It Could Happen Here Weekly 35

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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. If I know one thing

(00:27):
about diseases, it's that their home bodies. Now, it's fine,
we make it. They just want to netflix and chill.
You just line up the entire population of the US
in a line across the US. We shoot any deer
that tries across the line. I think we should do
the reverse and have deer shoot people who tried across
the line. It's the only thing that can protect us

(00:47):
from the dangerous east. No, no, no, that look look well,
I guess it worse in east and in the west.
We have to maintain the right to arm bears. Yeah,
I'm I'm of the opinion, given how dry it is
in New Mexico, that we need to sink every part
of the country east of New Mexico to give it
a coast that can that can keep it moist. I
wonder how much of this is going to get in

(01:08):
the final cut. Well, if you live east of New Mexico,
welcome to the ocean. That's my suggestion. Um, speaking of
people east of New Mexico, this is it could happen
here a podcast where some of the listeners are east
of New Mexico, even though I don't recommend that. Um,
I'm Robert Evans. On the call with me is Christopher Wong,

(01:31):
Garrison Davis, Sharene Lonnie Units, and then our producers Sophie.
Today we're talking about terrorism. Yeah, we do it in
a little NPR voice. So uh. Recently, the same week
as the Supreme Court leaked a document stating that they
would be taking out Roe v. Wade and ushering in
an era of theocratic fascism in a number of states. Uh,

(01:55):
an individual or individuals unknown in Wisconsin attacked Anti Choice
headquarters building with a Molotov cocktail and spray painted graffiti
on the side saying if abortion isn't safe, then you
aren't either. That same group or individuals claiming to be
from them, later reached out to me through an intermediary
and sent a manifesto of sorts about the attack, promising

(02:17):
follow up attacks within thirty days. But they wrote, but
they wrote in cursive, So who can say, Who can
say if this actually happened. So we'll talk first. I'm
gonna just go over first what what happened in like
factual terms, and then we'll talk about the discourse around it.
So basically, there's this attack on this UM anti choice

(02:39):
like advocacy organizations headquarters in fucking Wisconsin. UM it was
seemed to be a pretty good molotov and that, like Garrison,
you and I have watched a number of people failed
to properly utilize. I watched a few people get watched
one get ignited by him altop, I've seen a couple

(03:00):
of not cops get ignited by mollotsovs um they're they're
they're not like people can suck them up easily. Whoever
did this did not suck them up. It was seemed
to be at the moment. No one has been arrested.
Now it's possible by the time this drops, Wisconsin police
will be like, oh no, there was totally surveillance footage
and they fucked up and we just caught them, UM,

(03:22):
But at the moment, it doesn't look like that's the case.
So it looks like this is somebody who carried out
or some buddies, because it's entirely possible is multiple people,
but carried out UM a very effective like action that
did material damage to UM, part of kind of the
physical infrastructure of the anti choice movement UM and ended

(03:44):
without anyone getting caught. So that's the fact of the
actual attack itself. UM. A person who claiming to be
affiliated with the individuals or group who did this reached
out to a source of mine who I'm keeping anonymous,
but somebody who I've known for a while with a
very good track record of being accurate, and said, hey,

(04:07):
these individual slash individuals have a communic A they would
like put out UM. And I was sent on a
non files link, which is a link. If you view
it in a normal browser you'll get some fucked up ship.
Don't put it in a normal browser. I specified it's
like you're supposed to. If you put it in tour,
it will download a text file right UM. And the
text file is the communic A. So using the Tour

(04:29):
browser for that link, you can get a text file
in which they lay out number one. They named themselves UM,
and the name they've chosen for their group is Jane's Revenge,
which is a reference to the Jaine Collective UM, which
was a pro choice group in the late sixties early
seventies that UM provided women with access to contraception and

(04:51):
abortion illegally. A bunch of them went to jail. Uh,
they were pardoned after Roe v. Wade. If I'm not
mistaken or at least other one more about it, send
the market the k click. Yeah, yeah, very well timed. UM.
So they're calling themselves Jamee's Revenge, and they basically said, hey,
if you are an organization in the anti choice movement,

(05:12):
you have thirty days to close down your operations otherwise
there will be follow up attacks. They specifically noted the
long and it's at this point like a forty years
long history of terrorist attacks from the anti choice movement,
many of which have assassinated doctors, something like sixteen people
have been killed, UM, dozens of bombs and bombing attempts,
something like a hundred acid attacks. So they made a

(05:34):
note of all that and said that like, basically we
will be UM, we will be responding in kind and
UH attacks after this initial attack will be correspondingly more severe. UM.
They also claim to have a pretty wide geographic reach,
said they had folks in a number of cities, UM,
and that yeah, there's going to be follow up attacks UM,

(05:55):
and they're prepared to defend their bodily autonomy with violence.
So that's that's the gist of what was claimed in
the communic a UM. In terms of what I think
about its legitimacy, UM, I don't have any reason to
believe they're not representing the individual or individuals who carried
out that attack in Wisconsin, based on the timing of

(06:18):
when the communic was made, and based on the fact
that the communicate is pretty consistent with what we saw
from the actual action. Right. So, among other things that
you can tell from the physical action that was taken
is that, UM, the individual or individuals who did this
were pretty well organized. They carried out a competent action,
and they thought there was a value in very clear

(06:38):
messaging because there's clear messaging surrounding the attack. The communicate
is very clear messaging. It does not sound like a
right winger writing up a fake communicate. It's very UM.
It takes great pains to both connect itself to history,
to frame its violence within the context of the violence
perpetuated by the anti choice movement for decades UM, and

(07:01):
just in general, it's the communication seems consistent with the
action that we saw in Wisconsin. Now cannot say, we
cannot say, I cannot say to a statement of certainty
whether or not it's legitimate. One helpful thing they did
is place state that there would be another more attacks
in thirty days, So we're kind of waiting. If thirty

(07:21):
days pass and there's never any kind of follow up
attacks by this group, then we can probably assume that
this was either somebody bullshitting or that the heat got
to too much for them and they decided not to
carry out follow up attacks. UM. But we're all kind
of in this holding pattern now to see what happens.
My personal speculation is that UM, they were exaggerating a

(07:43):
number of things. UM. I think that the their claims
about having members in a number of states in a
capacity to strike in a number of states was more
aspirational than literal UM. In that I suspect the people
behind this attack, in this communicate are hoping that by
UM carrying out attacks. They can inspire other people to

(08:04):
carry out attacks and credit it to the same organization, right,
which is not an uncommon tactic in the history of terrorism.
And again, this is terrorism. Like that doesn't mean I
don't think, uh, they have a point or that it's
like fundamentally unjust. Terrorism is just like a set of
tactics that different groups can use, and it can be
ethical or unethical depending on how you you choose to

(08:25):
do that. You can attack purely infrastructure, UM in a
terrorist manner, and I don't think that's necessarily unethical. And
you can also attack civilians, UM in a terrorist manner,
and I think that is unethical. At this moment, these
people have not done anything I view as inherently unethical.
They burned a building, UM, which I think is often
justified and is in this case justified. So that's that's

(08:45):
my opinion on the matter. Let's open it up on
the point you kind of closed with. I mean, yeah,
they showed effective direct action. They did a physical thing.
Malta's are not the best way to do like to
like arsenal building, but they are good for a very
quick attack. Um. It caused this whole media thing, right,
there's a lot a lot of people talking about it,
then releasing the communicate through someone who can give it

(09:05):
a lot of visibility. Uh, and then by by doing
it with this with this name Jane's revenge and saying
in thirty days there will be more attacks in different
cities the messages that, Yeah, like you can. One way
to look at this is if if they don't have
tons of like you know, members are allies that they
know across different cities. Is that and anyone can do this,

(09:26):
Like anyone can do this and call themselves by that
name and be a part of this larger thing like
it's you if you if you spread it around, then
that it can become like this, this thing that anyone
can gloam onto. It doesn't need to be you don't
need to be a part of a member of a
specific group. You can just do stuff and release communicates
safely and add add on to the to the to

(09:49):
the specter. Yeah. Um, it's not hard to set up
like a text drop in the same manner that did
they did. It is relatively secure. Like there's no perfect
if you are committing terrorism, there is no perfect manner
to issue a statement. Um, but of the different things
they could have chosen. This is relatively secure, especially doing

(10:10):
it through an intermediary. I haven't had direct contact with
these people, but UM, we should probably note that there's
a huge discourse that started before the communic A came
out arguing that this is like a false flag attack. Yeah,
that's yes, that in a long line of calling a

(10:30):
pretty pretty well planned out direct action. When it actually happens,
people will defalse to calling it an OP. We're calling
it a false flag from a very people like that.
There's there's like there's like libs who say, oh, this
is a stage thing to make our movement look bad.
There's tank kys who think it's like the CIA planning something.
There's random other folks who are like, hey, I don't

(10:52):
know if it's legit. I think maybe it's like some
it's a lot of people get very various justifications for
calling pretty effective acts of direct action UM and questioning
questioning their legitimacy. I think some of this comes from
because there's obviously there's the bad faith elements of this UM,
but I think the good faith folks who questioned it,

(11:15):
there's a lot of learned helplessness there. This idea that
because somebody did carry out a pretty successful direct action
attack that kind of did what its intention was, then
it has to have been the FBI or whoever, right,
because obviously the left could never have pulled off something
as as cunning as throwing a single molotov at a

(11:37):
building and spray painting the side of it, you know. Um,
and I do think that that's a problem. Whether or
not you think the solution to issues like the right
wing attack on reproductive healthcare come from direct action, the
fact that folks almost can't conceive of effective action being
taken by the left without the FEDS being involved is

(11:57):
really an issue. Yeah, this was a huge thing during
one of the things that we saw there. There were
so many just weird conspiracy theories, and then the everything
that happened very quickly was people became convinced almost immediately
that anyone doing anything was it was a federal infiltrator.
And you've got people, you got crowds turning people over
to police. You got people on Twitter like trying to

(12:20):
track down, um, like who was throwing malltops and videos
and like one of the people they caught and they
turned over the police. It turned out had been had been.
The girlfriend is someone who got killed by the cops,
and so I mean this stuff, this stuff has has
The stuff has real world consequences. It has already like
sent people to jail, it has it has this normost

(12:40):
demobilizing effect of me. I don't remember people two people
remember the okay, the two two two big Okay, the
two big Twitter conspiracies were um bricks bricks and who yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's hoping that people like people would see a major

(13:04):
right next to a to a construction site, They'll be like,
how are all these pallets of bricks showing up this
there's like a construction site of block away. You're like, okay,
who's distributing the fireworks? How do these fireworks get here?
Never mind June. The history of like like the FBI,
some people will mistakenly like throw the CIA in there.

(13:25):
The CIA doesn't really tend to do like the domestic
facory um, they're international fay. But like, if you look
at the history of the FBI fucking with left wing
social movements, it's not by handing out brick palates. Yeah,
but that's not what they do. We have a lot
of documentation about what they do and it's not bricks.
And if there is some secret group who's maliciously giving

(13:46):
out bricks so people attack, throw them through windows, or
throw them at cop cars, like who cares? Like bricks
are getting throw a cop cars. It doesn't matter where
they come from. Like people are still choosing to do action. Yeah,
the best example of this is is the Russian Revolution n. No. Five.
The Russian Revolution of n. Five was started by a

(14:06):
guy who was a police agent. Like his whole thing
is he was he was he was working to create
like unions that could be controlled by the state, and
he marched a bunch of people into a square and
the police shot them. And that's how and that's how.
That's literally how the Russian Revolution started. Like it doesn't.
It doesn't like there's there's a there's a point, Okay,
they're they're like, there's two layers of this. One is
that like there there almost is never a conspiracy going

(14:29):
on into if the conspiracy is we want to push
people towards doing things. It almost it doesn't. There's a
point at which it stops mattering because a lot a
lot of people forget about acams rights. There when you're
talking about these types of things. Usually, the more simple
the answer, the more likely it is. The more the
less involved parties, the more likely the more likely it is.

(14:52):
So if there's a choice between rad people fucking up
an anti choice headquarters versus a government conspiracy to do
false flag operations to make the antichos to make the
abortion movement look bad, like, one of those is much
more simple and much more likely. And it's people just
deciding to do stuff because guess what you can You
can actually do that. You don't need to allow these

(15:14):
these weird narratives to to like to justify your uncomfortableness
at like at forms of radical direct action, because it's
it's people use that false flag idea, so so they
don't need to actually engage with what direct action will mean.
And if it is someone's moral imperative to physically attack
like physical manifestations of these sources of oppression, yeah, I

(15:36):
think you're right on the money there. I think one
of the things that's most frustrating to me about this
is it kind of suggests that a sizeable chunk of
people who ostensibly consider themselves on the left are like
focusing their time not on doing anything and not on
taking any action to materially change the conditions. They're angry

(15:56):
at um, but are instead looking for reasons to disavow
other folks on the left, and that that's like the
primary which is if you again, if you like look
at what we know Herbert Herbert Hoover was saying about
the FBI's co Intel pro program was the goal of
co Intel pro right, That's what That's exactly what I
was thinking. I'm just like, I feel like this promotes

(16:19):
I don't know, a morality like race or like just
like competition, where the only thing it does is just
promote infighting. When you have this, like you're on your
morality horse. But I think if you actually support real change,
you have to come to terms with like you have

(16:40):
to do illegal things and like holding on too, like
these made up laws that someone made up about like
how to achieve change is useless. And there's i mean,
like dividing up a side that's supposed to be going
for the same thing. Like that's exactly yeah, it's just
it's missing the point and people don't really Yeah, if
you look at the right, you've got all these folks

(17:01):
who were like legal and and whatnot, Uh, proponents of
of ending reproductive health care access and any of the
folks who were doing repeated acts of terrorism. And the
folks who were on the legal side of things didn't
disavow those people. They were often affiliated with churches that
did shoot like auction off the possessions of like extremists

(17:23):
who had murdered doctors and ship like they were like
even the most they would do is just not directly
talk about those people. They didn't disavow them, they didn't
like attack it because they understood that a diversity of
tactics was going to be how they achieved their goals.
That it was a mix of pushing for these legal
changes and carrying out so many terroristic attacks that it

(17:45):
frightened people away from supporting UM abortion service providers and
other kind of reproductive healthcare service providers. UM difference between
the right and the left, though, Like Democratic Republicans are
really good at uniting on this big picture, and I
feel like Democrats are not. I feel like they just uh,
I don't know, it's too there's too much in fighting,

(18:08):
and that's why it's always fractured. Part of it is
that on the Republican side, you have Republicans and you
have the far right who are also Republicans. And even
though a lot of folks on the far right bitch
about the centrists in their upboard, like the folks who
are closer to the center, they all get in line
for really radical stuff, Like the center of the Republican

(18:28):
Party always yields to the radicals, whereas Democrats do not
acknowledge leftists as having anything to do with with the
Democratic Party or democratic politics other than the yell at
them when they don't vote. Um. And on the other
hand of things, there's a lot of folks on the
left who hate liberals more than they hate fascists, you know. Um,

(18:49):
And it's it's I think one of those is a
bigger problem than the other. I think that the failure
of the democratic establishment to like deal with the left
at all, um, or make any kind of progress that
could be seen as as actually left. Actually yeah, but
but I think I think there's they're there. I think

(19:10):
there's structural reasons for that too, Which is okay, if
if you look at what is the basis of conservative alliance, Right,
if you're a conservative, you know, okay, if you're from
the sort of like moderate business wing, get the party
if you're from the fascist wing, get the party right,
you can have one judge who gives both of you
the things that you want right, because if you're if
you're like the Koke Brothers, the thing that you want
is the regulation. Right, you want to be able to

(19:31):
just like dump poison into the environments. If you're on,
if you're on, if you're an evangelical, the thing that
you want is uh, you know, to no one can
ever have an abortion again. And you know, if if
if you're like a fascist, I don't know, maybe you
want like we don't give food to immigrant children anymore,
so they start to death. And one judge can give
you all of those same things because the the sort

(19:54):
of the the class and social issues of the Republican
base can all be fused together without harboring each other.
But the problem with with with this with the Democratic
Party is that like the Democratic Party's basis is like
what's left of the Union movement, but then also like
a bunch of corporations and banks and like weapons manufacturers
and stuff, but then also like a bunch of angry

(20:16):
students and also like a bunch of people from different
minority groups, and all of these people like have different
interests and you know, in the Democratic Party, ultimately like
the thing, the thing that they care about is keeping
capitalism going. And you know if if they have to
like if that means that, yeah, I mean well okay,
if if if your things you want to keep capitalis
and going, like of course you're just gonna throw your

(20:36):
left wing out to the wolves, right like it. It
makes sense for them to do this because because the
part of their base that actually matters isn't like the
labor movement, it's like it's Goldman Sachs. I think that
one of the other things that that causes people to
have this like immediately anyhow someone does someone does. Like

(20:58):
people remember like when and Nancy Pelosi's driveway got graffiti,
like that was like that's never never, that's horrible. Don't
graffiti Nancy Pelosi's driveway. That's evil. Yeah, like it's an
isis you did nicest there? Yeah? Everyone lost their mind
and was like, oh, this is obviously a false flag,

(21:18):
and it's like what you know, But the reason they
do this is because they have they have like Democrat
optics brain were like I said, if anything being about politics,
every everything is just about optics. And optics and how
does it look? How does it look? How does it look?
Like the only people who care about this are like
weird pundits, but because because because everyone's so sort of
absorbed in like the Twitter media's fear, like they think

(21:40):
that like the actual general public cares about the things
that pundits care about because the only thing they're seeing
is pundits writing angry articles. But like nobody cared like
zero people, especially the graffiti thing, because man, people like
dissect how someone sprayed an anarchist a. It's like if
you're not aware, like a big chunk of the discord,
are e it being a false flag or whatever? Was that?

