efforts and that
is what saw projects like the Olympic Games, which destroyed
an entire community in Atlanta. You should look up people's

(02:02:45):
down here in Atlanta was just in Summer Hill completely
raised to build arenas and all of this ship And
it feels like a continuation of the powern where politicians
decide what is best for the city the Olympics, a
new police training facility or whatever business measures on the

(02:03:06):
table today, not to mention that like during the nineties
six Olympics, they're like specifically built Atlantice City Detention Center
for the for a place to put houseless people who
have been sweeped up the streets and like criminalized them.
And during the George forlid uprising in that was reused

(02:03:27):
too as detainments and overnight states for protesters who are
like going to get low bail justice a form of
repression is regularly used. Again like that jails regularly used
specifically against protesters and isn't used for anything else. Is
a like absolutely still around the face of humanity and

(02:03:49):
Artisha Lance Bottoms said during her turn that she was
going to turn that into a social justice side or right,
it's still a jail. It probably already it probably all
ways will be until he fucking destroy it. Uh. And
like now the Fulton County sheriff wants to take over
the jail and use all of those beds because the

(02:04:12):
jails here are so overcrowded with bullshit charges that they
are just expanding and expanding, expanding, and there's no sign
of stopping. For every one time that they promise that
they're going to be closing jails, repurposing ship doing all
this liberal reform bullshit, there's a new training facility, they're
selling jails to people that are using them more. The

(02:04:32):
system just continues to expand and expand and expand until
we fight back and destroy it. Need black haw Yeah,
police need Black Hall just as much as black hall
needs the police, you know. And these are the symbiotic
relationship between the two. Police are instrumental in gentrification and

(02:04:53):
also police need gentrification to capture poor black and brown
people and lock them in case. And so these are
two things that that feed each other in a relationship.
So it's very important to do our best to attack
book is Atlanta. Was it the Atlanta police who have
like the point system for rust? Yes, Atlanta Police. Yes,

(02:05:17):
Atlanta Police has actually a point system where among the
highest points is capturing a child. For capturing a child
and arresting them are alongside felony charges, folony warrants and
other things. Um longest point system. They use it as
a rubric to measure how well an officers doing. Um

(02:05:41):
yeah yeah, I mean in terms of like needing gentrification
to continue your job. Yeah, that's that's the exact same
thing is, let's have this point system so we can
get races and it arrest all the people who are
on the street. And it's uh a mask off moment,
as they say. And I also think it's this funny thing,
like I don't know, right, they're building this fake city

(02:06:06):
to train in, and I wouldn't be surprised if Black
hawns up renting it out from time to time to
shoot films, right absolutely, But also at the end of
the day, even if they don't, it's literally the same
exact thing, right, one is training people to actually do
it and the other is performing it too. People think
it's cool exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I just pulled up

(02:06:28):
the actually my friend just pulled up there like chart
which is it's a one to five scale. It's five scale.
It's five for juvenile arrest, five points for felonies, four
for a misdem or charge three for a city, charge
for for deal wise and it goes on um and
like the fact that juvenile rest is the top one

(02:06:49):
is sucking monstrous. No I expected like they are the
monster like that. Yeah, like if it's not, it's not shocking,
but it shows the extent of like the the horrible
nous of what of like what their job is like,
that is their job, That's what that's what they do.

(02:07:13):
That is the entire thing. One thing that's given the
Atlanta Defend the Force movement and edge is being able
to consistently set the terms of engagement and establish a
media framework regarding the instruction of the forest and the
development of Cops City to stay one step ahead of
the enemy. Like we've mentioned, the Cops City of project
was never actually initially announced by the city or the

(02:07:34):
Police Foundation. It was brought to light by activists digging
through open source data and public records in April one,
when activists discovered the proposal to destroy the South of
Our Forest. First, news spread via word of mouth for
several weeks about a large information sharing session at Entrenchment
Creek Park, one of the areas under threat. On May fifteen,

(02:07:54):
over two hundred people gathered for a barbecue and info
presentation night on the threat of the forest and the
broader campaign to defend it. The city government had yet
to announce its plans publicly, so the activists and Force
defenders were able to craft the public narrative first and
lay the media groundwork. At the information session, presenters were
able to accurately contextualize the development within the cross section

(02:08:17):
of racist and authoritarian backlash against the George Floyd protests,
the increasing gentrification and urban displacement, and the devastating climate
effects such a project will inflict upon the region. Having
activists and Force defenders break the news such a development
denies the city and the police the opportunity to introduce
a development to the public with a distorted narrative, assuming

(02:08:38):
that they were gonna announce their plans and make them
public at all. And then, on May seventeenth, less than
forty eight hours after the info sharing barbecue, seven unguarded
machines at the forest destruction site, including excavators, tractors, and
other pieces of heavy machinery, were targeted by sabotage, with
smash windows and severed inner tubing scorched by fire. The

(02:08:58):
destruction equipment was left inoperable. An anonymous statement appeared online
detailing their motivations and methods of attack, while tying the
actions to the struggling and colonialism, authoritarianism, and the history
of this particular land as the site of horrific abuses,
of the site of displacement, child slavery, and prison slavery.

(02:09:20):
The communicate ended with quote to the developers, governments, contractors,
corporations and politicians have perpetrated the heinous deforestation. Any further
attempts at destroying the Atlanta Forest we met with a
similar response, the forest was here long before us, and
we'll be here long after. We'll see to that defend
the Atlanta Forest. Today, no one has been arrested for

(02:09:42):
these actions. The presence of such a targeted direct action
campaign this early on in the movement is important for
a few reasons, one of which being it's meant in
sabotage as a part of this movement from the very beginning,
like it was moven into the genetic fabric from the conception,
so any debate around the validity of these tactics was

(02:10:03):
virtually non existent because they were there from the beginning.
That's what this movement is and that's been super interesting
to watch because usually this type of sabotage or direct
action happens later on in these movements, you escalate to
that point, But in this case, it's been happening since
the first week people knew that this thing is was existing.
Over the following weeks, there was meetings, posters, and flyers

(02:10:25):
that spread throughout the city. People organized public forest walks
through areas of the woods that were under threat. Even
a few candidates for city council adopted the struggle as
a component of their electoral campaigns. The movement's consistent ability
to break the news on the development and the destruction
of the forest has been crucial in the efforts to
gain public trust and setting the terms of engagement and

(02:10:46):
the ground rules for the conflict. The type of public
discourse regarding the forest was successfully established by anonymous activists,
not by politicians, and not by police. Think something that's
been really cool about this movement. From the early days
of when this was going on, it was extremely radical,
like it wasn't It wasn't three or four months after

(02:11:07):
the first initial meeting, it was like a barbecue at
the park where people were lighting bulldozers on fire to
prevent construction from happening. The Atlanta Police Foundation has had
its offices, its office windows smashed, like people are not
afraid to fight back physically. And this was occurring at

(02:11:29):
the same time as the more electoral tactics as how
I'll phrase it, and I think that you know, we've
seen neither of these being able to successfully stop the movement.
But when it comes to like being able to measure
that the police have and their allies have slowed down,

(02:11:53):
the electoral tactics have been a complete utter failure. Um
and physically harming that property of the police, end of
the black Hall and all of the forces that would
destroy the forest. That's been shown far away to be
a tactic that's not only acceptable in this movement, but

(02:12:14):
it's something that's seen as like one of the go
to strategies. It's we haven't had to work our way
to that. People were there from the getto. Yeah, it
was like a day or two after the Young for
a night, but the very first public facing event, but
like bulldozers were set on fire in like Michelle Obamba Park,
which is funny or enough of another like recuperation tactic

(02:12:37):
of like destruction of the environment and like on Ding
gentrification where that's actually Black Hall Studios old plan site
for their um new studio. And the idea of the
land swappers they take this shitty land where they destroyed
forest type, replace it with an earth ground and in

(02:13:01):
and as long as they turn into a park, they're
allowed to UM build and construct on public forest land UM,
which is like a Bunker's idea. Yeah, yeah, I know.
It's actually like a new precedent right here back has
not been done before. I think that like one of
the other things, you know, along with the fiery start

(02:13:25):
kind of kick off, is that the folks who you know,
like in my experience, most like kind of big broader
campaign type things that people who are doing jail support,
the people who have abroad reach, the people who you know,
have access to resources, etcetera. Kind of the like backbone
life sustaining things of a movement tend to be folks

(02:13:47):
who have really rigid moralizing ideas of like what is acceptable, etcetera.
And you know, people in Atlanta have been there's a
lot of credit due to folks who have been putting
in a lot of work and are a little wiser
than to have such a limited narrow view. So most

(02:14:08):
of the folks that control and are not controlled. Most
of the folks who like backline and are working really
hard to do them more like reproductive things and jail
support and get food and things like that, are also
people who have a really like, um, creative and accepting
view of you know, like what kind of things are

(02:14:29):
okay and really don't want this movement to fail and
aren't going to limit themselves based on abstract ideas. And
so that's something that is really special and um, you know,
one gets excluded for for doing things that are effective.
When talking with the force defenders, the other thing that
was really emphasized is that instead of waiting for distant

(02:14:51):
politicians to say the environment, and instead of dedicating tons
of effort into petitioning companies with moralized grehtoric to make
them feel bad in hopes of them dropping of the
the project, you can instead have immediate material attacks that
hit them where it counts, and where it counts is
their pockets. Because you can't expect companies to be swayed
by moral decisions around harmful policing or the environment, but

(02:15:13):
you can attack their physical and social capital if it's
framed as, hey, this is something that is not a
good look, fam, and uh, this is going to hurt
your bank accounts. That is the type of general language
that these corporations do understand. I feel like this is
the most intersectional thing I've been a part of in
a long time. There's just like so many different ways
to oppose the facility, and there's so many different people involved.

(02:15:37):
And I'm really grateful for all of the comrades, especially
the anarchist comrades, who've been holding it down for years
and helped push the struggle in a certain direction. I
think other people are touching on this. We want to
keep bringing it up because it's important, and other struggles
we've been a part of, like the liberals control a
lot of the money for jail support or bail funds
or food distract and a lot of those mutual aid

(02:15:59):
aspects of the struggle that help maintain an occupation which
has really turned this place up are in the hands
of mostly anarchist folks, and that has also really set
the scene for what we're able to do and not
able to do, Like no one's getting thrown under the
bus for a leisured behavior like when I was reading
about this before I came down here almost exactly a
year ago, there were like machines are on fire, and

(02:16:19):
I was like, holy shit, it's like usually that's like
the way later in the struggle, and that was like
right out the gate. People whoever they are, were attacking
the machinery, and I think, to be honest with you,
that was drawing a lot of people here because people
are tired of the n v d A or non
violent direct action. It's not about like let's criticize something
to death that makes us feel bad. It's like people

(02:16:42):
are tired because they're losing a lot of comrades to
long prison sentences. They're getting three different felonies that are
like the same amount of time or more than if
you would allegedly arson something. So these are things that
are coming up for people, and people are realizing that
old tactics aren't working anymore. A lot of the comrades
that were burned into a weird shape from the Green
scare are aging out, or the things that they're afraid

(02:17:02):
of are very valid, but we're living in two dire
of a time to neglect those tactics or a larger
level and people are just are seeing how terrible things are,
and it seems like more people are down or just
don't care anymore. Ever since the George Floyd uprisings, they've
just seen an uptick in a lot of this behavior.
There's a campaign that launched publicly that mentions all the
subcontractors that Reaves Young, one of the construction companies on

(02:17:24):
the project, has to employ to make the Atlanta Police
Foundations project here possible, and a lot of that could
be home visits, it could be going to where they
I don't know what it is, obviously, but I'm just saying,
long story short, everybody knows this, but you find where
they store the evil equipment, that's the best way to
stop the project. Long story short. They usually don't listen
to what we have to say, but actions speak louder

(02:17:45):
than words. And if you really want to hurt them,
you hurt them in their pockets. And if you cost
them enough money damage, they may pull out of the project.
They shut down. And even if there is other subcontractors
that they could get to write machinery from to cut trees,
whatever the funkt is they're going to do, we want
them to be afraid if you look at very romantously
struggles that have largely been successful in their own ways
throughout the world. I'm just going to mention a couple

(02:18:07):
because people talk about them constantly, like the Zon in France,
on a Hambach in Germany, or no Time in Italy.
Blocker laws around property destruction and defending your area. Another
strong point of the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest
is that it's not simply coalesced around a single coherent strategy,
whether that be sabotage or above ground organizing. For over

(02:18:28):
a year now, force defenders and movement participants have employed
several parallel strategies in tandem. Strategies of one approach can
fill in for the shortcomings of another. Often these differing
strategies can be mutually beneficial. As sabotage was happening, opponents
of Cops City also organized a continuous stream of educational
events on the land, as well as pressure campaigns aimed

(02:18:49):
at pushing city and county officials, investors, and contractors to
drop out of the project. As summer began, more traditional
political activist organizations like one connected to nationwide socialist organizations,
abolitionist networks, and ecological advocacy groups began doing more direct
community outrage by knocking on the doors talking with people

(02:19:11):
in the neighborhoods next to where the forest was being
slated for destruction. Forming connections and ally ships with the
local community in the vicinity of the South River forest
is crucial, especially since that they would be among the
first of those impacted by deforestation and the close proximity
to such a militarized police hub with you know, explosive
testing and helicopter pads um plus you know, local community

(02:19:34):
outreach is useful for learning what might help mobilize more
regular folks. Other tactics and strategies emerging during early summer
included getting those involved in the planning of Cops City
to realize that they don't get to operate in some
safe politics, only realm Their political decisions have real world

(02:19:55):
consequences and real world effects for those people that they
allegedly represent, so perhaps they too should be forced to
feel real world consequences. On June six, there was a
city council meeting which was supposed to voute on the
Police Foundation's land lease ordinance, sponsored by then Councilwoman Joyce Shepherd.

