It Could Happen Here Weekly 8

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Forest Service and the AD Council. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here,
and I wanted to let you know. This is a
compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just
happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less
ads package for you to listen to in a long
stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the
episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new

(01:45):
here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Well,
I'm Robert Evans. They have said that already. I don't know,
Like I said, too many mother fucking podcasts. But this
is the last week episode, um and and with me

(02:07):
actually in the office right now. Maskless is a protest
against the mask man. Garrison. David, it's fine, it's fine, Garrison.
I understand that that you don't believe in health mandates. Okay,
we have to respect each other's differences. No, I have
magic to protect myself. That's right, that's fine. You use

(02:28):
chaos magic to protect yourself from COVID. Garrison, what do
you got for me. We're doing We're doing the first
it could happen here Daily book episode excellent, um sexy
and so irotic. We were looking for for spooky content
for Spooky Week and around Halloween, and I wanted to
find a book written by an unhinged like Christian writer

(02:51):
about what they think Halloween is. And I found I
found one with very very little browsing. It took It
was very quick. It took me like five minutes. It
used to be you were too well, no, because you
did grow up in the cold, but you were tooting
to remember this being a super mainstream I mean, I
wasn't like we had no Halloween. I was a kid.
We couldn't get treating. We had like we had, like
we had like a we had like a harvest party

(03:12):
the church put off, but like we had we had.
I couldn't. I didn't. The first time I went trick
or treating was when I was like twelve and I
moved to Portland. No, I was like thirteen, was the
first time I went trick or treating? Yeah, it's um,
I mean it used to be like it used to
be something that got more mainstream play, the like anti
Halloween thing. Um kind of tied in with a Satanic panic.
I remember the early nineties, that's what this book is

(03:33):
going to be about. Angry about it, but man, it
just is like it's it's it almost feels like homey
and comforting. Thinking that this book has been oddly comforting
because it just reminds people with childhood was like, because
that's just all the same stuff. Yeah, I want you,
I want you to read the title and the author
of this amazing book. Okay, so this is wow. The

(03:57):
cover is honestly just looks like a normal jack It
looks like a regular a bat into a jackal lanard,
but it's got like spooky white smoke coming out of it.
The title is Helloween Satan's New Year, by doctor Billy Dimily.
It's not a real name. Is not a real name,

(04:18):
Billy Billy like it's I swear to God listeners, b
I L L y E. That is not a name.
And the name it is certainly not Billy, that's Billy,
but the last name it was just as bad. Dimily. Yeah,
d y M A L L y dim ally ally
nonsense nonsense. So we have whenever you find a Christian

(04:40):
book written by someone with doctor and from their first name,
you know, you know it's gonna be good. You gotta
figure out what kind of doctor. Guess what? Guess what
kind of doctor. So, first of all, for the maybe
so Billy dim Ley, the author earned Billy earned a
theological doctorate of ministry in the mid eighties at the
Honolulu extension of the of the Western Conservative Baptist Theological

(05:02):
Seminary headquartered in Portland, Oregon. So that's fine. The Honolulu
one headquarters. The branch was in Hollelululu, but the headquarters
was apparently in Portland, Oregon in the eighties, and that
makes sense muchure if it's still here. But you know,
sister cities Portland and Honolulu. She wrote at least fifteen
original manuscripts her word manuscript um on a wide range

(05:24):
of biblical doctrines. And I believe so, I mean it
has she her pronounces, I got, I can't continue, I'm
gonna look this up. So yeah, Billy. So then the
book that we're looking at is is one one of
her fifteen manuscripts um self published by Infinity Publishing. Um. Yeah,

(05:45):
this was in the publish in two thousand six. That
and if that's her actual picture on the front. She
just kind of looks like a looks like a white lady,
like a white lady. So yeah. So one of my
favorite parts of the book so far is right when
you opened up to the title page, it says Halloween
satans know you're the titled the book, and then as
a as a brief description of what the book is,
it says, a systematic compilation and narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Oh, whoa, No,

(06:11):
that is not her on the cover, because she is
not a white lady, is she not? So that's her? Oh?
She she's like a black conservative bath Yeah, just like
she looks like kind of like a judge. She does
look a lot like a strong judge, does judge energy? Yeah? Okay,
well I I do. I do love the systematic compilation
narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures, not actual Bibles. Not actual

(06:35):
Bible scriptures. Wow, God Garrison, Uh huh. You want to
guess what she has as her as her place of
employment on Facebook? Well, let me think, I don't know.
I'm gonna read it verbatim works at in and this
is all caps now the service of God. Alright, she

(06:55):
works at in the service of she does work at
the service who doesn't work at in the service of God?
Am I right fucking incredible? Based on this book, I'm
guessing she got real, real into Q and on. But
that's just based on what I read. I think she
may have died. Oh really well, her last post is
in February. Oh, I wonder what happening around in February.

(07:19):
Maybe she's just not super into Facebook but just posting
quite a lot. I think she's not. She's actually not
super He's a decent chance COVID got her. Yeah, maybe
she just doesn't use a lot of social media. That's fine, Okay,
continue please, So yeah, I do like that She describes
the book as paraphrase Bible scriptures, not actual par paraphrase

(07:39):
and and Bible paraphrase Bible scriptures on the doctrines of
good and evil, including an expose on the practice of witchcraft, magic, occultism, divination,
and Satan worship, so that that is how she describes
the book. Now, the book is like almost The book
is two pages long, and it is mostly the same
sentence rewritten in like twelve ways. It's all saying about

(08:01):
how good Jesus is and how evil Satan is and
how people using magic our servants of Satan. Basically it's
just that for for two hundred pages, and she includes
like a lot of a lot of like again paraphrase
Bible scriptures about you know, basically like really classic evangelical
kind of conservative Baptist Christianity type stuff. Um so that's
how most of the book is. There's there's not much

(08:23):
Halloween content in this Halloween book. That doesn't surprise. That's
often the case with these weird life Yeah, it's just
it's they've got some bizarre theological gripe that's only potentially
related to the culture ward stuff. I'm like, like they
have like stuff on like Zionism and the Holy Spirit.
I bet she's got great takes on sacred books, Baptism.

(08:43):
Like it's a whole bunch of a whole bunch of
just like regular kind of conservaive Christian stuff. Except there
is one chapter that is pure gold. It's called the
Witch of Endor and it is this is this is
the explos day on witchcraft and Halloween. I'm very excited
it is. It is the best part of the book.
And um hand, it's it's like at least like thirty pages.

(09:04):
I'm not gonna we can't read the whole thing because honestly,
again it is mostly the same kind of sentences. But
I have highlighted a few a few key passages from
the Witches of endor Um to to distill out to us.
So first the first thing, That first thing for when
when a billy billy, billy billy. So in the section

(09:27):
called what is a witch? Uh, he says, which is
a sorcerer, Which is a Satanist, which is worship ancient
false gods and practice magic. Magic is the divinely forbidden
black heart of bringing about the results beyond the human
power by use of evil spirits and including the devil
and his demons. Magic always brings Satan's diabolical power into play.

(09:48):
So it's it's it's really good, um. She She goes on.
She goes on to to describe the practice of witchcraft
using like a cult, formulations, incantations, magical mutterings, peeping and chirping.
No it says, it says chirping parenthesis, criminal hypnosis parenthesis.
Oh okay, that's chirping, that's exactually, clear up. That's what

(10:10):
makes a good writer is when you you you anticipate
the questions chirping criminal hypnosis. Yeah, that writer would have
further explained, is that hypnosis that is itself criminal? It
is that is hypnosis on a criminal? Has it hypnosis
that makes you criminal? It does not give you any
indication real mystery. Yeah. So she she she basically rounds

(10:35):
up all all different types of of kind of magic
and a cultism into this, into this banner of witchcraft. Um.
She said that there's there's no distinction to be made
between witchcraft and sorcery, despite the erroneous claims that sorcery
is diabolical and witchcraft is creative art. Both are diabolical
and devilish. Yeah, I mean, I guess I I do
agree with her that I don't feel like there's a

(10:57):
meaningful distinction between craft and sorcery, um, in that they're
both things from from from your books that you read
as a kid. But so, the first thing she gets
into in witchcraft, I think is this. It is a
weird intro, but I guess it makes sense from like
her perspective is demon possession. So this is the first
the first like technique that she gets into demon demon

(11:18):
possession is a result of which is of richcraft incantation
in diabolical whipchcraft, the which voluntarily invites the devil and
his and his demon spirits, who are sometimes referred to
as the goddess or god of, or the host of
a particular names of a particular deity for each society. However,
there's a difference between demon possession through deliberate invocation than

(11:40):
demon possession by demonic internal attack upon helpless and often
unsuspecting suspects. Possession is often a common aftermath of certain illness,
of certain forms of certain illnesses, such as strokes. So
she says that the most one of the easiest ways
to figure out if you're possessed is if you have
a stroke, also if you have if you have eppele
s or coma. This is really you know, my my, my,

(12:03):
my grandpa was pretty hard into demonology there at the end,
she's oh man. And one of the fun things about
this book though, is that she really tries to hammer
down and all of like the biblical examples of witchcraft,
which there is like a few, Yeah, it's the Bible.

(12:24):
There's lots of wacky magic, and she really tries to
convince like her Christian readers that witchcraft is a current
problem to be worried with, um, because she is. She's
kind of upset that people view it as like a
fake thing. She's like, no, it's real. It's in the Bible.
You have to be scared of it. Um. The God's
word authenticates the reality witchcraft. Therefore it is not mere superstition.

(12:45):
So a lot of a lot of this is her
trying to her trying to scare people into believing that
witchcraft is actually is a is an ongoing problem. Yeah.
She says that the familiar spirits of which is spoken
of in the Bible are referred to in folk history
is dwarves, fairies, trolls. I don't know where this one is.
What's was this? Was this? You don't know what? Don't Well,

(13:08):
they're usually like a cr one or less, little monster,
little bit of reptilian things often found in dungeons. If
you got a low level party you want to bring
them up against. I mean, cobalds are one of the
things that you could have them go up against person.
I have not encountered them. Weird games. Yeah, they're they're
little little, little little lizard type type goblin things. So
those guys dwarves, fairies, trolls, and other small spirits of

(13:31):
northern folklore. They can be friendly, mischievous, or malignant. In folklore,
they were purported as nature spirits. This is the other
thing she really hammers down on is that if you
like nature, that means that you're actually a Satanist. That
scans which is that that does remind me of my
explore Nature Hail Satan shirt, which is my favorite shirt. Yeah,

(13:51):
that is mean that that you do. That is a
very good shirt. It's pretty good. So she she traces
back the origin of magic to the fall of man
at the beginning of human history, as as said in
the book, is that where we got magic. That's what
she says. Um, she says, so basically, the way she
explains it is that you know magic and this is

(14:12):
something actually kind of a group. It's like magic is
the idea of like that you are kind of on
your way to become God in some way. Um, this
is and in terms of like in terms of like
in terms of like chaos magic it's like you're trying
to like increase your own ability to have power over you,
like your own life and that of the idea. So
what she says, is that basically in the fall of

(14:35):
in Genesis, when Eve tried to eat the try to
eat the fruit fruit of the knowledge of of good
and evil. This was her attention, Like, this was her
attemption to like gain god like power. God can see
good and evil. At the time, man could only see good.
So when Eve ate the fruit, she was trying to
become like God. She was taking agency over her existence

(14:56):
and her fact eating the fruit to gave her the
magic power to see good and evil, right, which what
we have now. So this is how this is how
she tricks back the origin of magic. She's a biblical
she's obviously because you know she's a conservative Baptist. She's
a biblical literalist. She reads The Garden of Bean as
a literal historical tale, not as like a piece of
poetry or art men to like symbolize things and culture
like it was obviously written as Um okay, I mean yeah,

(15:22):
there's a lot of a lot of misogyny in this book. Um, sorry, Billy, sorry,
there is a lot she rails against feminism later on,
and there's a lot of hatred because like Eve was
the one that ate the fruit, so the woman's fault
like the woman is like the tempter of man. It's
always their fault. That's that's very well tread evangelical ground,

(15:43):
although it is extra fun when it's a woman who
is hating on Yeah, and it's it's easier because this
whole chapter is about witches and which is are typically feminine. Um.
But she she does say that there's like wizards and warlocks,
but she just kind of ripped them all together. I
searched a second ago and I couldn't find any evidence
that she wrote books about Harry Potter. M So this

(16:03):
was written to us in six So from what I've read,
I have not seen Harry Potter mentioned in this. So
far fascinating, is boy that piste off a lot of
people who are otherwise very similar to Yeah, I sure did. Yeah,
So yeah, let's see she is. She she is very
concerned that that Satanism and witchcraft is basically a re

(16:25):
re invention of paganism um. And she finds this to
be incredibly disturbing and tying into a whole bunch of
like all like the woo woo spiritual stuff of the nineties.
It is also very concerned about She says millions are
now involved in some manner of ancient magical practice and rights,
ranging from walking on hot coals with no ill effect,
spooking knives through flesh without creating wounds, to reading from
blind eye sockets or from sighted eyes which have been masks,

(16:47):
to magically filling the cade teeth with gold, which I
don't know is that is that just dentistry? What is
she referring to? I have parents who have like gold fillings.
A lot of people that doesn't, um that's witchcraft. I
don't think that is witchcraft in a way that it
it makes money disappear. Also, it's I would I would

(17:10):
compare most dentistry to more like armed robbery. But sure
I haven't had great dentist experiences. Yeah, I mean I'm
not a big dentist. Dentists are bastards, would be my contention.
So yeah, she she She says that basically the sign
of the of the new uptick and magic around this
is a round to us and six is right up
to the panic was the sign of the end times.