(22:04):
The incursive? Yeah, and that they did. They did as
they did like um, the anarchy a inside the inside
the circle. Um. And it's wild because I mean, spray
painting what they said, like if if abortions aren't safe,
then you are either in cursive is a genius move.
It's great because if you're spray painted in some like

(22:25):
random punk fond that's easy to be ignored like, oh,
it's just people doing like whatever, people prey any stuff.
But doing it like methodically in cursive is is actually
a really good choice because you're like, oh, it's like
we're dealing with adults. It's like like the type of
things that people will go through their minds when they
look at it is great. Um, and it's just a

(22:46):
weird denial to assume that no one who takes radical
direct action whatever write in cursive. It's just it's like
the most the most brainworms thing. And it's also like
it's also very clear, like like okay, so I am
very bad at spray painting, right, but like I have
I have used a spray paint can, and well, this
is an aged I was. I was, I was making
I was making banners for stuff, So this wasn't even

(23:06):
like this wasn't even cryings, but this is just like
regular spray painting. It's like that is hard, Like writing
that incursive and having it look that nice with the
spray pain can is like difficult, which you know, if
if you think about this about five seconds, this makes
it more likely that it's actually left just doing this
because it's like, what, okay, hold on, So the anti
abortion people have one person who's really really good at graffiti,

(23:31):
and this person that they've decided yeah, theist school and
secret like learning. It's like it's nonsense, but it's like
people people just people want everything to sort of like
like and I think this is the other angle of
this is that people think that like have this wild
overassessment of the capacity of the state. Yeah, and they

(23:52):
think that anytime something looks slightly weird, it's like, oh,
it must be the state. Like like one of the
one of the things that happened with with the Brooklyn
shooting tube was like you had all these people that
there's a tweet going around that was like, oh, like
the cameras just happened. All all the cameras, all the
cameras in New York were working except the exact one
that would have caught the shooter. And this is this
is like everyone circled around this and everyone was like,

(24:13):
oh my god, this is a false flag. And then
know it turned out that like the guy had literally
called the police, but the police were so incompetent that
like other people like saw him on the street and
got to him before like the cops did. And and
like the camera it turned out wasn't even like the
camera that was out wasn't even the camera that like
like they had him on camera. It was a different camera,
but it was like everyone everyone just immediately has this

(24:37):
like conspiracy brain thing where they see like one thing
out of context that looks slightly weird and they go,
oh my god. This whole thing is is is a
state like c a like depressing. It's so depressing because
it's such it's so depowering your specific you're like it
ties into the learned helpless, this thing that Robert mentioned,
like you're convincing yourself that we don't have power to

(24:59):
change things, that we cannot take any physical action to
change things. Um. And that's not great mentality to have
if you want to improve the world or if you
want to if you want to destroy the things that
harve you, Um, you do. You don't want to fall
into that that specific like I don't have any power
mindset because you turns out you can do stuff. Things happened,

(25:23):
you can. People threw a ball off and broke windows
and cool people sometimes do cool things, yes, just like
the people stuff. Yes. The Sophie Sophie Sophie, Sophie Sophie

(25:44):
one of the things that's interesting to me, and it
it might hold some lessons for folks thinking about radical
direct action. And what gets attention and what doesn't. So
obviously this attack has garnered a lot of national attention,
right the fact that I think because there was both
an attack and a message, there was another attack. And

(26:04):
it's not a p that this had anything to do
with the pro choice movement, UM, but I suspect it does.
The Attorney General Virginia Jason Miarez UM, on the tenth
of May, there was a somewhat shot into his office,
like a bullet was found in the office. UM. It

(26:25):
was probably fired when no one was there. We don't
really know more than that. It is unclear as to
whether or not this is involved with things. But three
days before the shot was fired into his office, he
had basically Catholic groups had been planning big masses to
celebrate the leaked draft opinion, and protesters had been organizing
to protest the Catholic masses, and he had threatened to

(26:47):
charge people who protested masses. UM, because he believes the
right to freedom of religion trump's the right of free speech.
So it's kind of like a fucked up situation. People
got angry at me ares UM, and it seems kind
of noteworthy that someone shot into his office three days
after this. I mean also, I mean there's been a
lot of stuff like on on May eight, there was

(27:09):
an attack on the organ Rights to Life building. Yes, yes, yes,
there was certainly appro choice. Yeah yeah, there was there,
there was there was at least two multop cocktails throne
and there was a break and inside. So it's like
you can do things. You don't have no power like
you can physical you can interact with the politics in

(27:30):
a physical way. Um, people do interact with politics in
a physical way. Yeah. And and people people have this
assumption that like this is going to be incredibly unpopular.
And again I want to point out burning the third Precinct.
How to higher approve of rating that both presidential candidates,
which I mean I I again tend to advocate in
we should elect the burning of the third Precinct in

(27:51):
Minneapolis as president. Look every look, the way that works
is the burning of the precinct takes off this and
then every day you burn another precinct. So that's so
that you can actually have a president. Well that is
how you fill the cabinet. Yeah, there needs to yeah, yeah, yeah,
you have to eat well, yeah, all all all the
staff positions filled with the Health and the Health and

(28:15):
Human Services Secretary will be the West Los Angeles Police
station and so forth. Yes, I'm really excited to see
which one gets picked for the Housing Secretary. I am
just on my on my toes. Just's exciting, exciting. Democracy
can be quite far. Electoralism has some has some really cool,
really cool points. Yeah, hey, you you too could go

(28:35):
in front of the National Labor Relations Board and the
National Labor Relations Board is just seven? Is just seven?
On fire police stations? Charred really win? So yeah, we
just we just want we wanted to at least talk
about this because if whenever a cool thing happens and
a large swath of of of people who are ostensibly

(28:56):
leftists or even or even anarchists default to calling anything
cool a false flag or notp it's like, well, like
what do you want? Like you want people just to
stay at home all the time and not do anything? Like,
what's what's the end goal here? If you're calling everything
that happens enough. Yeah, and also just like if you're

(29:17):
going to if you're worried about ops and thinking of
suggesting that something might be what is your line? Is
it just that people broke a law? Are you saying
that if people do illegal things, that's always like a
government op because that doesn't seem like yourself an anarchist,
doesn't seem like a good strategy. Yeah, especially when it

(29:38):
comes to reproductive rights, like you're gonna have to do
illegal things, if people are gonna have to break exactly
pick and choose. I'm a hundred percent convinced that like
all of these people, if they'd seen John Brown, would
have been completely convinced the John Brown. Oh, John Brown
was for sure the FBI, he founded it, the original

(29:59):
op John Brown. I think that there's an aspect there
of also like okay, if if if you're on Twitter
right mostly or not doing politics, and the thing that
you're actually doing on Twitter is trying to feel smarter
for everyone else, and if you're the person that's like,
oh hey, look all these people believe that this thing

(30:21):
wasn't an op or like oh I A yeah, it's
like it's like, yeah, okay, you you very quickly like
spiral into just like every all all the all the
sheeople to smart fight this suspicious like it's it's like
it's it's just a bad like looking at an element
of event and going oh, this is weird, but in

(30:43):
a way that is oh hauh, isn't this weird? It
must be the government, Like that's that's just a bad
way of thinking. Like in in the mirror hours, in
the mirror minutes after anonymous people broke into the Portland
Police Association headquarters back in I think was July, just
mirror hours, people were calling it a false flag that
the police were dressed to the black block the people

(31:09):
and started protesting. The Feds. Yes, they alleged that this
was like I guess the FBI or Homeland Security trying
to get protesters angry at the cops again, which is
I mean, for one thing, if actually happened, if there
were to be a point where the left wing had
the FBI fighting or the FBI or Homeland Security whatever

(31:30):
fighting with local police over who was getting protested, that's
a win. That's a that's a big, solid capital dub
for the But people like the FBI is a block
breaking into the police union building and trying to light
it on fire, you're like, well, doing doing less physical,
let's be honest, doing less damage to that police union

(31:50):
building that I have seen my friends do when attempting
to deep fry French Fries. Like I have watched people
do more damage to their living rooms than that protested.
The people's astonishing because like there was so many people
at that action, and so many, so many people using
the moment to to actually gain like physical political power
for a brief a brief moment um, and to take

(32:12):
that away from them is just as a bizarre impulse.
And I would like to see it end, especially as
we're going to see hopefully see that people will realize
that that that direct action is going to become more
and more important for securing your personal rights and securing
your personal freedom. And also I would say these people, Okay,

(32:32):
if you want to be completely sure if that something
is happening is not an off, do it yourself. Stop
yelling about it on Twitter. Do it yourself. Then you'll
know it's not an off as a general rule. As
a general rule, look at France. What do the French
do whenever something they consider a right gets taken away
from them? They burn downtown Paris down, They light banks

(32:55):
on fire. They like Paris. Everyone who has gets select
did to a position of power in France knows that
if they cross certain lines, the capital will be ungovernable UM,
and there's a reason why French people have such quality healthcare.
Well with with with that note, I mean, I can't
believe we're ending on the note be be like the French.

(33:17):
I just is that is the friendship made a lot
of good calls, a lot of bad ones to not
trying to whitewash France, but there's a there's a number
of things they got spot on. Anyway, we will we
will be counting down the days until that thirty day marker,
and who knows, maybe other attacks will happen with people
also calling themselves Jane's revenge because and obviously this is

(33:40):
something that we as journalists have no opinion on one
way or the other. We're just reporting, just pure reporting. Anyway,
Listen to listen to people who did cool stuff, to
to hear about the Jane collective, and maybe also recreationally
read about what different civilian groups are doing in Ukraine
and the degree to which a wide variety of incredibly

(34:02):
available tools UM can can be repurposed in neat ways.
All right, I think I think that I think e'spisode
that's a good sude. Hey, everybody welcome to it could

(34:28):
happen here, and it continues to happen here. UM. I'm
Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart
and what to do after that happens. And we are
all currently dealing with the falling apart of several decades
of progress on reproductive justice. UM. The Supreme Court leaking

(34:49):
that UM they are coming for Roe v. Wade and UM. Yeah.
Today I'm here with Christopher Wong and Sharine Launie Unice
UM and my producer Sophie. We have two guests from
the bridget Alliance in the Midwest Access Coalition. We're going
to talk more about what they do in a second.
Broadly speaking, both seek to UM attach people who are

(35:12):
looking for reproductive healthcare and abortion access UM but cannot
get it easily in their area UM with clinics and
the things that they need in order to get to
the clinics, including transit and you know, time and hotels whatnot, UM,
in order to make it easier to get access to
that kind of healthcare in places like the Midwest, where
folks have been spending decades making it much more difficult

(35:34):
even prior to this recent ruling to get that kind
of healthcare. So I'm gonna let our guests introduce themselves. UM,
you've got the floor. Well, Hi, I am O'Dell Shelley.
I am the executive director at Deep Bridget Alliance, and
I'm gonna introduce my counterpart here. I'm Diana Parker trusta

(35:56):
from the executive director of the Midwest Access Coalition. And yeah,
so you'll have been in some ways kind of dealing
with elements of the post row world because obviously, like
you know, we're all focused on the Supreme Court decision
that's in the pipeline, but um, anti choice activists have

(36:16):
been working very hard to essentially create a post row
world in chunks of the United States prior to this point.
So you all have been kind of dealing with the
reality that a larger number of people are going to
be living under for a while, right. Yeah. Yeah, MRURI
has been able to effectively bad abortion state for years now.

(36:39):
I think, Uh, there's maybe a handful of abortions that
the one clinic there are able to do because of
all of the trap laws, um, which is the targeted
restrictions for abortion providers, uh, and the waiting period so
people have to go to another state. Kansas Iowa or Illinois, Missouri. Um,

(37:03):
and we've been helping those books for years, and UM,
I'm going to guess this. I mean, just because you've
been living in with this for a while, I'm gonna
guess the announcement last week did not come as a
total surprise. The timing of it certainly did, which for
Diana and I came at the heels of a conference

(37:26):
that we were at thankfully together, which is was kind
of just pure luck for us so we could actually
commiserate together. But no, ultimately this is not a huge surprise.
I mean, I think we're all still waiting to see
what actually happens in June. That the writing has been
on the wall for months, in years, if not longer.

(37:48):
And you know, as you were just pointing it out, essentially,
for organizations like the bridget Alliance and the Midwest Exist Coalition,
we have been existing already because the protections of ROW
are insufficient to actually secure abortion access for all in
this country. So this has been our lived experience, and

(38:09):
preparing for this moment has um It has been a
long time coming, and I'm sure there have been a
number of conversations that have been going on about what
to do and how to prepare for this right because
the primary change is going to be, at least initially
until some they make some sort of federal push that
states that have some sort of functional access to abortion

(38:31):
are going to be flooded with an even higher number
of people in need of care. Um, could you kind
of walk us through what sort of steps have been
taken to in order to kind of brace for that impact,
so to speak. Yeah, So I think a couple of things.
And and the first to sort of pull back on
that for a second is to say that part of

(38:53):
preparing for what's to come has been our orgs in
the community that we exist in. This this incredible expansive
landscape of different types of organizations that have existed for
decades to secure abortion access where the laws were insufficient,
where um people were faced with barriers like income and
equity and geographic inequity and the unavailability of providers. UM.

(39:20):
This network, though, has existed largely unseen, and so a
lot of preparing for what is to come is really
embracing our existence, feeling affirmed in that and in our value,
not shying away from the expertise within this community which
is held book by volunteers as well as staff UM,

(39:41):
and so I think a lot of the last couple
of years has been focusing on really trying to harness
that expertise and that knowledge and compassion and the fact
that many of the people who are leading a lot
of the efforts in the reproductive justice movement are people
who have had abortions themselves, which is a enormous and
valuable part of how this movement moves and hopefully will

(40:04):
continue to center the people most impacted by the fall
of row UM. I think, more specifically for Bridget and
or its like MAC preparation means deepening our relationships with
the clinics that we work with. They are critical, of course,
and their sanity is critical to abortion access. Is making
sure that we have the sufficient funding to continue to

(40:27):
staff train that volunteers systematically and mindfully UM, and ideally
do so in a sustainable way so that we're not
all overwhelming ourselves with the sudden surge of need and
the sudden surge of impact UM. And then you know,
for Diana and I even personally, it means deepening the
relationships that US practical support organizations have with one another,

(40:50):
because no one organization is going to be able to
help every single abortion seeker who will need to travel.
It will rely upon really strong and transparent collaboration. So
those are some of the things that you've been focusing on.
One of the things that strikes me as a problem
that's going to be, if not immediate, been pretty imminent

(41:11):
for y'all is we've already seen threats and promises from
legislators in some states to attempt to criminalize leaving a
state where abortion is illegal in order to get access
to healthcare. How what what kind of preparation is even
possible for that sort of world, because it does seem
like we're staring down the barrel of that. Yeah, I

(41:33):
think the only preparation we can have right now is
to expect that the corners will allow them to do that. Um.
They're very creative now that they've seen a going to
effect and hold on as the law of the land,
even though it's in direct violation of federal law. UM
scode us the highest code court of our country, UH

(41:58):
is the one that has been allowing that to happen.
And so that sends a huge message to all these
UH force birth legislators that you know, bring us your
worst take on the law. We will find a way
to let you keep it. UM. We're we're working with
you on this, and UM, you just need to get

(42:22):
bolder and bolder and see what you can get away with.
So we can't really predict how they're going to do that,
although Missouri has indicated that they're going to consider an
a guessing as it's fertilized a resident and um, a
resident of the state, that they have, you know, responsibility

(42:42):
for protecting um completely ignoring the fact that it's growing
inside a complete human being that has rights. UM. But
that's that's the latest that I've heard of them figuring
out how to restrict someone's someone's travel um M. But
it would require a significant shift in how we understand

(43:06):
constitutional law and um the basis for our legal system. Yeah,
and that that seems like something that I don't know,
like really genuinely seems to be on the table in
this moment. I mean, we have I think it's Louisiana
who's trying to like part part part of their bill
is that they like literally it says that they can

(43:26):
disobey the federal government, which we had a civil war
about that. We had we had a nullification crisis about
that we like, so, yeah, I guess I'm wondering what
your impression is on like how far this can go?
Like do do we get to the point where states
can just like tell the federal government no, Yeah, yeah,

(43:52):
I mean that's what the architect of the st law
essentially told The part is that they don't have jurisdiction
and all the law is that they have passed in
the eight hundreds are actually um enforceable, and the federal
government has no authority to stop them, and uh they
are the fifth district An Scotus has indicated that maybe

(44:15):
you are right, maybe that is the correct way to
interpret our constitution. Um. So I feel like all of that,
all of our decades centuries of um figuring out what
the law means for this country is just up in
the air, and we may be looking at laws now

(44:39):
that are just more and more buzzarre. Um. As long
as you know the GOP and the Right have control
over so many bodies of our government. You it really is,
I can't even fathom. I don't think we can predict
what's going to come honestly, UM, I mean I'm also

(45:04):
wondering to put it crudely will legislators in states that
are currently committing because we have seen a number of states,
California kind of leading the pack committing to maintain um
access to to to abortion and other forms of reproductive
health care, they are being threatened right now. Do do

(45:25):
you like, do you feel like you have a good
chance that they are going to back you, especially in
the event of, you know, laws that would potentially open
people like you up to criminal charges just for trying
to support people in getting you know, reproductive health care
outside of their state. Is your question? Do you do
we think that elected officials that are pro choice are

(45:46):
going to back us? Yeah? Yeah, yeah? Do you like
it's entirely possible that we're going to see some sort
of federal law that not just criminalizes abortion or even
like prior to that criminalizes aiding people in seeking a
ortion outside of states that have banned it, right, Like,
that's on the table. How does that change the landscape
for it? Do you suspect that, like in kind of