(02:20:16):
At this point. Back in, the meetings were all virtual
due to the COVID nineteen pandemic, so the city council
members hosted their conversations from inside their homes. With just
a little bit of work, activists and researchers were able
to locate the home address of Councilwoman Shepherd. A group
went to her home and displayed a banner during the

(02:20:38):
city council meeting. Most protesters just chanted from the public sidewalk,
and one individual approached her house, knocked on the door
and ring the doorbell before returning to the street. Turns out,
council Woman Shepherd did not like this very much and
went into a bit of a panic. So like kind

(02:20:59):
of a recording terms of like city Council or other
targets has been like whenever the first time they were
going to vote on this uh like UM Institute for
Social actually copsody UM. When they were going to vote
on copsody UM, someone went up to Joyce Shepherd's house

(02:21:22):
and knocked on her door. They're so painful of protesters
outside and someone just knocked on her door and she
went to her frenzy freaked out, called off the vote,
left the meeting, ran to the precinct and comments during
the bough the corn section, and then gave a like
long speech to like a bunch of police and press,

(02:21:45):
which like called out, which effectively called off the vote
for another like three months or so, just because someone
visited the house of a politician because they had names
and addresses, and like that also happened with Ryan Mills.
App that's happen with that's CEO and chairman of Reeves Young.

(02:22:06):
There's this whole idea of politics as existing within this
political astral space. Right, It's it's it's the same thing
with like corporations. Right, everything exists in the corporate space
that's removed from people's actual lives. Right, it's it's removed
from actual personal consequences. People in positions of power assume

(02:22:27):
that their actions occur in this political or corporate astral plane.
That means that consequences of their decisions won't directly impact them.
But we don't need to play by those rules. After
a friendly knock on her door, Joyce Shepherd called off
the vote and left the meeting early to call the police,
who arrived after the protesters had already dispersed. Immediately after,

(02:22:49):
Joyce Shepherd held a press conference from the newly constructed
Zone three police precinct. Their Shepherd stood surrounded by police
officers and news media and described in detail the aims
of her land lease ordinance, the nature of the cop
City project, as well as the efforts of protesters to stopper.
By doing this short public statement, she catapulted the movement

(02:23:10):
and the story into the mainstream, out of the political
backdoors that it was existing in previously, and Atlanta to
any councilwoman says protesters came onto her private property to
speak out against a piece of legislation. Joyce Shapherd says, well,
she supports the right to protest. This time it went
too far. People have a right to come out and
say whether they four or against it. I have no

(02:23:32):
problem with that. I've been doing this for years and
know that people have the right. But what they don't
have a right to do is come up on my
private property, knock on my doors, protests on my lawn,
on my poech They don't have that right. So I'm
fair tonight that I'm still supporting the academy. I'm not scared. However,
there will be no right for people to come up

(02:23:54):
my property and protests. The next day she made another
statement which you just heard a little bit of, where
she also claimed that she would be pushing through the
ordinance no matter what the city residence that she sensibly
represented had to say. And her and her fellow city
officials took a stand against the protesters and rejected their tactics,
falsely implying that the methods like going on a sidewalk

(02:24:18):
were illegal. But by showing up outside a politician's house
and knocking on her door, just a few people were
able to achieve an early goal of the movement to
transform the cop city and black Hall developments from back
to agreements into big public scandals. It got out of
the shadows and into the spotlight. As a bonus, the
vote was delayed, buying more time to develop further strategies

(02:24:39):
in defense of the forest. It was an effective demonstration
of the potential of direct confrontation with people in power,
and it led to the emergence of another strategy that's
become a big part of the genetic fabric of this movement,
pressuring decision makers directly and dissolving their notion of a
safe political or corporate astral space. During this time of

(02:25:01):
showing up at Politician stores, more sabotage and direct action
were also taking place. Signs appeared in the forest warning
that trees in the area had been spiked, making it
possibly dangerous to attempt to cut down trees, with the
risk of saws being damaged and possibly injuring unlucky workers.
On June tenth, three more excavators were burned at the

(02:25:21):
black Hole Studios the site. Neither action appeared much in
the local news media, but anonymous communicates and photographs of
the incidents and damage circulated online among the radical anarchist
mill us. In late June there was the first planned
Week of Action. There's been another one since then, and

(02:25:42):
there's another one upcoming from May eight through May fifteenth.
We'll talk more about the upcoming Week of Action in
the next episode, but I strongly encourage people to travel
to Atlanta as soon as possible if you can make
it for any of this upcoming weeklung event again, that's
from May eight through May. If you make it front
of that, please go to Atlanta. It will be it

(02:26:03):
will be fun, I assure you. The June Week of
Action featured a guided walks through the forest by day
and by moonlight discussion and conversations on ecology, abolitionism, colonialism,
and queerness. There was a nightly bonfires and safe open
sections of the woods at a nearby radical venue. There
was a hardcore punk show during which hundreds of concert

(02:26:26):
goers repelled the buzz kill police who are trying to
shut it down. And there was a night rave deep
into the woods where five hundred people were dancing with
glow sticks late into the night and early into the morning.
In all throughout the week of action, thousands of Atlanta's
got to gather under the banner of Defend the Forest.
They were able to learn about the project and get

(02:26:47):
plugged into taking action. During the week, people under the
cover of night visited the home of black Hole Studios
CEO Ryan Millsap in the Atlanta suburb of Social Creek. UH.
They also visited his second home in Tuxedo Park and
the ups he frequents in Edgewood. According to an anonymous
online statement, quote flyers were distributed to all his neighbors mailboxes,

(02:27:11):
as well as plastered on his front gate and the
streets that he frequents. The flyers let fellow concerned community
members know about the harm he is responsible for, and
ically provided the address to his one hundred acre farms
and that grievances could be addressed there. The flyers placed
all throughout his neighborhood and investment properties were also distributed
in hopes that it would quote inspire others to research

(02:27:32):
and take the fight to those directly responsible for the
destruction of the forest. Two days later, on the final
day of the week of action, around fifty protesters marched
to the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Foundation, quoting crime
Thing again quote. As the crowd emerged from the Five
Points metro station, a small contition of officers attempted to

(02:27:52):
arrest somebody. The crowd engaged hand to hand fighting with
police and successfully repelled them. Advancing past the security, they
marched straight to the Alant Police Foundations office and smashed
the glass doors and windows before overturning tables in the
towers lobby. According to police, on Friday, around four pm,
multiple protesters stopped the flow of traffic on Peachtree Street

(02:28:13):
and Andrew Young International Boulevard. Photos taken by a local
freelance photographer showing a group called Defend Atlanta Forest shattering
glass doors and also holding signs that say our woods,
not Hollywood's. CBS forty six reached out to the group
but have yet to hear back. Atlanta police believe the
protesting ignited over the building of the new public safety

(02:28:36):
training center. When officers arrived, protesters quickly fled the scene,
but the damage still remains. At this time, we know
no arrests have been made and the investigation continues. In
Atlanta on Barbawayans CBS news momentum was growing throughout the summer,
Police and corporate press had failed in crafting a counter

(02:28:57):
media strategy. Meanwhile, the Offend the Forest project brought together
police and prison abolitionist organizations, environmental justice and preservation organizations,
civil and human rights nonprofits, and even neighborhood associations near
the proposed site, including the East Atlantic Community Association, the
Grant Park Neighborhood Association, South at Lantin's for Neighborhood Development,

(02:29:18):
and the Kirkwood Neighbors Organization, each of which passed resolutions
opposing the proposal. Grassroots organizations that mobilized against the proposal
included Defend Atlanta Police Department, Refusal Communities, the Atlanta Sunrise movement,
community movement builders, the South River Forest Coalition, A World
Without Police, and the autonomous organizers working under the banner

(02:29:40):
of Defend the Forest. Organizers spread informational flyers and online graphics,
conducted interviews, knocked on doors, and organized phone in campaigns
during subsequent city council meetings that were still held on
zoom because of coronavirus related restrictions. Through in August and September,
the Stop Cop City Coalition and others worked to introduce

(02:30:01):
tension and clog up the city council process, digging cues
from the protest outside the home of Joyce Shepherd, which
resulted in the vote being delayed for over two months.
Protesters gathered outside the homes of possible yes voters on
the nights that the vote was related to take place,
causing further delays in the entire process got pushed back
from August into September, so again, another another delay. Briefly

(02:30:25):
it seemed like there was a possibility that the Stop
Cop City campaign might be victorious before the end of summer.
Votes on the groundle sordidents were repeatedly delayed because of
these objections and demonstrations at the homes of Atlanta Chief
Operations Officer John Keene and City Councilwoman Madeline Archibond. Eventually,
September seven was set as the final vote day. Seventeen

(02:30:48):
hours of pre recorded comments from over one thousand Atlanta
residents delayed the discussion. Due to the sheer number of
public comments, the vote got pushed back another day as
Sydney Council members spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday listening
to the playback. After months of organizing, community outreach and
public education efforts from these top Cops City organizers, approximately

(02:31:10):
the collars fiercely opposed the proposal, explaining in great detail
why they are quote unquote representatives should vote it down.
The minority of callers who supported the Cops City project
either self identified as residents of the disproportionately white and
wealthy Buckhead and Northeast Atlanta area or we're just like
actual cops. Uh. At least thirty officers called in to

(02:31:32):
say that they support the instruction of the forest to
end the building of Cops City. Big big shocker, the
cops what Cops City pro Cops City collars invoked the
false crime wave narrative propagated after the George Floyd uprising
and used the language of so called white flight by
threatening to leave the city if something wasn't done to

(02:31:52):
stop the growing crime wave. Uh And Yet, when the
seventeen hours of public comments ended and the council's discussion began,
council members largely failed to acknowledge the hours of public
comment that they had just spent two days listening to,
much less acknowledged the far ranging movement that produced such
overwhelming public discontent, quoting crime think again quote as those

(02:32:16):
who study revolutionary movements, No, the police perform an essential
function in class society, without which many other hierarchies and
exportitive relations could not exist for very long. This is
not simply an economic or civic issue that can be
worked around with some clever ideas in a bit of
pressure unquote. Despite the efforts of organizers, which culminated in

(02:32:38):
seventeen hours of primarily oppositional public comment, the ordinance was
passed on September eight, while the police arrested protesters outside
the home of councilwoman Madaline Archibong about an hour before
the final vote took place. During the Council's final session
on September eight, the City Council voted by a margin
of ten to four for the creation of the ninety

(02:32:58):
million dollar facility, handing over almost four acres of for
us to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Obviously, many folks were
pretty disappointed and kind of demoralized about this. UH. Some
turned their frustrated energy into the upcoming local elections, hoping
that the city government may be stacked with abolitionist or
progressive candidates that might strike down the project. Mayor Bottoms

(02:33:21):
did not end up running for re election, and the
former mayor of Mayor Read lost to the now current Mayor,
Andre dickens Um. I do think it's really funny that
the old mayor of Atlanta was Mayor Bottoms and the
new and the new mayor is Mayor dickens Um. Anyway, UH,
City Councilwoman Joyce Shepard, who introduced the Cops City Plan,
also lost her campaign for re election. But since the

(02:33:44):
elections in November, nothing has actually changed regarding the black
Hole and Cops City developments are nothing has changed on
the electoral front. There's there's no indication of electoral strategi
as being impactful, and thankfully not everyone focused their efforts
on electoral ref warm. I'll leave you today with this
sentiment that I kept hearing during my stay in the forest.

(02:34:05):
When you criminalize a non violent direct action, the end
goes away. On the final day of the vote, people
went and protested outside a city council member's house, and
eleven of them got arrested, despite the fact that they
were already dispersing and following orders. During the top line
three movement, people were receiving felony theft charges for using
lock boxes to attach themselves onto construction equipment um, which

(02:34:28):
of recent hasn't even really been an effective strategy resulting
in any material winds. But if they're going to arrest
you for standing outside of a politician's house and give
you charges, you may as well consider doing something a
bit more spicy. If you're gonna get felonies for basic
non violent direct action like locking yourself onto machinery, you
may as well light that machinery on fire. When non

(02:34:48):
violent direct action result in felony charges, if they're going
to criminalize standing outside of a politician's house and holding
a sign, then going into the forest and doing monkey
wrenching suddenly becomes a very similar consequence level, and the
action that can be done in secret turns out to
be actually a bit easier to get away with. The
funny thing is is that this is the state's fault,

(02:35:09):
not anyone else's fault. When state repression against public non
destructive tactics increases, then what happens is the less public
and more fiery tactics, which in this movement we're already present.
We'll just end up becoming more and more prominent and
even more integral to keep the movement going. In the
next episode, we'll hear about how the more radical folks

(02:35:30):
continue to defend the forest after the vote, and you'll
hear a lot more from the force defenders that I interviewed.
And finally, if you can please head to Atlanta if
you're able to, for the upcoming week of action from
A eight through. More boots on the ground are crucial
as the large scale destruction of the forest is becoming
more and more imminent. You can go to Defend the

(02:35:52):
Atlanta Forest dot com and scenes dot no blogs dot
org for more information. See you on the other side.