(17:31):
Magic is the colossal revolt against God, whose satanic purpose
is to instill in fallen man the desire to be
a god. Did I say cool? That sounds rast. Yeah,
I mean that is that's also the Mormon faith. More
or less, I'm sure she has opinions about more. We're
gonna get to her opinions on the Irish Lader so good,
oh good, oh fantastic. Yeah, she has a lot of it.

(17:55):
That she's real, real punchy towards the Papists. So she
does down the difference that she she sees between black magic,
white magic, and what she calls a neutral magic. Um.
She says that the term black magic refers to the
direct league with Satan himself, often involving an actual blood
pact of allegiance, so that she she thinks that the

(18:15):
black magic is when you directly involve Satan, and white
magic is merely black magic in a in a in
a mask. It may it may deceptively employ the names
of Jesus, Christ, Got the Father, and the Holy Spirit magically,
along with other Bible phrases and the Christian terminology, but
this facade is covering its demonic character, so she thinks

(18:36):
that even though they may use this is interesting. Like
she she complains here that white magic uses the names
of God and Jesus and in its magic, but later
on in in the book, she complains that no magic
uses God's name, so that's a fun thing that we'll
talk about in the book. Um. And then and then
for neutral magic, um, she says, the devil shrouds himself

(18:57):
with nature. He is referred to he is. Oh boy,
he's that. That's that's her take on Wicca. Huh. He's
he's revered as mother nature and worship and a door
by which is under this deluding guy's neutral magic. Satan
just dresses up as leaves and it's how Yeah that
makes sense. Yeah, Wika only gets one mention in this actually, yeah,

(19:19):
but she's clearly like that's what she's talking about. I mean,
she talks about a lot of like she she uses
these terms very loose. She's got a lot of gradients. Yeah,
a lot of gradients. Yeah. Uh. She has a small
section on magical ceremonies and symbolism and kind of actually
lays out kind of how magic works in terms of
like using like like like this, like symbolic objects and

(19:41):
incantation and like calling upon powers, which is more like
traditional magic. Um. I find it more fun to call
on fake characters because it's very silly, which is more
of a more of a chaos magic thing. Yeah, um,
because the more silly again, I think, the more fun
it is. Then she does have a nice section on initiation,
rites and rituals, which gets into the really good Satanic

(20:03):
panic stuff. So she she she describes the you know,
a covid of of which is coming together to have
sex with the devil um usually maybe like symbolically with
like a male leader of a cult or something. But
then she says, when the initiation has been completed, the
devil worshiper takes part in a parody of the sacrament,

(20:23):
many times bringing in the bodies of children who who
whom they have murdered. Good. Yeah, that's the good ship.
That's the good ship. In America alone, there are over
one million missing children at any time. Many of these
children who are never found or seen again are victims
of satanically controlled perverts who do the grossest forms of evil,
but many more are the victims of witchcraft and incantations

(20:45):
and other rights. Oh that's great. These children who are
being stolen at an astonishingly at an astonishing rate each day,
maybe stolen from unbelievers homes, or they maybe children conceived
by the witches, themselves at regularly held sexual orgies, which
is there that that's an old one, that whiches are
having orgy babies and like not reporting them to Yeah,

(21:08):
the children are often offered up a sacrifice to the devil,
and some ceremonies that which has may boil the children's bodies,
mix them with lobes and substances, or they may consume
the children's bodies in the blood ritual parody of the
Lord's supper. So that's fun. And I do like that
this idea never went anywhere and is not and there's
not an important part of the USS politics now No, no, no,

(21:29):
of course not nope. Um, yeah, to hear it. That's
pretty good. That is that is that is fun. She
she does have a small section on a pagan music, magic, religion,
and sorcery are some of the means used by the
devil for the purpose of luring men away from the
Christian truth. The heavy metal, punk, hip hop and other

(21:52):
such abuse than confinding the Western European world. Okay, yeah, no, no, yeah,
I don't remember when it's actually gets quite more racist,
I'm not. It's counterpart of the hypnotic traits inducing inducing

(22:12):
drum rhythms employed throughout the whole world by the African
nations through the millions, which the insidious and evil mstr
the devil and setting them to sexual lust in Satan worship.
It is incredible that in two thousand six she's doing
the black people music is the Devil and she is
also like black which is very safe. It's incredible. Yeah,
it's uh yeah, unfortunate would be a word for it. Yeah,

(22:35):
well I is it? Is it time for an ad break?
I'm not looking at the close. Yeah, it's probably about
time for an ad break. Speaking of oh oh boy, yeah,
speaking of millions of missing children. Maybe some of them
are in these ads. We're back putting more children in

(22:56):
the cauldron. Oh we're recording. Sorry, anyway, back to back
to reading this magnificent two hundred page book by dr
I've read the first hundred pages because after that it's
just the same words, rewritten it again and again in
different in different combinations. Like it's just it's just the

(23:17):
same stuff. Um. So the next section is this is
this is and again I'm skipping over a lot of stuff,
but this is like the rough this is the most
fun sections of her stuff on magic and which is um.
Now we have her section called Halloween Satan's New Year. Um. She.
She starts by explanning, which is celebrate eight major festivals
or Sabbats each year. Halloween is the primary annual festival

(23:38):
commemorating Satan's New Year. Yeah. She then goes on to
explain that the Sabbat is a parody of the holy
Sabbath of God. Now, this is actually really interesting kind
of historical tidbits. So, yes, the words Sabbat in terms
of which is does come from does come from like
the Sabbath? Yeah, this actually probably comes from, uh, the

(24:00):
persecution of witches being heavily tied to anti Semitism in
the Middle Ages. So the first witch hunting book was
called The Hammer of the Witches um and it is Yeah,
And it is large port large portions of which are
plagiarized from a previous book called Hammer of the Jews.
The entire sections are copying, pasted, They just change the

(24:22):
word Jews to which you really had to put the
effort into plagiarism back then because your hand had not
like know, you're doing the whole thing yourself. This is
also where like a lot of like the pointy hat,
which stuff a lot of like the big nose with
like like like a really big nose, green oily skin like.
All the stuff kind of comes from anti Semitic tropes

(24:43):
because the persecution of Jews and the Semitism was heavily
tied to the persecusion of which is often one of
the same things. So when they would do so, then
when they would do Sabbath, they would they would say,
like they're doing like a Sabbat, they're going to they're
going to basically do like blood libel with children and
with the devil, which is what which is what a
lot of witches are about, like finding children and stuff,

(25:03):
because that it actually is tied to all the stuff. Now,
I'm not saying we have to cancel witchcraft, which is
totally fine. You could do all this stuff. It is
really cool, but the or a lot of the origins
of which hunting is tied to these antis anti Semitic tropes. Um.
So anyway, she she goes to describe different like pagan
like festivals throughout the years um with like like Yule
and all this kind of stuff, Midsummer blah blah blah

(25:24):
blah blah. And the last one, the eighth one is
October three one, or Halloween, because she calls the the
unholy Satanic New year. Um. She says that the rights
and ceremonies and which Halloween was originally observed, had their
origin among the Druids. In the course of time, there
were added to them some of the rights, particular to
the Roman festival of Panama, which is which presided over

(25:48):
their harvests. November first among the Druids was the beginning
of the year and the festival of the Sun God.
They lighted fires in honor of their false god. They
believe that October thirty one the end of the old year.
The Lord of Death, which she puts in apprent this
is the devil. Oh good, I'm really, I'm really again
very appreciative of how of how clear her writing is.
So the Lord of Death gather gathered together all the

(26:09):
souls of the dead who had been allowed to enter
the body of another human being. The belief is that
the root this belief is the root of the false
belief and reincarnation. Now I did not fact fact check
any of this, so I have no idea how how
accurate these these claims are. For what she views as
the origin of Halloween. But I think they're pretty funny. Um,
I know, like there is Halloween, like Halloween kind of
traditions are are There is like stuff around this time

(26:31):
through a lot of like old pagan stuff. Like the
modern notion of Halloween is pretty pretty modern, like the
whole like tricker treating thing and all. Like the way
we modernly think of Halloween is pretty it's pretty new,
because I mean there was of course, like all Hallow's
Day or like All Saints Day and the evil which
other people would do Shenanigans, which is what we currently
have as Halloweens. That's the day before All Saints Day.

(26:53):
All Saints Day is November one. Um, Like, you know,
the modern notion of Halloween is not it's not super old.
So I'm not quite sure how tied these old harvest
festivals really are to our modern Halloween. That's something I
could look into later, but I just picked up this
book and I'm reading right from it because that's easier.
So yeah, So she views Halloween now as like as

(27:14):
a pagan the pagan holiday. Um, this pagan festival, Halloween
is it broadly celebrated throughout the Christian nations as a
major holiday in America, Halloween has become a kind of
saturnalia for children, a night in which of the rules
are suspended and children venture out to demand streets and
certain reprisals against this dingy. Yeah, okay, I mean that

(27:35):
is a cooler way of looking at Halloween. If it
were literally the saturnality a children would actually take the
role of the parents and make decisions for the family
and demand Yeah, I mean parents would have to go
to school, kids would have to go to work. That
would actually be an incredible that would be. That would
be so many people would die in plane crash. It
would be especially if you enforced it, like you don't

(27:57):
have a choice your you are piloting the plane today
and a bunch of other kids are getting on it
to go on work. So the kids on air traffic
control they don't know what they're doing either. Forcing all
of the soldiers out of the various countries we've put
them in and having like the children of Special Forces
guys conduct raids. In the media, it is pretty easy
for a kid to use an a K, so I
think it is a rs even easier. Yeah, it would

(28:19):
be funny. Yeah, A lot of people are not going
to have very successful heart surgeries that but it will
be very funny in like a cosmic sense. Increasingly and alarmingly,
this celebration is assuming dreadful expressions of evil and harmful
acts are perpetuated against the children themselves. In serious proportions.
The treats are increasingly found to contain drugs, poisons, razor blades,

(28:40):
and needles, ground grass, many other harms. Maybe she meant
weed or something. Oh yeah, I didn't. I didn't even
think of that, because that's like needles and grass. Yeah,
oh no, grass, So yeah, she she, she does seem really,
really really thrilled with this idea that the people are
giving out drugs, which, man, what a dream I wish um. Halloween,

(29:04):
like Christmas, is also highly commercialized and it's part of
a major money making event for the merchants, okay breaking
in at the present time, second only to Christmas in
that vein. Halloween is the Satanic New Year, and as
a celebration of the devil and is he's using the
world today to gain greater acceptance of the perversity as

(29:24):
he continues to proclamate his doctrine of demons, so that
that is fun um. Then She has a very small
section on Old World Halloween traditions, which I'm not going
to read tons of because again I don't know how
verified these things are, but I am going to read
like and she goes on to talk about like how
like the laws against witchcraft and like the six dres

(29:44):
and other stuff. Um she was, she was, but I do.
I will read just the first sentence of the Old
World Halloween Traditions section, Irish Traditions Devilition Origin. Yeah, here
that Irish We're coming for you. I don't bring it
on various methods of finding the future and Halloween we're
accepted as a tradition. So that that's really all I'm

(30:06):
gonna say, because I just love the line Irish Traditions
Devilish in Richard. Yeah, I mean that's I think every
Irish person I know would agree with that. That's really
all you gotta say. Yeah, oh man, it is it is. Wow,
what a what a book. It just keeps going on.
So she talks about like the basically like the people's
different Honestly, this section is not even tons about Halloween

(30:27):
and more about different people's belief in witchcraft. So like
she goes through like all the laws against witchcraft in Britain.
She goes against like she goes she she talks around
the witch trials in America, um saying that there were witches.
She doesn't talk about all the like, come on you coward. Yeah, uh,

(30:48):
it's it's pretty she she has. It's a little bit
of I I am actually gonna read some of the
stuff on on on America. Belief in witchcraft was common
to the early settlers in America. But which is we're
charged with to make king wex and images of their
victims and causing their illnesses by sticking pins in the image,
or making by sticking pins in the image, or making
them waste away by melting the images before the fire.