(46:07):
a similar way to how some of these some of
the legislators and states trying to ban abortion and said,
like we're just going to ignore federal law. If that
contradicts our state law. Do you think that, um? Do
you think that pro choice legislators in states you know,
like California are going to be willing to go to
the mat and protect you? Or are are we? I mean, yeah,
I guess I I know this is kind of an unknown,

(46:29):
but I'm kind of these must be conversations that y'all
are having, right, I mean, I really freaking hope that
they are. And if they're listening, please please prepare to
do so. And it's been really heartening to see states
like California and Oregon, in Illinois and New York and
Connecticut for instance, UM, come up with really clear language

(46:55):
around their support of not just choice, which was the
language of the past, but abortion and are saying that
and are starting to invest in things like abortion funding
and travel to themselves actually, you know, put forth their
own efforts to contribute to people who will need to
travel into their states. UM. And you know, Diana was

(47:17):
just speaking the other day with a bunch of elected
officials in Chicago. So I think I think this is
also why what I was talking about earlier in terms
of orgs like ours coming coming into the light is
so important. Is that we were going to need those
relationships with those politicians. We're gonna need them to know
us and see us and understand that we're a critical
part of how we're going to serve their constituents and that, yeah,

(47:41):
we're going to need them to back us. Will they
I can't say definitively, but I really freaking hope. So yeah, yeah,
and hopefully those you know, as O'Dell said just now,
I was UM in a press conference yesterday, the city
the Mayor's office announced this fun to support abortion procedure
funding and practical support. And my hope is with UM,

(48:05):
municipalities will talk to each other and give each other
the models for doing UH this protective, preemptive UH support
for people traveling to our states for abortion care. And
UM yeah, I'm in with talks with the a c
l U in Illinois to talk about potential UM bills

(48:26):
that are floating around to even further protect UH puption
in this state. Specifically, I know of one that wants
to explicitly protect providers from being extradited or sued or
shut down by prosecutors in other states that want to
claim that they have to jurisdiction because like like I said,

(48:48):
they figured out a way to give residency status to
fertilize eggs or something. Yeah, it's just completely fun that
that's kind of what we're staring at right like that
that's the thing that you have to be concerned with,
is like out of state law enforcement. I don't know,
like and and that's the thing. No one knows what
it's going to look like, right Like we know that

(49:09):
they have a vested kind of interest already in doing
parts of this through bounties, which is kind of like
the thing that I'm worried about. Are we going to
see like out of state law enforcement bounty hunting people
trying to folks up with reproductive healthcare? And I guess
that's just kind of an unknown at this point, but
it's right, and it really depends on like our local

(49:29):
protected state juristics, Like how far are they going to
go to protect us from those entities that are going
to try to come in for us? Um. Just just today,
one of our staff members tweeted about practical support funds
and who to support throughout the country that provides the
sort of travel logistics for people, and they got followed

(49:54):
by a sheriff department in Missouri Yeah, so they're already
out targeting and surveilling uh, abortion seekers and that people
who support them. Yeah, and of course I'm sure that
there's a degree to which some of these folks are
working with um, shall we say, like nonstate actors in

(50:14):
order to like, I know they've been prepping with that
for a while as well. Um, what is I mean
one of the things that I know because I've been
having some conversations with friends of mine who are and
like I guess we could say adjacently adjacent organizations to
to where y'all work and who are at in some
cases the convention you were at, who are concerned that

(50:38):
as providing people with reproductive healthcare becomes illegal. Um, there's
going to be a lot of fair weather friends kind
of revealed and I I am interested, like, is this
a thing that in order to be engaged in providing
people with reproductive health care you have to be willing
to engage in illegalism at this point? Like is that

(51:00):
where we are? That's really interesting question. Yeah, as as
members like as bribing C threes, uh, you know looked
at by our state governments are federal governments. We can't
engage in anything that's legal UM. But people have forever

(51:24):
on their own dumb things that the state has considered
illegal in order to have bodily autonomy. UM. There are
people who can't afford it. There are people who are
just so far from the nearest clinic that they can't
even fathom how to make that trip. Uh. They're undocumented folks. UH.
There are people near the borders that can't even physically

(51:46):
move past a border trick point because they're just trapped
there and can't get care UM in other parts of
their state where it's available. UM. So they're that that
will be a thing. I think that is going to increase,
because the need will not decrease UM. And I do not,

(52:12):
like my organization can't really see anything about that. But
you know, personally, I'm like, you do whatever it takes
to live your life and thrive. UM laws are made
up especially now. Yeah, that is nice to hear, because I,
you know, I try to keep abreast of the sides

(52:34):
of this fight that are you know, working through five
o one ses and and the like, and and engaging
in electoralism. The people who are you know, doing stuff
like trying to figure out ways to UM provide access
to like miss pills and whatnot to people. UM, because
that's just where we are. We've talked about the degree

(52:54):
to which you guys have already been living in some
people's future, you know, just because of the specific nature
of what your organizations have been doing. UM, and the
degree to which you know you knew some of this
is coming. What has surprised you outside of just like
the fact that it got leaked ahead of time about
kind of what we've seen in the last weekend change.

(53:15):
Mm hmmm, mm hmm. I think I am. I'm not
so much surprised by the response from folks. UM, I'm
a little frustrated that it took this moment for people
to realize what has been happening in this country for

(53:38):
the past decade, few decades. Honestly, this is this is
a very long game, uh for the antis. But ever
since Trump was put into office and started just flooding
the federal courts with very young, very anti conservative judges, UM,
and SPA was a huge flag. UM. But I think

(54:06):
I was surprised that there was a mass amount of
people that we're going to step up when the decision
came out. UM, it's it gives me hope I hope
it's sustained for the many many years we're going to
need uh practical support and abortion funds while we fight

(54:28):
for legal rights. Um. Yeah, so I guess the surprise
is a mixed it's a box bad for me. Yeah,
I was gonna say something similar that I think I've
been pleasantly surprised at how well educated and informed a

(54:50):
lot of our supporters and newer supporters are about. As
Diana mentioned, the existence of abortion funds and practical support organizations.
That practical support is and being talked about is huge.
We couldn't get this conversation into the media a couple
of years ago, So like, this is really remarkable and important.

(55:10):
But what's more, there seems to be also like a
different understanding of why we have to exist. Um, it
doesn't seem to be shocking people quite as much. A
but there certainly are still tons of people who are
shocked by this, But for many they're not shocked that
for some abortion has simply been inaccessible and what those
reasons are. Um. And you know, that's thanks obviously to

(55:33):
a lot of the really hard, important conversations that have
been had over the last couple of years about racial justice,
and I think that, you know, it's a silver lining
for sure, but I'm I'm grateful to find that the
depth of the conversations is there now and hopefully that
means that the commitment is going to be sustained in
long term, because this is a little bit of deja

(55:55):
vu for us in the sense that we've had little
moments like these ever since our organized aations existed. Um,
when a single band goes into place or is threatened
to go into place, this like swell occurs using my
hands a lot, which obviously you can't see if you're
listening to me right now, So I'm gonna put my
hands down, um, and you know, and that and that

(56:16):
brings out a lot of really incredible donors and a
lot of really incredible offers for volunteers, and and then
they tend to go away. Um. And especially when when
Biden was you know, elected, and there was definitely this
like moment where everyone was like, Okay, we're cool, right,
which this guy hasn't said the word abortion, but we're
still fine, and we're not we're like the furthest from fine.

(56:40):
So yeah, again, like pleasantly surprised that people seem to
have um, a sense of why we're here. Yeah, I
just wanted to bring up the website. Did Biden say
abortion yet or its like it's so unfortunately hilarious to me, um,

(57:03):
but I'm just really glad it exists. Um. And then
they someone reached out to the someone in the Biden
administration to make a comment on this when the when
the the draft was leaked, and they said, well, we
tweeted it or like whatever it's and it's like it's
he said it once in a tweet and like once
in like a statement or something. So I just think

(57:26):
it's there, you go. I don't know what more we want,
but like, I just think it's important to what you
were saying earlier. Um, how legislators in Oregon or California,
like it's so important they're saying the word abortion, not
just pro choice, because I think a lot of people
are a lot of people are scared about that word
for some reason or it sounds scary to them if
they're not that educated about what pro choice means or

(57:47):
what abortion means. So I think I have a little
bit more hope seeing more people even saying that word, um,
because it really has pro choice. Yeah. Yeah, I think
the statistics is something like the antis have been using
the word abortion three times as much as we have,
and that is why it's so stigmatized and difficult to

(58:09):
talk about. And I definitely try to encourage people to
say the word abortion, to talk about abortion with everyone
they know, just so we can stop hiding. I guess
kind of the last thing I'd like to ask, and
we can we can cut this bit if this winds
up not being something you want to get into. But
have you have you felt an additional need to worry

(58:31):
about given how public you are in your advocacy personal
protection UM as things kind of have heated up, you know,
we were we were recently at the conference that you
mentioned before, UM, and it definitely with all of my
colleagues in one place, it definitely made me feel a

(58:53):
little vulnerable for myself and them. But honestly, the people
who are targeted or the providers by far UM, I'm
not worried about my physical safety. UM. I'm worried about
the physical safety ever of our providers and the fact
that our government is responding to peaceful protesters outside kavanas

(59:15):
Um House and talking and and asked for I think
Susan Collins on the sidewalk outside her residents results in
legislation being immediately they all somehow got together for once
in their lives to do something about the terrorists who

(59:40):
chalked sidewalks by legislators home. Um uh is it's it's
really demoralizing. Um because we have our providers have seen
violence and um yeah, they've seen violence on this every day, murders,
asset attacks, bombings. Um. Yeah, Chris Sharine, do you have

(01:00:07):
anything else you wanted to get into. Yeah, I wanted
to ask one thing, so, you know, Okay, seeing this
sort of increasing fectlessness or politicians even by their standards,
and you know, the response to this being let's give
more power to the U. S. Marshals, which is great idea,
the worst idea I've ever seen. But what can just

(01:00:28):
people do about this in it? You know, I mean
we've talked about like giving to abortion funds, but like
what how how can people get involved and how can
people get involved in a way that's sustainable of the
long term. Yeah, I mean, definitely give to abortion funds,
give to practical support organizations like the Midwest Access Coalition
and the bridget Alliance. Um. If you are interested in volunteering,

(01:00:52):
reach out to your local organization. UM. There are a
couple of really great resources for lists of those organizations
and where they are, like the National Network of Abortion
Funds UM. And you do bear with all of us
because we are handling a flurry of emails and that's incredible,
But we won't be able to plug you in immediately. UM.

(01:01:15):
It might even take a little bit of time. But
then I think that you know, voting is still critical,
especially in local UM, in any local elections, especially if
we're thinking about how we're going to prevent the possible
criminalization of abortion seekers and of abortion providers, we need
to make sure that we've got the judges and good

(01:01:36):
local elected officials at the very least, So do not
stop doing that. UM. Yeah, I think those would be
the things that I would say, focus on and the
thing that I always say, which is just like talk
about it. Like I am totally that person who is
like the downer at the dinner party talking about abortion,
But be that person and go and talk about it

(01:01:58):
and share why it's important and how it's not just
about abortion, and it's not just about women, it's about families,
it's about parents, it's about queer folks, it's it's about immigrants,
it's about miners. Um, You've got a lot to be
worried about right now, So don't stop talking, listening, reading,
consuming whatever you can. Yeah, And just to jump off that,

(01:02:23):
if you are in a safe state, you're not going
You're not going to be safe forever. Uh, They're gonna
come after us. They're going to come after the legislators.
The supreme courts of those states. They're usually a thin margin,
um as far as conservative versus progressive judges on state

(01:02:43):
supreme courts. So find out who your local org is
that is leading that voter turnout to make sure that
people are voting for the right judges go in. Um.
And also I wanna lift up escorts. Escorts are on
the ground many days of the week. They will put
you to work and they're going to be needed more

(01:03:04):
and more. UM. Yeah, I think that's that's all very
important and a good note to end on. Does anyone
else have anything else? Or are we um? Should we should?
We Let y'all get back to your very important work. UM,
And thank you again for for making the time for us, absolutely,
thank you for covering us and talking about it. Yeah,

(01:03:26):
happy to do so we'll be we'll be continuing to
to do that. And I hope you all, um, um, jeez,
I don't even know what to say. Like, I hope you.
I hope you function up for the people who are
sucking shut up, you know. But I hope the support

(01:03:48):
doesn't like dissipate as like the trend goes away or whatever.
You know. I think that's so disheartening if that happens.
And like, hopefully the flood of emails but not necessarily
remains a flood for you. But like, I hope that
people are actually serious about doing something. And um, I
think this time they might be just because I keep
being surprised about little things, so I'm not gonna expect

(01:04:12):
anything anymore. Maybe people were surprising, But I really appreciate
the work you do. Um, So thanks for coming out
to talk to us. Thank you for us talk to

(01:04:37):
your zoom h six about crack cocaine abuse. Some amount
of crack cocaine is perfectly normal for recording device you
to use. It is part of the recording industry. But
everyone can overdo it. And if your zoom h six
starts not reading cards or for example, stealing from you
in ordered upon your stuff to buy more crack cocaine.
You might need to do an intervention. This has been

(01:04:57):
Robert Evans and a public service. And now about the
zoom h six handhold recorder? How's that? Are we good?
Is that a good way to introduce a podcast? What
depends an That's a great question, Sophie. Scholars have debated
for decades which show this is. But personally it is
the opinion of myself, uh and a large body of

(01:05:20):
researchers at Oxford and Cambridge that this is It could
happen here a podcast about how things are falling apart
and how maybe put them back together one of these
days figure it out. I'm here with Garrison and Chris.
How are you guys? How are y'all doing? Just just
absolutely splendid. I'm extremely excited that every time I leave
Twitter as a new mass shooting there's there was, Like

(01:05:44):
this has been weekend. There have been quite a few
mass shootings in the last forty eight hours, and there's
a non zero chance there's been at least one between
when we record this podcast and when you listen to it.
I'm not trying to be flippant. That's just a reality. UM.
So I think we're going to talk about the two
most recent ones, one of which UM was the mass

(01:06:05):
shooting in Buffalo, New York by a four chan motherfucking
white supremacist very much patterned after the twenty nineteen eight
Chan shootings, particularly the christ Church massacre UM, and then
the day after. I guess it's not technically a mass
shooting because only one person was killed, thankfully, UM. But
there was a shooting that was certainly an attempt to

(01:06:27):
be a mass shooting because he attempted to close the
exit and stop people from leaving at a Taiwanese church
UM in southern California, UM, which was stopped by the
congregation before nearly as many people could get killed. UM.
It appears to be it's just come out, UM, motivated
by nationalist hatred of Taiwan by a Chinese man. UM.

(01:06:52):
That's the broad understanding of both. Its complicated. Yeah, I'm
sure we'll get into that that, but we should probably
deal with them chronologically. UM. The Buffalo shooting is it's
one of those things I made a big chunk of
my bones as a journalist in the field that I

(01:07:13):
used to spend most of my time reporting and covering
the eight Chan shootings, and after every one of those
in twenty nineteen, I had an article within about two hours.
I haven't written anything about this one. I don't plan
to because there's not much to say. It is what
we've seen before. UM. I know there's some debate over
how much of the man as there should be, over
like how much of the manifesto you can take at

(01:07:34):
face value, which is none of it, um and, as
to whether or not there might be something more going
on here. But it is kind of my opinion from
the information we have, that this is the kind of
attack we've seen before and the kind of attack we
will probably see again more than once before the years over.
You know, this is someone who was radicalized primarily against uh,

(01:07:56):
the immigration or the existence really of people who are
not white in the United States um and believes that
the best way to cleanse the country of people who
are not white is to carry out mass shootings that
will radicalize other people and that will lead further to
the breakdown of civil society in the United States by
pushing it kind of like hot button issues like gun control,

(01:08:20):
UM in order to further you know, it's an accelerationist
sort of attack. Um. So yeah, that's that's what I'm
seeing here. Yep. I mean it's yeah, like like we said,
it's very very much riffing off of christ Church. I
mean at least over half of his manifesto was like
specifically richized manifesto, which, of course that manifesto itself was

(01:08:44):
was ripped from a lot of other manifestoes. It's kind
of just just a series of like launching the medic
language from one shooting to another, just kind of compiling
into this massive conglomerate that's all based on trying to
convince more people to do the same act. Um. That's
really that's that's why when people are like talking about
this and people try to limit the attention on the

(01:09:07):
manifestos and that kind of stuff, because it's it's all
crafted specifically to get other people to do the exact
same thing. Um. It's it's filled with themes, filmed with
filled filled with in jokes, full of like in grip
up group stuff to convince people to kind of go
down a similar path, and all of it's carefully crafted
that way. The one really interesting thing about this is
that there's not only manifesto, but also like unless seven

(01:09:28):
hundred pages of diaries that he posted as well, um
and logs from from like over like like like from
a long, long, long time, tracking his inner thoughts. But
also like again, he posted it and he knew he
was gonna do this, So there's no telling how how
accurate that is. It's all it's all in this package
that he wants to present to people. So a lot

(01:09:49):
of the navvy gritty are is not even worth talking
about in a lot of a lot of cases. No,
and I'm not I think there's broadly speaking, things you
can learn. And I'm also to be clear, I'm not
against searchers studying, and I think it should be absolutely
I am against just finding a thing in there and
like posting it like when I when I made my post,
I was pretty careful to note a couple of things

(01:10:11):
that seemed consistent based on other aspects of the like
things that he claimed about his radicalization that seemed consistent
with what we were seeing, Like he noted that he
was primarily radicalized online. That seems plausible to me because
of how fucking online the manifesto is. Um like and
and it's one of those folks are not entirely wrongfully
bringing up the fact that the great Replacement White genocide

(01:10:33):
sort of conspiracy theory that seems to have motivated this
fellow is basically identical to Ship Tucker Carlson says, that's
not not that that's not what radicalized him though, but
that's not what radicalized Yes, this is not a dude
who was watching Fox right. That's something I've been frustrated
by looking at the discourse because yes, obviously Tucker shouldn't
be talking about this because he's normalizing this very rhetoric

(01:10:55):
that you find in these manifestos, but he did. He
did not find this from Tucker. This is like it's
it's it's a whole whole different ball game. Um. And
when there's that conflation, I do find it to be
slightly frustrating. Yeah, And some of the problem with discussing
this is the problem with discussing basically any of these attacks,
is that the mass media coverage of it is nearly

(01:11:18):
always going to flatten it to a degree that works
in the favor of the people who are using this
as propaganda of the deed. And we can talk about
maybe are there ways to detern that you know, I've
I've definitely that's something that I've spent a decent amount
of my career kind of struggling with. It's it's a
tough thing to do because, um, one of the things

(01:11:42):
that's very frustrating that we've we've seen in the wake
of this attack, and that we see in the wake
of basically every politically motivated attack is a whole bunch
of people from a whole different bunch of belief systems,
insides immediately trying to spin it in order to push
the narrative if they think is useful for the attack
to have, and some of them believe legitimately what they're saying.