(02:36:13):
Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis
and this is part two of the two part mini
series on the Defended the Forest Movement in Atlanta, Georgia.
Last month, I traveled to Atlanta to stay a week
in the woods and talk with some of the Forest offenders.
In the previous episode, I covered the movement from its
inception to where the city council approved the Cops City

(02:36:34):
project near the end of last summer. I went over
a lot of historical background between the land itself and
the history there, the increasing gentrification of Atlanta, how the
movement pulled the veil off the secretive plans for Cops
City and pushed it into the public spotlight. We talked
about the early days of sabotage and the targeting of
individuals and positions of power. Basically, I did a lot

(02:36:57):
of a lot of talking, maybe maybe too much talking.
This episode will be more led by the discussions with
Forest offenders that I had during my weeklong excursion to
the woods. We'll learn about how the movement evolved in
the wake of the city council vote up until the
current state of affairs. One thing that makes to Defend
the Atlanta Forest Movement very different from previous eco defense

(02:37:21):
projects in recent memory is that it's right in the
middle of a sprawling metropolitan area. Right outside the forest
is an Amazon facility. Downtown Atlanta is just a ten
minute drive away. We'll be talking tactics a bit later
on in the episode, but just the simple nature of
doing a forest equo defense project while still inside the
city gives a lot of pretty interesting tactical opportunities. You

(02:37:44):
have to selectively use some of the older, more rule
equo defensive strategies while having the backing of a city
based mutual aid network. There's the option of rapid response
popular mobilization that city based protests can have but are
more challenging for equatif and stuff that's like three hours
into the middle of nowhere. For the people camping in

(02:38:05):
the forest, they can easily get supplies or switch out
who's staying in the woods and who's living in the city.
The combination of forest and urban prompts and necessitates the
crucial experimentation and innovation that's been badly needed in eco
defense projects and protests for the past decade. There's a
lot of trains to go by here. It's really pretty,

(02:38:25):
so it's definitely the most urban forest defen I've ever
been a partner. But it's really beautiful and unique to
see a lot of urban the city be able to
be involved and like urban tactics kind of mixing with
yet more traditional, more earth firsty forest tactics. It's kind
of like the rule book and a lot of people
saying this like it's repeated, the quote unquote rule book

(02:38:48):
for how to indeede with the multiple enemies in this
area has been like chewed up, spit out, shadow and
burnt over because it we're kind of doing something that
doesn't really happened a lot. Something similar I can think
of is the Sacred Old Grove that was being protected
in Minneapolis in the late nineties maybe thousands, and that

(02:39:10):
was another kind of anarchists alliance at the big earth
first presence. But that's kind of one of the more
urban in this part of Turtle Island struggles I can
think of like this, but this is unlike anything I've
ever I think. Another interesting part is like a lot
of force defense stuff is focused on like old growth,

(02:39:31):
being like we should defend it because it's old growth. Yeah,
this is not an old growth. For this is like
a messy, dirty um confusing. I've gotten lost so many times.
It's yeah, I just did there's tires, there's barrels where
it was built. On the prison farm, you'll find like
old portions of the prison which is incredibly fucked up
and haunted, right, Like in terms of like haunting is

(02:39:52):
like there's the specter of what used to be there.
Police are trying to build over it with their more
like a bomb range, right, It's like that's very much
like they're just building over the thing. Um. But it
doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending.
And that's an idea that I think people need to
understand more, is like it has value even if it's

(02:40:12):
not like five hundred years old. Like it has value
despite not despite being one hundred year old old forest,
and it's about because it is in one forests. Like
it has value because it is a forest in a city,
and that's something that's worth like emphasizing. Yeah, I also
think that's cool. And like people talk a lot about
like invasive plants and there's like I think the Brandford

(02:40:33):
pairs in this forest are a really interesting example. There
are these trees that are like feral. They used to
be part like planted here when it was a um
the farm plantation or whatever, and um those trees are
fucking spiky, fine trees. They're spiking ship. Well but you know,
the good news is they're awful, and the bad news
is they're awful. Like I know where there are when

(02:40:53):
I halass in the forest, I usually don't get Bradford
pair in my eye, but um, but some chasing the
cap well yeah, and and so it's just it's cool
to kind of interact with all these things and get
to choose how you want to interact and like, yeah,
it is a um you know, I think it's interesting.
It's not yeah, like a traditional forest or like whatever

(02:41:15):
forest that people would value in that way. Um, but
for me, I connect to it, I think even more
than that, because it's not this like held up is
this thing of like purity, like they fucking buildoz and
like a month later that ship was overgrown. You couldn't
see it again. And that was all quote unquote invasive
plants like whatever funk that means, which is often that's

(02:41:36):
the whole thing. They're often racialized plants. You know. It's
it's almost like a punk forest. It's like we're surrounded
by enemies. And that is the problem is, um, they
see this as a cess pool, and something I talked
to a lot of liberals about, like when they're taught,
we're talking them about defend the forest, like, oh, is
it a pristine wilderness with large old growth trees, and like,

(02:41:58):
you know what, that would be cool. The problem is
this forest needs to be allowed to return to that
because there's been so much abuse and part of like
whether I don't know what it means to quote unquote
win or lose, but there's a lot of little winds
and losses all along the way, and we've had a
lot of winds. There is some big cheese that are
left in the forest. They're legally supposed to leave all
the big trees by the creek, But from what historical um, president,

(02:42:24):
do we trust the cops to quote unquote be accountable
to anyone? I don't know where we're thinking that. I've
I've had a lot of people be like, oh, some
of these three houses are strategic. Then in the spots
they can't cut, and I cannot. Friends. I've looked at
the map and it looks like this whole motherfucking play
is Society for clear Cutting. Exactly one month after the
city council voted to approve the land Ley's ordinance for

(02:42:44):
cops City that defend the force slogan was put to
the test. On October, contractors and land survey workers showed
up around the forest and appeared to be clearing land
to take reference photos and collect soil sample. Two dozen
force defenders emerged from the woods and confronted the workers.
The people hired to destroy the forest fled the work site,

(02:43:07):
and after they left, police surveillance tower in the area
was toppled and the force defenders were able to disperse
with no arrests. Ten days later, a similar turn of
events took place. A group of survey workers and construction
teams were on site. Again, a small group of rapid
response Force defenders disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at

(02:43:27):
the old Atlanta Prison Farm. Simply the mere threat of
an on site protest shut down construction for the whole day.
Key access points for machinery were blocked using available materials
like piles of nearby tires, preventing vehicular machinery from moving
freely through the destruction site. No construction occurred, despite the
attempts of the Decab County Police and the Atlanta Police Department,

(02:43:51):
who mobilized twenty vehicles in the vicinity of the forest
in an effort to prevent the protest or punish the participants.
By the end of the day, no was arrested, and
yet again, select monitoring systems and police surveillance towers were
toppled and dismantled. A statement released online from anonymous force
defenders read quote, this war will be one, one battle

(02:44:13):
at a time. Pressure must continue in a variety of
ways to halt all construction. It became clear that for
the next phase of the struggle to defend the force,
people would have to directly target and oppose the contracting
companies hired to decimate the woods and build the facilities.
Today we know of at least three companies that have

(02:44:33):
been contracted by the Atlanta Police Foundation to do work
on the old prison farm land. Some of the surveying
work appears to be done by Long Engineering, and two companies,
Reeves Young Construction and brass Field and Gory, were hired
to do grounds clearing and early construction. It is not
yet clear who will be contracted to clear the land
in Entrenchment Creek Park, where Black Hole Studios hopes to

(02:44:56):
expand their sound stage again quoting the crime Think article
the City in the Forest Reinventing Resistance for an age
of climate crisis and police militarization quote. The information that
is known to date was hard won by diligent activists
on the ground. Shortly after the city council voted in September,
surveyors and small work crews began entering the site near

(02:45:18):
two key roads. The trucks and uniforms revealed the names
of the contractors, which once again gave opponents of the
Cops City project a chance to initiate a struggle on
their own terms. Had the force defenders utilized only virtual
or bureaucratic channels to collect information, they might not have
learned that Reeves Young were being called in to do
the actual destruction until it was publicly announced much later.

(02:45:41):
The ability to break news to the public before the
city government has been a consistent advantage in trying to
keep the momentum of the movement going. Post the city
council vote, a second week of action was planned for November,
albeit with some new twists. From November tenth through, various
groups organized a wide range of cultural events, info nits, bonfires,

(02:46:04):
and meetings for this Week of Action. Many of these
events occurred in or near a publicly advertised encampment on
the Entrenchment Creek Park side of the forest. Days after
the second Week of Action, thirty people converged on the
Reeves Young Construction headquarters in sugar Hill, Georgia, forty miles
outside of Atlanta, holding banners and demanding that the company

(02:46:25):
severed their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The group
was able to walk right into the offices, disrupting a
board meeting involving company president Dean Reeves and CEO Eric Young. Initially,
the executives tried to keep their cool, but in short
time the businessmen started getting more annoyed and eventually violence
towards the protest. There was a protest that it was

(02:46:47):
at the Reeves Young office. Went into the office, Disrand
disrupted a board member meeting that happened to have a
lot of the people who were like seers and chairman
there and um, from what I gather as a brawl. Yeah,
I know, there's reports of the Reeves CEO guy like

(02:47:10):
punching punching protesters. There's a joke that a worker puts
someone a guillotine, and I love the version of these
workers doing ww referred to love We'll love from more
cop fights fights with cops to just be w W

(02:47:32):
E style match. Disrupting the board of meeting was another
successful step in the goal of applying direct confrontational pressure
to the Atlanta Police foundations contracted construction service providers. Days later,

(02:47:54):
two more bulldozers were lit on fire entertaining about the
road and sit. We got two construction vehicles all involved
in the till Radio quid and simpedia my location as well.

(02:48:15):
There this equipment was located on the land swap parcel
by Black Hall Studios, the planned future location of quote
Michelle Obama Park unquote. These were the eleventh and twelve
pieces of heavy machinery to be sabotaged, and I think
now we're at like around twenty five, which is a

(02:48:36):
lot um. The anonymous communicate this time was short and
to the point, quote we burnt two bulldozers in the
South Atlanta forest. No coups city, no Hollywood dystopia, defend
the Atlanta Forest on top of the more publicly advertised
encampment at Entrenchmant Creek Park. Around the second week of action,
a small cluster force defenders set up a secondary, more

(02:49:00):
secretive encampment on a stretch of woods in the old
Atlanta prison Farm. Again quoting the crimes article quote, a
few dozen people pitched tents, erected harps and makeshift kitchens,
hung banners, and constructed a bonafid protest camp in the woods.
Establishing a semi permanent presence in the forest was a
way to gather information on an ongoing basis and to

(02:49:23):
provide an immediate deterrent to developers. So I was involved
in the original occupation of the forest. There was a
group of individuals who many of whom we're housing and secure,
and we're like, we need fucking housing, and like there's

(02:49:44):
this struggle and we believe in it and a fight
in it, and so we moved to the fucking woods
and we've lived in these woods. Official time is six
weeks that we were in the woods, and we had
a higher quality of life, been like many people who
lived in houses and apartments. We had the nicest kitchen

(02:50:06):
of anyone we knew we had. Yeah, we had armchairs
and couches and fire pits and we you know, we
had more food than we knew what to do with.
And so we just started feeding people, and like we
created a social space that allowed the movement to drow

(02:50:28):
simply because we're like, well, we need these needs man
in our lives. Don't we go do that? And that
like evolved over time. A little over a month after
the more secretive encampment was established, about a dozen protesters,
some bearing witch hats, marched to the gate of Black
Hole Studios on Constitution Road and blocked the main entrance.

(02:50:49):
A communicate posted online read quote iconic spells for destruction
were loudly chanted at black Halls general direction as the
witch block held hands, cackled and skipped the sun wise direction,
blocking Black Hole studios main entrance. Smoke torches were lit.
Approximately one hour post which block antics, the Cab County

(02:51:11):
Police responded to a call made by Black Hole Studios
saying that they quote followed the protesters into the woods
and deduced an encampment they came upon must belong to
the apparent witches unquote, which is quite the sentence. Shortly after,
a large contingent of police raided the forest, evicting the

(02:51:32):
protest camp established there. There was at one point and
help a demonstration outside of Black Holes outside of black
Holes site and they express the discontent. Yeah, an entirely

(02:52:00):
like peaceful protests at Black Hall Studios. That was like
just kind of standing in like the front gate where
employees leave and enter UM and generally doing stuff like
bringing American flags, holding signs like um and just like
taking up space and making the actual interns and leaving
of the facility like less doable. And their response was

(02:52:25):
for a Black Hall to lie and so like the
camp and Cammon wasn't trespassing on their property which was
actually in place in of like a public park, Um
and orchestrated with the police to evict Um. And they
orchestraed with the police to do like a pretty like

(02:52:46):
intense eviction for like. But it was essentially we were,
what a moment to a homeless camp living there, and
they had two helicopters circling more police that I could count.
They were throwing our ship into dump trucks and like
actively like pursuing people through the woods. It was like

(02:53:10):
an absolutely I mean it was like like very like
visible show of force against us. Quoting the crime Thing
article again quote at the urging of Black Hall, the
cab County Police entered the forest on mass mobilizing police
cruisers and the parking lot officers on foot, helicopters and
drones overhead, and unmarked vehicles in the streets. The officers

(02:53:33):
were likely intimidated by the low visibility to rain. In
any event, all of the force defenders based in the
encampment escaped without being detained. This was the first time
a concerted effort was made by law enforcement to engage
protesters in the South River Forest. And to be honest,
it was a fucking pain in the ass and it
was a traumatizing event. And that is all true. But