(31:10):
This belief is held by the peoples of Africa as
well as other pagan people in a and widely varieting
in widely varying civilizations and localities. The early settlers do
not initiate this belief in America, but found it already
to be believed in the American Indians who populated this country.
So that that's her little section on that which is

(31:31):
I don't know, hashtag problematic, Yeah, would I would call
that slightly problemat I would call it slightly problems You
know what's not problematic, Garrison, the products and services that
are gonna hopefully sell candy to kids. We we guarantee
that less than a third of them are responsible for
the disappearance of a million children, million children. That's the

(31:52):
behind the bastards guaranteed less than a third of our
sponsors who are undocumented too, well, yeah, but which is
making them much more. It's likely much more. But anyway,
here's the ads, here's the ads. Ah, we're back, we
are all right. Bring it home, Garrison, bring it home.
So yeah, she she does mention that the devil likes

(32:12):
to withhold the fact of existence of witchcraft, like the
devil likes to height. So most people kind of live
in the dark. Um, she says. Although the imps which
frolic on Halloween now are small children raping on doors
and gleefully receiving treats. Rapping on doors, wrapping doors, not
raping on doors. That's a very different, very different holiday. Well,

(32:34):
who knows, that might be Canadian things. That's Canadian Halloween,
the night which was formally accepted as the time when
witches met and demons in the form of ghosts and
ghouls who were likely to wander about has come to
be regarded a's a time of merrymaking and frolic. The
majority of people are so engaged and are unaware of
they satanic consultation of the magic oracles and the Covin's

(32:56):
and groves on this night. So consay, that's not how
you say it, Well, that's how I say. You just
you just got COVID on the brain. COVID is what
you call a coven that meets during COVID because they're
not properly socially distancing. All right, there we go. But
basically she thinks that basically these all of the witches

(33:19):
and magic doors are meeting, all these ghouls and Halloween
and people are unaware of this, extremely concerned that children
might like walk in on a ceremony and it didn't
get murdered. Very funny when you realize like how isolated
these people are from the real world because they've never
just like stepped outside during Halloween, not really like especially
I mean Halloween the two that's in six. I was

(33:41):
eighteen then, so maybe I'm wrong, but I think there was.
It wasn't huge then, Like it's gotten kind of smaller
every year. The biggest fear back then was like traffic accidents. Yeah,
that's always the biggest. That's like the number one thing
every year. Thinking back on it, my parents shouldn't have
let me be a ninja as often as they did,
But I made it through. Yeah, it's like we're saying

(34:02):
so many the same words again that the most of
the book is. But Halloween Satan's New Year. Halloween has
a long and dark history of devilish traditions, which has
survived both Christianity and the science for two thousand years,
is to be considered the chief festival for the worship
of the devil, which begins his new year. Halloween and witchcraft,
or the means by which the devil seeks to reintroduce
the worship of old false gods by synthesis of polytheism

(34:24):
and feminism. Yeah, that's what Halloween issos and feminism, two
sides of the same devil coin. I love to worship
multiple gods and respect women. Just really, that is my
that's my way to spend a night with my ghoul friends. Incredible,
there's also a real here's a real here's a real

(34:45):
good quote. Um, there is no question of the existence
of modern witchcraft. It has been admitted. It has been
admitted of by thousands upon thousands worldwide and growing rapidly
in the Western countries, particularly America. The word of God
makes it undeniably clear that witchcraft is a real It
has existed at least six thousand years, and it still
exists today. Oh good, Yeah, that's good. Six thousand years

(35:06):
going good. Good for happy six thousands. I just like that,
she add so that it's a better around for all
these six happy six thousands, six six thousand years witchcraft on.
I'm guessing because it's the new year, this is also
the birthday of witchcraft. I mean also just the birthday
of the world. Because if the world as we know
was if if the world as we know it was

(35:26):
born when Eve ate the fruit and was Adam and
Eve went into the greater world, if that's like the
birth of Dawn, which has been here since the very beginning,
well since the beginning of like the fallen world, because
you have to assume that they had a hundred years
or so beforehand. It's real unclear this it depends on
what It depends on what denomination you're in and what
kind of theological viewpoint you have on whether there were

(35:47):
people outside the garden there as people who believe that
some people just don't um. That is up for debate
among different congregations. Yeah. So, and and the other thing
that she's really concerned with is that witchcraft is making
more people have sex because she she thinks that most
of witchcraft is practicing sexual orgies on quote every continent
of the world. Um. And that's what that's what that's

(36:09):
that's what black masses to her, So she is she
is very concerned. I mean, there's are in sometimes in
Black masses sexual elements to them that I hope. So
that is that it does sound much better. But she
she thinks that as another one of the main catalysts
of her being fearful of of paganism and witchcraft is
that is making more people have sex. Um. And again

(36:32):
she reiterates that this is just a new form of paganism,
saying that Satan's current day revival of paganism it's a
sure sign of Christ's second coming, and it's it's pretty good.
And this this is the section where she where she
complains that magic doesn't use the Bible, even though previously
she said that white magic does because some magic, some
which is drawn other false religions such as the Kabbala,

(36:53):
uh Sufism, or various Eastern religions, but never the Holy Bible,
the Word of God, or is employed in their beliefs
or practices, except in a paradoxical counterfeit imaginative magic, rites
and rituals performed in the in the Covin's in the
initiation of the converts and their celebrations of Halloween and
other Satanic spots. So that's that's that's that's what she

(37:15):
thinks I mean. But honestly, I'm pretty sure it's it's
like the Shabbas. It's the Sabbath, it's the Sabba. I've
I've heard Covin and Sabbat in the starr. Alright, alright,
let's have let's have a debate everyone everyone at no,
don't don't do that. Um. She also claims that this

(37:35):
is this is this is very exciting. Several universities in
America offer a bachelor's degree in magic. I was unaware. Oh,
I would love a bat unaware of because this will
read now, well, this will make me consider going to college.
Now a bachelor's degree? Is that A a B A
or is that a BS like? Is that like is

(37:56):
it a Bachelor of Arts or of science? And really
that's a that's a key question about the school match
match magic is both in our na science. So yeah,
well that's why I'm wondering. And she doesn't say, she
doesn't say what university she claims does this. I mean,
I've always wanted to open a witchcraft store, so I
may go back to get a b A in or
a BS in witchcraft along with my m F A M.

(38:21):
What's the business thing? What they don't I don't want
to fill it in with the acronym from the business degree.
Whatever you get. I don't know. We I dropped out
of college. Garrison hasn't gone. Yeah, I went. I went
to film school. That doesn't count though it doesn't. It
absolutely does not. Um. Yeah. And then in this last
section she really ties modern witchcraft to the rise of

(38:43):
feminism UM, specifically starting in the sixties. She says the
pre eminence of the goddess and witchcraft hasn't made an
attractive to some feminists. In ninety eight, which the woman's
International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell as an incredible acronym great
acronym Amazing was founded as a political protist group who
who per purport, who purportedly justified their name as mere

(39:05):
jest ah. It is what a what a good name
which women international quite an exciting, quite an exciting back
when we could have fun and activism. That does sound amazing.
Many of the members of this feminist movement are unaware
of the cultural movement within the political and many are
are more and many more are entirely unaware of the

(39:27):
spiritualist movement within the cultural moment. So a whole bunch
of weird stuff around, how which is are using political
feminism to inject cultural feminism, to inject cultural witchcraft into
the mainstream. This is all what the goal of feminism is,
um so yeah, and she has this whole whole pair
of feminist feminist witches. Feminist witchcraft is at present the

(39:51):
most rapidly growing segment in the Witchcraft revival. And it
is from the spiritual core at the heart of the
feminist movement that the political and philosophical women's rights tenants
as a whole emerge. To name what to name one
such tenant the rights to abortion, or more correctly phrased,
the might the rights to murdered children not yet born.
This this coincides with the which is present ritual practice

(40:11):
of murdering children already born. So she thinks that abortion
is just a way for which is to speed up
the ritual process. Yeah, that is what that is her
that that's her main bomb at the That sounds that
sounds accurate. Yeah, um, she doesn't. Just have a great
section describing the different tools which is used. Um, and

(40:34):
and an athlete. A phallic penis symbol of the liberated, unbridled,
unlawful sex represents the power of self will. It's pretty
pretty good. Sexual symbols are common in witchcraft, and which is,
are unrepressed by God's mortal law in their sexuality. Their

(40:55):
use of sex symbols is rooted in paganism. So again,
she's very scared that people are having sex and enjoying it,
specifically women. She's very scared that women are having sex
and enjoying That sounds right. I hate it when the
people pushing this line are themselves women, But it does.
I mean, that's a huge part of the evangelical propaganda movement. Yeah,

(41:16):
see a bunch of ship, Margaret Atwood wrote. You know,
now she gets to describe some some of the coolest
parts here. A typical which is Sabbath celebration will have
a sky clad parenthesis, nude penthis which is gathered in
an isolated place, a grove of trees, if possible, around
an altar which holds an icon or statuary of a
false goddess and or God's, and candles for fire, a

(41:39):
child's for water or wine, a container of salt and
a container for earth rather than the bread, and a
sword or a wand which sounds amazing to just have
a whole bunch of naked which is in the forest
around a ritual altar fire. This sounds like the best
best time ever. It does sound like a good Saturday night.
This does sound like it goes who knows, we can?

(42:02):
We can, we can get wild? So yeah. She goes
in to describe what she thinks magical rituals are and
different things that she could do again. She is very concerned.
Ritual sex is engaged into intensify the magical power raised
in the cone of power Wheels of the coffin Witches
is symbolized with the code shaped hats see the typical
pictures of which is in literature. Are you fucking kidding me?

(42:28):
Because nobody wearing one of those hats has ever gotten fucked.
I feel confident say I wear that hat. All right,
Let's let's move forward, Garrison. That's not fair, allegedly, let's
move forward. The Cone of Power. M hmm. Yeah, the
Cone of Power is incredible after raising, and it is phallic,

(42:49):
so it must be for fucking after the raising and
release of the Code of Power, a ritual COVID communication
with cakes and wine which the priestess or priest has
consecrated by dipping into the childe touching the cakes with
other unholy tools are passed on from a kiss from
the priestess to the priest. Um. Basically, this just sounds
like a fun time. Um. Yeah, but I do love

(43:11):
the Cone of Power, which I have not read in
any other magic book. No, I have not ever heard of.
I've read a decent amount and I've never heard of
the Cone of Power. Yeah, that feels like pure her.
That feels like somebody who's deeply sexually frustrated. It's kind
of shape like a dick and being like, that's got
to be push poor lady for her. Then she she

(43:35):
has a small section on Satanism, particularly like the iron
Ran the version of Satanism. So I'm not even gonna
get into that. I find that boring and it doesn't matter,
and and and and she even says that these Satanists
don't believe in an actual devil a little. They just evil.
So I'm not even gonna bother with this section because
it's just talking about the dumb iron Rand version of Satanism.

(43:57):
And I don't care about that. Um, if you like it,
I mean whatever. It has anarchistic stuff kind of, but
it's also very randy and and it has it has
a lot of like, not great stuff either. I don't
I it's fine and all it all is more effort
than I want to put into thinking about the universe.
And then I think, I think this this could be.
I think this is our last, our last paragraph favorite.

(44:17):
This section is called titled the End of the Witches, Witches,
our children of the Devil, the end of the Witches. Sorry,
there's the witches, definitely before their adulterous altars, at their
depraved spots where they eat and drink and play their
gross music and sing and dance, naked and shameless and corrupt,

(44:42):
and defile themselves and desecrate God's holy Sabbath, shall surely
be accomplished by God, who will put them, who'll put
them to death and cut off their souls forever among
his children. So that's that's the end of the Witches. Everybody,
we're gonna be dancing naked shamelessly, like having like an

(45:02):
undeniably good time being able to dance naked and listening
to gross music and singing, what a time. Sounds like
the ideal weekend and then and then God will put
us to death and then does sound a little bit
like our last weekend. But it was very cold, so
people were wearing Yeah, so very happy with the weather.
That is that is that is most of that is
most of the good parts of the book. Again, it

(45:24):
gets two hundred pages. Yeah, it's a nice breezy read.
Grab it you know this weekend. It's only ten bucks
on Amazon. What a deal? What a steal? Yeah, And
it is fun that she she does, Um, there is
one there is one section where she like outlines what
all she thinks like magic is like all like all
of like the different groups. She puts them into a

(45:44):
really nice little package. But I don't think I can
find that because again there's two hundred pages and I
did not mark off that section. But I think I
think we decently got the gist of the main main
parts of this book. Um. Again, most of it is
just her talking about Jesus. Yeah, that sounds right, and
and and the Christian soul. Um. But the one which
which is of indoor section is pretty good and honestly

(46:06):
worth the read. So that is my first book report
for it could happen here. All of you Satan's New
Year beloved children, enjoyed this this this book and are
are properly warned about the dangers of witchcraft which is
coming to make your children have a pretty red time.
You're gonna dance in the woods listening to gross music.
So I hope everyone on this Halloween danced in the

(46:28):
woods listening to gross music. I hope those of you
who climactically could did so naked. Um. I hope none
of you got hit by cars while dressed as Ninja's
and I I also hope that most of you weren't
out trick or treating, because I think the average age
of our listeners is sometime in the mid twenties. That
would be a little bit of a little awkward, a
little bit weird, but hey whatever, it's your life, your thing,

(46:49):
do you think. Hello everyone, Garrison here just going to
be adding in one quick correction for our Halloween Satan's
New Year episode. So towards the end we made some
assumptions about the the Code of Power which were apparently incorrect.
So the Code of Power does actually seem to be
a thing inside ritual magic Um, but particularly Wicka. So

(47:11):
I'm not super familiar with Wicka. This is not this
is not my system of choice, so I was unaware
that this is actually a thing. But apparently apparently it is.
It is. It is a method for centering or directing
or like raising energy. Um, well it is. It is
less tied to the witches had though, so that part
is is more um made up. I cannot find much

(47:32):
tying the Cone of Power directly to like the cone shape,
which is hats. This is mainly an invention of of
of Doctor Billy from at least from from what I
can tell. But apologies for assuming that the Cone of
Power was completely made up and when in fact it
is a part of Wicka. So so sorry, sorry to
the Wickans and the more proper witches. For that, for that,

(47:54):
for that gross assumption on mine and Robert's part. Anyway,
this wraps up our Spooky week of content. I hope
you had a good Halloween. This episode should be releasing
on Halloween itself, so I hope you are having or
had a good time, and hopefully you were able to
celebrate Halloween Satan style just like it was designed to.