(01:12:04):
Like the folks, I think most of the people who
are like this is you know, Tucker Carlson's doing are
generally just folks who have not spent as much time
in the fever swamps as we have. And see, oh,
Tucker Carlson's talking about this this guy carried out of shooting.
They must be related, right. I don't think that's like,
that's wrong, but I don't think that's malicious. And then
you get folks who are malicious with it, right, like
you have stuff the folks right one of the one

(01:12:27):
of the narratives we've seen form, particularly from what I
like to call the ship head left. Um is folks
being like, well, there was a sun and rod, the
black sun. It's a Nazi a culti symbol. People who
are more nerds about Nazis will even quipped that, but
that's that's the broad strokes of what it is, um.
And it's it's a symbol that's definitely on some as
of gear. It's also on a has been on a

(01:12:48):
bunch of ships well before there was an as. It's
all over the place. And um, the reason he did it,
the reason he had a black sun on some ship
was not because of the as of but allien um it.
In fact, he talked about wanting to break up NATO
a bunch, but it was because the son and rad
was on the chest of the plate carrier of the

(01:13:09):
christ Church Shooter. Yes, but there's always a big fan
of the christ Church Shooter. There's all of these people
who are like, yeah, authoritarian left or whatever, who are
being like, oh, how can Americans condemn this attack when
this guy is using as of imagery and there there's
no telling how genuine they are with this, Like there's
there's no telling if if they actually know what they're doing,

(01:13:32):
or if they're just or if they're just being like
if they're purposely misinformed, or what's going on. It's like
he doesn't mind, it doesn't matter. But yeah, my my
assumption with those folks is that they are doing it
because if you are a competent, paid propagandist, you want
to always be pushing the narrative in a way that

(01:13:55):
furthers whatever it is your job to push. And if
your job is connecting Ukraine to every bad thing that happens,
and a mass shooting that has nothing to fucking do
with with Ukraine or the Ukrainian government, um, if you
can connect it back to them, then you're back in
your wheelhouse, right, Because maybe you're not so strong talking
about the fact that you and some of the people

(01:14:16):
around you have been friendly with fucking Tucker Carlson. Uh
and he pushes a similar narrative to the one this
mass shooter used. Maybe that's uncomfortable. What is comfortable is saying, no,
this guy who did this bad thing is tied to
these other bad people who are tied to this group
that my entire career is about attacking. That's a much
stronger position to be in, you know, if you're you know,
a propagandist. It's just like you see folks on the

(01:14:39):
right who don't want to grapple with the fact that
this was a right wing or who carried out a
terrorist attack, um, based on an ideology that even motherfucking
Ben Shapiro has pushed elements of. Um, you don't want
to deal with that, So you call him a leftist
because we saw the same thing with christ Turn he
could Yeah, he made a couple of vague he's not
a leftist. He repeatedly identified himself as right wing and
as a fascist, as a Nazi, UM, as an ethno nationalist, UM.

(01:15:03):
But he made like a couple of vague comments that
they're taking out of context and being like, see, he
was on the left, but she wanted to happen what
he wanted to happen. That's why he put it in there. Right,
It's like it is like it is all part of
the bit, it's all this, it's it's it's it's all
of this like like irony poisoned thing that they do
on purpose to give any one a propaganda out or

(01:15:23):
give anyone a propaganda. It's all yeah, if you'll remember
it before, it's not it's not new, but it's frustrating yea.
In the christ Church Manifesto, tarrant Um said that he'd
been radicalized by Candice Owens, who's like a person who
says a bunch of shitty, fucked up stuff. I don't
like Candace Owens, but like had nothing to do with
that guy's radicalization, right, Like, that's not that's not where

(01:15:43):
he's fucking coming from. Um. But he did it because
he wanted to, because because it's sucking. It's ship posting,
you know, it's to muddy the water. It's to get
people like it's too it's to reduce the ability of
people trying to grapple with what has happened, to accurately
see what has happened and accurately identify the problem and
respond to A big, big motive for this stuff is

(01:16:04):
to cause this kind of social and discourse chaos. Right.
They want people, they want everyone to be confused, and
they want everyone to be fighting each other and distance
agreeing on basic terms, right, and the whole the whole
point of this is to encourage gun control legislation, which
we'll get the right match to cause people to be
more willing to do mass shootings or to do a
tax against government. Right, it's it's it's all part of

(01:16:26):
the very basic accelerationist like talking points and tactics. So,
and the confusion is not accidental, it's all it's it's
all in if you, I think a good way to
look at this, if you like fighter planes and helicopters
in a combat zone will have a type of countermeasure
they will launch if someone shooting a missile that's like

(01:16:48):
a tracking missile, heat seeking or whatever at them. It's
called chaff, and it basically it looks to the missile
the same as a helicopter does. So you shoot a
bunch of these out and the missile goes and hits
something that's not the fucking hell copter, but to its
sensors looks like a helicopter. That's what they're doing. They're
shooting out chaff. They're getting you to like about box
with shadows rather than potentially landing a blow against like

(01:17:10):
the central problem. And the central problem is not an
easy one to grapple with without all that stuff around it, right,
because the the issue here is how the way in
which the Internet enables radicalization, the way in which online
communities are prone to radicalization, UM, the way in which, uh,

(01:17:32):
the conservative media and aspects of like just basic American
history play into this specific people who want to do
violence in this way for this reason, UM, which is
why the cops don't notice them even when they're on
their radar, which is why that like the warning signs
don't get spotted. Um. And the ways in which, I think,

(01:17:56):
more than anything, the ways in which the Internet has
created a perfect incubation chamber for radical violence. And that
is one of the stories here right. UM. You know
people are focusing on gun control, um, which this guy
bought his gun in the state of New York, which
has the most restrictive gun laws in the country. UM.
Was more relevant even if you're on that end, is

(01:18:18):
this guy was deeply involved in like tactical Reddit. This
guy was heavily involved in in tactical videos and training
videos and talking with other people about the best weapons,
the best ways to use them. And if you watch
the I don't watch the video. But he was competent,
he engaged, competently, he did he maximized his ability to

(01:18:38):
do damage he took out somebody, um with a gun
who was attempting to stop him. Um, that ship, the
stuff that he did to prepare tactically worked, and the
kind of tactical chunks of of of reddit of the
Internet which are not all right wing, but a hell
of a lot of them are, and a hell of
a lot of them have gone in very scary directions
in the last couple of years. Um. Not only do

(01:19:01):
I suspect contributed to his radicalization, but I can say
certainly contributed to his ability to effectively kill people. Yeah.
I mean he had like over five pages just on
what helmet he picked out. He had pages on what
socks he was wearing, which is not which is for
multiple reasons. It's one to make the actual act more effective.
It's two to inspire not like discourse like this, but

(01:19:22):
also to to get people to replicate what he did. Right.
It's crafting all of these symbols that people can be like,
oh he picked out these socks. I mean, I'm gonna
these socks. It's it's it's all this branding thing. Um,
we should take we should take a break, and then
I want to come back and talk about some me
medical language stuff. You know who else can give you
good advice on socks? Oh all right, here's ads okay. Um,

(01:19:46):
I want to talk about some medical language stuff because
this was all heavily riffing and I specifically use the
term riffing um off of the christ Church shooting, uh,
which itself was riffing with other stuff. Right, but he
went so far. I mean, the the christ Church shooting
was a copycat shooting of the Anders Breddock shooting, or
at least descendant of whatever term you want to use.
But that's what inspired the christ Church shooting. And it's

(01:20:10):
I mean, he was for for the Buffalo shooting. He
was testing on different live streaming platforms. He was doing
all the stuff to craft a very specific image, and
like images are very very very powerful. We've talked about
like me magic before if we want to get silly
about it. Um, but he was very very much involved
in crafting these things that could be replicated visually. Um.

(01:20:31):
That's that's why he wanted to live stream. It's so bad.
It's that you just the same way, the same way
of christ Church was And this is like really important
for why we don't share this type of stuff and
why we why we specifically clamped down on this, on this,
on this style of propaganda, and why we really encourage
people not to share it, not to look at it,
not to do that stuff. Because he he does in

(01:20:54):
the few parts of the manifest that that he did right, Um,
he does. He did say like watching the christ Church
video was very impactful for him, which I don't disagree with.
I'm sure, I'm sure it was. He he did even
and he did great links to recreate um. And this
is why we people who are like researchers and people
who kind of hand try to handle this kind of

(01:21:14):
stuff um in like in their time on Earth, uh,
are so particular about this. Like a a thing last year,
like a year and a half ago, there was this
film company based in New Zealand who wanted to make
a christ Church film. Uh. And they want they were
going to film a recreation of the shooting. But they said, like, oh,
but it's too to show the horror and to show

(01:21:36):
the impact on the victims. Doesn't fucking matter, it matter,
It matters zero amount, because once you put that language
into cinematography, you are giving them basically ammunition to help
create propaganda and will get more more people killed. This
is why the same thing we see the same thing
on fucking um roadblocks, we see people recreate the christ
Church shooting on roadblocks. There's actually a major problem, like

(01:21:57):
a year ago, specifically, it was a huge problem people
recreating the footage inside this game engine. And it's it's specifically,
it's it's very it's a very powerful tool that they
used to spread around. It's targeted specifically people ages twelve
to eight teen. This this guy was eighteen years old. Um,
it's he was heavily involved online gaming. He was really

(01:22:18):
heavy Reddit user, specifically, um, he loved Discord. So it's
these are the places where where it spreads even more
so than a now to Yeah, and I would say
we know. And that called him like a four chance
shooter because number one he definitely was familiar with with
Pole and number was there he announced his livestream there.
I do agree with you read it was a bigger
part of his radicalization. I suspect and in a lot

(01:22:41):
of and Discord probably, and I suspect he did purposefully
minimize the extent to which conversations on Discord were part
of his radicalization journey. In particular, that would be my
assumption at the moment, but for countering this type of rhetoric,
in this type of propaganda, right, because they're they're trying
to make themselves look cool, they're trying to make themselves
look tactical. They're trying to look they're trying to make

(01:23:01):
themselves they look like they're in a video game. They
make it look like they're in a movie. Right, they're
trying to be cinematic. He was, he was testing on
different cameras. Um, he tested like a GoPro, he just said,
he tested out his phone camera, right, trying to get
this specific look. And we just we just talked about
how he was tactically proficient in some ways, but in
handling this type of thing. We have to when we're

(01:23:23):
crafting counter stuff to make this, to make this thing
less likely, we need to not even focus on that.
We need to make them look stupid, make them look juvenile,
make them look like they're pathetic, make them look like
they're stupid and silly, like they're Larper's. That's one of
the things that saved god knows how many lives. At
kind of the high point of the eight Chance shootings

(01:23:44):
in nineteen was that fucker in Hall, Germany, tried to
carry one out and got the piss beat out of
him by a dude at a mosque um and was
photographed the next day in court just covered. It's like
beat two ship um. That image probably save some lives.
They want to be cool, they want to be mimic,
they want to be spread around as a symbol. And

(01:24:07):
we need, like culturally, need to. Yes, this is obviously
very scarce, this is a very real threat for many
for many people, many people of color, many black people,
many many Muslims, people of different religions, Jewish people, queer people.
But we need to when when specifically crafting rhetoric and
propaganda against these things, we need to make them look pathetic,

(01:24:29):
right that that that that's what it needs to be
framed as, because if you make them look scary and competent,
that's actually gonna make these things worse because they love that,
right Like as if you film the Christ, if you
do any kind of like movie about the Christ shooting,
no matter how you shoot it, they're gonna love it.
If you're shooting people in pain, they they want that.
They want that. It's that's that's what they're looking for.

(01:24:51):
You need to specifically frame this as these people larning
and these people being pathetic and people being terminally online
um and having bad social skills like you need you need,
you need to frame it in this way that makes
them look not desirable because their whole point is to
craft is desirable and visually stunning propaganda. Um. And I think, yeah,

(01:25:12):
that's that's that's I've been thinking about this for the
past because it's just been so much. But like I
identify these people, isn't the problem? Right? Like this guy
he was he was talked to you by by counselors
last year because they were for he was them to
do a school shooting. Um, Like there was a lot
of the red flags and stuff. And like he was
he was taught, he was talked to you by people

(01:25:33):
before this happened. Like he wasn't an unknown factor, He
wasn't an unknown of the vector to make to make this,
to make you know, to be this a person that
can do this. But there's there's no way. People are
very people are good at finding these people before they
do it, but we're bad at actually stopping them from
doing it once we found Once we find them, Uh,

(01:25:55):
there's there's really no power to stop it um and
interrupting any kind of radicals Asian pipeline. It's really hard,
so it's more about laying the groundwork to make the
pipeline look pathetic so it's harder to happen again. But
always counting this stuff is frustrating because if there's a
good strategy and wouldn't be here, be be deeply I

(01:26:16):
want to move on to the tent in California, but
at the at the end of this to close out,
be deeply suspicious, if not outright contemptuous of anyone who
posits a simple solution to these shootings, whether that solution
is gun control, whether it's expanded police powers, whether it's
fucking arming everybody so that they can shoot shooters, anyone

(01:26:39):
who proposes a simple solution this, This is a deeply
complicated problem, um, because we let a number of horrible,
horrible obvious problems go on for way too long, and
the solution to this will be painfully agonizing lee difficult
and will take time, and there is there is not
a simple, all encompassing way to deal with this. Um.

(01:27:03):
One of the things that you can do right now
to better prepare yourself to potentially deal with this problem
is take a stop the bleed course, carry an iPad
I fact and a gunshot wound kit um as often
as possible. And that continues to be my best immediate
advice to people, um, because that there's no downsides to
doing that and it could and does save lives and

(01:27:24):
other shootings. All right, let's move on in other dudes,
in other news. The next shooting. Yeah, hooray, Yeah, Okay,
this is a weird one, UM, and I think the
thing we need to make clear of front is that
this happened yesterday. Um a recording still yeah, a top

(01:27:48):
of recording. Details are still emerging, and it's weird. There's
a lot of potential to so so for people who
don't know, Um, a Presbyterian church in California was attacked
by a Chinese guy. This is this is a time
when East Church, Um, it's mostly senior citizens. And okay,

(01:28:13):
so there's there's a few important things up fronts that
people should probably understand about. This one is that Okay,
so Taiwan. Taiwan is ruled by military dictatorship. But for
like basically the better part of of the post World
War two period, it is ruled by military dictatorship run
by the Nationalist Party of the CAMPT. The cam T
is extraordinary in this period. It is extraordinarily violent. They

(01:28:37):
they assassinate people all over the place. They kill people
on American soil. They killed they trained death squads in
Latin America, and you know, they're they're they're known for
the sort of humanity communism, but eventually they're sort of
toppled by revolution isn't quite the right word. But as

(01:28:57):
you know, the CAMPT as a party is still around
today and as one of the two sort of major
like Towny's political parties. But they're not like the sort
of desk they're not exactly the sort of des squad
mafia party that they were through most of the twentieth century.
Um the sort of the sort of progressive forces that
work to overthrow the dictatorship. A lot of them coalesced

(01:29:19):
into a party called the d d P. And one
of the things about the d DP is, and there's
a lot of sort of complicated Towny's political stuff here,
but they are very very closely connect connected to the
Presbyterian Church in a lot of ways. And this I
don't know the specifics about this church, but there is
there is a very strong connection between and then the

(01:29:41):
d d P are Okay, pro independence is putting it
too strongly. But if you're a pro independent, like you
want to want to be an independent country and you
don't want them to sort of like either continue, Well, okay,
this is the problem with town these politics. It's enormously convoluted. Uh,
there's a lot of stuff going on something at any time,

(01:30:04):
and these people are gonna get mad at you if
the supplications they're making. But yeah, the short version of
the story is that the sort of anti CCP pro
independence e forces are and the sort of like progressive
movement is sort of lumped into the d DP and
those are the people who are getting shot like because yeah,

(01:30:25):
because again there's there's a very strong connection between Restbyterian
Church and the p UM and the KMT who again,
I mean, okay, they've had an extremely complicated relationship with
the Communist Party over the last hundred years. It's incredibly baffling.
But they've basically swung around towards being more favorable to China.

(01:30:47):
And there are there are some fact extremist factions of
it that are that support unific like just unification Um,
what seems to have happened here is okay, So this
the shooters families seems to have been like deported from
China to Taiwan, and he like did not like it

(01:31:11):
in Taiwan. And and this is where it starts to
get very murky. Um. The police statement we have says
that you know, it's about sort of racial like it's
it's it's it's an anti Taiwanese animus, but that can
mean a lot of things. And yeah, and then this
this again, I keep saying it's murky, and it's because

(01:31:32):
it's it's genuinely murky. There's a chance that this is
one of one of the things that's been happening since
the Hong Kong protests. He is a solidification in mainland
China sort of anti of anti Tiwanese sentiment has sort
of lumped in in this sort of like nationalist anti
Hong Kong thing. There was there was a hardening of
rhetoric against Taiwan, but also there's a lot of there's

(01:31:54):
a lot of people in Taiwan, like like especially canti
hardliners on the hard right who like really really really
intensely hate like the sort of like the sort of progressive,
anti CCP, pro independence people. And you know, and this
is something we don't we don't know what his affiliation is.