(02:53:57):
it's also even we learned from and like we got
a pretty good idea of like ap d s and
like they have counties, uh like capabilities, and like how
they are like surveilling things protests and how they're surveilling
camps and like how they figured out where we were,

(02:54:17):
and like what triggered them to act against us, and
like that's allowed us to move in far more confident
ways that are also far more subversive. It's really interesting
that you know, just like when they make it, you know,
illegal to do n v d AH, whenever they attack

(02:54:41):
like that and do these really violent raids that put
people in like awful positions and like traumatize the ship
out of people. They are teaching us how to fight back.
They are showing us their weaknesses, and in a really
ironic way, the next time they come in and they
suck it up because people know it to a spects,
it will be a monster of their own making, because

(02:55:03):
like for every one step of aggression that they take,
that's two steps further we can take towards them with
everything that we learned from the struggle. And obviously this
forest is really beautiful and the more time I spend here,
the more I feel connected to it and driven to
like protect it. But also a big part of it

(02:55:23):
for a lot of us is for me is like, um,
you know, they are doing this for their own morale,
and so my goal is to make sure they are unhappy.
And so yeah, even if I uh yeah, even if
they win, as long as we come back and you

(02:55:44):
learn from that and we keep pushing back, you know,
it is a way of attrition, and um, it is
about their morale. And like, it doesn't matter if they
build the police facility. What matters is that every single
time that the police and moved to recuperate that their losses,
which they just took a big one, they are faced

(02:56:06):
with just unyielding hostility. Um And I think that, like
that's something that's really important, is that we don't expect
to not take a lot of owls. Like in the
forest occupation. We understand the nature of this thing where
an ecstatic position complice moving around us, but like it's
a it's about making them fight for every inch the

(02:56:27):
best we can. The encampment was just one part of
a large ongoing fight. Over the course of those six weeks,
hundreds of people were able to circulate through this camp,
enjoying meals and performances, making arts together, and spending time
around campfires, building and sharing a life in the woods.
After the camp was attacked and structures were destroyed by

(02:56:49):
the Cab County Police, land offenders and Atlanta residents mobilized
quickly to recover camp supplies and belongings and continued on
with efforts to defend the forest. A great thing about
these types of free autonomous zones is that they can
directly demonstrate to people what a free life outside the
confines of regular society can look like and what it

(02:57:10):
can feel like it's not just like we want to
save the Words and we want to go back to
our regular ass lives. A lot of us are realizing
that we're living in the apocalypse and we're just gonna
we want to keep living like this. It's not just
this Words, it's not just this police facility, and we
would want them to not have any more space or
platform to organize this police, but we might. A lot

(02:57:31):
of us want to be free, mean want other people
that like during the idea of like whatever the funk
it is, hitchhiking, train happening, living in the woods, the
fact that it's a fucking crime or considered crazy to
be the people living in the Words is insane. And
that's kind of the vivally out from the moscogy for
access today. They're like our whole world, like we're here

(02:57:52):
trying to reclaim our culture because there's a lot of
hope for saving the land from like an indigenous perspective,
if people would effects them. And the whole point is
the US government doesn't actually want them and doesn't actually
respect them, and reservations are literally have prisoner of war
numbers because they're hoping by blood quantum if they kill

(02:58:12):
these people off, they can take their land back. So
the whole land back idea of fucking freaks and not anyway.
We want to save this forest, but it's not just
about this forest. Were kind of endangered species. We've talked
about ourselves feeling like deer Like how deer like they'll
be chilling. They'll be like all around being a deer
and mating food and they're like, I was on guard,
you know, to do something else if there's an enemy around.

(02:58:33):
It kind of feels that way. I like, it will
be chilling. Nothing's going on. Also there's cops. But the
whole point is if it can happen here, ha ha
did it, it can happen somewhere else. And we help
to spread the vibe that people not like occupied. What
a horrible name for a movement, but it's cool that
that happened at the time that we had made sense.
We all have nobody knew any better. We know better now,
that's good, But get the vibe. We're getting this vib

(02:58:56):
to like continue this kind of stuff. And obviously there's
people in all kinds of places, square buildings and do
all sorts of ship. But the more territory that we
occupy and control and can help remay trade back to
indigenous grassroots comrades, not IRA and reorganization, active government sanctioned
indigenous groups right if they can't not everyone's our ally.

(02:59:18):
These have to be ally ships. That makes sense. The
Muscogee commrades that we're close to, obviously not all of them.
That some romanticized, generalized bullshit. They said the same ship
that when we talk to them, they're like even our
own people betrays sometimes because we're not all the same.
It's some homogeneous bullshit, and I've seen that play out
poorly in other places. And like would give the land
back to the natives and like which natives like people

(02:59:43):
were all on the spectrum of conversation and deconization, and
sad least one of us are further along the lines
and others. And it's very much on the colonizer's fault
for doing that. But where we're at is the people,
the people that feel the called the anarchy, the people
that feel to call to some kind of radical left orientation.

(03:00:05):
They can find it in their hearts and in their
patients to tolerate each other. And we need to band
together to come up with better plans because we're all
we got and it doesn't get better, it's getting worse.
So hopefully this can be an inspiration for people to
do other ship. I'm inspired. I'm not from anyway freaking
near here, but I've been here for a year now
and i don't want to leave because I'm tired of
the same old tactics. And I have been a part

(03:00:27):
of stuff that has been successful before and I had
nothing to do with non valid direct action, and I
have to do time for it, and I know people
would have done time for it also. And if there's
any message I can give to the young generation is
there's no future and it's worth it. And like if
your future is just like working at nine to five
and like watching the earth, so they're like shriveling to nothingness,

(03:00:50):
I would argue, it's not really a life. Might as
all well might as well be dead. So I'll hope
you live. I hope you choose to live. I think
it's a to the like interesting thing the psychological aspects
of this, because the first time you do the way
we're scurcialized in the society is to be obedient and fearful,

(03:01:14):
and the first time you do something illegals. The first
time you do something that you know is against the rope,
the first time you steal some food, the first time
you smash the window, the first time you do any
of that, you're scared. But then you get away with it.
You realize that this is a thing you can do,

(03:01:35):
and I think that the state can't stop you from
doing and you realize, oh, I can do so much more.
And once you get over that initial fear, once you
smashed that window, and you've gotten home and you're like, oh,
I didn't go to jail for this. But when when
you like get home and you're like, I have all
this food now that I didn't have to pay for it,

(03:01:58):
you start to realize maybe I don't need to work
a job. Maybe I don't need to work nine to
five or you know, five to midnight every day to
get a job and payper You realize, wait, maybe I
can just steal the food. Yeah. I've been wanting to

(03:02:19):
talk about that for a while. For I want to
make another Hyper Objects episode UM and talk about the
anarchist properties of client bottles. UM and I described this
type of freedom is like it's like how a client
bottle works, or like a fourth dimensional object. It's like
you need to in order for there's like this extra
degree or extra dimension of movement that we usually don't

(03:02:40):
think it's possible, but it is actually there if you
know how to interact with it. UM. And Yeah, it's
like we're domesticated in so many ways to view here's
what's possible, here's what's impossible. I have to exist within
this framework, UM and only doing these things which are
seen as correct. And there's actually more degrees of freedom
than that. We just don't often like acknowledge them. But

(03:03:03):
you can totally phase through things and you can totally
find that extra degree of freedom, and once you do,
that's a super interesting feeling. UM. As opposed to like
waiting for gay luxury space communism, you can instead do
like fourth dimensional like hyper anarchism, which gives you so
much more freedom right now instead of just waiting for
the communism that will never come and the relationship you build.

(03:03:27):
The relationships you build that are based on a trust
that is, I trust you to have my back, I
trust you to work with me and do this thing
is so much deeper than the trust of I guess
I trust my coworker. But like I really trust them
not to snitch my boss. Like the trust that comes

(03:03:50):
from a relationship where you're like, yeah, let's like we
need food, that's going to steal it together. That kind
of trust is not something that can be incuperated. And
that kind of like relationship where it's like our relationship
is built on the fundamental we will do that we
have to to survive. It creates an intimacy that you

(03:04:13):
can't find anywhere else, and a criminal intimacy. You might say, um, yeah,
and that that was the point as somebody else think, yeah, yeah,
just to double down not too like I think it's
um it's cool too because uh, when you also come

(03:04:38):
to a space like this, like you can live like
that on your on your own or with your friends,
but then there's something wild when you come to this space. Um,
and then all of a sudden, it's like when you
start attacking something that a lot of other people want
to see attacked. All of a sudden, all you have
to do is attack that thing and foods there. Yeah,

(03:05:00):
and like you know like that and and like yeah,
and like you have all these resources and you can
focus on that and so like it's like yes, I'm
like it's like a joke to some degree, but like
if you want to be a lifestyle ran because like
if you want to actually be an anarchist right now
and do anarchist ship, you can come to Atlanta and

(03:05:22):
do and like it's not easy. It's fucking scary, it's sketchy,
it's hard, there's freaky as bugs, but like, yeah, you
don't have to wait, and like, yeah, it I think
that that's something that like, for me, is really magic.
Is that like actually the more you attack and the

(03:05:43):
more you like position yourself to be antagonistic towards the world,
the more of it's like fourth dimensional like winning shoot
on you know, like which I don't need really understand,
like starts to kind of like self actualize and yeah,
I think it's cool it And then like it freaks
me out to think that there's not people who are

(03:06:03):
probably probably pretty cool like waiting for some opportunity like waiting,
just teachers waiting, and we don't have that much time. Yeah,
you can live anarchy now. You don't need to wait
for the collapse TM because turns out that party it's
already happening, and that already happened. We're just waiting in
the liminal space until the climate change catches up with
the admissions are already there. We're already living in it.

(03:06:25):
We just don't realize it yet, or some of us
are in denial of it yet. But the collapses like now,
we it's already the thing. We don't need to wait
for the one big collapse, because that's a myth. But
you can live anarchy and do stuff. You don't need
to wait for the next communist president who's going to
run and fail. There's no coming social there's no coming collapse.

(03:06:48):
There's nothing to wait for to keep on waiting his
madness aside. I think a really interesting aspect of this movement.
We are attacking up popular target, and how like in
attacking a popular target, we've built this like thing is
we are. We're not just here and attacking this thing

(03:07:13):
that doesn't exist in isolation. We're here and we've built
a movement and we've built uh, we've through attack, we've
built a built this like popular idea that like actually,

(03:07:35):
you know, like if you want something to not be there,
instead of like talking to a politician, you can send
it on vote harder, vote harder, just just just just
one more vote. I swear I'm sorry. Now I like

(03:07:59):
to talk more about tactics. Since the City Council voute,
on the ground tactics have gained a much more integral
role and grown past the basic sabotage and house visits,
although both of those still are crucial aspects in keeping
the movement going. Different ways of preventing physical construction, surveying
of land and destruction of the forest made up most

(03:08:20):
of the on the ground direct action efforts inside the forest.
I think a really interesting aspect of the struggle has
happened here is that because it's so decentralized, there are
people and no one really knows who. There are people
who will just to show up and like, you know,

(03:08:44):
it's like there were people who are like getting the
crops called on them in the woods and ships, and
then like a bunch of anonymous people have showed up
and like propable the camera powers and people stopped getting
the crops called on them in the woods for a
long time, and like that kind of decentralized thing, especially

(03:09:06):
where it's like, you know, regardless of even like if
the people in the woods were like you know, like
into doing ship, it's like it's really useful when people
who have more skills and people have more knowledge and

(03:09:26):
more ability to do things and more ability to take risks.
It's really awesome when those kinds of people can come
and make things safe for a larger mass of people.
And I feel like that is like a strategy and
like the interactionary space that can be truly like expanded on,
where people who know their ship can make things safe

(03:09:48):
for large groups of people. To generalize revolt, Yeah, I
regret like a lot of that hard of struggle and
struggle has been framed from the very beginning as like
there was no call to action do x y Z.
There was a bunch of people pursuing their own individual
desires and what they saw as a forward facing like

(03:10:10):
a reprojection of their own ideas into the future and
made that happen. And it was underneath this framework where
there was no limit, there were no boundaries um, and
there was no idea of like us all having to
be on the same page about that. Yeah, you don't
need to like attend a march to be to like

(03:10:32):
do effective things. In fact, it turns out doing things
that are not attending a march can often be way
more materially effective and to double down on that, Like, um,
so many times there's just like a script that the
people follow, this is how we do it. And then
there's there's like this action that's applied to everything that
people don't like, and holy ship, that's a crazy book.

(03:10:56):
It was a wildfire. Um um think about that. But yeah,
but there's these like things that applied to everything, and
this struggle very much has no script, which is really exciting.
And but but what's even cooler about that is that
it's not it's also not reinventing the wheel. And so

(03:11:17):
there's people who are taking from you know, like kind
of like classic insurrectionary anarchists like approaches. There's people looking
at ego defense stuff from all over the world thinking
about um, there's people looking at some successful like non
violent direct action. There's people looking at alf struggles and

(03:11:40):
like how like those campaigns, target campaigns, secondary targeting, how
things like that worth The contracting and subcontracting companies hired
by the Atlanta Police Foundation made up the new targets
of the pressure campaigns and direct confrontation methods that threatened
physical and social capital bringing back the house mis It's
mentioned the previous episode. In late December, banners that read

(03:12:03):
Reeves Young out of the Atlanta Forest were hung in
the backyard of the private residence of Dean Reeves in Suani, Georgia.
Dean Raeves serves as the chairman of Reeves Young Construction
and was among the board members present at the November action,
and he personally allegedly shoved and assaulted protesters inside the brawl.