(48:17):
So goodbye everybody, see you on the other side, and
hopefully we can do Spooky Week again next year. Good Bye.
After thirty years, it's time to return to the halls

(48:38):
of West Beverly High and hang out at the peach pit.
On the podcast nine O two one, OMG joined Jenny
Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit
series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh. From the
very beginning, we get to tell the fans all of
the behind the scenes stories to actually happen, so they
know what happened on camera obviously, but we can tell

(48:58):
them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get
all the juicy details of every episode that you've been
wondering about for decades. As nine O two one oh,
super Fan and radio host Sissany sits in with Jenny
and Tory too reminisce, reflect and relive each moment, from
Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates,
you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the

(49:21):
entire ten years that we filmed that show, and you
remember absolutely nothing of the ten years that we filmed
that show. Listen to nine O two one OMG on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall as his
male life and death. I thank these people of planning

(49:42):
to kill Dr King. On April four, Dr Martin Luther
King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal
named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to
the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison.
Case closed right, James hyl Ray was upon for the
official story. The authorities would parade all we found a gun,

(50:06):
the James old raybald in Birmingham that killed Dr King,
Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One
of the problems that came out when I got the
Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far
as I was concerned did not match the circumstances. This
is the MLK Tapes. The first episodes are available now.

(50:28):
Listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen with joined me
the host of Eating Wall Broke podcast While I eat
a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities
over a meal they once eight when they were broke.
Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess

(50:50):
of comfin Asia kinnik and Asia. This is the professor.
We're here on Eating Wall Broke and today I'm gonna
break down my meal that got me through the time
when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on
the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever
you get your podcasts. Welcome to it could happen here

(51:13):
a podcast about well, mostly it's about how things are bad,
but it is also sometimes about what you can do
about it. And today we have two people who are
in fact doing things about it. So with me, we
have a Bro and Janine who are part of the
Common Humanity Collective, which is a mutual a group out
of California um clogen Club. Bro how how are how

(51:36):
are you t doing today? Doing well? Thank you? Doing
pretty good? Thank you. So yeah, we wanted to have
you too on to talk about basically your mutual aid
work and then also the sort of political aspect of
that because I know about something YouTube and wanting to
talk about that. I've ever read the media coverage of it,
in it does not ever make it into the interviews.

(51:58):
So yeah, I guess, I guess to start. So you
two started doing mutual aid stuff with with this group,
specifically around the beginning of the pandemic, as I understand,
you know what, can you walk us through how it
started and what you guys are up to? Absolutely, and
I think it's interesting to trace out the different stages
of this work because it's very much bean a kind

(52:20):
of evolution. So let me go back to the very
very early days, and this is really the first day
of lockdown UM in the Bay area where we live.
I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley and UM. As
COVID was spreading from the east coast to the west,
we knew that things would quickly get shut down in California,
UM and there was someone in my lab, a good

(52:43):
friend named h Yvonne and she and I just quickly
realized that this pandemic was going to hit UM. Given
the sort of crumbling public health infrastructure, the poorest among us,
the elderly, this possessed UM, these people would be vulnerable.

(53:03):
And as PPE just completely disappeared from store shelves, these
people UM, especially those living in cramped housing conditions, those
with essential work, UH, those in nursing homes just would
not have access to UM the tools they needed to
protect themselves from this disease. UM. And in the very

(53:24):
early days, when we thought that the stuff was transmitted
via surfaces, UM, all of the attention was focused on
handwashing hand sanitizer. The problem was you couldn't even find
hand sanitizer anywhere. So here we were in our labs
and UM, you know, our few moths weren't being used
and everyone was getting sent home. UM and UH we

(53:46):
realized that we could pull ethanol from the scientific re
agent supply chains and stir up some hand sanitizer ourselves
in lab and distribute it UM just two homeless shelters
to people who needed it in the city, etcetera. UM.
So this began as a very sort of low key
quiet under the cover UM effort and UM. You know,

(54:12):
we didn't have a name. We didn't even know what
mutual aid was. I think we were just following our
basic instincts UM. And fast forward a week or two
and suddenly a whole lot of people got involved. UM.
We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure which started sort of
self assembling. UM. Lots of people came to find ways

(54:34):
of getting the sanitizer to everyone who needed it. In
the meantime, we realized that as the demand was enormous,
we need to come up with ways of procuring the
supplies UM and mixing it at scales that we didn't
have to turn anyone down. So we called upon lots
of different labs on campus and asked him if they
could do this, if they could shift some of their

(54:55):
discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals. UM. And you know again,
within a few weeks after that, we were mixing hundreds
of gallons of hand sanitizer and delivering it to absolutely
everyone who needed it. My phone was just getting UH
called NonStop from the moment I woke up to when

(55:16):
I went to sleep, But I was forgetting to eat.
I was barely sleeping. UM, just responding to these cries
for help from all over the Bay area UM, and
in that time we met so many people UM and
we figured out how to do this work efficiently and effectively.
But also UM as the attention shifted from surface transmission

(55:38):
to aerosol transmission UM, everyone started realizing that, in fact,
masks were probably the primary way in which we protect
ourselves from the coronavirus UM. And that's when a good
friend of ours, Chris, who was a PhD student and
he's now a post a brilliant, brilliant creative guy, came
up with ways of actually making sub mic on masks

(56:01):
out of just UH supply chains that weren't getting tapped UM.
So initially these were shop towels, and then he started
looking at NANI fiber material UM and he found ways
of for around sixty cents making a mass that was
basically the quality of an N ninety five mass that
could be made in just a few minutes at home. UM.
And so we suddenly just integrated that whole effort into

(56:25):
our own and started just recruiting volunteers, sharing all of
our resources and UM this large assembly network of these
little pods situated all across the Bay Area, each of
them with the team lead, with a little army, a
battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers were just making

(56:47):
thousands of these mass every week, which we were then
distributing through the the distribution infrastructure that we had uh,
sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic. And
so we found ourselves and this was still very much
at a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks
or surgical masks and shops, we found ourselves astonishingly being

(57:07):
the primary source of this essential ppe for tens and
tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area. And
as we werecovered in the early days by the Chronicle
in the l A Times, loads of people started joining
the volunteer network, we started getting donations, and uh, that
was the earlier stage of what we did, and I'll

(57:29):
pass it on to Jinine to talk about what we
did next. Yeah, So, kind of, as UM Common Humanity
Collective was working on this project, m up Bar, myself
and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a
Democratic Socialists of America or East by d S a
side of what was happening UM. And through this project,
our intent was to UM, have a little bit more

(57:52):
political education and think really critically about how we could
make this true mutual aid, whichever and I have learned
is really really difficult to do offecially under capitalism. UM.
And so, because we started this project around December, so
kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to
make it accessible for people who were really COVID cautious UM.

(58:13):
And so we would assemble kits of masks in a
park with a couple of folks outside, and then we
would drive these kits to people's homes and get on
zoom UM. And we would have a breakout room for
people to learn how to make masks. UM. People oftentimes
people who had only come to the build a couple
of times started teaching new folks how to build these masks.

(58:34):
And in the other room, we were doing readings. UM.
We were reading you know, Pannic Cook and Jane macklew
e side by side talking about you know, trade unions
and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing. UM
A bar do you want to talk about Rosa Luxemburg
a little bit? Yeah, I mean it was an amazing thing.
We were trying to sort of expand our own political consciousness,

(58:58):
and we did things like host a three part series
just discussing, examining, analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxembourg UM.
And we had huge participation. And this was at a
time where in our d SA chapter UM and many
of the different committees, people were panicking because no one
was showing up UM. And yet we found an enormous

(59:22):
number of people joining our effort in these discussions were
so energetic and so enthusiastic UM. And you know, this
was a lonely time. It was a difficult time, and
people seemed to find something and what we were doing.
What do you think about that, Jim? Yeah, and I
think you know, not only were people coming and participating, right,
we had high school students, We had people who had

(59:43):
dedicated the pandemic to reading political theory, right, and so
you have this huge breath of knowledge. We have more
liberal people joining. We have like anarchists and communists right,
like all in this space that are actually talking together.
And what was so empowering to me was everyone felt
like they could speak. We had people that were really
introverted UM then in the beginning didn't talk at all,

(01:00:04):
slowly start to open up. We had high schoolers asking
really incredible questions, right, like is revolution even possible right now? Um?
And kind of getting into some of this. And I
think one of the most impactful things was that we
had these calls from seven to nine at night, and
after that we had what we called late night, where
folks would stay on till like twelve at night and

(01:00:24):
talk to each other. And in this time of like
isolation and depression, I don't think anyone that I know
at least was having a good time in December, January, February, right,
people were coming together on Zoom and actually staying on
Zoom after what we were doing to feel some type
of camaraderie, to feel like they were part of a community, um.
And we were able to actually create that space. And

(01:00:46):
I think that that was something that to me was
really incredible. UM. And I think, you know, framing this
also from the George Floyd protests that happened over the
summer and thinking you know, more about abolition, right, thinking
more about community building. I don't think you can truly
or I can't imagine the future without the prison industrial
complex that doesn't involve communities of care, that doesn't involve

(01:01:08):
giving people both the resources and the like love that
they need to be able to not be pushed into
situations where they have to commit crimes, and also having
accountability amongst each other. Um. Not to mention, right, this
work is really really hard. People burn out. Like we
are exhausted to be able to create a space where
everyone cares for each other. We're checking in with each
other where you know, in the beginning of this virtual

(01:01:30):
Mask Builds, I think, you know, a bar, myself and
a couple other folks were doing the majority of the
work and by the end we were doing none of it.
We had like been able to reallocate those tasks, we
had been able to develop leaders, and we had essentially
organized ourselves out of a job, which to me is
like the organizer's dream, right, Like that's what you really
want to see happen um. And so that's kind of

(01:01:52):
what was happening on the production side of the Mask Builds.
On the distribution side, again, we're thinking, how can we
actually make this true mutual aid um And so we
started to partner with Tank Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, which
is one of the main tenant groups in the Bay
Area UM and working with them to go to food
banks right, places where people are generally low income, where
they might not be able to have the resources to

(01:02:14):
get masks, and we're distributing masks asking them, are you
having trouble with your rent or your landlord? Right? The
goal in this is to give people the tools to
organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent to them,
especially with an impending fiction moratorium right. And so UM
we learned a lot through this. We went to a
lot of different food banks we found um you know,

(01:02:37):
some of them were places where people primarily spoke Cantonese
and Mandarin, and so we you know, used our networks
again that we had created through this project, these relationships
of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin and we're
willing to come out um and talk with folks. UM.
We found people that spoke Spanish that we're willing to
come out and talk with folks. And we started to
develop relationships at these food banks where we were able

(01:02:58):
to distribute masks to people, talk to them, understand what
issues they were having, UM, and invite them to come
to meetings where they could actually get their resources to
try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing abroad.
You have more to add on the mass project. Yeah,
I think it's worth saying that. Um, we're all very busy.
I'm a PhD student. While we were doing this work, Um,

(01:03:22):
you know, in d s A, I was teaching a
class and I was doing research, and Janine is a
extremely busy union organizer. Um. And normally, you know, we'd
come home after work and be absolutely exhausted. Um. And
this was very tiring, but we felt somehow energized, We
felt driven to do this, and we found that lots

(01:03:43):
of the other people who participated were also busy with
their jobs and yet would make time to do this.
And Um, in terms of our actual practice, in terms
of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution
aspect of our mutual aid, there was a con an
interplay between what we were reading and what we were practicing.