(01:32:16):
He was like like he was like into like his sixties, right, yeah,
well and and this is this, this is this is
weird because there's a lot of things that that could
be true about this because of how old he is,
like again, you know, I mean he is around when
the KMT is is straight up with Deska Party, right,
so it could be that it could be she's sort
of like independently radicalized. There's been some like rumors might

(01:32:40):
be too weak of a word, but there there there
have been some kind of sketchy reporting that like his
ex was leaving for Taiwan and that that may have
played a part in it. But you know, violence between
the KMT and people who don't like the KMT is
a the that there wasn't a There was a very

(01:33:01):
large amount of in the US for a lot of reasons.
And even though the CAMT is sort of like I mean,
the their alignment that China has like flipped in the
past about forty years, I I don't know, I'm really
really desperately hoping that that's this isn't going to set
off because I mean there's already been a lot of
especially around Hong Kong, there's been a lot of physical violence,

(01:33:24):
like people attack each other at protests about between for example,
people who's prot their Hong Kong protests and Chinese like
CCP nationalists. But this is something different, very weird, very
embedded in the time in these context and I don't
think we fully understand what's going on here. Um, the

(01:33:45):
everything again is like this guy like he lived in
times one, like he was speaking Taiwanese, like when when
he was essentially like going into this church to infiltrate
before we shot everyone. So like he this isn't like this.
This this is and I think people are reporting it
like this because they don't know what's going on. But
like this, this isn't a case of like a guy
who is from mainland China who like decided that he

(01:34:05):
hated to time when these people like this, he he
was there, he like he speaks, he speaks time when
he's he like understands the time when he's political situation
very in depth, which presumably is why he targeted the
specific church. But other than that, it's it's the motives
are still kind of murky. And this is the other

(01:34:27):
problem with it, which is that like the sheriff's like
there's no way that the sheriffs have any idea what
they're looking at, like that they're apparently reading his personal notes,
and it's like, I don't trust their analysis of it.
Good lord, no, yeah, like these if you weren't here,
we would have to find someone else who understands that

(01:34:48):
conflict in order to talk about it. I don't feel
comfortable like trying to figure out or analyze that guy's notes.
I sure as ship don't trust some fucking sheriff's like, yeah,
this I don't know, And I think that that's I
don't know. I will say like this, I think was
like the worst possible scenario for what that shooting is about,

(01:35:09):
because this is a kind of this is a kind
of violence that was really intense, like right after World
War Two and sort of like and you know, there
there's been periods where like, yeah, I mean people have
been like people have gotten killed here, but it hasn't

(01:35:30):
been that violent in a long time. And I don't know,
I'm hoping this is just one guy who had a
particular grievance who I don't know, like was it was
pushed by sort of external factors. But if this is
a sign of like if this is a sign of
sort of anti Tiwanese like nationally, well, okay, so there's

(01:35:52):
one other thing that that we need to talk about
because that's unclear because there's two kinds of potential right
when Chinese actually lizab met play here, and it's unclear
which one is happening because there are there are people
who are right wing Chinese nationalists who are like pro
CCP right, but there's also a kind of like a

(01:36:12):
kind of like it shifted, but there's also like a
a like a KMG nationalist based right wing Chinese nationalism
which favors sort of like reunification with China, but is
is not the same thing as as the sort of
mainland nationalism and has its own particular, like very local
political grudges like with with the d DP and with

(01:36:35):
the sort of like progressive movements in time one and
I don't know and anything beyond that is kind of
like trying to figure out which one it is, like
we just don't know unless the police, unless the police
actually decide to like show us this guy's notes or
like give us recordings of what he's been saying. Uh,

(01:36:57):
we're not gonna know. And maybe maybe by the time
this is out, like they will be more stuff. But
right now it's very muddled, very bad. The fact that
this guy also I think was an American citizen but
was born in China has gotten every like even even

(01:37:18):
the Chinese media outlets are saying extremely weird stuff because
they're confused by it. So it is a it is
a muddled is a muddled mess, I mean, and everything
about this last weekend's been uddled. There's been so many
different mass shootings this weekend, there's been people being paranoid

(01:37:41):
about copycat mass shootings. And now yesterday there was reporting
that a gunman entered a church in Buffalo. Um. That
was not actually true. It's someone someone in the church yelled, um,
like there's a gunman or something or like or like
get the gun down or something, um, and it caused

(01:38:02):
people to create this this kind of rumor, but that
there wasn't actually someone with a gun. It was it
was this someone was like reacting to the sermon that
was that that was being had. Um. But yeah, everyone's
been super paranoid about every stuff and all this kind
of stuff as as they should be. So sorting through
sorting through all this stuff is very complicated and uh,

(01:38:25):
not a great time because it's not it's not fun um,
and we shouldn't have to do it, but it sucks.
Do you think it's also worth noting that the police
did not stop uh, I know, specifically they did not
stop the one in the church, the past pastor, a
pastor hit the hit him with a hit him chair,

(01:38:49):
and then they hog tied him with an extension toward
and then the police came, which is so um. I'm
sorry they were ever in that position. They should never
have to be in that position, but it's turned out
more and more people are having to do because it's
not also the first time that a mass shooter has
been stopped by someone hitting them with a chair. If
I'm not mistaken, that's how the Gifford shooter was stopped eventually,

(01:39:11):
or part of how he was stopped to somebody fucking
decked him with a chair. Yeah, it's it's really useful
to have something beyond just your limbs. If someone is
trying to shoot you with a gun, ideally you get
away but if you can't get away, trying to hit
them in the face with something heavy is certainly a
choice that has saved a number of people's lives. God what,

(01:39:36):
what an absolutely dogshit country. It's not a great time.
And when I you know, I noted earlier anyone trying
to sell you like simple solutions, and I mentioned gun
control on that, which is not to say that like
the outrageously easy, how how ridiculously easy it is to
get any kind of gun in this country. Obviously that's
a factor in these shootings. My my um hesitance to

(01:39:58):
take gun control as a if you'll forgive the term
magic bullet to fix any of this is number one,
the sheer number of guns that are already propagated. Number two,
the fact that a lot of gun control measures boiled
down to making it harder for poor people to get guns,
and neither of these shootings seem to have been poor
people shooting up um folks. And uh just also the
fact that while some states are capable of passing additional

(01:40:20):
gun control. Number one, New York's basically done everything it's
constitutional to do are e restricting gun ownership um and federally,
Biden and their Dems can't protect Roe v. Wade. There's
sure a ship not gonna pass any federal people want
as well, Like they're specifically doing this to get this
stuff started so that it increases plays. Whether or not

(01:40:44):
to agree with my fundamental claim, you don't have to.
You can believe that if gun control were to be passed,
it could be the solution, but it's not gonna be.
And so like as as regards those of us trying
to survive, um, we have have to look in other
directions because you're not going to get an assault weapon
span it's just not happening. Yeah, I mean the one

(01:41:08):
good I don't I don't say good thing. But it
has been nice to see people slowly uh dropping the
whole like load wolf terminology, that is a positive development
because these are not not a load wolf. It's it's
part of a very it's part of an intentional effort
to cause these things to happen. Part the groups may

(01:41:28):
be decentralized, but they are not anything they are but
they Yeah, they are decentralized in acephalis, but they are deeply,
deeply sophisticated and connected, just not in a way you
can drone strike easily. Well, yeah, and I think I
would have some target suggestions anyway, get knifefac, do stop,

(01:41:55):
and don't don't feed into their propaganda in the way
their propaganda um organized with folks in your neighborhood. Yeah, okay,
well kids, adults, boys and girls, and individuals of non

(01:42:16):
binary or other gender identities. Uh. Cats who happened to
be listening in um Airwolf the helicopter if you're listening
in everybody, every sentient creature listening. You know, I do
believe that things can get better. So part of that
is not letting the crimes that these the things that

(01:42:41):
these people do, Like, part of the purpose of an
attack like this is to make people feel hopeless and overwhelmed.
It's to blackpill you, you know, to to to utilize
some of their terminology. So the way to fight against
it is, among other things, if you're talking about immediate
things you can and do, go out and do something

(01:43:03):
nice to help people. Yeah, and you know, I would
say like as as a sort of like one brief
last note, like, yeah, like in Taiwan, they overtow the
dictatorship and oh hey, it turns out people stop getting
assassinated by the knteen American soil. So, you know, over
overthrow your governments, and you too can make peace with
your enemies. Yeah, overthrow your government, overthrow another government. You know,

(01:43:25):
it's all good. It's all good baby. Hello everyone, welcome
to It could happen here at the podcast about things
falling apart and sometimes have you come put them back together.

(01:43:50):
Today it's me Garrison, Chris, our producer, Sophie and Uh.
Andrew joins us. Once again. I love that guy. Oh
me too, me too, Hi everyone us another episode of
Andrew talking about whatever he feels like talking about. Okay,

(01:44:13):
today's episode, Um, I am happy to announce that I
finally finally finished Don't Have Everything by gradually. It took
it took a while, you know, there was some points
in time, some weeks it just went by. Why I
didn't even like make a dent um. You know, life
got in the way and stuff. But I finally finally

(01:44:35):
finished it and I get to talk about it and say,
you know, with some authority that I've read Don't Have Everything.
You know, Yeah, it's a very dense book, but it
was worth it. I mean, there are some critiques that
I've been taking into by some authors in the field. UM,
And so I highly reco when people look for critiques

(01:44:56):
as well, not just you know, taking it and consuming
who will sale, but in addition to those critiques like
on with those critiques, um, such as by people like um,
what is politics on YouTube? And also a couple of
academic writers as well, I think you could get a
lot out of the book, and I certainly have. Yeah,
this is it. This is a this is a very

(01:45:16):
good book. And I'm excited to talk about it because
I read it like it was a while ago now
like it's like five months ago or something. Didn't talk
about it. I've been like waiting for I've been trying.
I've been I've been picking up bits and pieces of it,

(01:45:38):
but unfortunately my book list to get through is way
too long at the moment, so I've not been able
to actually dive fully into the text itself. Um. But
it is definitely on my lest after I get through
my twenty other books I need to read for my job. Yeah,
it's a lot, it's a lot. Um. At least we

(01:45:58):
got to read books for a living. It was something
adjacent to that. Um. And I mean it is a
difficult book. I would say to like discussing its entirety,
and I didn't. I don't tend to not to read
any parator or anything, Chris, but I don't tend to
talk about the entire book, you know, because that's like
several hundred pages. Yeah, you know, and each chapter covers

(01:46:21):
like so so much UM. But I actually wanted to
talk about chapter four in particular, UM, where the authors
explore the concept and the origins in a sense of cultures, UM.
In one particular segment, I mean a lot of mysteries
of the upper pyliarithic that we don't know, right, I mean,

(01:46:44):
that's why the mysteries, um. But you know, we've come
to learn, you know, through the course of the book
that this assumption that everything was just these small tight
nic bands, um, and that was just the entirety of
the human social arrangement into the States. You know, at
least it's new to the layman to realize that this
is not necessarily the case. You know, UM, that there

(01:47:07):
is a lot more political structural, you know, dibuicity in
that time period. We don't know at that point in time,
you know, what languages pe who were speaking. You know,
of course linguists have been able to like reconstruct like
proto languages and stuff. And I mean, I'm just a

(01:47:29):
hobby Linquist, just like I'm a hobby everything else. But
I think it's been really cool to see how linguish
is just able to do that. Like, can we just
take a second to realize that, like linguists able to
take scraps of existing languages and just kind of piece
them together to get a sense of like how they're related,
Like how do you all do that? Um? But there's

(01:47:49):
a lot we don't know, right, We don't know about
their language and know about their myths, you know, um,
their conceptions of the soul, what their favorite foods were,
even know they ate, but we don't know what like
Joe Skeleton thoughts about his breakfast that morning. But what
we do know is that, you know, from the Swiss
Alps to out Mongolia in the Upper Polithic people were

(01:48:11):
using a lot of the same tools, um, playing a
lot of similar musical instruments, carving similar rather interesting female figurines, um,
wearing similar ornaments, and conducting similar funeral rites. And there's
also reason to believe that people actually traveled a lot

(01:48:32):
more than we would expect them to do, and tra
actually traveled longer distances than we would expect for that
time period. I mean we don't have they didn't have
rather you know, like cars or or chariots or trains
or planes or anything like that. So to think that
these long distance um journeys were occurring, you know, places

(01:48:57):
like Australia or in like North America is just really
interesting to think about. Yeah, I was one of your
fing talked about like one of the things I thought
was really interesting about this is the way that they
talk about culture areas where you have these like, yeah,
you have these like very large I mean like almost

(01:49:17):
like like half continent sized areas where people are speaking
similar languages, like the same language, and you have these
like you have like these clan structures that are like
you know, you you you you can go from like
and go from like Missouri, and you can end up
in like Mississippi, and you'll be in a place where
they still have like you know, the sort of like

(01:49:39):
four basic like plan lodges are still the same, and
you'll beat people who are like from your clan. And
he has this really interesting line about how like sort
of kind of intuitively like the world's gotten like the world,
like even even when there was like people spread over
geographic distance, like the world sort of got larger as

(01:49:59):
technology you progress, and not sort of like smaller in
the way that people sort of think about it, because
like I don't know, instead of there being these sort
of like mega like culture areas, you can go from
one place to another and you'll there'll be people who
speak the same language and you can sort of slot
into the like systems that are there. You suddenly have

(01:50:22):
this incredible diversity of stuff, right right, So I mean
specific to like North America. You know, um, we had
all these different clan structures. We usually tend to think of, um,
you know, these groups says and you know, especially like
your immediate relations with people that you know, it's like

(01:50:44):
clue skin family, that kind of thing. Um. But there's actually,
at least in some studies of hunt together as, there's
some suggestion that their composition can be quite cosmopolitan. So,
you know, you have these groups and biological relations might
only make up a small percentage of like total membership.

(01:51:07):
They're actually drawn from a wide pool of individuals of
a larger stretch of area, and you know, not all
of them even speak necessarily the same first language. UM.
This is YouTuber Indigenous NICs YouTuber named twin Rabbit, and
he had this excellent, excellent video. I need to rewatch
it on planes sign language, which is this um method

(01:51:28):
of communication that Indigenous Americans UM used across you know,
the plans to conduct trade and diplomacy and discussions even
if they didn't share the same language. Um. In Aboriginal Australia,
people were able to travel halfway across the continent, moving

(01:51:50):
across people who spoke entirely different languages and still find
you know, camps that had people of you know, their
same to atomic mighty you know, and those people were
we treated like their brothers and sisters, you know, so
like no hanky panky, but you know they had this
this you know, cross continental bond of like hospitality. From

(01:52:18):
the Great Lakes you know, to Louisiana Bayous, you can
find settlements of people speaking entirely, entirely separate languages, unrelated
to their own. And yet still you will find you know,
bear clans or elk clans or beaver clans that we're
obliged to host and feed them, you know. UM, And
we could only really guess as to like what kind

(01:52:40):
of systems were like and how those systems might have
worked for eight years ago, you know, in the upper pyioithic.
But what we do see with the you know, similarities
and material um uniformities and stuff of these different tools
and musical instruments and stuff suggests that there might be
a bit of a similar system in place at that time.

(01:53:03):
Roughly around like twelve BC, we start seeing like new pottery,
you know, getting dropped. We started to see the outlines
of more specific cultures and specific areas, new stone grinding tools,
new ways of preparing and eating wild grains and roots
and the vegetables, um, different ways of chopping, slicing, creating, grinding,

(01:53:27):
silk and training, boiling and storing, smoking and preserving meats,
plant foods and fish. And so when we start to
see something that really brings people together, and that is
cuisine and cuisine you know, being the birth of cuisine,
being the booth of like really more specific cultures um,

(01:53:49):
you know, the kinds of soups and porridges and stews
and broths. And basically what they were talking about was
the way that people who like wake up and eat
fish stews every morning tend to, you know, develop a
different center themselves relation to their world, compared people who
might wake up in the morning and eat some porridge

(01:54:10):
with like berries and wild oats, you know, and then
from there they start to develop different tastes and including
you know, in in dancing and drugs and hair styles.
I remember last are on the book um the David's
point out that some addigenous um Nat American groups who

(01:54:31):
actually known for specific hair styles. And I kind of
knew that based on the fact that, you know, we
tend to associate mohawks with people, you know, mohawke cair
style mohawk people, but I didn't realize that, you know,
other groups also had their own kind of like culturally
specific hair styles, right. And there's also like courtship rituals

(01:54:52):
and forms of kinship and styles of rhetoric, and so
of course you still have these large cultural areas in
the Mesolithic, larger than some nation states. But he's starting
to see a bit more specificity, in a bit more
diversity in shorter um spans of area. If we look

(01:55:14):
at now, for example, where you know, we have in
the Amazon all these different languages and cultures that co
exist merely kilometers from each other. I think the overall
trend of human cultures, you know, the past tens of
thousands of years, has been the opposite of marginalization. And

(01:55:34):
it makes me think a bit about the whole concept
of the nation states and how it tries to like
bring people together to this like one narrow conception of
what it means to be you know, X, y Z,
and how humanity naturally seems to like resist that and
naturally seems to like split all from that. Like, even

(01:55:56):
when you have situations with the forceful spread of English
in you know, the Caribbean colonies, you still see like
a diversity springing up with a bunch of different unique
creoles and dialects making the language something different. You know what,
if not for the enforcement of language satidization through the

(01:56:16):
school system, I think you would actually see an even
more rapid um explosion of you know, linguistic diversity developing
out of these creoles and dialects. You know, like a
couple of centuries from now, you know, Patua and and
Creole and British English maybe entirely incompatible. Even in Britain itself.