(03:12:26):
After the backyard banners were hung, an anonymous online statement
read quote, we hope this action gives but a miniscule
dose of what the creatures in the South Atlanta forest
you want to bulldoz might feel unsafe in the place
they call home. A month later, on January, Reeves Young
Construction and representatives of the Atlanta Police Foundation entered the

(03:12:49):
forest with a bulldozer. They started knocking down trees to
complete more surveying work and determine the construction supplies needed
for a laying of building Foundation force. Destruction was halted
when approximately a dozen protesters approached the workers in Atlanta
Police Foundation representative Alan Williams and demanded that they leave.

(03:13:10):
Workers were safely escorted out of the woods and the
bulldozer was left at the scene and was subsequently taken
out of commission. In my interviews with some force defenders,
I believe one of them referred to this as the
bulldozer tripping and falling, So that's fun. The day after
autonomous groups of people finished construction of multiple well built

(03:13:31):
treehouses up in the canopy near the site of the
previous day's confrontation, people climbed up into treehouses and announced
their intention to remain there in order to delay further construction,
ripping off the old tree sit and bipod tactics. From
October one to this point in the struggle, which just
like mid January, work was consistently able to be stopped

(03:13:55):
by small, dedicated groups of people without resorting to force.
Throughout the next week, attempts at land surveying in the
area of the old Atlanta Prison Farm continued, but now
with workers being accompanied by the Atlanta Police Foundation, Atlanta
Police officers, and a cab County police. With the backing
of cops, workers were able to accomplish more of their tasks,

(03:14:16):
including tree felling and soil boring per Crime Thing quote.
In some instances, only handful of activists were on the
scene behind makeshift barricades. Reinforcements cannot arrive rapidly enough to
assist those on the ground. Unquote. Reportedly, undercover cops surrounded
the forest, intimidating those who would park nearby. As such,

(03:14:40):
some outside support did show up, but not in mass. Meanwhile,
in the forest, it was a game of cat mouse
between the workers, forest offenders, and cops. Police went so
far as to start chasing people on forest trails while
writing on a t v s. Barricades and the tactical
removal of land survey markers did slow down work on

(03:15:03):
some days, but ultimately efforts were unsuccessful in halting the
destruction process entirely. This week of land destruction and caton
mouse culminated on January. Around sixty people, the largest crowd
in months, gathered to march into the south of a
forest and on to the old Atlanta Prison farm to
directly confront construction workers who were boring holes in the

(03:15:25):
ground doing soil sample collection. The cab County police attacked
the protesters, tackling multiple people and arresting four, the first
arrests inside the forest within the context of the movement.
Quoting crime thing again quote, police attacked the march, tackling
several people. The other demonstrators did not mount a proportional

(03:15:46):
response to this aggression, despite outnumbering the police. Perhaps some
of the tactics popular during the rebellion, such as the
mass use of umbrellas or makeshift shields, could have equipped
the participants to feel more capable of decisive action. Ellen
Williams of the Atlanta Police Foundation was filling protesters, looking
a little anxious as he did so. A statement on

(03:16:08):
the Defend the Forest scenes dot no blogs dot org
site concluded their report back with this sentiment quote, at
this point, we are in need of two main things.
More people to help support tree sets and defend the
force from destruction, and legal attempts to delay construction. Yeah. Always,
you want more people to be on the ground in

(03:16:28):
the woods, in the city. Cass We ned casts like
the cast like that. You want to wear out the
enemy and a lot of different ways. And the enemy
is a lot of different people of the enemies, and
enemies are subcontractors and enemy as a police enemy. Garge
Parker Power owns quote unquote the power that divides both

(03:16:53):
entrenchman Creek and sorry, there's a lot of different people.
So if there's a lot of and we also have
a lot of different people involved, a lot of different
ways living in the words, people living in town, so
people already knowing it's already happening. We should be visiting
the offices, We should be visiting at the damn church,
we should be visiting there in the forest, there should

(03:17:14):
be there should be no peace. And I believe that's
how we can win, because we need to make it
unpopular and unsavory and hopefully next year impossible for them
to make these choices. Even this as a small part
of the forest, they're just going to continue on to
the next thing. I want to briefly go into some
details about a method of protests that combines pressure to

(03:17:36):
both physical and social capital in hopes of resulting material
changes from businesses, corporations, or people in power. It features
many of the actual tactics we've in fact already discussed.
Will refer to it as the Shack method for reasons
that will be shortly explained. House visits, targeted vandalism, phone calls,
and hanging banners and backyards all have a place in

(03:17:59):
this method oology. It's a focused drive to dissolve that
safe political or corporate astral space that I talked about
in the last episode. The cred of the article contains
a really good summary of the Shack method. So instead
of just like regurgitating their explainer, I'm gonna I'm just
gonna narrate certain sections of it because that will make

(03:18:20):
my job easier and I'm I'm a hacking of fraud
blah blah blah blah blah quote. The goal is to
hold those responsible for these projects personally liable for their
decisions and the decisions of the companies they own, because
the entire system of rules and norms we live under
dictates that exploiters, warlords, mass murderers, and those that destroy
ecosystems must not face pressure at home as a consequence

(03:18:43):
of the decisions that they make. It work, this strategy
is bound to be controversial. It rejects the entire logic
of limited liability that forms the basis of corporate rule
in our society. At the beginning of the twenty first century,
animal rights activists in the UK and the US set
out to take down the biggest animal testing corporation on

(03:19:04):
the planet, Huntington's Life Sciences. The campaign to stop Huntington's
Life Sciences was called Stop Huntington's Animal Cruelty or SHACK.
It formally disbanded, and it's best known for its period
of ambitious international participation in the early two thousands. The
methodology of this movement, which encompassed direct actions, symbolic protests,

(03:19:26):
cultural events, sabotage pranks, and more, included many features that
have been since used in a wide range of campaigns.
The overall strategy of SHACK involved mobilizing a few hundred
people to maximize their effectiveness against a major enterprise by
focusing only on their ability to function economically. The SHACK

(03:19:47):
model is centered around tertiary targeting I isolating service providers
from third party contracts in order to limit their ability
to provide services to the client, which is the actual target.
A Right now, I'm just gonna pause here because if
that sounds confusing, let me let me briefly provide an example.
So the actual target here would be the Atlanta Police Foundation,

(03:20:10):
since they're the ones with plans to build a cops city.
The Police Foundation has contracted a few companies of Brassfield
and Gory for one and Reeves Young. So these companies
are the service provider. The shack model attempts to isolate
the service provider, so reeves Young from all of their
third party clients and contracts, which will in the end

(03:20:33):
go back to hurt the actual target, which is the
Atlanta Police Foundation back to crime think the service provider,
so in this case, heves Young Uh. The service provider
depends on many third parties. Third parties provide the service
provider with insurance, materials, equipment, security, catering, cleaning, mail, service, data, maintenance,

(03:20:54):
and more. All of those third parties can be pressured
to drop the service provider. Furthermore, the service provider is
likely a company with more than one client, and those
other clients can also be pressured to drop the provider.
Any company or contractor that is able to move their
money away from the service provider because they have other

(03:21:14):
economic opportunities can be pressured to do so. Essentially, this
strategy does not directly challenge the bottom line of any
of the third party companies. It only isolates and demoralizes
the service provider and therefore the end target. Today, it
still remains unclear who is the service provider for the
Black Hall Studios development, although that information will come out

(03:21:36):
sooner than later. In considering the limits of the shack
strategy in actions outside of the forest, it might be
more difficult for activists to maintain a sense of urgency.
Targeting individuals at their offices and homes will chiefly bring
out those who are excited about such confrontational methods, rather
than those who prefer to maintain welcoming spaces of encounter,

(03:21:58):
to build treehouses to or to clean campsites, to cook
for others, to cultivate the kind of collective imagining that
is needed to transform society. Also, if people fail to
do proper research or mapping, activists could waste their time
targeting minor institutions and companies that are unwilling or unable
to drop their contracts. They could spend months facing down

(03:22:21):
insignificant companies with many possible replacement subcontractors. Oh sorry, that
was a lot. That was a big info dump, but
I think it is useful information. So the goal isn't
to sway companies with moralizing arguments, but to frame their
association with militarized policing or ecological destruction as a bad

(03:22:42):
look that could hurt their reputation and ability to secure
future clients. Combined with economic consentives inflicted on the service
provider like access sabotage, The resulting targeted campaign attacking physical
and social capital can lead to pressure on third parties
to influence the decision of this of its provider on
whether or not to stay on the project. Methodologies can

(03:23:04):
put to the test through practice and be judged by
the outcome. The proposal to employ the shock strategy to
defend the Forest is just built on the simple hypothesis
that if Reeves Young is forced to drop the contract
with Atlanta Police Foundation, the Atlanta Police Foundation investors will
then lose the confidence that's required to find an adequate
replacement and the project could stumble or fail. The same

(03:23:26):
goes for the Black Hall project. If activists defeat Reeves
Young by means of direct action and self organization, even
if the project of finds a new contractor, sophistication and
confidence in the movement will have developed in the process
will likely help it evolve once again. Also, one thing
that people have figured out because like for the first

(03:23:47):
to after the first two arsons, you could literally just
walk up to during daylight, up to the area of
Michelle Opona Park and touch take pictures of like uh
have sex around like make out with the construction equipment
that I've been burned, and you could see the stickers

(03:24:08):
of where they had rented these like construction equipment, UM
destruction equipment, and like after the first one it changed,
there was no longer rented from the same company, and
after the second one it changed again. And there is
reason to believe that with every arson or attack that

(03:24:29):
they are changing construction equipment companies, because rental companies tend
to not like it whenever their equipment is destroyed to
cost them a lot of money, and oftentimes they cannot
afford hundreds of thousands of dollars going down the drain
be to support a pot project that is highly unpopular.

(03:24:50):
And the other thing what we're talking about with the
modified like a policing modifying itself as it's interesting because
where at this point where policing is highly unpopular and
so it's kind of hedging its bets, and it's doing
two things. First, it's calling itself like the Social Peace
and Justice cute Bunny Rabbits center for your racist if
you don't like us or whatever. And then it's also

(03:25:13):
just like mask off doubling down buying mad guns like
like yet just becoming increasingly more militarized, increasingly more violent
and like moving mask off like an occupying force. So
there's this split where there's no and people are well
aware of this. There's there's no like public chance of

(03:25:36):
convincing UM a lot of companies that this is wrong. Right,
there's it's it's it's well, it's very divided. So the
people who are committed are very committed. There are fucking
enemies and where their enemies and that's it. But then
there's other people who are doing this for economic reasons

(03:25:56):
and kind of understand that policing is not shoot right,
and then it's at least unpopular, going out of fashion
to some degree, and can make money in other ways.
So yeah, it's this interesting thing where like being able
to like fight battles for public opinion maybe doesn't super work,

(03:26:17):
and all you have to do is um kind of
trying to cut away the people who are supporting people
who are ideologically committed to our destruction and we are,
you know, feel reciprocal. If you look at the photos
of what was happening with Michelle Obama Park the land

(03:26:38):
swap site, they were trying to build on You can
tell that heavy yellow Equipment LLC of Marietta, Georgia stopped
providing them equipment after like the first or the second
time that their machines got lit on fire. And now
it's alf A l I f of I don't know
where Georgia. So you know, these are photos that you

(03:26:59):
can see, like you can look at these communicates and
just tell like like like if there's a photo attached,
like there is a traceable like trend of companies are
dropping the funk out because they, for whatever reason, just
cannot take the heat. On June twelve, while fully in

(03:27:20):
the throes of nationwide revolts against police after the murder
of George Floyd, two Atlanta police officers killed Ray Schard Brooks,
a black man who had been sleeping in his car
in the parking lot of a Wendy's. Not long after,
the restaurant was burnt to the ground by determined crowds.
In the time period between June to the end of
the year, more than two hundred Atlanta police officers left

(03:27:43):
their jobs, including the a chief of police, local sheriff's deputies,
state patrolmen, and transit cops. Also resigned during the year
of the uprising at a higher than average rate. As
the entire system of policing and capitalism faced a crisis
of legitimacy. Corporations, business owners, landlords, business associations, and international

(03:28:04):
real estate companies demand a public pacification and a reassurance
of a future with stable consumerism. Profit incentive and police
need each other in a symbia like relationship. I'll do
one of my last crime thing quotes here. Quote. Forces
in local and federal government, business associations, police departments, and

(03:28:26):
our militias have continuously worked to make sure a popular
uprising does not reoccur. A large part of the institutional
reaction to the popular uprising has focused on managing public perception.
Industrial interests and private investment companies have conducted influence campaigns
using local news outlets which are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group,

(03:28:49):
a right wing news organization between Sinclair, Next Star, Gray, Tega,
and Tribune. This coordinated reframing of events has damaged the
way that many sectors of the television viewing public perceive
revolt and its consequences. In the wake of the uprising,
a false narrative circulated to the effect that police, while

(03:29:12):
demoralized and underfunded, cannot control the crime waves currently sweeping
the country. This orchestrated narrative has shaped the imaginations of
suburban whites, small business owners, and many urban progressives. The
crime wave framework implied that police departments around the country
had in fact been defunded or had their powers curtailed,

(03:29:32):
and were consequently unable to assure social peace or free enterprise.
In reality, the vast majority of police departments received an
annual increase in their budgets as they normally do. If anything,
they accrued more power following the events of So it's
no coincidence that the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Atlanta
Police Department are pushing to build a militarized urban warfare