(01:04:04):
So as we began working with this Radical Tenant Organizing
Group tank that Jinin mentioned, whose aim is to give
tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions
in order to use tools such as rent strikes to
rebalance power between themselves and their landlords and real estate companies, etcetera. UM.

(01:04:25):
During that time, during our mask builds, we would then
go and read articles in newspaper clippings from you know,
early twentieth century, when there were examples of you know,
twenty year old factory girls in Lower Manhattan organizing groups
of apartment buildings to go on rent strike, you know,
ten thousand families in one case, to go on rent strike.

(01:04:46):
These incredible, deeply inspiring stories UM where people uh suddenly
became uh subjects of history and not merely objects. And
I think part of what sustained our own work in
this group was some uh similar feeling and UM at
the same time when we were trying to imagine future

(01:05:09):
beyond capitalism, we were looking at moments when that future
seemed within reach, and so we were studying, for example,
Paris in ninety, which is a moment within many people's
living memory, all although not our own, UM, and studying
how it was that these protests began with the student
movement and then spilled out into these massive strikes and

(01:05:33):
all the sort of self activity that emerged from that,
and there was such a wide, wide breath of people
who came to these builds. There were people as young
as high schoolers, were also much older people in their
seventies and eighties. And when we were having this discussion,
someone who lived through the sixties and witnessed these things
very up close came to talk about Paris in nineteen

(01:05:54):
sixty eight and shared the wealth of his own experience.
And again, all of this was driving what we were
actually doing with our hands, what we were doing on
the streets, what we were doing at these food bank lines, UM.
And so it was very critical that everything we were
reading was somehow feeding into our practice. Yeah, and I think,

(01:06:16):
you know, we had over a hundred people participate in
these masks builds, and I think one of the things
that I really took away from this is again, people
were craving that community, They were craving relationships, and people
came back because they felt that in this group UM.
And that translated also as we transitioned, right, we had
built a culture of friendship and of caring for each

(01:06:38):
other that people wanted to continue working on this, They
wanted to continue to be a part of this project.
As we transitioned UM to building air purifiers, right as
the UM you know, vaccines became more prevalent masks were
still being worn, but to a lesser degree UM and
we started turning to fire season UM as these disasters

(01:06:58):
right continued to strike with actually with climate change only
getting worse and worse. One of the things that I
think is really powerful about mutual aid and is really
powerful about communities is that these disasters have been happening
and continue to happen at a greater and greater frequency.
And I think what I've learned from looking at you know,
the heat waves that recently took many lives across the

(01:07:18):
Pacific Northwest, the um really really freezing temperatures that happened
in Texas about a year ago, and especially COVID, is
that you know, the government, local or federal is not
stepping in to help people. Billionaires are not really stepping
in to help people. It's really only communities and networks
of relationships that are keeping people alive. And the only

(01:07:40):
way you know, that we're going to get through this
is through having those relationships, through understanding where people need support.
And we started to do this with the distribution of masks,
right is build relationships with community members in you know,
fruit Vale and Oakland, which is not a large not
a place that many people from d s A or
from TANK are living currently, right and starting to build

(01:08:03):
relationships with people that do need these resources in times
of crisis, UM, so that we know where we can
plug in and also build relationships amongst our fellow organizers
so that we can support each other through these disasters. UM.
And so as we transitioned to the air purifiers, we started,
you know, thinking about everything we have learned from the

(01:08:23):
Mass project and kind of making that even bigger and better.
And how can we you know, continue to take what
we've learned and change it and turn it into something
really really incredible. And UM, we you know Chris who
Abar mentioned before, who came up with the masks, came
up with a really incredible way to make air purifiers

(01:08:44):
that like ridiculously efficient. UM. Is really really useful, especially
for wildfire smoke, but also for just people with asthma.
There's a lot of environmental pollution in the Bay area, right.
These things can be used UM year round. And we
began to build these air purifiers out of you know,

(01:09:04):
box fans and he a filters UM with a shroud
with weather stripping right to make the air like only
go through the fan to make it extremely efficient, and
UM started to think about how can we make this
like community aspect even bigger at least this is what
I was thinking of because I had started to realize,
right I think the only thing that we can rely
on is each other right now, especially UM. And so

(01:09:27):
we started bringing in a bunch of different groups to
come to these builds. So we have you know, east
By d s A. We started working really closely with
Sunrise and developed a level of trust and reciprocity in
that relationship that has you know, continued to be really
beneficial to us UM and really helpful. We met amazing
people that came out. You know, they've helped fundraise for
US as our funding has gotten really really low because

(01:09:50):
these air purifiers are not cheap those they are much
cheaper than commercially available, but we're you know, giving them
to folks for free because we want this to be
mutual aid UM and so working with Sunrise, we're working
with Asians for Black Lives UM, Berkeley, Mutual Aid MASK
Oakland UM who both came out to our builds but

(01:10:12):
also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno and to
places that had you know, a qu I s of
five hundred right when fire season was so bad, when
the smoke there was just like unlivable. UM. We were
able to work with them to distribute these air purifiers
where people really needed them most. UM. We were able
to you know, continue to work with tank UM. Some

(01:10:33):
folks from the i w W came out. We were
able to distribute these air purifiers to the Sagorata Land Trust,
which is UM a land trust that is run by
Indigenous women UM and is working on essentially giving indigenous
land back to Indigenous people. We were able to distribute
with critical resistance and amazing abolitionist groups started by Ruth

(01:10:56):
Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis in Oakland were to distribute
UM to s r oh UM, a group that is
working with UM low income Chinese immigrants in San Francisco
who are generally living in single family homes right with
really bad air quality. UM and work with like all
of these different groups, you know, Berkeley Mutual Aid. We're

(01:11:18):
pulling in people from just countless networks to come and
build air purifiers together. UM. And we had you know,
an ex black panther talking to someone from Sunrise from
San Francisco, right, Like these just wild connections, um that
are happening at these builds of people who are deeply
political and people who are barely understanding, um, you know,

(01:11:41):
what socialism means, but are wanting to come out and
do something for their community. Um. And through these relationships
and networks again, like we're able to hang out after
the builds, people are able to enjoy themselves. Everyone said
they were having a really fun time. Even though we
were like literally doing work on a Saturday, people were
still like, this is so fun. We had you know,

(01:12:03):
people baking bread and like fruit tarts and cheesecakes and
bringing it. We had so we had music. It was
like a very fun atmosphere and environment. And despite the
fact that you know, it was physical labor and it
was taxing and a lot of times it was on
hot days. Um, people stayed for you know, four hours
to help do this and to do this work because

(01:12:24):
they cared, because they wanted to see, um, you know,
what they could be able to do. And they also
I think started to build relationships. UM. I know, you know,
countless people talked to a bra and I and had
no idea you know, we've known each other for less
than a year now, UM, and they thought we'd known
each other our whole lives. And I think that that
really speaks, right. I think that speaks so much to

(01:12:44):
the relationships that we've been able to build through this.
And you know, I think a Bra and I have
met countless people and have developed like an incredible community
through this work. UM. That definitely helps me keep going.
I would definitely not be able to continue to do
this work if I couldn't, you know, call Librara. But
nine PM and we talked for three hours and we complain,

(01:13:05):
but we also talked through like what are we doing
and how can it be better? And how can we,
you know, get through this roadblock UM. And I saw
that in countless places UM. As we moved to our
own distribution, so we're partnering with these organizations, but we're
also doing our own distribution UM, which I think is
like a huge experiment and how to actually do mutual aid,
which UM is something that you know, when we talked

(01:13:28):
to the organizers in our circles, we weren't finding answers too,
and so we kind of realized like we just have
to kind of try and figure this out. But we
would go out and do these distributions and afterwards, you know,
have lunch with people and talk to each other, like
what could we do better? What are we doing wrong?
Is this mutual aid? Like these are questions we're having
right after we've been standing in the sun talking to
people for three hours. Like the dedication of the people

(01:13:49):
involved in this like of our said, most of us
are working forty fifty sixty hour weeks and yet we're
dedicating constant time during the week and at least one
day every weekend to either distribut U Shoan or a
build UM is incredible. I feel like incredibly honored to
be able to work with the people that we've been
working with UM. But in our distribution, we started thinking about,

(01:14:12):
you know, how can we invite some of these people
to come to our builds. Maybe that's the reciprocity. I
think true mutual aid is really about believing that the
people that were distributing to can also give back to us,
rather than seeing them as like helpless UM. And so
we continue to do some of our distributions with tank
Um and actually we were able to do some of

(01:14:33):
these distributions in a way that helped new buildings who
are just starting to form tenant councils UM, you know,
use the air purifiers as a way to open up
conversation with some of these people and say, hey, you're
building is being organized. Remember how the fire season was
last year, right, Like, this is something that you can use,
and let's talk more about other tools that we can
use coming together to really fight for changes that we

(01:14:54):
can't necessarily make on our own. UM. So that was happening,
and then we also decide to look at data around
where in Oakland or asthma rates really high, where in
Oakland is air pollution really bad? And where in Oakland
is it primarily lower income folks? Right? We want to
be giving these air purifiers to people who can't generally
afford a hundred to two hundred dollar air purifier. UM.

(01:15:17):
And so East Oakland was one of those places. And
again through this network that we had built through the
Mask build, we had a connection in East Oakland someone
that had UM that is part of East Bay ds A, right,
that had done a lot of community organizing, and someone
that was actually able to, you know, send out an
email to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air
purifiers and so we had people posting up at her house. UM.

(01:15:41):
So you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that
was not our own, which in some ways, UM, you know,
there's a lot of complications to that. UM. But we
were also able to do it at someone's house that
we knew. UM. And our goal in this was to
get people to come to our builds to make air
purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends,
so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods, right,

(01:16:02):
so that they can then start to own that distribution
and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it. Um.
And so we also kind of door knocked around the
neighborhood talking to people about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke,
about coming out to a build, you know, about why
this is really important, um, why we need people to

(01:16:23):
engage in this project. UM. And we distributed almost a
hundred air purifiers that day, I think folks in that
community and after that that week UM, so we distributed
on Sunday and then um, a week later on Saturday,
we would have a build. So within that week, right,
we're calling everyone that we distributed to saying, hey, how

(01:16:44):
is your air porifier working. Can you come out to
a build. It's really really valuable that you come out
to a build so that you can make sure that
your community has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season. Um.
And through these calls, right, I talked to someone who
lived in East Oakland for an hour, um in this
person just started opening up and was so touched that
we had done this and basically said, you know, no

(01:17:04):
one has ever cared for my community like this, No
one has ever even thought about us, right. And you see,
like there are nonprofits right California was giving out air
purifiers to certain people, like there's a semblance of the structure.
And yet we were actually interfacing with these people who
seemed to have no idea that any of this was
happening right there, saying, you know, no one else has
been able to do this, um. And we're starting to

(01:17:26):
form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make
people feel cared for and follow up. Um. And despite
all of this work, right, no one shows up to
our bill that week. UM And I think Obar and
I both felt pretty defeated, right, Like, is mutually possible?
What are we're doing wrong clearly, Like class and racial
barriers are really hard to overcome in this UM. And

(01:17:49):
you know, we're talking to our ex black panther friend
that has continued to be a huge part of this project,
and he was like, you're you know, you have to
keep trying. You're doing the right things. And so we
went to West Oakland again where we had a connection
from our MASS project that helped us set up in
front of this corner next to UM, a vegan cafe

(01:18:11):
that serves trans poc for free UM and has really
wonderful food. We're able to talk with them give them
air purifier as they allowed us to UM kind of
set up shop in front of their store. And there's
also like a liquor store on this corner. It's like
a very busy corner in West Oakland. UM and kind
of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers,

(01:18:32):
talking to people about the build, talking to people about UM,
you know why this is important. And we're also door
knocking in the neighborhood, talking to folks UM at their homes,
UM asking people, you know, who needs an air purifier? Right,
Like these communities generally know each other really well, and
we're able to talk to people who are like, oh
my gosh, you know, like my aunt lives over there
and her kid has asthma, and like you should go

(01:18:53):
talk with her. UM. And so we start to develop
these connections and kind of map out the neighborhood and
you know, again we're following up. We're talking to these
people on the phone, We're asking them to come out
to the build. And we went out to this neighborhood again.
So the second time we went out, UM, I started
to recognize people right, and I started to be able
to talk with people, and UM, through I was kind

(01:19:15):
of like door knocking, UM. While people were posted up
by the liquor store and this Beacon cafe and uh,
there was like a church service going on and I
recognized one of the people there, and he recognized me,
and we were able to talk and he was really
grateful for the work that we were doing. And he
started calling his friends over and be like, hey, you know,
do you all need an air purifier? Remember how a
bad fire season was last year, And also like we

(01:19:38):
should all go to this build next time. UM, you know,
we should actually be showing up and helping out. UM.
And words spread so quickly, like these communities are so
deeply connected. UM, at least from what I like witnessed
and UM that week again, right, we called everyone. We said, like,
you know, we really think it's valuable for you all
to come out to a build. We want to give