(01:56:40):
You know, you might have a case where London English
and I don't know, Sussex English or whatever starts to
sound like entirely different, and I we already have that
with accents. But just to see how, you know, even
in short spaces of time, a short as a century
or two, because for example, trend add Um was not

(01:57:02):
always an English speaking colony. Um, we actually spoke French
creel for the most of our history and only in
the nineteenth century did we have that period of Anglicization
where English was you know, brought in Um. And to
see that in that short space of time and that
handful of centuries that you know, you're not already has
its own unique English based creel, you always just fascinating

(01:57:24):
to see. Um. There's something really interesting to me about
the way this process plays out because it's it's it's
almost like because you have this sort of like like
you have this period in the Mesolithic, all the period
names are blanking out I had, but like like you say, yeah,

(01:57:47):
like you have this period where you have kind of
like you have a lot of cultural standardization, like spread
across a long period like a bunch of places, and
it's used sort of as a mutual aid thing. It
allows people to travel because you can go a place
and know that like there will be people who are
like you there and they will take care of you.
And it's interesting to me. It's like, Okay, so this

(01:58:08):
breaks apart as sort of like these these new cultures,
like as people develop local cultures around like food and
around just like Graver has this thing that he loves
talking about. These were talking about for ages called scisolo genesis,
which is like you have two people, you know, it's
like I think I think they're his ositional examples. Like
if you people who are arguing with each other and

(01:58:29):
they like disagree minor ly over like one thing, and
then by the end of the argument, like they're they've
they've taken like completely mutually opposed identities to each other
based on an incredibly minor disagreement, and you get this
with yeah, like you get cultures to sort of like
define themselves against each other and like they have things
that they like and things that they don't like. It's
interesting to me that that you see you see the

(01:58:50):
state trying to sort of like reimpose that kind of
like like forty year old cultural commogity on all of
these places that are like incredibly not homogeneous but they're
doing it for like the opposite reason. They're doing it
because they need senatorization in order to sort of like
make their make their bureaucratic like systems work better and
make their sort of like seeing like a stage kind

(01:59:12):
of thing. Yeah. Yeah, And also like, like I mean,
this is a huge thing. Everyone in the in the
like the early the late nineties and early two thousands
thought that like the extent of capitalism on the around
the globe was going to make everything exactly the same,
there's only one culture, and that like kind of really
didn't happen. But there was this real sort of I

(01:59:33):
don't know, like that there was this real sort of
fear that that it wasn't just gonna be the nation
state spreading like homoganization, but like capitalism was going to
sort of like spread imoganization. And I guess I guess
the thing that they round up doing againstead was like
figuring out that you could just sell everyone into their
individual cultural niche, which to some extent, yeah, because like
we see McDonald's in the US and the McDonald's in

(01:59:56):
Bangladesh and McDonald's in Japan, and they sell all of
the same McDonald's stuff, but they've also like sort of
specified to the you know, specific country. Yeah, we have
the worst version. The US is the worst version of it,
by the the the like Taiwan has one that has
like they have like rice sticky rice patties. It's it's

(02:00:17):
so much better than Yeah, I mean, I will say
that if I did end up traveling to Taiwan, McDonald
is probably be the last place I would want to go. Yeah,
I mean we wanted beating there and we we were
we had to catch a plane, so we wound up
eating like Taiwanese McDonald's airport food because we had like

(02:00:37):
five minutes. It was a you know what they say,
what airplane food? Um, but yeah, that's exactly us. Well,
to get into actually the whole idea of cultural differentiation,
you know, um, and this this tendency of humans have
to subdivide and to distinguish themselves from the near buzz.

(02:00:58):
And I mean it's not to assume that, you know,
this differentiation comes from like differences and like language, you know,
with you know, language splitting off over the centuries and
people associating with their native language and ethnicity. But that
really tell the full story, you know, Like for example,
in northern California in the early century. The Ethno linguistic

(02:01:20):
map had really a jumble of languages that drew from
entirely different language families, you know, as distant from one another,
as like Arabic and Tamil and Portuguese. And yet these
groups still shared you know, broad similarities. You know, how
they went about gathering and processing food, you know their
most important religious rituals, how they organized their political life. Um.

(02:01:45):
And they also managed to keep themselves distinct. You know,
you have the Iroque and the Hoop and the Karak
and so forth. And I mean, to some extent, these
identities did map once linguistic differences, but their neighbors, we
spoke different languages, still had more common with them than

(02:02:06):
people who came from their same language family in another
part of North America. Of course, you know, European colonization
had like a severe impact on like how neat Americans
were distributed. Um. But we still tend to see this
trend of how like these modern nation states they went
around at the time to you know, or the population.

(02:02:27):
Since these neat Ethno linguistic groups, you know, this idea
that the world should be divided into these like homogeneous
units to their own history and everyone has a claim
to like a certain territory and all that. It's I mean,
it's really a concept that is born onto this mythology
of the nation state. And you know, of course we
have to be real careful before we project those kind

(02:02:49):
of uniformities back in time. Yeah, it's definitely really like
two years old, like it it's pretty young, yeah, exactly exactly.
But um, there are some concerns, you know, with the
concept of culture areas because that whole notion of culture
areas came out of North American museums who wanted to

(02:03:11):
arrange their stolen artifacts to illustrate their theories of the
different stages of human adaptation, you know, like Colover's lower
savagery and upper savagery and lower lower barbaris sum and
so on. And so they hadd to in whether they
were an organized these artifacts based on like language, family
or regional clusters um or some sort of like traced

(02:03:35):
history of of of regional of ancient migrations. Right. Eventually
they realized that you know, this way of organizing into
regional clusters seemed to work best the art and technology
of different Eastern Woodlands tribes had some very similar um

(02:03:56):
things in common compared to like trying to group people
be sturn like say the Athabascan language or all the
people who relied on fishing or all people cultivate to
me is um. And they were able to find similar
patterns in the Neolithic villages of Central Europe, you know,

(02:04:16):
finding these regional clusters of domestic life and art and
ritual and so like. This whole cultural area concept was
kind of a way of pushing back against this way
of you know, talking about humanistry that like ranked populations
into higher or lower anything. You know, this this idea

(02:04:36):
of of claiming that you know, people were of a
certain superior genetic stock and viciouslynd fance level of technological
evolution and so rather this there's been there was a
shift in anthropological focus to look at the diffusion of
more cultural treats like ceramics and sweat lodges and you know,

(02:04:58):
the treatment of young men or certain sports um as.
They wanted to try to understand how these different tribes
of certain region came to share this mesh of culture traits.
So one of the people who were thinking on this,
you know, whole culture traits cluster idea. Um, it was

(02:05:20):
guy named bous right, and he wanted to figure out
why is that, like geography seemed to define the circulation
of ideas, you know, with like mountains and dests form
these natural barriers, and how basically the diffusion within those
regions was basically historical accident, a legal hypothesizing that there

(02:05:44):
was some sort of like way to eventually develop a
kind of a natural science, developing how and even predicting
the ebb and floor styles, habits and social forms. And
eventually muscle Mouse pulls up, you know, and he's basically
taught obviously, like right, bunch of essays on nationalism and civilization,

(02:06:06):
and he says it's basically, this whole idea of cultural
the fusion is nonsense because it's based on a false assumption.
And the false assumption is that the movement of people, technologies,
and ideas is some sort of rarity, something unusual. Instead,
Mouse argues that like people in past times traveled even
more than people do today, and it's just that when

(02:06:31):
these people interact with people of other cultures and they
see their cultural traits, they reflect on that and find
a way to relate that to their own cultures, right,
so that people who are traveling back then, obviously all
of them, you know, we're aware of basketry, you know,

(02:06:52):
or or or feather works or whatever the case may
be that other people were use in a couple of
miles away, seemed to be said for like certain drum rhythms,
or certain you know, games, or like For example, he
spent some time focusing on the distribution of the ball

(02:07:15):
games around the Pacific Ocean, around the Pacific Rim from
Japan's New Zealand to California, and what he realized is
that while people pick up certain ideas cittain traits from
other cultures comes down to how they'd want to be
defined against their neighbors, against their closest neighbors. The question

(02:07:41):
becomes less about why certain culture traits spread, but why
other culture traits didn't. Because if you were aware of
all the things that your neighbors and stuff are doing,
all these foreign customs and arts and technologies. I mean,
we know that the Silk Road, for example, when we
talk about the Silk Road, you know we had a
silk road going from China all the way into Europe

(02:08:01):
and all across the Silk roop all across Central Asia
and West Asia. And despite that constant you know, sharing
of ideas, not every idea that you know came from
China or came from Pussia or I don't know if
Pusia was arounding the Silk Crew. But you know what
I'm saying, Like, not every idea that was along the

(02:08:23):
Silk Crew everyone necessarily picked up on, even if it
was a technology that might have benefited them, because cultures
effectively structures of refusal. So for example, um, there's this
guy on YouTube Religion for Breakfast. He did a video
recently on the pork taboo in certain cultures and certain religions, right,

(02:08:49):
and one of the things he pointed out was that
the taboo tends to be strengthened in times of like
repression so for example, or in times of cultural um definition.
So for example, he is pointing out that in the

(02:09:10):
period of Roman conquest, the Jewish people were more inclined
to define themselves as you know, against the consumption of pork,
compared to the Romans. You know, for example, the Chinese
are the people who use chopsticks, you know, they don't
use knives and forks, So you're the tie the people
who use spoons and so on. You know, it could

(02:09:33):
just be said said that, you know, it's like aesthetics,
like styles of art or music or tim man and
is of course those things won't differ. But even like
technologies that have like an adaptive or utilitarian benefits might
still be risk, might still be refused by people who
might even benefit from them. For example, the Athabaskans in

(02:09:54):
Alaska refused to use Inuit kayaks despite the fact that
there are a lot better to suited for the environment
and their own boots, and the Inuit, for example, don't
use Athabaskan snow shoes um at least in the time
that Master Mouse is writing. And then, of course this

(02:10:15):
is a self conscious process, you know, this is a
process where a debate and discussion of all these different
customs would have been occurring. You know, for example, in
the Chinese courts when different foreign styles and customs would
you come into the lands, there will be debates and
arguments put forward by you know, the kings and the

(02:10:37):
advisors and their vassals, you know, discussing, you know, whether
they would ride the horses or drive chariots, or adopt
like the man chew dress codes and customs, and so
society's mouth said lived by borrowing from each other. They

(02:11:00):
define themselves by the refusal of borring than by its acceptance.
The question of how culture areas form and how culture
has split off is definitely a political one. The decision
to adopt a certain form of agriculture, or to cultivate

(02:11:25):
a certain crop more specifically, or to adopt a certain
style of dress. It's not just like a matter of
like mere utility of maya or caloric advantage or material efficiency,
or it's also a reflection and questioning of the values

(02:11:49):
that that group of people holds or purport to hold,
who they consider themselves to be. And I to think
about the development of cultures, you know, I'd like to
think about how our ancestors are, distant ancestors even consider themselves.

(02:12:11):
You know, it's easy to just fall into this trap
because it's a very common cultural troop that you know,
once you go before the invention of writing or whatever,
all of all ancestors are just like boga boogle cave
men kind of thing. But to think of them as
self conscious and politically um conscious, politically considerate, thoughtful actors,

(02:12:41):
not you know, static or passive props um. It's just
I think it's it's I think it's just very cool.
I think it's very cool, and I think we should
keep you know, these developments, these this recognition in mind

(02:13:02):
as we you know, in the modern time look to
try to transform the cultures we live under and to
try to develop new values, new values of like anti
authorityanism and anti capitalism and of you know, agree to
priority on mutual aid and on egalitarian and social relations. Yeah.

(02:13:29):
I think there's a lot of very interesting political consequences
of of thinking about this, because like, I think that
there's there's sort of like two tendencies that that we
sort of get stuck in when we think about like
our social structures, which is there's there's there's one which
is the sort of like I guess it's called capitalist realism,

(02:13:51):
which is the assumption that like nothing else could possibly like,
this is the only system that works, nothing else can
possibly exist, and that's unproductive. You know, you go back
and you look at like any other culture society, and
it's like, well, no, like there's unbelievably nearly infinite number
of ways you can organize your society. But then I

(02:14:11):
think I think the second one is that, like, yeah,
if you look at this sort of cultural diffusion and
cultural refusal stuff, you see a lot of examples of
people doing stuff that like under sort of like classical
economic or like sociological laws, they shouldn't be doing, right, Like,
there there's no reason why you shouldn't using more efficient

(02:14:32):
canoe if you're in a place of the part of
the world that's like extremely hard to surviving, right. And
I think that there's this tendency to sort of like
reduced culture and reduced just all of the ways that
our social and political systems function to these sort of
like oh, the the product of these like abstract historical
forces and like it's all like tech, it's all determined
by technology, and like how you farm and stuff like

(02:14:55):
that's just not true. Yeah, I mean not the material
conditions on you know, very important and understanding um, you know,
how these cultures develop, and that's one part of um
don't Everything that I found was a bit lacking. I
think that not all the time those thoughts were clearly connected. Oh,

(02:15:17):
I'd see, But I do think people put too much
stock in solely material materialist um explanations and that kind
of ends up precluding or leaving out the more messy
human round of explanation. Yeah, And I think I think
part of why this happens is that, like it's much

(02:15:38):
if you assume everyone he's like behaving a quality to
historical forces or like the thing that they're trying to
do is like maximize, um, they're trying to maximize their
utility and they're trying to like maximize the amount of
calories they have. It that that's a very easy thing
to like you like think about numerically, right, Like it's
a very easy thing to refuse the numbers. It's extremely
difficult to refuse the numbers, like to do to reduce

(02:16:01):
two numbers. A society that is like I'm going to
I'm going to intentionally make my life harder for myself
because this is the way we do things, and we've
decided we don't want to do things like other people.
We've decided that we have some kind of political value
that we have that makes it such that we're going
to like induce difficulty into our lives and like that,

(02:16:21):
I don't know, like that that kind of stuff. The
the fact that culture is not just a sort of
like superstructure that gets that's like a product of like
some kind of economic base like that that is very
important and something that gets ignored or downplayed constantly that

(02:16:44):
I think I don't like. I think like, yeah, I
think I think you can argue that everything like maybe
goes too far in the other direction. But I'm I'm
sort of okay with that, just because we've been so
far on the side of like everything is historical forces
for so long that you need something to remind people that, like,
societies make conscious political choices, and not only have they

(02:17:06):
made conscious political choices for like times of thousands of years,
I like, we also can make conscious political choices that
are not just sort of like pure reflections of like
however many tons of iron have been extracted, and like
what percentage of like workers are currently working in hospitals
versus like making cookies or something. Right, Thank you for

(02:17:30):
that ooh analysis, Chris, I agree that that's a joke,
Like twelve people will get I I love you if
you if you understand that joke. Also, I'm sorry, yes,
so you can wrap it up. Carson Um. All of

(02:17:53):
this has been very fascinating. What what I've learned the
most is that I need to finished reading all my
books as that I can read the Dawn and everything. Um,
I know I like, I like got it from my
dad for Christmas because um, because I knew that it
would be uh at least I think I did. My
memory could be I could actually be wrong. I could
have only intended to get my dad for Christmas and

(02:18:16):
forgotten to actually get it. But I've been reading it
to I've been meeting to both buy it for myself
and get it for other people because I've heard a
lot of interesting things about the book. So it is
definitely on my list. It's been a pleasure listening to. Uh,
you'll discuss it, um Andrew. Where can if people want

(02:18:36):
to check out more of your your work? Where could
where could they go about that? Right? So you can
still find me on Twitter and underscore see and Drew
when I'm not um hiding, And you could also find
me on YouTube andreism YouTube dot com, slash andreism, where

(02:18:56):
I post radios about also stuff, random stuff. You know
that I'm thinking about politics, history, Well that jazz. A
few days ago, as the time of recording, um Andrew
put out a wonderful video on a solar punk stuff. Um,
I have no idea what this episode will air, so
that it's probably been like a month or two or something.