(03:29:56):
training center in the wake of the uprisings. By lever
ing that crime wave narrative and the fears of future
social unrest, they want to have the tools to bring
down the inevitable upcoming revolts for racial, environmental and economic justice,
and now more than ever, including reproductive justice. Cops cities

(03:30:17):
leading the charge is a part of a new effort
to adapt American policing strategies to our new era of
societal decay and the ever crumbling that will define this
century as we face the escalating consequences of industrialization and
climate change. I think another really important thing to look

(03:30:37):
at this is like when you look at the Gurge
Floyd uprising in the Crisis of Pride and policing and
they realize that, oh, holy sh it, people are so
angry about this that they will pose a threat to
the sovereagety of the state, which is the first time
that has happened in an extremely long time. When that

(03:30:58):
finally happened, the state, the morale of police departments around
the country was broken. Cops everywhere, we're like, it was
a demoralizing thing. And when you think about cops as
an occupying force, as an occupying military force, it thinking

(03:31:20):
about the fact that we broke their morale is really important.
And then thinking about this place as they intend to
build a training facility to increase morale, which is a
classic military tactic of create cool and interesting ways to

(03:31:41):
train your soldiers to do a murder, is like, that
is a classic military tactic. And when you think begin
to think about this as social or when you begin
to think about this as not just a struggle against
cops city that like as a struggle for like disabling

(03:32:02):
and destroying the police. When you think about this as
a material struggle against the occupying forces that are the police,
this becomes like way more contextual In fact, I feel
like that is the best way to contextualize this movement.
So one interesting thing is that after Rachard Brooks is

(03:32:26):
murdered and the UM two cops involved were UM this
substanquently charged UM what was it, six hundred tops went
on seconut hundreds of hundreds UM, and their morale is broken.
A land police has always been understaffed for like as

(03:32:46):
long as I've known UM and not understaffed by any
media propaganda spend standard there standards, but like every single
day they're facing backlogs in every zone where they cannot
answer calls. And it's a good thing. This is a
war pattriction where their current training facilities have broken. Torrespneky

(03:33:07):
pipes have have like have undeniably miserable conditions. Their cars
are out, their cars are like continually on their last legs,
and we that's that is a path to abolition, is
making it so it is so undesirable to be a

(03:33:27):
cop in this city or any city that no one
would dare do it. It is crucial that police are
not the only ones that seek to evolve their tactics
for a new era and moving beyond the kind of
non violent action that's become so common during protests during
the Trump era and the post Green Scare, and even
like post occupy, there is this looking for a new

(03:33:50):
form of anarchist or radical resistance. Really emphasized the learning
things here is that this struggle took all the different rulebooks,
tore them up, set them on fire, and use the
ashes for their shutter. Like everyone here is learning things.
People who have been who have been doing things along

(03:34:11):
fucking time are here and learning new things. We're we're
not just like tearing up and like destroying the rule books.
We're like we're like larges out of the were weird. Yeah, yeah,

(03:34:33):
like put them like like tore all of them up
and make allogious out of them, and is trying to
create this like weird paper machee mesh of a experimental
path into the future. And and like we wouldn't when
we say we are experimenting with new forms of revolt,

(03:34:54):
new new tactics, new strategies, we truly mean, there aren't
existing models to do what we're doing. We are writing
the book as we could do it, and yeah, we
sunk up sometimes, but we've also got some really cool
ship happening. Ship that hasn't happened in twenty years is happening,
and ship that hasn't happened ever is happening here. And

(03:35:18):
I think that's like a really it's a really important
thing to touch on. Is that, like much of the
you know, much of the like Eco defensship that's happened
in North America that for quite a while has like

(03:35:39):
not done, you know, or at least not released, communicates
about like ship that happens here seemingly every couple of weeks. Now,
like the ship here is crazy and wild under dreams.

(03:35:59):
It's also scary and hard and dramatizing, and it's beautiful
and terrifying and like, yeah, that sounds great, you should come. Yeah,
this's is such a way from us actually evolving out
of a I look at this as like a huge
step in what land defense looks like after we have,

(03:36:28):
after we have faced green Scare repression, and now we
are moving past the post green Scare repression movements and
figuring out how to move forward and regardless of it.
For this like uh lands and are really repressive like
boot sounded throats like situation. I don't think anyone should

(03:36:48):
ever stop experimenting. I don't think people should go back
to the old ways. I don't think that we should
be resigned to not experiment. I think that everyone, like
we are in a situation where there is nor future.
They're like the collapses now, we're probably not going to
avoid one point five degrees warming. Our police are only

(03:37:09):
further mailitarizing, and the like reality of resistance is that
we that we best, that we need experimentation. Yeah, if
there was a winning strategy that was proven to be effective,
then it would have it would have been effective in therapy,
we would have a winning strategy. There's a popular name

(03:37:30):
in the forest which is the arena instead of are you,
are you experiencing the joy of attacks on um? And
I think that is an important line the same way
Cops City is a part of the new evolution of
American policing. Defend the Atlanta Forest can be seen as
kind of trailblazing for future movements, a look at how

(03:37:54):
they might develop post the George Floyd protests for my
last final cry think quote quote. This campaign represents a
crucial effort to chart new paths forward in the wake
of the George Floyd rebellion, linking the defense of the
land that sustains us with the struggle against police. The
movement opposed these developments, mobilizing around the watchwords defend the

(03:38:17):
Forest and stop coops City, have passed through several phases
of experimentation, using a wide array of tactics and strategies
to keep pace with the current course of events. It
represents an important effort to revitalize eco defense and police
abolition strategies in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion. So,
considering the possible wide ranging impacts of both the evolution

(03:38:40):
of policing and the evolution of resistance tactics that defend
the Atlanta Force movement is extremely relevant to all people
who want to improve the world, whether or not they
live in Atlanta. Atlanta as a testing ground floor new
surveillance tech and like in like experimenting with new forms

(03:39:04):
of struggle. Here in Atlanta, there are things that not
only are we in many ways on the front lines
of experimenting with new tactics and integrating new strategies and
how they work. But we're also on the front lines
of like different kinds of both like like in person

(03:39:26):
and digital forms of oppression that don't have to be
worried about other places, and like it also provides approving
ground for ways to struggle specifically against those forms of
surveillance and understanding the different ways that sometimes the most

(03:39:48):
effective thing in protecting yourself from oppression isn't some super
high tech ship. It's a ski mask of paragloves and
not bringing your phone, and like people don't seem to
like think about that that I don't need to. But yeah, um,
so speaking of surveillance, we actually have like not we

(03:40:12):
I don't claim that, um, the police here and the
state here has like the video Video Integration System, which
I believe is like one of our re integrations video
integration center where they take where businesses and homeowners of
like ring cameras can volunteer their video surveillance equipment to
be plugged into a network UM that can be monitored

(03:40:33):
and pulled up at any time by the police UM
in a downtown location and they and that is like
one of the largest surveillance network systems in the world,
I believe, um and it is actually reading the charge
in like new forms of surveillance, and other cities are

(03:40:54):
looking at this as a model of how to sure
how to better surveillan own cities, which obviously makes one
police defination trying to create their own little mini city
a very interesting prospect in terms of like establishing new
you know this this is mentioned before, which was like
establishing new ideas and how to take policing forward into

(03:41:15):
thirties after we've had these wave of social justice like
uprising and uprisings for Black Lives Matter, um with you know.
I mean not many places actually got defunded, but the
propaganda has to be different, and like the way the
police optics work definitely needs to be changed from their
perspective or they're trying to have them be changed. One
of the strongest things I feel like came out of

(03:41:37):
this movement really pass ahead was our ability to have
their game on, like the narrative and then never being
able to recuperate that narrative because their plan was this
answerstude for centual justice. There's a new way of training
police to quote be better or like not murder people
as much and like more refined. Um, And I don't

(03:42:03):
want more refined like police that like murder quote the
right people, or the right people, or cage the right people.
That's not my desire. I went into police, and yeah,
I think that there's a lot of projects happening in
the forest. And you know, I also just want to emphasize,

(03:42:23):
like I'm not from Atlanta, but I feel like it's
really important for me to be here. You know, I
think a lot of people who felt inspired by the
George Floyd uprising, like, um, this is an attempt to recuperate.
Like I've said this a million times, it's a time
for the police to recuperate from that. I'm trying to
finish what we started. I also think that we need
to understand that this isn't just about Atlanta. Like one

(03:42:44):
of the buildings that they're trying to build, and like
one of the points of this training facility is that
it is like a hub in the same way Atlanta
with a with a movie theater, the same way they're
trying to make Atlanta this hub. Right, It's there's an
infrastructure for being a hub from shipping and stuff like that,
and so now they're trying to make it this this
economic habital or white collar way, and so they're trying

(03:43:05):
to make it a hub for police in Atlanta, but
also to train police to do fucked ship and to
mutate like nationally. And I know that the police from
the you know, whatever city I live in are probably
going to come here and go back and funk that up.
So I'm trying to make sure that they can't come here,
and that you know, police are demoralized in every city

(03:43:27):
and they're having trouble on every city. And this isn't
just about the A p D. If you live pretty
much anywhere on the East Coast, there's a high chance
that your police are going to come here and then
go back to your house and funk you up. So
come here and make sure they can't. And the other
thing I want to say is like, um, yeah, they
want to make this a training facility for police right now,

(03:43:49):
it is a training facility for anarchists. If you come here,
I promise you you will leave with more courage and
with more skills and knowing a lot of fucking people
who are really fucking down all over the country. Um,
and I think it's worth I wanted to jump in

(03:44:09):
and say, like, this is about you. Um. An hour
or two hours south of here is the School of
the America's you might have heard of it. It's here
in Georgia. It's where a lot of awful fucking dictators
and their henchmen learned how to do really awful ship
a bunch of war crimes. And here in the city

(03:44:29):
of Atlanta, a local school, the largest, the largest university
in the state, Georgia State University, hears something called the
Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange or GILLY, which is where
they and the i DF get together to train local
police forces here in Atlanta and around the country. And
if you don't think that Cops City is going to

(03:44:52):
play a huge role in your police department learning from
the i d F how to beat you up, you
have another thing coming. You should come here to Atlanta.
What's going on because this is about everyone here, like
it's about the whole country. They're coming to Atlanta to
learn how to brutalize people, and it's going to stop it.

(03:45:15):
A funny thing about this project is that there's these
sort of dual intersections and dual microcosms. On one side,
there is the intersection of policing, gentrification, racism, ecological destruction,
and climate change. And on the other side there's the
intersection between the tactics of urban city protest and rule
eco defense. But there's also this dual microcosm. On the

(03:45:39):
side of the state, they're trying to construct this police
facility with a mock city to train in microcosm for
protest suppression and practice urban combat against people who live
in American cities. And on the people's side, there's this
microcosm not only for how resistance movements can evolve post
but more importantly for the people involve been the struggle,

(03:46:01):
a microcosm for how you can live a life free
of the oppressive societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose.
I think another really interesting thing about this being like
such an ungovernable space is that because it's ungefinitable, because
it's impossible to control, it allows us to create these

(03:46:21):
new ways of relating to the trouble there that can't
happen in other places. Like where else are like people
and their everyday lives just gonna be able to walk
around as gender funded as they want, and like it's fine,
Like you know, if they're a clear basher comes into
these fucking woods, like, it's gonna be a bad time

(03:46:44):
because literally everyone here is queer, like we don't. That's
the thing is like, when we exist in these spaces
in this ungovernable way, we like our like create many
versions of Yeah, this thing I want to talk to about,
something I wanted to talk about in terms of like

(03:47:05):
the microcos the macrocosm idea of after uprising, looking for
new paths forward, the depending on a forest thing can
be viewed as this microcost, like this micro causum of
how we can approach different struggles going into going into
twenties and stuff um, because yeah, like it is like

(03:47:26):
this small version of what we want. There's also the
whole idea of like what I've seen here in the
forest more closely resembles like an actual temporary autonomous zone
than like the chads ever did in terms of like
people actually like actually living free, actually living like not
relying on like city water, like not like not living

(03:47:46):
in like the downtown metro area. It's like it's an
actual free space where people can be queer and be
all of the things and climb trees and talk with
the deer and like that's people are actually allowed to
do that, Like there's there's not all of the stigma
that even I think like Chazz had like so many problems,

(03:48:07):
right like extremely extremely hashtag problematic in terms of how
that resulted. Um, And yeah, this is such a microcosm
of like like an autonomous area where people are able
to do those things. I also kind of want to
talk about like the like idea our ideas of safety
and security don't reside and like the ideas of say

(03:48:30):
a safety or security for us, it doesn't really resides
in our trust in ourselves and each other. It resides
and like we actually keep each other safe. We have
each other's backs, we will fight for each other, and
any threat to any one of us is like taken seriously.
We have this like intimacy, criminal intimacy like allows us

(03:48:56):
to build more chin win relationships with high highs and
low lows than anything ever could. And like the deadening
that society puts on us, this like chemically induced regulated
median of gray and terrible is that's not what we live. Yes,

(03:49:20):
some days here it sucks to wake up and everything
you own use wet and you gotta go ship in
a hole that it's flitted. But also some days things
here are fucking awesome, and I get to wake up
to the birds calling and go like have a party
with my friends. I don't like exist here in a

(03:49:42):
way that is like comprehensible or legible to like a
wider like society. I don't exist in a way that
people look at this and be like, ah, that's what
you need. But I have never been happier than when
I've been in the woods with people I trust and
care about and don't have my back. People people don't