(01:19:59):
you like ownership an autonomy over this in a world
where I think so often you feel so little autonomy
um and so little power when everything feels like it's crumbling.
Right to have some semblance of ownership and autonomy, to
be able to um do something that is immediately like
visible and real UM feels really powerful. Right when sometimes
you know, uh, talking to elected officials is moving too

(01:20:21):
slowly because disasters are happening so quickly. There is a
need to balance immediate need and system change, right, and
I think you have to constantly hold both. Um. But
you know, we're talking to these folks, were asking them
to come to the build and UM we actually had
a couple of people come out to our build from
our distribution people that had a really amazing time. People

(01:20:44):
that you know said they enjoyed being there um and
took air purifiers back and gave them out to their
friends and family. UM. And we're able to say, you know,
I made this right, Like this is something valuable, but
also I understand how it works. And I talked to
one of these people, are Xt build is actually on
his birthday, and he was like, I really want to

(01:21:04):
come out on my birthday. I really want to come
out and help people and do this thing that has
been enjoyable. UM. And it is also like helping people,
And that to me was right, Like that someone wants
to come on their birthday to like build air purifiers
on a Saturday, when most of these people are you know,
working forty two however many hours a week, that they're

(01:21:27):
willing to continue to even work on a Saturday, I
think is a huge feat UM. And it is something
that's definitely felt really really powerful in this Yeah. I
think something that Janine brings out is really important, which
is that UM, at every stage, we've been sort of
interrogating and examining the work we're doing and asking whether

(01:21:49):
we are truly drawing out the full political potential of
our work. So in the earlier days when we were
just stirring up that sanitizer and getting out these masks,
you know, we did a lot and you know, this
network of volunteers comprised well over two hundred people, and

(01:22:10):
it was sort of consuming all of our time. But
eventually we realized that to a large degree, we were
basically just acting as a stop gap measure for government austerity,
for the big gaps left behind by this extremely problematic
nonprofit industrial complex. And the work we were doing then

(01:22:30):
we realized was sort of susceptible to co optation UM,
and it didn't necessarily represent too much of a threat
to capitalist hegemony and UM. At that point, you know,
we shifted into d s A and we started bringing
in a very sort of explicit political education component and

(01:22:52):
started associating with an organization like Tank, which is already
been doing um, really incredible radical organizing in the Bay Area.
But eventually we ran up against the limits of that
as well. And you know, d Essay is an organization
where a lot of us initially learned our politics, but
you know, in its current sort of stage, it's characterized

(01:23:14):
by a strong degree in our chapter of sort of
democratic centralism, and most of the effort is being put
toward electoral work and reform work, and everything that we
were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme limits
of that form of organizing, and how these forms of
organizing in fact represented sometimes the more reactionary elements of

(01:23:35):
the left in earlier moments in history, and we wanted
to go beyond that. And so we realized that we
were spending a lot of time having to just sort
of defend the work that we were doing. So eventually
we just decided to uh sort of reassert our autonomy.
And as we shifted into the Air Purifier chapter of
our work, that's what we were doing, and UM our

(01:23:55):
inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading about these
earlier moments in history, something which UM had an extraordinary
effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish
Revolution in six and suddenly I was reading about this
moment in history that's been more or less erased from

(01:24:18):
most of our textbooks are presented UM in a very
kind of dishonest form. UM. And what these workers and
peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was
create on an enormous scale, UM the perhaps the most
egalitarian society that I've ever read about, which truly represented

(01:24:44):
UM a sort of liberatory, radical, early form of anti
authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much
uglier uh forms of so called socialism that we've seen
appear in the twentieth century. And what I noticed was
that this society in Spain in six was absolutely replete

(01:25:09):
with mutual aid, and these kind of anarchist tendencies had
um sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of the
workers and peasants in Spain, you know, sixty years before
the revolution, after um Bakunin in the First International sent
out an emissary to start spreading these ideas, and they

(01:25:30):
took whole like wildfire and spread across the country. I think,
I think one of one of the most incredible things
about that story is the the guy they gets sent
from Italy, like from as as the representative and now
the cause. Yeah, he doesn't speak Spanish, right, he only
speaks Italian, and he he he should just look at
this place, right, and he's he's he's such a sort

(01:25:50):
of brilliant order and and the sort of like the
power of the ideas that he has is so strong
that you know it it breaks through the language barrier,
and it's it's this sort of I think it's just
this incredible moments that you know, I think, I think
comes into a lot of a lot of what the
two were running into with, you know, I mean, we
still live in a place that's you know, incredibly defined
by language bears, and just the ability to break through

(01:26:12):
that becomes it gives you this just incredible potential of
power and organization. Yeah, Chris, you don't know how much
it means to me to hear someone who's as familiar
with this as most of the time when I talked
about it's just total blank faces, even among my friends
and comrades on the left. And unfortunately, but yeah, I

(01:26:32):
mean reading about Finelli, who didn't speak a word of
Spanish and he just went and with his wild gesticulations
and his passionate rhetoric was able to basically inspire people
with the radical politics that he came there to represent,
and it somehow then took on a life of its own.
Is kind of an extraordinary thing. And what I would

(01:26:53):
do to take a time machine back and just see
what this guy, you know, on trains and basically lived
as a rant as he went from village to village,
spreading the word what what this looked like? What was
he doing? Um? And yet these ideas took hold in
a the only deep way. And UM. These notions of solidarity,

(01:27:15):
mutual aid, cooperation, free association existed by the time of
the Spanish Revolution in nineteen thirty six. So these sort
of dual power counter institutions were more or less in place.
And these are the things which UM were the basis
the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian social revolution that then unfolded,

(01:27:38):
which was unfortunately destroyed by force. UM. But this was
the sort of society that I imagined I might actually
want to live UM and and uh and and what
you see is that there is a deep element to UM,
a sort of shared consciousness that existed at that time.

(01:27:59):
And it was quite an effort for people to bring
that consciousness from sort of the countryside where took hold
more nash naturally into sort of the industrial UM centers,
the metropolitan areas where people working in factories were UM,
you know, found it a lot more difficult to sort
of exercise these UM values because these things are effectively

(01:28:20):
bled out of them as they work on the factory floor.
And UM. That brought a whole different meaning to the
work that we were doing now. And we wondered, what
can we do to uh inculcate, to nurture this kind
of consciousness among the people with whom we're interacting, as
we do our mutual aid, as we do our distributions,

(01:28:42):
as we hold these builds that you know, even though
we had trouble getting initially a few of the people
from our distributions to show up, there were still you know,
sixty seventy people showing up every other weekend. And now
we finally started having the people that were distributing extraordinarily
surprising and and exciting, and yeah, this has been it

(01:29:02):
could happen here. Join us tomorrow for part two of
this interview, where we'll go more in death in the
political side, common humanity collectives work. Meanwhile, you can find
us on Twitter that happened here pod and also on
Instagram in the same place, and you can find the
rest of her worker cools on media in the same places.

(01:29:28):
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(01:29:49):
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(01:31:15):
could Happen here podcast about things falling apart and about
how we can put them back together in a way
better than they originally were. And today we're going to
continue our interview with Janina Aprar from the Comedy Humanity Collective.
We've been talking about their work. We've been talking about
the origin of the mutual A products. We've been talking
specifically about the political aspect of their work and how

(01:31:38):
they're reading this sort of anarchists. The history of anarchist
struggle in Spain and particularly mtual Agree in the Spanish
Civil War helped impact and shape the politics and work
that they've been doing. One thing I want I wanted
to sort of circle back all the way too from
the beginning, was the stuff you've got you were doing
at the very beginning of the pandemic. Because I think
that this is I've talked about this before on here,

(01:31:59):
but you know the difference between a country like the US,
where what seven hundreds and hundrefifty people are dead and
places with that didn't happen was the degree your community mobilization.
And I talked about this with the Chinese example, is
that like, yeah, I mean like that the reason that
China the pandemic sort of got contained there, it wasn't
because the state stepped in and was like, we're going

(01:32:20):
to do this. It was because hundreds of thousands of
ordinary people just took to the streets and we're like, okay,
we're doing the lockdown now. And you know, and it
takes a different form in China because you know, there's
there's a lot of different sort of things going on there,
but that kind of mass community mobilization in the beginning
of it's just like it. It didn't happen that much
in the US. And I think, like, you know, the

(01:32:41):
world where we don't all die in the pandemic, right
is the one where the things that you all were
doing happened. I mean, one the way the things I
remember my sister is a bio grad student, and she
was telling me about how, you know, so so the
you know, one of one of the things, one of
the bottlenecks beginning of a pandemic, and it's still kind
of a bottleneck was it was about being able to

(01:33:01):
being able to do COVID tests and you know, biograd
students can do PCR tests like it's easy. This is
you know, this is one of the first things they
teach you. And that capacity just was never used. It
just it was just sort of left and like sat
there and rotted. And it sat there and rotted because
you know, the actual pandemic response was run by a
state that just didn't care and a bureaucracy that, even

(01:33:23):
when it did care, was sort of you know, I
didn't have this capacity to mobilize. You know, it's it's
its entire existence. It's about making sure that sort of
the capacity for a ton's mobilization never happens. And I
think that that was one of the most interesting and
powerful parts of what y'all were doing, was that you
just did it and it just it kept spreading. Yeah, No,

(01:33:44):
I think it's a that's a really good and important
point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before
we started doing any of this stuff with PPE, I
was actually you know, as word as as as the
um uh, the fear of the pandemic started spreading, and
we finally had a picture of what the US would

(01:34:05):
soon look like. I remember going to a union meeting
among my fellow grad student workers and talking some people
afterwards and saying like, hey, um, I don't think that
we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that
we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff,
Like why don't we just is there any way that
we can just take PCR machines and set up these

(01:34:27):
little guerrilla operators and start testing people for free? And unfortunately,
one of the things I noticed was that people, you know,
we're just very confused by this idea. They had much
more faith in the state's ability to um assemble these infrastructures,
and I just realized that was not the way in
which I was going to be able to help out.

(01:34:48):
And so it's it's unfortunate, but a lot of people
have even though they have these instincts for sort of
mutual aid and for this kind of autonomous organized this
stuff lies just below the surface US, often they don't
feel actually capable of it. And I think more than anything,
what we've done with this project is we've created a
context in atmosphere in which things which people typically feel

(01:35:11):
like they cannot do they suddenly realize they can do again.
It's just to come back to that idea that most
of us, you know, we live our lives, we sell
our labor for wages. A few people who own the
means of production, you know, accumulate profits and use them
to manipulate the state for their own purposes. Um. And

(01:35:32):
this has an effect on us. I mean, this has
an effect on dulling our consciousness um. And it's an
extraordinary transformation in our social relations, in our sense of
our own individuality when we do realize in these moments
that we can be um subjects. And so unfortunately my

(01:35:52):
initial to try to stimulate some of this activity around
testing didn't work out. Um. But yeah, it just presents
this recurring problem, which is that people are not used
to doing this kind of work. And Janine and I
have found many many times that you know, people are
willing to come and use their hands and build something

(01:36:13):
for a few hours. But then what we try to
do is get them involved. We say, come to the meetings.
You have decision making power. You can determine the trajectory
of this work. And that's always a very very difficult
thing to be doing. Now, given the way that sort
of people have been conditioned UM right now, and I
think that's something which is concerning because these uh traits

(01:36:38):
of subservience and sort of submission, I think are incompatible.
If there were a moment of revolutionary rupture, I'm not
sure that that would necessarily lead to any better sort
of society. So I think this stuff is deeply, deeply
important to get people involved in this kind of work.
I just want to go back to one of the
things you said, Like you mentioned the community asked act

(01:37:00):
and like those relationships, and I think that I know
I've said this so many times, both in like my
organizing space and even on this podcast today, but I
truly have felt like building community is one of the
most powerful ways to organize. And I think so many
people in leftist spaces right now see organizing as like
a place where you just do work UM, and I
actually think that that's a really terrible way to organize.