(02:19:19):
But definitely check out the Andrewism channel. It's one of
my favorite spots too. Uh watch something. When I feel
like I can't put any words on the page, I
go watch your things because it's very helpful. Um. Yeah,
so that doesn't for us Today. You can find us
that Twitter and on Twitter and Instagram at happened here
pod coos out Media. You can find me posting about

(02:19:41):
hyper objects and liminal spaces at Hungry bow Tie And
I heard that you have a Twitter, Chris. Yeah, it's
at mc h R three. You can find me mostly
complaining about other people who are doing mean isn't wrong?
I guess that's most of what I post about. Love

(02:20:03):
that for you, you two will be able to differentiate
between the sixteen different For exceit, it's not even there.
Used to be long ago into galaxy, far far away,
and made a decision, and that was that I was
going to sacrifice my brain to understand the different kinds
of maoism. And if you two want to understand why
it still exists in all twenty varieties of them, yeah,

(02:20:23):
go there. If you don't want to do that. Do not,
You'll be happier. Well, what a ringing endorsement. Uh? Good bye?
Everyone go I don't know, should we should? Should we
plug up people at the other shows? Yeah? I guess
everyone's tune dead at this point. I hope they've all
stopped at the podcast player. I think I think, Uh, yes,

(02:20:48):
go outside and be free there, I can you can
you can edit that into something that is more concise. Sorry,
Daniel Slash, I don't care. Yeah, it's well, it is

(02:21:15):
the podcast. It could happen here, but for once, it
is not about the world falling apart. It is entirely
about putting it back together again. Uh. And and joining
me to talk about putting it back together again is
zero of the other people who are normally on this podcast.
But I'm joined by Shannon and John Horonomus, who are
part of the team of Organized Is working on the

(02:21:36):
Dual Power Gathering. Shannon, John, Welcome, Welcome to the show. Hi,
thank you, hey. So, I guess the first part of
the Dual Power Gathering is dual power, and I think
we should walk through what actually that is, in what
our sort of visions for it look like, because Man,
I know we've talked about this on the show before,

(02:21:57):
but that was a very very long time ago, but
which I mean like probably only like seven months, but
you know, it feels like ancient history. So yeah, I
guess do you two want to talk about what dual
power is and how how do you do? Yeah? Sure,

(02:22:18):
I'm gonna stop trying to think about what happened seven
months ago and trying to Okay, you said that. I
was just like, oh wow, Okay, no, never mind. Um So,
dual power, John, how about I go ahead and share
with our audience what is sort of the poetic language
that we have up on the website from the the organizers,

(02:22:40):
and then we can kind of like break it down
and talk about it. Um yeah, that works for me,
all right. So of the website texts such dual power
is a way to imagine the moment just before our
movements converge, as the possible becomes the actual, when the
seeds of social transfer nation we have sown for generations bloom,

(02:23:02):
when the old world begins to wither and new worlds
can be born. Is a way of thinking about how
we got to that moment and beyond it. Dual power
is the project of building self determination, mutual aid, solidarity,
and direct democracy in our communities by creating spaces that
empower us all and from which new and mansipatory institutions
can emerge. It's a pretty So what does that mean?

(02:23:30):
So what does that mean? UM? First off, I want
to say like a shout out to a lot of
people have been working on this vision of what dual
power is for years and years now, and that includes UH,
A lot of groups UM that we are either in

(02:23:51):
conversation with or have been taking inspiration from. UM. One
of the biggest, I think most developed groups that's doing
that work is Cooperation Jackson and Jackson Jacks Mississippi, UM
and UH. I think the goal is people went up.

(02:24:11):
Oftentimes when people do like here dual power, if they
don't have any other UM context for it, but they
are maybe from the left. They've heard about this moment
in the Russian Revolution when there were these two competing
like uh, you know, basis of power in like Russian

(02:24:32):
society while they're undergoing this revolutionary change, and uh Lenin
wrote like a pamphlet about it, calling it the dual
power and looked at it as like a thing that
needed to be like overcome by you know, workers in
Russia UM, to like establish a workers state UM, which

(02:24:54):
they kind of outlined in a book called State and Revolution.
And but when we look at like they were describing,
we kind of look at this as I think that
emerges in any time when there's a social revolution and
kind of unfolding in a society where you have various
classes who are like changing like social relations, workers, peasants, UM,

(02:25:21):
different groups of people who like have like a class
they have come together around a class interest and overthrowing
their oppression, and they have to go through stages of
building their collective power their collective identity there, and they're
kind of like overall strategic movement in a particular direction UM,

(02:25:46):
and they create this tension between the existing state order
and a newly emerging like uh, like social revolution that's
like overthrown, challenging uh and overthrowing that like UM power.
So that being said, we want to ground that. We

(02:26:08):
want to ground that a little bit in a like
less historicized context or whatever. We could say maybe that's
the work that we're doing to build up the institutions
and relational structures that we need to care for ourselves
in each other UM as we moved through uh sort
of like different states of like institutional organization in the society. Right.

(02:26:33):
So when we're thinking about how do we meet our
basic needs together in ways that are not dependent on
the oppressive institutions that we're trying to overthrow, we're talking
about dual power. Yeah, it's like any time working class folks,
And it's like in a broad definition, communities, people who
aren't necessarily working but like depend on like taking care

(02:26:55):
of each other or who do the work of reproducing
every you know society, UM basically build their own independent
power like uh to like to be able to fight
back and to challenge the you know, the status quo. So,
like there's a lot of things they're kind of percolating
that we've been like that have been happening in North

(02:27:18):
America that takes inspiration from areas of the global South, UM,
but also our homeown, homegrown like traditions, UM. So that
could be in anything from like your local mutual aid
network to uh, your local tenant union to like a
rank and file UM union of like Amazon workers or

(02:27:42):
teachers or care workers, um, you know whose existence puts
them in conflict with the state capital um and like patriarchy,
settler colonial relations um, you know, like indigenous protectors um,
folks who are building up places where the more developed

(02:28:06):
it becomes, the more it kind of built its own momentum.
And you have spaces that are like autonomous, fully like
autonomous regions from like state power and to begin to
like pick apart at capital and like reconfigure are like

(02:28:27):
relations of like how we make things, to do things
and take care of each other in like fundamental ways.
And we have lots of beautiful examples of this from
the like organizing history not even that long ago. And
people will be familiar with some of the Black Panther
programs or some of the programs that were integrated into
the farm workers movement, and some of the programs that

(02:28:50):
were put together by the anarchi feminists who were trying
to support women's bodily autonomy and secure abortion rights through
thing like mutual aid healthcare and and things like that.
So we'll see there's like a lot of really beautiful
examples of this work happening over time around successful organizing movements.

(02:29:10):
And we're all really excited about what's going on now
and we want to see that just to sort of
come together and flourish. I think it's important to think
about dual power or something that's like, I don't know,
like I I think there's a lot of people who
look at it as sort of like dual power is
planting a garden. It's like, I mean sort of, yes,
but like there's you know, they're there. There's there's sort
of two components of it, right, There's there's this sort

(02:29:32):
of there's a defensive component and an offensive component. There's
a component that's about taking care of each other, and
there is a component that is attack. Right, there's there's
there's a component that is the people who are preventing
us and taking care of each other need to be
stopped from doing that. And so yeah, I think I
think it's important to, yeah, think about different kinds of

(02:29:54):
like different kinds of institutions that you would not normally
think of as doing the same thing, as being part
of the same struggle. And yeah, I guess that brings
us to what YouTube and a lot of other people
have been working on. For god, it has been this
is this has been in the work for a long time. Yeah,
which which which is the which is the this? Uh,

(02:30:16):
dual power gathering. And yeah, I guess you want to
talk about what what that is because yeah, yeah, well,
you know, we've all been sitting around the past couple
of years dreaming about being together, and so I think
this is kind of the fruit of that dream. Right
coming up at the end of July, UH, we're inviting
everyone out to the Indiana Dunes for a camping trip.

(02:30:40):
UH and during that time, we're hoping to see a
collaboratively produced event that incorporates everything that the participants can
bring to it, which we know far exceeds the uh
sort of even the scope and vision of the Orangizing Body.

(02:31:01):
So we're really trying to, um, just create a space
for people to come together who are interested in these ideas,
who have various levels of experience working with it. That
will be valuable to everybody, from people who are brand
new to this stuff and just want to learn more
about it, to people who have have been doing it
for years, for decades even UM. And yeah, that's sort

(02:31:25):
of sort of the the underlying ambition of it is
to get people together in space. You know, a lot
of us have been to these kinds of events before
and felt like the most important thing that we got
out of that was the relationships that we were able
to build and the people that we were able to
meet that we could then carry on ongoing dialogues with,

(02:31:45):
and that we could find inspiration uh in in those
dialogues and in those connections that would birth new projects
that you know, we don't yet know are even possible.
And so this is kind of, at least for me,
like that's the really important ending sighting force of the
of the plan. Yeah. Yeah, I think that, like they're

(02:32:08):
the some of the things about this I think are
really like it's been like really a collaborative effort to
come up with this thing. Like we had the discussions
about this is a thing that needs that we thought
need to happen because at the end of like by
the end of the middle of one, we're like, look, clearly,
we've all been through so many different experiences over the

(02:32:32):
last ten, fifteen, twenty years. At this point some of
us are getting to be elders, and um, we uh
and we need to like, um, it feels like it's
now is an excellent a really great time to have
like a actual conversation about where we where we're coming,

(02:32:54):
where we are, where we're coming from and where we're going,
and how do we translate these experiences into like networks
of like trusting relationships and sharing, um sharing of all
this knowledge is like we need to debrief like the
like the past five years I think in particular, have

(02:33:16):
been like it's like crammed. It feels like, you know,
the whole saying like some some years nothing happens, and
some you know, in some months decades happen or phrasing
or whatever, and it's like so much stuff has come.
We've all gone through so many things and come to
like uh, and we're seeing people who didn't have like

(02:33:39):
maybe a stance on various political things or are like
seeing their communities torn apart by like the real lived
experience of like climate change and wants to and need
to do something about it. That sort of thing like
bringing in people who have lots of experience with people
who have maybe are just now figuring things out and

(02:34:00):
really kind of like musing and taking this as an
opportunity to maybe to generate new knowledge so that we're
going to be like kind of like clarifying what we've
gone through and where we're heading, and um get people
like in the same space who like might as a

(02:34:20):
like I do a lot of union ship, So I'm
always thinking about how do I get like rank and
file union radicals in the same space as like a
like a neighborhood abolitionist or a tenant union organizer or
a community land trust and getting all these like different
groups because together and then like thinking about how they

(02:34:41):
overlap in support and build off of each other because
we I think the operating theory of many of people
who are involved in this is that every context is
different where we're organizing, but many there are many kind
of principles that can kind of translate across context, but

(02:35:01):
the context will shape very like like the I was
just talking with one of the organizers who's like twenty
minutes away over in northwest Indiana, and you're like in Gary,
and you know, those areas and their contexts for building
something like a an ecosystem too power organizations is going
to be very different from my context where I am

(02:35:22):
like down the street from this big global center of
capital that's like University of Chicago and like, and it's
doing all in my neighborhoods being gentrified by two billion
dollar corporations. And I've got a big nurse union, whereas
they're in the middle of like a neighbor community that's

(02:35:44):
being actively divested and destroyed, like just like eating away
at by like because capital just pulling out and has
been doing that for basically as long as you've all been.
At the same time, y'all are dealing with the same
like biosphere complications and climate change implications, and so yeah,

(02:36:04):
we're thinking about the ways in which like the kinds
of affiliations that makes sense for us to be successful
in our projects are like, you know, they're not just
they're not just local, they're not just national, they're not
just continental. There's like a lot of different things that
are going on there. And that's the only way for
us to really like sort out who we need to

(02:36:26):
be in coaligion with on any particular issue is to
know everybody, uh and to try to understand better there
they're specific contexts and their specific experiences. And I think
there's like, you know, I think, you know, to to
John's point about you know, how much has changed in
the last two, you know, handful of years or whatever,
I think one thing that we've all come away from

(02:36:46):
the pace of change is pretty humbling. You know, um,
I think we definitely all we gotta we got. We
took in a bit of the humility around around that
what is it that we actually need to do? We
are definitely not prepared for it, you know, And it
doesn't matter how many decades we've been doing this organizing work.
We just are not ready for how quickly things are

(02:37:09):
changing right now. And the only way for us to
get ready is to make sure that we shore up
and strengthen the networks of people that we can rely
on to produce kind of positive interdependence um as we
move forward with the continued chaos that is the contemporary world. Yeah,

(02:37:30):
I mean. And then part of this is also like
thinking about because the way this is structured, this isn't
just like a series of panel discussions where we've like
the organizers have curated like you're gonna listen to you know, uh,
so and so who's like you know, a prominent tenant
organizer so and so. It is like a prominent like
uh like in like climate change direct action work. Like

(02:37:55):
the goal is is that we like specifically chose a
format and officially it's called like like an unconference. But
the way I think of it is it's like which
which comes out of tech, which I find kind of irritating,
But that doesn't. But the core of the idea of
the thing is is that we're coming into this space

(02:38:16):
in generating new knowledge, not necessarily sitting there and receiving
a bunch of knowledge from people who designate as like
movement leaders or experts. That doesn't mean that people who
don't have a lot of experience and a lot of
like skills aren't going to be there. It just means
that we're going to be. Because one of my things
is popular education coming from the tradition of like pala

(02:38:38):
Frere and like um everybody learning together is like it's
like taking those principles and kind of like doing them
in parallel in various circles. Where there will be a
circle here of like cooperative organizers or people who want
to get coops off the ground. Will be a circle
here of people doing land us work. Will be a

(02:39:01):
circle here of like unionists. There will be a circle
here of people doing like abolition work, and or interest
are people who are interested in all those things are
getting those sorts of things off the ground, and as
they work through like a like they present tell stories
share ideas, do debriefs on like the various things that

(02:39:23):
we've all been going through over you know whatever. How
far back our timeline is depending on how far which
elders decided to attend UM, but then taking that knowledge
with our facilitators and then being like, you know what,
I think that these two conversations are happening kind of
like in parallel would be better if they were merged

(02:39:43):
together and beginning to kind of like build that sort
of like and so the idea isn't necessarily come away
with like a pre like we're not setting up like
a like a predetermined set of conclusions for people we
believe and based off of we've been having monthly community
calls for people who are going to be attending. All

(02:40:04):
the different groups of folks who will be coming to
this is going to be I think like the depth
of experience is going to be really phenomenal UM and
people coming from We definitely have people confirmed who are
coming from Canada, people who we may be having folks
with experience the indigenous communities is uh in Mexico, we

(02:40:25):
maybe have We're fairly confident we're gonna have people who
are like just come from areas like northern Syria and
iraq Um and taking all these different ideas and experiences
and then generating next like coming to new conclusions, maybe
unexpected conclusions or things that we didn't quite that we

(02:40:48):
weren't anticipating, but maybe asking new questions. Right Like, this
is a kind of intended to be a prefigure of
space for engaging with things where we don't know what
the right answer is. And I think we all need
to release sit with the fact that we do not
have like a clear right solution into the problems that
we're facing right now. Like I've been kind of pulling

(02:41:09):
on the slogan a little. It's like no gods, no masters,
no right answers, you know, just like get used to it.
We need to be more creative and we need to
be more open to experimentation. And you know, there's just
a lot of there's a lot of stuff that's going
to be coming at us fast, and you know, this
is a we we we hope this can be a

(02:41:30):
space where we can kind of take some time to
slowly get square with what it is we're going to
have to be thinking about, even if we don't know
what to do exactly yet. So I had I had
a really good experience where I was listening to like
one of the like a person who came out of
Act Up giving a talk in my neighborhood, and she

(02:41:54):
was saying, because we had had questions, is this going
to be about a lot of theory? Are we gonna
be talking about of abstract stuff? And um, this organizer
was like, you know, Actup had no theory, right they did.
They took action, and the theory followed afterwards. And so

(02:42:14):
the idea that we're like necessarily having coming to this
with like the right answers already figured out is just
not like something that I think it's going to be
a super generative discussion. The idea of coming up with
like coming up with orientations and thinking about like where
we are heading kind of in a general sense, and

(02:42:36):
then seeing how that unfolds and builds is I think
a big, key, key aspect of what we're trying to
do when we come together. We're just not to say yeah,
which is not to say that there won't be theory,
because that's not up to us. That's up to y'all.
So you know, um, I probably don't know like what
I'm really interested in is having conversations about like doing

(02:43:00):
mental health care, you know, and like, for me, the
theory is less interesting than you know, like talking about
what we actually need in the spaces that we work in.
But that's you know, that's where I'm coming from, and
everybody else is coming at this from their own perspective too,
So I'm really excited to see what people bring to
that space and what we can get out of it.
Um by just thinking that we all are contributing something

(02:43:22):
constructive to that conversation. And then also there's gonna be
a lot of discussion about like literal practical skills, like
here's how you like, here's how you uh. This has
always been the perennial thing. This is how you pick
a lot, This is how you uh, this is how
you organize comms at like at like a like on
a picket line. This is how you pull together uh

(02:43:47):
a demand letter for like a list for like tenants,
like you know, these are the sorts of things that
like we're gonna be talking, We're going to be doing
concrete skill shares. Plus these discussions about our experience is
and sharing our stories and you know, hopefully we're gonna
come away from this. A big goal of it is
to um come up with a lot of like different

(02:44:11):
like um, just like content. We're going to be recording
videos and uh like uh audio and like also and
then transcribing things and writing things up. And we're hoping
that once we're then we're gonna have a big report
that we can share out with people who can't attend. Yeah,
privacy concerns obviously considered. So yeah, for sure, Yeah, there

(02:44:33):
is Consent is a big is a big thing with
us as organizers. She should help. So yeah, you would think,
but you know, not everyone is down as you would imagine. Okay,
so basically we're building a perfect little utopia for like
four days and you'll come out because we're going to

(02:44:54):
fix the revolution. So kidding obviously on on on kind
of crete level, Like what does like a day here
look like? Like what do what are what? What what
are we doing? Oh that's fun, that's a fun question.
Uh if I may, John, Yeah, yeah, go for it. Um.
What we're thinking right now, basically, is it a day.