(03:50:06):
have to worry about working to pay their water bill
because you can go just get the things you need
from places you don't have to pay for it, And
like you don't have to worry about all of these things,
all of these societal pressures. There's not this constant threat
of oh I lose my job. Oh all those things,
all those things, all these mental constructs that control us

(03:50:29):
aren't there anymore. Because we've built a world it doesn't
it doesn't rely on that in the slightest, And I
think that's like a really powerful thing that like we've
already met our own needs and so we can fight
back in these beautiful and fiery ways. Pun intended that

(03:50:54):
like allow us to just experience things that like have
been stolen from us generations. Yeah, I was going to say,
we're not safe, but we're free. And I think that
anyone who makes that decision is an active decision to
not be safe, but to be free. I may not light,
but by definition ILL ride for them. Because we're now

(03:51:17):
nearing the end of the episode, but before I finish,
I need to go back to talking about tactics for
a bit and end with some actual good news. From
January to present time of recording, there's been an increase
in solidarity attacks in cities across the country, some targeting
Reeves Young and Long engineering equipment in other states a

(03:51:39):
third party service providers of contracted construction companies or locations
and offices of corporate sponsors of the Atlanta Police Foundation.
This past March, six machines owned by Reeves Young, including
two large excavators and a bulldozer, were destroyed in Flowery Branch, Georgia.
The online communicate reads, quote, so long as you continue

(03:52:01):
to contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation for the destruction
of the South Atlanta Forest and the construction of a
Cops City in its place. Know that your equipment is
not safe, your offices are not safe, your homes are
not safe. Unless your company chooses to pull out of
the Atlanta Police Foundation's Cop City project of its own volition,
we will undermine your profits so severely that you'll have

(03:52:23):
no choice but to drop the contract unquote. Subsequent solidarity
attacks have happened in Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis,
and Highland, Michigan, to name a few. Many of these
attacks were targeted at Atlas Technical consultants, who own many
smaller companies such as Long Engineering, which has done work

(03:52:44):
with Reeves Young and brass Field and Gory for the
Cops City project. In the vein of shack style methods.
This past April, on the ninth, a website called stop
Reeves Young dot Com launched onto the interwebs. The listed
some of the various third party clients and subcontractors under
Reeves Young Construction and ways to contact them to voice

(03:53:08):
concern about their relation to the deforestation and this urban
warfare construction project, as well as including the names and
addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their
affiliates on the day I was set to leave Atlanta
and say goodbye to the forest for the time being,
activists got word that Reeves Young Construction might be dropping

(03:53:28):
out of the project. This would obviously be a big,
big win and an indication of the possible effectiveness of
the shack method combined with sabotage and the forest encampment tactics.
At a stakeholders meeting for the Copsity of project the
next day, it was publicly confirmed that Reeves Young will
not continue work on the new police training center. In

(03:53:52):
the public statement addressing Reeves Young's lack of future involvement,
the Atlanta Police Foundation tried to frame the situation as
Reeves Young simply have quote finished their role in the project.
This is a laughable deception, as Reeves Young is one
of Atlanta's major construction firms and has even built massive
quote unquote public safety facilities in the past. They do

(03:54:15):
not merely do preliminary sub contracting survey work. They work
on projects from start to finish, taking lead contracting roles.
It was speculated that Reeves Young itself may have been
the main subcontractor hired to do complete construction of Cops
City by brass Field and Gory, who have more established
ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting from the Stop

(03:54:36):
for Reeves Young website quote, the Atlanta Police Foundation would
have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do
nothing more than hire a bulldozer and walk alongside long
engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes
and did some soil testing. Police and their corporate backers
don't want to let it be known that a focused

(03:54:57):
group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the
Cops City construction, while the Atlanta Police Foundation tries to
say face, we are celebrating a major victory pressuring a
main contractor out of the project. We are pleased that
the movement has built up so much momentum and that
the Cops City development continues to face setbacks because of

(03:55:17):
the intelligent actions of regular people. However, the struggle continues.
Brass Field and Gory, another large general contractor, remains with
the project. A Georgia Open records request from April confirmed
via Paper Trail that the Atlanta Police Foundation has been
working on the Cop City project with brass Field and Gory,
another major general contractor in the Southeast region of the

(03:55:39):
United States. Brass Field and Gory is an LLC and
a multibillion dollar general contractor, ranked as a top contractor
in the Southeast by Engineering News Record. Based on recent
Atlanta Police Foundation emails required through public records, we can
now assume that brass Field and Gory act as the
soul contractor for Cops Said, quoting again from the Stop

(03:56:02):
Reeves Young website quote, Brassfield and Gory are dependent on
subcontractors to complete their projects. Now they must hire a
new entire set of subcontractors in order to build a
Cops City. We believe it is in their best interests
for brass Field and Gory to follow the lead of
Reeves Young and drop Atlanta Police Foundation as a client,

(03:56:22):
rather than remaining complicit in the destruction of the forest.
It is up to all of us to make that
clear to them. We can pressure brass Field and Gory
out of Cops City by complicating their ability to do business.
This does not have to be limited to the Cops
City project. Their various construction projects and third party service
providers are numerous. If brass Field and Gory begin to

(03:56:44):
feel like they must choose between all of their contracts
and their Cops City contract. We are confident that they
will choose the former. By working to convince the subcontractors,
consulting firms, surveyors, architects, etcetera around the country that brass
Field and Gory are not a good business investment, we
can make it easier for the construction company to do
the right thing and dump the Atlanta Police Foundation for good.

(03:57:09):
This has been an incredible period of momentum and research,
but nothing is over yet. Now that we have made
a decisive victory, it is important to remain more focused
than ever. In the coming weeks and months, we will
need to continue pressuring all of the contractors associated with
the project to create economic consentives for them to simply
move their time and resources to other endeavors. The Stop

(03:57:30):
Reeves Young website will continue to serve as an educational
hub for this ongoing campaign. End quote. On top of
confirming that Reeves Young was dropping out of the project,
a few other interesting pieces of information came out at
the recent stakeholders meeting held on April. Allegedly, there will
be a bid for the next contractors or subcontractors UH

(03:57:54):
in the coming weeks, and that will be publicly announced.
It was also announced during the meeting that the cops
city planners will keep construction timelines secret and may surround
the construction site and future facility with an unwanted fence.
In response to the quote law breaking protesters, Atlanta Assistant
Police Chief and Site Security Chief Darren sheer Bomb said quote,

(03:58:18):
we are working with decav County to address any criminal
acts related to trespassing and vandalism unquote. He also stated
that police were also concerned with protesters targeting those who
work on the project at other locations. Here's an interesting
note from our force defender pals on how the Atlanta
Police Department function and are allowed to operate while inside

(03:58:39):
the old Atlanta prison farm and Entrenchment Creek Park. This
is something that's true police departments in Channel. But as
soon as the copies out of streets and things like that,
that cop is uncomfortable. And like, cops here are carrying

(03:59:00):
in twenty pounds of gear on them at all times,
and not only are they hearing that much gear, but
they spend most all day sitting running around and sitting
in a car, and like you know, that cop not
only doesn't want to chase you through the woods, but

(03:59:20):
they have so probably aren't capable of it. And aside
from the hobbyists, like you know, their infrastructure issues then
being away from their cars, not being on the streets
having all of their gear. We're also not in the
City of Atlanta in this forest. We're an unincorporated the
Cab County, which means Atlanta Police Department doesn't have legal

(03:59:41):
jurisdiction as police here. They only have legal jurisdiction as
agents of the City of Atlanta because the City of
Atlanta owns this property which is outside of the city.
So in any time when they're conducting and arrest they
have to have the Cab County Police Department officers present
with them. There. There can be an Atlanta Police Department

(04:00:02):
and has been major like one of their huge like
high ranks who has no legal authority here except to
represent the city. And that relationship is kind of like
tenuous at best. They hate each pals. They hate each
other and you know, so if you're if you're headed
in the town, like bear in minds, that is a

(04:00:24):
huge place to drive a wedge because they fucking hate
each other. Yeah, I know, there's like, um, there's like
one thing one time where like a Lamp police officers
were inside the forest um with like a specific goal
in mind in the Cab County Police cruisers. Not only
did the Cab police not want to gather cruisers and

(04:00:44):
go into the forest because they have they didn't care,
they didn't want to do this. So the Atlanta Police, Uh,
We're screaming into their radio saying, get this person. They're
walking out of the forest. Get this person they're walking
out there. It would just be like five or ten
minutes before the Cab Police like cruisers to just roll

(04:01:05):
down the road and like you know, they're like people
who like ran into the woods and like ran from
the riche Cat police. Like like, I'm not going in
this word these words, and I'm also not calling to
let the Lamp police to let them know that this
person just ran from me into the woods, because then
they'll have to actually go in after them. Also, during

(04:01:29):
the April stakeholder meeting, Security Chief shear Bomb announced that
the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agreed to
an assistance request in mid April from Atlanta Police Chief
Rodney Bryant and will be assigned to the site while
attempting to work with neighborhood watch groups. He noted that quote,
we look forward to working with those agencies to ensure

(04:01:51):
that this is a safe project that is occurring here
and addressing any criminal acts that may be occurring on
site to try to stop the project from proceeding unquote.
The co chair of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee, Sharon Williams,
invoked the term echo terrorism as relating to the forced defense,
marking the first time that word has been used by

(04:02:12):
the government officials to refer to this batch of protests.
She also thanked the cop City planners for quote transparency
in explaining why they cannot be transparent on the construction timeline.
Emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta,
obtained via public records requests do give a possible look

(04:02:33):
into the future of the development. In a January two email,
Police Foundation representative Allen Williams said that we quote plan
on enabling work possibly in the May and June time frame.
Our project will last until the last quarter, and our
contractors are currently working on an overall site logistics and

(04:02:54):
safety plan unquote. Although at the time their contractors all
included Reeves Young so there's no telling how accurate that
timeline is. Now. Other emails detailed plans for Homeland Security
to obtain ring camera subscriptions to monitor quote criminal activity
at the New Academy footprint unquote. In general, when involved

(04:03:17):
in any level of protest, no matter of the alleged legality,
security culture considerations should always be among people's top priorities,
especially with more eyes being directed to the defend the
Atlanta Forced Project. Each person should be responsible for themselves,
and I think that that type of action you're interested
in taking should severely inform the type of personal security

(04:03:41):
precautions that that you're taking. Um. I think that's that's
been a recurring theme as the movement builds. There are
folks that come in movement not having heard the term
security culture or whatever you want to follow, and so
that be really jarring for folks that are just first

(04:04:02):
trying to get involved, But people pick it up surprisingly
quick once you have built as a community like norms
and customs around is they say phones on our phones
off meeting? Are we talking about this on signal? Is
the call for this action going out on social media?
Are we just sharing this amongst friends? Where that hadn't

(04:04:25):
really been a thing, and where frankly, a lot of
people face significant repression here in Atlanta during the uprisings
because of security culture decisions that were made. I think
that a security culture is being built here that where
it didn't really exist before, or at least wasn't widespread before.

(04:04:47):
He is going to survive long past this movement, I think.
I think one of the biggest aspects of these things
is like the social aspects of it, and like like
the generalizing of the norm of if someone answers you
vaguely and seems uninterested in to meet and continuing the conversation,

(04:05:13):
she's understanding that they have your best interests in heart
when they don't want you to know, And like, quite frankly,
you just can't accidentally share information you don't have. And
so like, you know, when we sit here in these
woods and people say, you know, like you say, like,

(04:05:35):
so you know you're where have you been? Blah blah blah,
and I'm just like, oh, you know our places or
something like that. I just don't ask questions. And I
understand that I don't just not only do I not
need to know, but I probably don't want to know.
And like you know, when it comes to like more
like material technical things, those are important, but like the

(04:06:02):
social aspects of security culture are so so much more
important than the technical aspects. It's like I don't know
as everybody talks about security culture as like take your
phone out of the room, but like, you know, if

(04:06:24):
you take the phone out of the room and talk
about doing crazy ship with complete strangers, you don't you
know and have a reason to trust them, And like
coming here to Atlanta, like if you want to do
crazy shit, don't you know if you want to do

(04:06:46):
if you're coming to Atlanta, let me rephrase that you're
If you're coming to Atlanta and you want to do
crazy ship, like you to think about like how to
do that in a safe way or in safely possible,
you know, don't don't come to us and be like, hey,

(04:07:08):
I haven't met you before, but like do you want
to go do some federal felonies? Because no, I don't,
And I don't want to know that you're doing that either,
Like we have do you want to do crazy ship?
That's cool, just like I don't want to know you
did it, And like if you're like coming here with

(04:07:30):
the intention of creating like with the intention of like
doing ship because it's like cool and fun. If you're
coming here with the intention of, like, I want to
gain social capital because I did crazy things, Like maybe
you rethink that like if you if you want to

(04:07:53):
do crazy ship and you do want to come here,
find your closest friends playing a road trip and don't
help anyone. In a recent interview, Atlanta Police Foundation President
and CEO Dave Wilkinson estimates that defend the forest quote
unquote group members have done hundreds of thousands of dollars
of damage to utility equipment and has brought up plans

(04:08:16):
to add defense around the entirety of the site as
construction begins, saying, and anyone on the site will be arrested,
and as we move forward, the enforcement will become stricter
and stricter unquote. Also stated in an interview is that quote.
The Police Foundation also hopes to build separate museums on
site dedicated to police officers and the labor prison that

(04:08:38):
was once located there. So that's that's what the kids
call maskoff moment of building a dedicated museum two cops
and the labor prison a k A. Slave labor prison. Anyway,
the first phase of the project had the initial ninety
million price tag attached, with expair is being forced to