(01:37:22):
I don't think that you're gonna have people come back
right like. I don't think that um, anyone is going
to feel empowered. And you know, kind of through talking
to a bra I've started reading this book on the
freewomen of Spain and like thinking more about this also,
right and thinking about how they're talking about community building
and how they're talking about like community is believing in

(01:37:43):
each other and like helping each other realize their full
potential UM and as a way to actually find equity
and equality through like horizontalist structures, through allowing people to
reach their full potential UM And I think, you know,
these are some of the politics that have informed what
we're doing, that have informed how we're trying to allow
people to grow. And so many people have come to

(01:38:06):
us and said, you know, these mass builds or these
air purifier builds are like the highlight of my week
or the highlight of my month UM or I'm thinking
about the like the way that you're structuring UM your
distributions and thinking about how I can implement that into
the work that we're doing UM And I think that
those things are so powerful when you're able to create
these spaces again where people care for each other, and

(01:38:29):
like you're saying, that goes a long way towards being
able to mobilize UM when there are disasters, to being
able to mobilize around protests, to being able to mobilize
around these ruptures because you have solidarity that's built through relationships,
and that is allowing you to build power. One of
the things that that YouTube sort of getting it is
that you know, if there's it's hard in a lot

(01:38:52):
of ways, because yeah, I mean, the US has and
you baked into just to every single part of your
life is there's going to be someone who is above you,
who can order you and tell you what to do.
And that's you know, that's that's that's that's the defining
characteristic of life in the United States. And the second
defining characteristic is if you don't do what they tell you,
a person with the gun shows up and either beats

(01:39:13):
you or hauls you away and enslaves you. And you
know that that that has these enormous sort of psychological
consequences that you know, create creates this culture where people
you know, I mean, and that this goes along with
there's there's this whole the skilling process that's that's been
a sort of part of the broad arch of capitalism
that you all trying to reverse. But even even yeah,

(01:39:33):
you know, it's talking about even the people who have
the skills just don't sort of they don't believe in
their own autonomy. In a way and that and that
that becomes this incredibly powerful, you know, tool of keeping
people in line. But when that breaks and when when
people start to see it, it can take time. But yeah,
you know that the the kinds of power in the

(01:39:56):
depth of the sort of organization that you build isn't
from that is incredible. And I think it's only anything
about the Spanish example that people tend to forget, which
is that you know, okay, so that the c n
T which is the sort of giant c n T
f A eyes that the giants sort of h Annachrist,
the union that's that's running a lot of this stuff.
You know, they're almost completely destroyed at the drink, like
over the course of the Spanis civil war, and they're

(01:40:17):
you know, distruber the stalents, distruber with the fascist and
at the end, by the end of the war, you
know that the fascist control Spain for about forty years.
But even that, you know, I mean, they kill hundreds
of thousands of people, they like, there's massacres is you know,
it turns into literally a fascist police state. But the
moment that the moment the fascist a tatorship collapses, the

(01:40:39):
CNT reappears. And they even even in you know, in
in seventies Spain, in a place that is in a
lot of ways the industrialized, they still almost overthrow the
government one more time. And you know, I mean they're
they're still around the sort of much reduced form to
this day. But I mean, once once you build that
kind of power, right, even you know, even footy yours

(01:41:00):
fascistctatorship was enough to completely destroy it. It was you know,
it was it was still there, sort of waiting underground,
and then the moment there was a rupture reappears. This
is a really important thing that you're bringing up, Chris,
because I think it has um a lot to do
with how we just measure and talk about success on
the left. Um, what you're describing, which you know, Spain

(01:41:22):
is typically by many people on the left described as
kind of a failed experiment. Oh it was nice, but
it ultimately failed. So let's look at Russia, you know. Um,
but uh, some people have argued, and I think very correctly,
that you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Once something like this happens. It's there. Those energies are there,

(01:41:42):
They are not forgotten, they're not lost, and there's you know,
a very vigorous sort of left wing radical anarchist movement
that's resonant um uh and very sort of consistent with
with the earlier movement during the thirties. And UM, I
think that's that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about.

(01:42:05):
We tend to measure these projects in these very sort
of linear, sort of status terms, and we discovered, especially
when we were doing work in d say, that a
lot of people were trying to frame our own project
in that way. You know, what are the demands that
you're making, what are the what pressure are you exerting
on the state? Um? And so there's these criteria that
people use to evaluate kind of the efficacy or success

(01:42:28):
of projects like these, And the Spanish example tells you,
UM that the way that these things work is in
fact much more complicated and much more interesting UM. And
that by assembling these structures, these organizations, even if at
some time or another they don't necessarily exist anymore, all
of those people who participated in them are transformed, and

(01:42:48):
the people that they interact with might then also be transformed.
And so something like the c n T, which is
you know, an extraordinary organization the f ai is what
you know, really gave it the kind of anarcho syndicalist
content that defined the quality of that revolution. Um, that
never got lost, that never went away, even when it
seems to have disappeared. Um. And so I think we

(01:43:11):
have to learn to think about success and failure um,
you know, as we very simplistically use these terms very
very um differently. And this is something which informs our
own work when we're asking was this successful? Was this
not successful? Um? I think that's a much more difficult
and complicated question than we often make it out to be. Yeah,
and I think there's something very specific about you know,

(01:43:34):
if we can go into sort of d s A
factional politics for a little bit, but like I think
like in some ways you see the shallowness of a
lot of the approaches that was happening in the d
s A where you know, like if if you if
you look at a lot of how the sort of
Medica for All stuff went or a lot of how
the sort of Bernie campaign stuff went right, it was okay.
You know, you have these you have these organizations that

(01:43:56):
are like a mile wide and inch deep, and it's like, okay,
they're their capable of mobilizing people devote one time, but
you know, then they lose the election, and then what right,
so that they don't they don't don't they don't have
you know, there's they're supposed to be this whole thing
of like Bernie being an organizer in chief and this
whole sort of plan to use the sort of lists
he developers organized anything. It's never happened, and you know,

(01:44:17):
it didn't happen in a lot of ways because it
was just sort of they they treated the whole process
of building power as essentially a beocratic exercise. Right, it's
how many people are on this list? How many people
are showing up to the the state, like you know, and
like how how many how many how many doors have
we knocked on? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, it's it's just you know,
and that's the and that's the other thing you're talking
about with the fact that organizing spaces have to be

(01:44:37):
more than just another just another place you go to work,
right is if you know, if if all you're doing
is just replicating these sort of bereocratic things, you're you're
going to watch them fail exactly the same way the
burocracies do, except you know, you're you're you're not the
American State, you're not a a Democratic Party. You don't have
an infinite amount of money or the ability to sort
of you know, you don't you don't have the ability
to call an army to enforce what you need to do, right,

(01:44:58):
You don't. You don't have you don't have the fallback
of bad methods of organizing, which is violence. And when
that happens, you know, and and suddenly and you can't
confront your own failures because you're stuck in this, things
just start to sort of implode, and you start to
lose people, and you start to sort of you know,
you see this sort of stagnation and decline that I think,

(01:45:20):
you know, talking about, Yeah, we're getting exactly too much
into what's going on in East Bay, Like that's that that,
that's been everything I've seen out of it. Yeah, And
I think to go kind of off of what a
bro was talking about to kind of put this into
terms of the work that we've been doing, right, you know,
through the Mask builds um as they were winding down,

(01:45:40):
we weren't quite sure what our next project was, and
you know, we talked a lot about like how do
we keep this energy going like, we don't want to
just lose this. And I also felt, you know, a
certain amount of social obligation to you know, keep this
community together that had formed during the pandemic. And so
we started did a book group kind of in the

(01:46:01):
interim reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, and
you know, had around thirty people show up to that
UM And I think, as you know, you're talking about
the importance of once you know, these relationships are formed,
once these ideologies start to percolate, that they don't just
go away, right. These people that we you know, brought

(01:46:24):
into d s A and a lot of ways the
d s A came to join this book group and
later came to join the Air Purifier project despite the
fact that it was more outside of d s A.
A lot of these people, because of you know, what
we had built and what we had created, continued to
be such a huge part and take on incredible leadership
roles UM and you know, facilitate this project in a

(01:46:47):
way that it would not at all look like what
it does without you know, these people dedicating so much
of their time and energy to this project. Kind of
throughout the process, Yeah, and Chris, I'm going back to
what you're saying earlier. I think, um m hm, I've
I've seen a very interesting, um a kind of reflection

(01:47:09):
come out of some of these organizations, and you see
these different splits and sort of uh wings developing. But yeah,
I mean I Janine is a very sort of organic,
radical and revolutionary who I've learned an enormous amount from.
But I think my own trajectory was much more characteristic
of what you described earlier, which is that you know,

(01:47:30):
I put all my eggs in this basket. I thought, Okay,
Bernie Sanders, like, that's that is, that is the that
is the beginning of how we undergo a sort of
democratic socialist transformation. And then, you know, in a few
snaps of the finger, even though I had spent just
like hundreds of hours just knocking doors and promising all

(01:47:51):
these things to people who might you know, vote for
him at their door, and and all this stuff that
and and and just sort of regurgitating all the slogans
and and talking you know, rapturously about these welfare programs.
Um I saw all that dissolved in a moment, and
I realized that I didn't leave anything behind, And there

(01:48:14):
was you know, in D. S A and our chapter,
you saw that there was a large group of people
who just wanted to keep that flame burning and just
say we'll do better next time, you know, we'll do
more work at the local level to elect representatives. But
then there was another group of people. It was much
more disillusioned UM and really started wondering is this what

(01:48:35):
we should be doing, or at least is this all
that we should be doing UM. And you see the
same thing coming out of a group like Sunrise, which
whose primary sort of mandate is to just put pressure
onto Congress UM to urge the necessity of a green
new deal or whatever. And nevertheless, out of Sunrise, we've
met people who, after the George Floyd protests, after the

(01:48:57):
dissolution of the Bernie campaign, had and lead down the
same radical path as as some of us UM found
ourselves traveling UM in in East by D. S A.
And they're the ones who have now come to help
our project and you know, using whatever autonomy they have
at the sort of um hub level in Sunrise, because

(01:49:20):
even though it's an organization with sort of paid staff
and something of this bureaucracy right now in this moment,
the individual little local hubs actually have a surprising amount
of autonomy, and I really hope they're going to fight
for protect that autonomy. So they've been able to use
that autonomy to actually put a lot of effort toward
raise money thousands of dollars for our work at c

(01:49:42):
h C and come to our organizer meetings, become a
part of the effort, and urge upon their own um
friends and co organizers and and people they know in
Sunrise to shift the direction of their work of their
branches towards doing more work like this. So there are
of these kind of interesting different uh splinterings that you

(01:50:04):
see happening, which give me some hope that we're not
just going to keep running the same tape over and
over again. So one of the other interviews we did
on this show was with a bunch of people who
were working with the basically this giant effort in Atlanta
to stop this like just atrocious sort of destruct this

(01:50:26):
destruction of a bunch of forests to create this like
weird teaching cops. How did you kind of terrorism enormous
academy thing that's being funded by like a bunch of
the Logic Corporations in Atlanta, and they were describing you know,
they didn't talk about sort of the exacting process of solution,
but you know, you saw they were like, you know,
one of the people with the hair was from Sunrise

(01:50:46):
and they were also talking about how they pulled together.
That's just like enormous coalition of bunch of community groups
that was, you know, and like the their their initial
goal was they're trying to pressure the city council into
stopping the into you know, not proving it and that
doesn't work. But you know, you know, some of some
of the other groups that were that were involved in this,

(01:51:06):
we're talking about like okay, well you know that they're
planning is like if this fails, we're gonna go stop
it ourselves. And I think that pivot right is one
of the most crucial things that is happening right now,
because you know, okay, if if you, if you you know,
if if you, if you you, you pull out your
like poll your policy like policy space diagrams right like
it's it's the United States. The policy that's enacted is

(01:51:27):
the one that is the policy is decided about the
sixtieth Senator and it's like Okay, so you know, even
even if if even if you're gonna try to do
an electoral thing, right, you need six you need sixty votes.
In the Senate, there is one arguably socialist senator and
we've never elected another one, so you know, and you're
just looking at this, right and it's like, okay, like

(01:51:48):
you know, we we elect like to maybe three socialists
in in the House every year, and if you know,
if you continue at the same rate, they'll be like
what like like two hundred years if we have a
majority there, And it's like yeah, you know, and at
a certain points like yeah, I mean, we're like we're
not gonna be around because we'll be dead, but like

(01:52:10):
most of most most of the stuff on earth will
also not be around because it will have been obliteral
bla climate change there. And you know, and at some
point you have to get to we're gonna have to
do it ourselves because no one, no one else is
going to do it for us. And I think that
the work YouTube have been doing is just incredible, is
just an incredible example of how that can actually happen
and what what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah, I

(01:52:31):
think that it is so important, and I think that
that's one of the reasons that to me, it was
also so important to get all of these groups at
these air purifier pims because I think oftentimes organizing is
so siloed and it really frustrates me, and people seem
very like loyal at least I've found this in East
by d s A to like their particular organization, any

(01:52:52):
other organization they don't even really want to talk about
or they don't even know still exist um. And to me, like,
if we can give people the tools to organize, I
don't care who they're organizing, UM, but if we can
also like have these groups communicate with each other, right,
Like different groups are doing exactly the same thing. Right.
We have the Ecosocialist Group UM in d s A. Right,

(01:53:16):
you have Sunrise, you have the i w W, and
then you have the Labor Committee of d s A.
And it's like sometimes there is cross communication, right, But
to me, it never feels like it's quite enough. It
never feels like we're really all working on this or
we're really all in it together. And I think we
really should be, because like you're saying, like there's kind
of a ticking cloth. We only have a certain amount
of time to actually make the changes that we want

(01:53:37):
to see. And when we're not willing to actually work
with each other and communicate with each other, things are
not going to happen as quickly. UM. And so being
able to have, like, you know, a table of people
assembling purifiers from d S a Sunrise tank, right, and
they're all talking about the organizing work that they're doing
and sharing stories and strategies, so that we're not all