(02:45:14):
It looks like we get up in the morning, we
drink coffee, we have breakfast, and we have a little
assembly check in to see how things are going, if
we need to make any major adjustments, and we put
up a uh sort of schedule for the afternoon's events
that was populated from the conversation that was happening in
the evening the night before, and anything that anybody wants

(02:45:36):
to bring up to that schedule that happened between yesterday
and this morning. Uh, then we're gonna roll off into
um basically what would be some of the kind of
like things we already know for sure that we wanted
to see happening that we could get on a on
a sort of schedule ahead of time. So some of

(02:45:57):
these skill shares that were planned that would require kind
of like replanning or maybe some discussions that people reached
out ahead of time that they definitely wanted to have
so that stuff would be happening earlier in the day.
Um that you know, we're we're talking about having sort
of just like sandwich bars and you know, make your
own lunch kind of situations going on. There should be
a lot of different things happening in different geographical locations

(02:46:19):
on the site, so you kind of get get a
choice of where you want to go. It's not like
there's one big event. Um, we're going to try to
group things that are sort of thematically similar in so
that they're nearby each other in case you want to
go around and see, um what the different kind of
stuff is going to be. And then in the afternoon
it's going to be like I mean, okay, of course
this is like how we're intending right now. The afternoon

(02:46:40):
would be the discussions and skill shares and events and
circles and spaces that um, we're generated out of the
conversations that have been happening in space so that people
came and thought, you know, we had this conversation yesterday
that really inspired me. Let's talk about this, and I'm
going to make space for that. So we're gonna have
big map where you figure out where you want to go,

(02:47:02):
and you're gonna be able to wander around and meet people.
Were trying to incorporate a lot of events that make
it easier to meet other people that you don't know yet. Um.
Where there's gonna be tables where you can do arts
and crafts. There's gonna be game space for whatever kind
of games you want to play. There's gonna be places
for kids to hang out. There's gonna be a quiet
tent where you can take some contemplation time. You know,

(02:47:23):
at some point we want to do it like a
kind of brief circle for people to deal with what
they've been kind of going through in the world. And
you know some uh you know, utopia, envisioning arts space,
you know, these kinds of things like where um, you know,
somebody wants to teach someone else a dance. Like that's
the kind of thing that we're really hoping can go on.
In the afternoon. Uh, then we would be feeding everybody dinner,

(02:47:47):
and we kind of had this idea we've been playing
with that we would have two campfires after dinner, and
one campfire will have kind of an open forum where
anybody can talk for like ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, you
know whatever however long people need who are there, depending
on how popular that is, and just kind of air
everything that's in their head. And we'll have a note
taker so we can try to incorporate what comes out

(02:48:09):
of those discussions into the next days agenda. Um. And
so that's sort of like what we were what we
were envisioning. And then for the other campfire, because people
who don't don't forget this, the other the other the
other camp fire for people who are like done with talk,
I need to just sit and stare at and flames
for a little bit. Yeah, I imagine I'll be going

(02:48:31):
back and forth between the fires, so you know, that's
also an option. But the idea is to get kind
of like somewhere between I think when we were calling
us like somewhere between a conference and a music festival,
you know what I mean, Like there where you're able
to sort of move around and you don't have to
go and sit in one place and do like, okay
for this hour, this is where you know, it's it's

(02:48:51):
it's meant to be a bit more informal, um and
we're hoping that that makes a lot more space for
people to sort of explore and people to meet other
people that they don't already know. Because I don't know
if that if that, if that sums up sort of
like what I'm imagining, because that's like, you know, that's
the spirit. So I think if that's the question, like
what does the date look like, well, hopefully it's fun.
You know, that's kind of the main the main thing

(02:49:12):
we're thinking here, So make it sort of low stress
and low stakes place that we can talk about some
of the highest stress and highest stakes questions that we
have to deal with. So yeah, and like that being said,
like because we're modeling it this way specifically based on
people's experience with like the Symbiosish Federations founding conference, that

(02:49:35):
sort of thing where there were a lot of stakes
and people were trying to kind of like funnel different
discussions through different ways. And this is not a necessarily
critique of how that all went down. It's just like
based on our experience and our experiences with those sorts
of things. The goal is too for this to be

(02:49:57):
if it's successful the first of many of these sorts
of things, UM, many of these kind of gatherings and discussions,
and to provide a model for how it could happen.
But to keep um, we deliberately decided that this we're
not going to make like a bit We're not going
to have big points of unity debate and discussion and
voting on assembly sort of thing. We will use assemblies

(02:50:21):
for you know, certain things like setting up like our
community agreements and that sort of stuff, and kind of
like getting the days rolling and kind of getting the
days closed. But the goal is like to not is
to bring people into conversation who haven't who maybe don't
have the basis of trust for those bigger collective like

(02:50:42):
discussions yet, but maybe they will later. But the goal
is for now is we're getting We're building and expanding
our networks. We're building, expanding our trust with different people
and building expanding our knowledge so that we can go
out and do kind of work that we think we
need to do to I don't know survives as a

(02:51:04):
species on this planet. So um, that's one of the
reasons why if there are some people are like, oh,
I don't know, it seems really kind of wishy washy.
It's very that was a very deliberate decision based on
previous experience from organizers who have been to these sorts
of things. And the goal is really too, to have
a place where we can have discussions about high stakes

(02:51:25):
issues without being so invested in it that we feel
like if our concept of how to solve that problem
doesn't come out as the like solution, that we've somehow failed.
So it's like, yeah, I was to say that I
think one of the one of these things that you
that you brought up there, that's really important. It's like

(02:51:48):
not even just in these previous conferences or congresses or
gatherings that we've been to have we seen to be
a problem. But basically, at least I can speak for
myself in a lot of organizing spaces that I've been
in over the past, you know, like fifteen years that
I've been pretty active in in the organizing universe. Um,
basically that one of the main problems that we have

(02:52:11):
with this kind of like space of trust that we
definitely know that we need to be able to work
together and moving forward, is that we don't really have
shared language a lot of the time. And we think
we do because we use the same words, but we
often use them to mean different things, or we often
use different words to mean the same things as well.
And then we come from kind of different organizing cultures
and a lot of different places like that some are

(02:52:33):
more are less. We should say that maybe that there
there are different places where you show solidarity in a
different way, you show good faith, and you show that
you're committed in a different way. What it means to
be democratic in a space seems different depending on this
on the tradition that you that you may be come from.
So what we're really hoping to do is kind of

(02:52:53):
makes space to incorporate all of that. So we were
was joking it was a camping trip, where many camping
trips fit, you know that like that there should be
an opportunity for people to kind of like learn to
talk past those those barriers that we might have to
understanding each other, and like that success would really look
like people coming away believing in other people's commitment to

(02:53:17):
get this done and with the kind of contacts that
they need to support each other moving forward as things
come up in different places, as opposed to just like
here's a solution, like here's a blueprint for how to
get this done. You know that relationship that you have
with a person who has had that experience in the
past is going to be way more valuable than any
document they give you based on their experience, because you're

(02:53:40):
gonna be able to say, well, ship, I wasn't expecting
this to happen, Like what do we do? And then
you can talk through that with them, and like that's
really I think that's really the foundation of our being
able to share this knowledge with each other is that
we have the opportunity to kind of engage in these
ways that are more focused on the kind of just

(02:54:03):
the sort of dynamism of the of the challenges that
we're dealing with right now. So emergence is a big thing.
Things are always gonna like things that are always going
to be changing, Like, uh, we are we need to
be prepared to deal with a world that's gonna be

(02:54:23):
throwing challenges at us that like we haven't like we
haven't had solutions for and like because we're going through
that's like really kind of like catastrophic like uh the
moments of like uh climate change and um, I mean,

(02:54:44):
I don't know how else to say it, but like
and and so it's it's like engendering the idea, the
idea that we're constantly evaluating what's happening around us, both
like at our local level and across the regions and
global and then taking new knowledge in and coming up
with new solutions um in a real like in like

(02:55:07):
a truly experimental way, like thinking about things is like experiments,
and how we're going to like come up with new
solutions to these problems because it's just well, like as
we kept telling people, because when we're out there trying
to bring groups in everyone's selling us our capacity. This
sounds great. Our capacity is incredibly low. Uh. And that

(02:55:31):
has just been across the entire spectrum of organizations, and
that includes huge, big, put together organizations like you know
unions versus little mutual a groups. Everybody is dealing with
this like feeling of exhaustioning like capacity. Our goal is

(02:55:51):
to get people together so that they can build capacity
UM through these discussions and to be prepared for things,
because capacity is always going to be an issue. And
our goal is to get people to this point where
because they're um, their mindset is okay, new challenge, Let's
think about it critically and come up with solutions that

(02:56:12):
fit this moment as supposed to keep trying to force
things into UM preset like easy. I mean, I don't
want to say easy, but like I think that sometimes
like everyone's trying to mind history for the like the
one weird trick to solve all these problems. And I
think that the one weird trick is that human beings
are creative, critical thinking machines. Like our our brain is

(02:56:39):
like this thing for taking in information and generating new
new thought and action, and we need to embrace that
UM because if we don't. I don't think we're going
to be very successful certainly. And the yeah, and these
times of just increasing uncertainty, that kind of humility and
flexibility and like continue building of comfort with that uncertainty

(02:57:01):
is going to be super essential to our being able
to maintain even sort of like the basic ability to
take action. And I think so we're going to have
to like continue to like to lean into that uncertainty
and to sort of I think, you know, kind of
historically the being comfortable with things changing and being comfortable
with uncertainty is actually one of our great strengths, right

(02:57:23):
because we can actually start to get moving while everybody
else is still going, what the hell? You know? And
so I think, you know, that's going to definitely be
something that's going to serve us. And Yeah, anyway, I
have I have one last I question on an extremely
practical level, which is like what is the like facility
situation here? Like how what what are what are people

(02:57:46):
sleeping in? Uh? So, like right now where we like
we have camp space reserved for people, um, and so
we understand the camping is not always super accessible, but
we are very fortunate that like the National Lake Shore

(02:58:10):
has specific accessible facilities UM for folks, and we do
have disabled like UH comrades coming to this event, and
we're working on making sure that those UH that their
particular needs don't keep them from participating fully in the events.
There's UM the discussions and circles themselves will be UM

(02:58:35):
at like shelter space UM a bit away from where
the camping is happening, so we're organizing transport between us
to split those spaces UM. For people who cannot camp,
we are working organizing some hotel space for folks UM,
and then for people who can camp but don't have

(02:58:56):
any equipment. Our goal is to work going to UM
basically acquire like enough camping equipment for a sizeable chunk
of folks to come. And UH. It's like literally today
walking through a Walmart with my daughter looking at their
camp equipment in pricing out things like sleeping bags and

(02:59:20):
camp like sleeping mattresses, intense that sort of thing. So yeah,
if people have have stuff they want to donate to
the cause to like, I think we should be able
to take some of that in. I think we were
just talking yesterday about the possibility of having like camp
gear repair zone. So if you have things that you

(02:59:41):
find at the thrift store that like a tour intent
or something like that will help you fix it. You know,
we just want to make sure that everybody has these
supplies as well, because they're they're broadly useful. I know
I've used my camping gear in uh some politically motivated
ways in the best I think that it's not bad
for people to have it if you need it. Also,

(03:00:05):
you know, the camping aspect of it is also it's
more of a feature than a bug. Like there's like
a like so to so to speak, like the pandemic
is not over yet, as we're like seeing right UM
in spite of everything that like a ruling class is
desperately trying to get us to agree to and so

(03:00:29):
having um the accommodations outside and doing the doing the
actual events like out of doors where there's lots of ventilatation.
We think it is like right now one of these
events so that we're not going to get so that
people aren't going to come away from this UM getting sick,

(03:00:51):
which is really important m from I mean as a
person who's recovering from COVID COVID rounds two UM and
as a healthcare worker. That was one of our big
concerns because when we started making these plans, we really
weren't sure what was going to be happening in terms
of the pandemic, and having it out of doors was

(03:01:14):
just like a sure fireway that we knew that we
could at the very least, we can minimize the chances
that people would be getting sick from just showing up
and being s space together absolutely, and we're definitely encouraging
people who are coming together with friends and comrades and
little groups to self organize their camps as much as
they would like to do that UM to sort of

(03:01:37):
make plans together to limit the UM you know, the
need for spaces. You know, we're sharing up tents and
all this kind of stuff to the extent that people
are comfortable with that that you know, people, if you
need to get in touch with people from around you,
if you don't know anybody, you can reach out to us.
If we know anybody else who's looking for somebody to
try to coordinate with, will definitely put you in touch to.

(03:01:59):
Something we want to be able to do is like
offer some of these connective services to help people UM
to link up with people who are coming from from
their areas or people who are interested in the same
kinds of things. UM. And so we're kind of thinking
of ourselves in the organizing body is facilitators of those
connections and trying to imagine how what we do will

(03:02:19):
make those connections most likely to happen. UM. So in
terms of the of the facilities as well, I think
we we've talked about trying to get some camp stoves
together for people who need to use sort of a
kitchen space to try to limit the amount of things
that people need to bring for that, but definitely feel free,
uh to bring bring your own stuff and and and
set up whatever whatever you need and let us know

(03:02:41):
if you need help from us. Well, we'll do our
best to accommodate. And people are getting fed, like so
we're playing and having meals arranged and that will be
vegan and uh with the caveat that Folks who want
to have separate food, like do their own self organized
like cooking with that other thing, they that they're really

(03:03:04):
committed to. UM. And we're playing and having like all
the necessities of like lots of water, make sure that
like we've got first aid lined up. There's gonna be
street credics who are participating in the work of organizing
all that harm reduction UM and just generally like like

(03:03:24):
some of the other things that didn't really mentioned, Like
we know that we're bringing a bunch of people with
a lot of big ideas and big personalities together, and
that means we're probably gonna have to deal with some conflict.
Maybe I don't know, so having UM conflicts, uh, like
people who are good at media and conflict. We're going
to have a crew of people who do that. We're

(03:03:45):
working on child watch training because this is going to
be the family from space, making sure that we know
how to take care of each other in case like
shady people from outside trying to do something like whatever.
Like our goal is to just make sure that like
this is UM as safe as it can be, bringing

(03:04:05):
people together as successful as it can be. Understanding implementations
of who's gonna be You're gonna be outside, so there
might be you know, all the some of the fun
of having like a collective group of people all outside together,
which can be a lot of fun. Like I'm I'm

(03:04:26):
waiting for karaoke and for UM like our open mic
and people bringing out like instruments and like just having
like you know, we're people discussing like, um, you know
some soccer uh potentially being a thing, um determining like

(03:04:47):
placing bets on who's going to be more into soccer
based on various ideological fin views and past experience, and yeah,
hit us up if you want to play some music,
if you've got an idea for something fun that sounds
cool to do. And just to come to circle back
to this, I think, like with the point about conflict mediation,

(03:05:09):
I just want to make that like super clear. Just
because we're not going to spend half a day trying
to come up with community with the points of unity
does not mean we don't have expectations about how you
act in this space. So our plan is basically to say, like,
don't be an asshole. And then that means you know,
like in all the ways that we know, uh that
those things can happen. And then if somebody accidentally is

(03:05:31):
being an asshole, where somebody's are accidentally being an asshole
like that, those are things we can we can manage
because we all know what it is that we're doing here. Um,
So it's definitely not a free for all you know
it's a this is a space where the normal things
we would expect in space are expected, you know, explicitly. Yeah.

(03:05:54):
Oh well man, I'm excited. Yeah, I'm looking forward to people.
I don't know. I don't actually know how widespread bonfires
are in the US, but we do a lot in
the Midwest and bonfires are a great time. I'm excited
people to experience that. It's it's good. Um. Yes, so

(03:06:16):
I guess, um do you you if anything closing that
you want to say? And also where can people find
this and attempt to go to it? Also when is
it happening, because that's another important It's going to be
July UH twenty nine one UM, and attendance is free,

(03:06:38):
there's no there's no charge, but we are soliciting donations.
So we're doing a fundraiser UM through Open Collectives UM
and we spend very generously given UH an offer of
matching donations from one of the organizers who got like
I got a little bit of a chunk of change
to kind of contribute to that sort of thing. We're

(03:06:59):
very I'm excited about that. So if you go on
to you can follow us on Twitter, and I believe
that's at Dual Power. Uh to let me tell the chat.
I think it's at Dual Power. Gathering is our Twitter

(03:07:21):
and um the website is dual dual power dot org. Yes, yeah,
um yeah. If you go on the website, you'll find
the links to everything you need to know. You can
get in touch with us. You can like, you know,
give us your your feedback, if you love it, if
you hate it, if you've you know whatever. We're We're

(03:07:43):
probably not going to change the whole thing right now,
but show up and we can change it at the time.
I'll also say we do have like an organizing discord
and people who are like serious about like getting involved
in want to have things like I want to come
to this and with things that they have specific visions
for now. It's like absolutely time to get engaged with

(03:08:04):
that because we're like we're working towards making getting people
into the like who are the participants to really own
the event itself, So that'll be like that's something we have.
I believe We're gonna probably two more community calls wanted
June and one in July. Every one of those calls
has been really amazing, lots of great people, um, and

(03:08:28):
during those calls are gonna be doing some training on
because you've got to do some prep work when you're
doing this kind of like generative discussion like popular education,
like unconfidence style. UM events like coming to them with
a little bit of un understanding of what that looks
like is really key to being successful. So um, we

(03:08:51):
encourage people who want to come get signed up, and
then we'll get into our mailing list, and our mailing
lists is where we disseminate like when those calls are happening,
and also pomping our discord as long as you're cool
and agree your community very manol like bring you in
and get all sorts of shipped together. We're very excited
for people. There's still a third number of thoughts open

(03:09:16):
for the events itself, were like almost half way full.
So yeah, I mean definitely, we're We've been trying to
think about this as an event that we would want
to go to, and we wanted to be an event
that you want to come to also, so help us
make it. So yeah, yeah, that's that's yeah, this is
really exciting. I'm god be going to it. Yeah. So yeah,

(03:09:38):
thank thank thank you, thank you to you both for
joining us, for talking about this, and I'm excited too.
I'm excited to see lots of people there. Hey, hey,
I mean we've all been wanting to see each other
for two and a half years, right, So I miss you.
I missing your face with dimension. Yea, I'm sick of

(03:09:59):
you're flat face. Yeah, thanks so much for having us
on to talk about it. Really looking forward to it.
I mean, we're getting closer and closer. It's just like
it just gets more exciting and also a little nerve wracking.
But thankfully a lot of people have been stepping up
on a very I'm confident that's gonna be really like

(03:10:22):
a really great thing. Yeah, and we will we we
will have links to everything in the show notes. Um. Yeah,
this has just make it happen here. You can find
us in the usual places happen to your pot and stuff. Alright, goodbye,
have fun. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes

(03:10:44):
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