(04:09:01):
pay thirty million dollars of that, and it's still unclear
what the final cost of the facility is slated to be,
or what the estimated operating costs are, or really how
many phases of construction they really plan on doing. The
past few weeks, the site of Cops in the Woods
has become a more and more common occurrence, whether to
do scouting or just apparently detonating explosives for funzies at

(04:09:25):
their current makeshift shooting range, like they did a few
days ago. One morning when I was there, I woke
up to people yelling Cops in the Woods, which by
the way, is a very effective substitute for caffeine in
terms of making you very awake and alert quite early
in the morning. Um. And then while running through the forest,
I saw a beautiful deer and a hopping rabbit. So

(04:09:47):
nice clash of of feelings and sensations there. In terms
of closing sentiments based on conversations and observations I had
from my brief time in the woods, it's this play
to your strengths, don't play by the enemy's rules, utilize
the intersection of urban city based tactics and resources, while

(04:10:09):
taking inspiration from classic forest based eco defense. Attacking from
the cover of the woods and ensuring that the terrain
is as unwelcoming as possible to vehicular machinery can help
by time for rapid response popular mobilization from people living
in the city, if and when that time comes, I'll

(04:10:31):
be careful coming down a key road. They throwing bottles
at the police, and the bottles at smoke ball, so
be careful. They in the woods um throwing at the
police cars and stuff like that, so appreciate it. Yeah,
And despite the defensive nature of defending the forest, there
still is a large amount of making sure that as

(04:10:53):
often as possible you can do the prep work to
set the terms of engagement so that they're fighting on
your terms. You're not always complying to theirs, which is
can be useful for defensive stuff. Obviously, the whole aspect
of defending a forest like this that you I think

(04:11:14):
the offenders can have this almost like spectral quality of
like cops don't know where people are, what they've built,
what's in the forest, what's in the woods, and it's
like spooky, like you like you don't know who's who's
up in a treehouse, you don't know who's behind what's tree,
you don't know what things are in the woods, And

(04:11:35):
that spectral quality of the forest offense is a really
interesting aspect of it that you don't see. And you
don't see that. And then like pipeline protests as much,
you don't really see that for like Protestant a city, um,
because the city very much as like a more of
like a cops terrain, UM. So I really do like
that aspect of like cops are kind of scared to
go in the woods because they're spooky. They have open

(04:12:00):
They testified like in court testimony that said that when
this forest defender was arrested, the police officer that gave
his statement to the judge was shaking, physically shaking because
he was so afraid from being yelled at, Like that
was all that had happened, is a bunch of protesters
were yelling at them and he was shaking. The police

(04:12:21):
are really dependent on their infrastructure. They are dependent on
all of that kid that they carry around. They are
not mobile. They are meant to be attached to that
squad car, and every further step they take away from that,
they are more and more uncomfortable. And when they look
around they realized they were in the middle of the
fucking woods. That's terrifying for them and that needs to

(04:12:43):
be like taking advantage of. And it is wo'ds that
like they that their drones and their police helicopters have
problem even with their thermal tracking of seeing through the
canopy woods that like, and I want to say, like,
it was really funny to me that in that it
was said bad the purposes were screaming, we know where
you live, we know where you live. We're coming, We're coming,

(04:13:07):
which is the whole, the whole post thing um, because
I mean, I mean in terms of in terms of
thermal stuff. I brought a thermal camera of mine here,
and the woods are very hard to see through With
my thermal camera. I cannot see more than twenty ft away.
I've I've tested it on people. It's that's the super
interesting aspect. And yeah, like it's the whole like Fern Gully,
Princess Princess Mononoke thing of like when people come out

(04:13:29):
of the woods wearing ski basks Like that's freaking like
it's like we are you, Like you can be the
thing that goes boo in the night like that, Actually
that is you, um, and that's something that should be
taken advantage of when there's people invading the forest and
trying to destroy it. I think this is really for

(04:13:50):
a lot of us, like us have been like the
dark and the night and the woods as this verything.
This is where I feel the most safe. This is
if you give me a bunch of camel and like
send me off into the woods, There's nowhere I'm going

(04:14:15):
to feel more safe and more capable both of safety
and attack. When I'm out here, I feel like I
can do anything. You give me a bunch of woods,
a bunch of hills, Like, there's so much we can
do because we're not in this position of you know,

(04:14:37):
entering hostile territory to you know, do things. This is
territory that we control, and this is territory that we
are using to fight back. And we're weaponizing not just
you know, the cops fear, but we're weaponizing the terrain itself.
Were weaponizing the trees, were weaponized in the hills. We're

(04:15:01):
recognizing the ruins, and we're recognizing everything here has like
literally a thing to use to attack the state. If
you give me a ridgeline, I can hide from the
cops better than any fucking you know, high tech thermal
scattering tilly suit is ever gonna give me. You know,

(04:15:24):
out here, you don't need a bunch of fancy ship
to like engage in conflict with the state. You don't
need thermal cameras and all that. You can walk into
a military surplus store and buy, you know, for fifty bucks.
You can buy everything you need to like do just

(04:15:45):
about whatever you want out here. And that's like, that's
like a really important and beautiful thing. Is It's not
it's not hard to do what we're doing. You just
have to break down the mental barriers and do it. Um. Yeah,

(04:16:06):
we we do our best to protect the trees, and
the trees protected us too. And it's it's cool living here.
And it's like obviously something ever on most people probably
think about is yet how important wild spaces are. But
it's cool to really fucking feel it, and it's like like, yeah,
this this place is super important because of how it

(04:16:26):
interacts with the ecosystem and how it filters the water
and that it's a safe haven for a lot of
really beautiful animals and plants. But also this place is
important because wild spaces are sucking uncontrollable, and I want
to live in an uncontrollable way, and like you need
those things, and um, it is it's really cool if

(04:16:47):
this is a wild space, it's also a forest in
a city, which is cool. It's fucking weird, Like there's
there's city people who come here who are fucking weird
and do weird ship and it's sick. Um and like
it is an uncontrolled space and like sometimes that means
that there's like fucking ship chemicals that are like fucking

(04:17:08):
plants up. But also sometimes that means there's people who
like are doing things that are free and doing things
they couldn't do in the city. And um, and it
doesn't matter if I like it or not. It makes me, Yeah,
it makes me happy. They just know that those people
can act on their desires. Um. And yeah, it's not

(04:17:28):
always fucking convenient or good. And sometimes I intend to
antagonistic relationships with that because it conflicts with my desire.
But there's no mediation, and there's there's there's no one
getting in between. And yeah, it's just it's really important.
And I think like the the slogan that people say
of not what is there, not one tree, not one

(04:17:49):
blade of grass, like is like an inspirational thing, but
it's also like a strategy, Like it's like a tactical
assertion that is important for us. Like, yeah, like this
forest and these wild spaces are essential, not just for
us to physically stop the police, but like essential to

(04:18:09):
be an anarchist. Like if there are not wild spaces,
spaces that they can't put security cameras up here because
they there's no electricity and the trees are two dens
for solar panels and they get smashed anyway, you know,
Like it's important to have those things. If there's not
places like that, there's not places where you you know,

(04:18:31):
like and and so that for itself is cool. And
the other thing is just living here with the fucking animals, Like, um,
it's cool the deer. If you want to find a
get hiding spot in the forest, pay attention to where
the fucking deer sleep. They sleep in different places most nights.
You won't suck them up as long as you don't
pick the exact same when they're sleeping and they're really

(04:18:52):
fucking hard to find. Same thing with the coyotes, Like,
same thing with the snakes, and like it's just very
cool to get to observe and live with all these animals. Know,
there's an owl screaming five o'clock. It's like a nice
little marker, and that's that's better than you know, looking

(04:19:12):
at my watch. That's pretty cool. This leads us up
to our present day and the upcoming Week of Action
in Atlanta, Georgia, happening from Sunday, May eight to Sunday
May If you are anywhere near the Atlanta area, you
have no reason to not check it out. It's a
week's worth of events spanning from early in the morning

(04:19:32):
too late into the evening every day for seven days.
You can find the calendar of events on Defend the
Atlanta Force dot com. And if you are not near Atlanta,
I would still recommend you make your way there post
taste if you are able to, whether that's during the
Week of Action or later on down the line. More
boots on the ground is almost always a plus. Here's

(04:19:54):
the more info on the upcoming Week of Action from
May eight through May fift so generally the past the
past few week of actions have been like really above ground,
really like giving people comfortable forest, getting people into a forest,
like the community events are like UM and just like
public gatherings, inform nights, UH skill shares, other stuff like that.

(04:20:18):
And I believe that this one, like well, like we
had a lot about those events. But I also believe that,
like due to the nature of what's going on UM,
that it's much more urgent that people UH come and
create their doing, their own ideas, being known in science,
their own desires. And yeah, we can imagine it's odd.
It's gonna be weird, it's gonna be crazy, it's gonna

(04:20:41):
be odd of things. I think there's gonna be family
family where black hacking trees kind of ship, and I'm
excited for that. And I think there's gonna do something
like what the fund is going on in the woods
kind of shares a bunch of cops kind of ship.
Obviously we don't know what's really going to happen, but
anyone that has been reading stuff like, oh man, don't
want to go throw down with the crazies, you should
come and do that. And we have some stuff to

(04:21:04):
share and hopefully there will be so many people here
that don't know how to deal with it. The problem
going here is the Atlanta Police Force. Um, they there
is a lot of them, but honestly they're also they're
stressed out and they are run um what's that run dry? Respect?
Then they really they don't know how to deal with

(04:21:26):
all this wood ship from ship that we've heard them
talking about. They don't know what to do. They're not
totally prepared. I think it's gonna be a really fun
and crazy ship show and we want you all to
come to our ship show in a good way. And
they know you shouldn't use those words, but in reality,
nobody actually knows what's going to happen. We know what
we're gonna do. We have plans that people can plug into,

(04:21:47):
some stuff you can bring your kids to, and some
stuff you should not bring your kids to, and there
will be more. To be honest with, you really got
to just be there in person because there's something You
can't put everything on Instagram by doing your best to
like communicate to folks what's going on, there's just some
things you gotta cam two whatever the weekend action. But

(04:22:09):
this is like we're helping people get returned out for
this weekend. Actually, and maybe we all just become a
roving nomadic war machine together. That would be the dream.
So you have a thing in your hometown, in your territory,
and we nomadic war machine over years back, and we
just keep doing that. A few resources that some of

(04:22:32):
the force defenders wanted people to know about is first, obviously,
Defend the Atlanta Forest dot com, which has the Week
of Action calendar to keep up on news regarding the movement.
You can follow them on Twitter and Instagram at Defend
the Atlanta Forest or Defend a t L Forest. There
is the Forest Justice Defense Fund at Open Collective dot

(04:22:54):
com slash Forest Hyphen Justice Hyphened Defense hyphen Fund, where
people can donate to support the work of the broad
Coalition dedicated to saving the forest. There's of course stop
Reeves Young dot com, which has information on subcontractors and
third party service providers relating to the cops city construction.

(04:23:15):
Very useful even just for simple calling campaigns. The website
scenes dot no blogs dot org hosts other news relating
to the movement, anonymous community case and stuff like maps
of the area and random other useful information resources for
info and guides relating to direct action. There's a website

(04:23:35):
titled warrior up dot no blogs dot org and people
can go there or to a warrior up dot no
blogs dot org slash guides for various interesting information. I'll say, um,
and that last one is really best viewed on tour
with via the tour browser just as a heads up.
Also probably with like a VPN. And I don't know anyway,

(04:23:57):
be be careful with that last one. But all of these,
all of these sites will be linked in the show notes.
The future lies in your hands. You have more freedom
than you know if you can find the unconventional ways
of expressing it. See you on the other side. And
I'll end with a word from our forced defender friend,

(04:24:19):
there's no future. That's nomadic war machine as well. Right, Yeah,
hopefully we're gonna stop the police training facility. I think
we really are looking forward to people, hopefully some people
sticking around there for the week of action, because we're
hoping that it doesn't die down too much to the

(04:24:39):
point where a smaller and achieve them that was here
for a week of action gets attacked. We love it,
and some of valid stay stay around exactly that if
it can happen here, I wasn't thinking abouts, it can
happen where you live. And maybe we can just keep
the idea. As we're sharing of skills we make ourselves.

(04:25:00):
Absolutely no one should be integral enough to the movement
that you can't die off a leave and it can't continue.
People should be reading manuals, sharing skills, telling stories, howling
at the moons. We're doing all this stuff to make
each other just a weird of the different things that
are possible for us to run because maybe we don't

(04:25:21):
have all the you know, the guns and the steel
and the gold, but if we have enough people like
being creative and doing some guerrilla ship, we can get
a lot done. And at the end of the day,
if you you can do you have to be careful
about how many hats to ring. If you don't know
about the r n C eight that's a long time ago.
Now look that up. They're wearing. They are really great
community organizers, but they were wearing too many hats. It

(04:25:44):
was the first time that Patriot Act kind of new
laws after not eleven was like you lized on people
and a lot of it didn't stick. But if you
what we really need is more faceless saboteurs, because honestly,
if they that's what we need, we need to be
There's just in reality, there's not enough people willing to

(04:26:04):
do nightwhere that looks like there's up behavior, which is great,
be safe, be smart at the actors a little, and
that's that's what we need, more than saying there's a
lot of people that um are willing to do above
ground staff. There's a lot of people that want to
be known, and that's great, but we have enough for that.

(04:26:28):
We need something else. It Could Happen Here is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at

(04:26:48):
cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey,
We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat Death of the Universe.