(01:53:59):
consly reinventing the wheel. That actually working together on this
I think is so so valuable. And this is something
that we've seen. You know, one of our friends who's
helping lead one of the tank locals, has come to
a number of our events and was telling us how
he's actually tried to bring things that he's seen that
we're doing into his own local and we've heard this

(01:54:20):
in other contexts as well. So things spread, and that's
I think a really important thing that um, you know,
especially because of Janine's um you know, just just uh
attempts to try to get all these groups together into
one place to communicate, to build relationships. UM. We're now

(01:54:41):
seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere and we're
also learning a lot from all these different people in
groups who come to our builds and then become organizers
in the effort. And you know, to mention someone like
you know, Gerald Jannine referred to earlier, who is this
uh wonderful full um cantankerous h ex black panther, you know,

(01:55:06):
who has such an enormous history of experience. For him
to give us that historical perspective for everything that we're doing,
um has been an enormous boost of confidence, and it's
allowed us to focus and you know, just to reiterate
what she said earlier, we were really depressed when we
went out and we were talking to people in West
Oakland and East Oakland, and everyone was telling us we're

(01:55:27):
gonna come, Yeah, we'll show up, we'll be there. And then,
you know, while many other people showed up from Sunrise, DSA, C,
HC elsewhere, none of those people showed up. And we said, Gerald,
they're not coming. What's going on? And he said, you know,
keep going, keep trying, keep doing it, do not give up.
Do not judge from that one experience. This is really

(01:55:49):
hard work. And these people have had the door shot
on them over and over and over again, and they're tired,
and it's the weekend, but you keep doing it and
they will come, and then next time they came. We
may not have gone there again had it not been
for Gerald bringing in this enormous um breath of experience
to share with us. You know, at the end of

(01:56:10):
our previous bill there there's this there's this quote that
I remember from every who was it was one of
the one of the people who've been heavily involved in
the Egyptian Revolution thousand eleven, had this quote and she's
talking about, you know, I whould be doing this for decades, right,
And she's like, yeah, because you've a protest and if
if if a hundred if people show up, you're happy,
and if a hundred people show up, you're depressed. And

(01:56:30):
then one day, eight hundred thousand people show up and
you kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah,
I mean that that is something that you know, Yeah,
you're like organizing is not easy. That you're you're gonna
spend a lot of time like not winning, You're gonna
spend a lot of time feeling like you're barely treading water.
There's gonna be a lot of time where you know,
nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart. But

(01:56:53):
you know, if you keep pushing, thousand people show up
and you know, and suddenly the regime is like taking
like you know, try trying to catch planes out of
the country and yeah, and you know, and you get
to that that CLR. James line about how the ruling
classes not defeeding until's ruling until it's running for its lives.
But you know they do run for their lives. This

(01:57:14):
is the thing that happens. Yeah, and you know, if
if we do this together, we can get there totally.
And I think, you know, what a bar saying is
so true. And we also, you know, in doing these distributions,
talk to people and I literally would say, like what,
we'll get people to show up, right, there's kind of
like honesty in these conversations of like, you know, this

(01:57:36):
is what we're trying to do, Like there's a reciprocal
relationship here again, like help us understand also like what
we need to do in order to make sure that
the reciprocal relationship is actually realized and actually happening. Um.
And I think that that was kind of an exciting
moment of like having people have some autonomy and like say,
and like you know, they know this community better than

(01:57:58):
we do, right, they know like how people are going
to show up and how maybe they won't. But Chris, Uh,
just to bring it back to what you were saying,
I think describing the kind of nonlinear trajectory of uh
popular movements in history is something that we try to
keep always in our minds. Um, things may begin, small,

(01:58:20):
things may seem small, even when you study the examples
in Spain of sort of the groups of people who
formed sort of the early f AI who were just
sort of discussing these ideas around to fire before they
tried to sort of infiltrate the CNT, and then this
became the sort of predominant um mood and sort of
ideology that that that that characterized the c NT, which

(01:58:41):
then you know, spread out and sort of characterize the
Spanish Revolution at large and massive numbers millions of people,
you know, um, And and just seeing what happened with
the George Floyd protests and studying the examples of you know,
Paris in eight where it at first just seems like
small groups of students and then you know, just a
few days and weeks later, you know, there's thousands and

(01:59:04):
thousands and thousands and thousands of workers, um, you know,
who are out literally just pulling out cobblestones from the street,
you know, up against the police. And and the way
that these things happen is very unpredictable. And I think
that's also a very important thing to keep in mind
as we're trying to evaluate, you know, what we're doing

(01:59:26):
in a given moment. Yeah, I think I think I
think that's that's that's a very good note to end on.
It's you know, every the the struggle we have embarked
in is an incredibly difficult one, and we're not going
to know how it ends for a long long time.
But that doesn't Yeah, you know, that doesn't necessarily means

(01:59:46):
it ends badly. And the kind of resiliency we can
build is incredibly deep and incredibly powerful. Okay, plugs time,
Where do you too want people to go? What do
you want people to know? And yeah, we can we
can link stuff if you want to send it to
us in the in the in the chat chat we can.
We can, we can link stuff. We can, we can,

(02:00:06):
we can link stuff. In the description of this episode,
this is why we have editors think yeah, UM, I
think definitely. Like our social media so Twitter and Instagram
is see Humanity, see UM for folks to be able
to donate UM, to visit our website, to be able

(02:00:28):
to plug in. If they are in the Bay area
and want to get involved, they can find ways to
do that through those social media channels. You know, they
can message us UM and then our fundraiser a bar.
I don't know if we should just send the link
or what The best way to do that is if
you go to a common Humanity collective dot org, there's
a donate button which leads to the fundraisers. You can
find it. Also also if you if you go there,

(02:00:48):
you can see how they you can see instructions how
to make the fans and they are so cool, like
they're awesome, it's it's sweet, it's so go do go
do that too because it's sick. And there's also instructions
or how you can make them as well. And we
hope people do this elsewhere. Please reach out to us.
We want to not be the only ones doing and

(02:01:09):
so this is why we've tried to just put everything
online that others can replicate this model and this is
why we're coming on a show like this and going
into so much detail into our history just that uh,
you know, we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel.
I think, you know, a bar and I have learned
so much from this project, UM, and a lot of
it really did feel like reinventing the wheel, which is

(02:01:31):
unfortunate because I know that, you know, mutual aid has
been done elsewhere, but with the organizers that we were
talking to, a lot of the things that we were doing,
we were having to kind of start from scratch. And
at least my goal is like we're both very accessible people,
like if there are questions, you know, to be able
to reach out so that we can you know, explain
our experience to other folks, UM and talk through you know.

(02:01:52):
Our relationship with Sunrise started because they heard about the
mutual aid work that we were doing and they said
we want to do that also, and we're like great,
and you know a bra are co organizer, Joe and
I and this woman from Sunrise met in a park
and eat dinner and just talked about music late, you know,
the pitfalls that had happened and what went well and
how we could do it in the future and then
like this beautiful collaboration began like a bar was talking

(02:02:15):
about so um, I think you know, we're really happy
to talk about where things have gone awry and what
we've learned from this project and thankfully at this point
to like what successes we've had. So yeah, go go everyone,
go go go go find them, go out of your communities,
go do this theirselves, and yeah, go go go get

(02:02:35):
us another Spanish revolution. We need another one. Yeah, thank you,
thank thank you to you so much for joining us.
I sagreat Chris. This has been such an huge pleasure
for talking to you. We've we've been covered by a
lot of places, but never quite like Yeah, just thank
you so much for doing this, and thank you. Yeah,

(02:02:55):
such an honor to be here and so much fun
to talk with you both. Thank you so much for
having us. Yeah. Yeah, so this this has been it
could Happen Here pod. You can find us at Happened
Here Pod on Twitter, Instagram and at cool Zone for
just the rest of the stuff that we do. Alright
by everyone. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit

(02:03:26):
podcast How Men Think, And that's good news for anyone
that is Confused by Men, which is basically everyone get
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(02:03:50):
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(02:04:12):
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Listen to How Men Think on the I Heart Radio app,
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Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in eight six,
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So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of
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(02:04:57):
the story than meets the eye. So step right up
and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mile Presents
now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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and Mild dot com Slash Presents, Hey Leath the listeners
tag here. Last season on Lethal Lit, you might remember

(02:05:20):
I came to Hollow Falls on a mission clearing my
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(02:06:03):
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Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's critical my race Theories? UM? Well, all right, that's

(02:06:30):
not a great introduction, but it's not a great time
in America. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen
here with me tonight as often but not always is
Garrison Davis uh and our good friend Christopher Wong Uh.
We're here to talk about UM a bunch of stuff. Largely,

(02:06:50):
we're talking about the increasing and escalating attacks on school
boards and attempts to take over and dominate school boards
by far right activists. And a lot of this is
centered around critical race theory, a lot of it centered
around vaccine mandates. It all kind of blends together like
a good gumbo um or like fascist syncretism. UM. One

(02:07:12):
of the things that I would say, that's that's kind
of most relevant right now as we're recording this. I
don't think the race has been officially called. But it's
become an increasingly obvious that UH Terry mccauliffe has lost
his re election bid and the uh new governor of
Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, as

(02:07:34):
like promised and based a huge amount of his campaign
on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books
and ship from being taught in Virginia schools. UM. And
this is all the result of a pretty far reaching
UM and and complex and honestly pretty pretty scary campaign.
And we're gonna talk about that tonight, Garrison. Do you

(02:07:56):
wanna do you wanna take it from here? Yeah? Yeah,
I'll do it little bit, then we can move over
to telegram. But yeah, so this is your drum solo time. Yeah.
We we decided we needed to do an episode on
this scen and later when a few weeks ago a
large number of of of anti vacts and anti mask

(02:08:18):
protesters UM took over a school board meeting in UH Portland.
And the reason why that is special in it of
itself because this has been happening across the country for
a long time. But that but the fact that they
were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school
board meeting with hundreds of people, like invading this building,
um and shutting this down with just the essurement of
like power that the people had there was it was

(02:08:40):
it's notable because it's like it's it's a liberal ish city, right,
It's that's generally how people view it as. And you know,
we're used to this happening, you know, more like southern
states and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative. But
when like a Portland school board meet to get shut down,
people were like, oh wow, this is like extra important
because this is showing that it's not this isn't isolated

(02:09:04):
to like quote unquote red states, right, this can this
can spread out everywhere now, you know. With Portland it
was it was a mix of like hippie types who
are like anti vax but there was a good deal
of like actual proud boys there as well. Yes, And
it was partly organized through an organization run by the
Bundies UM and there were some direct ties and they

(02:09:26):
helped to advertise it. So it's there's a lot of um.
I mean, one of the things that was so unsettling
is that a lot of these people were not Portland's residents,
but they were showing up and we're able to effectively
like take over and dominate a Portland's school board meeting
um in part because law enforcement is never ever willing
to do anything against There's there's a there's a lot

(02:09:47):
of a lot of points here, so like, yeah, one
of it being is like these like these big mobs
are definitely able to benefit from being you know, white,
mostly middle class like parents and stuff, or maybe not
maybe not not even parents. They're gonna be white, middle class, um,
which means they can like storm buildings and shut stuff
down without any real consequence because police aren't police and

(02:10:08):
security aren't really going to get involved that much, and
the like the Libs are not gonna like really be
pushing back on this in any kind of me They'll
just make fun of these people if they misspell something
on a sign. Yeah. So, like basically the idea for
this episode as we want to talk about why and
how school boards have become kind of the new front

(02:10:28):
lines for pushing far right stuff into the culturals, like guys,
because they've really become the new the new, the new
like space that people on the right are able to
push things that are that are more that are more
extreme and push things that are gonna you know, hurt
you know kids mostly m hm. So looking for this,

(02:10:53):
we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing
chats for how basically the right is talking about these
things and how they're trying to organize it. UM. And
one really interesting kind of thing of not which will
come up later in the telegram stuff is that in
I think it was when was it it was late September, UM,
the National school Boards associations like the National school Board

(02:11:16):
Union UM put in a request for federal assistance to
stop ongoing threats and acts of violence against UH school
boards like meeting members and people president at school boards
because this has been ramping up. You know this that
this was happening the last last school season as well,
but really the past few months, the the prevalence and

(02:11:36):
the number of these types of like mobs bas overtaking
these school boards has become so much more common UM
that the school Board Union put in, like sent like
a letter directly to the president saying, hey, we kind
of need help here. UM. So it's it's not just
it's this is this is a problem that's recognized widely,

(02:11:57):
even among people like on school boards, because yeah, they're
getting carasped, they're getting death threats. Um. This is becoming
like unsafe to hold school board meetings. Um. And whether
or not you like our modern school system or not,
the resulting effect of this is that it's going to
be hurting like kids. Like, Like it's a good whether
it be through like COVID, whether it be through teaching

(02:12:18):
them racist like curriculums, or whether it be to you know,
making trans kids have make their lives a whole lot harder. Right,
all of this kind of stuff is gonna be worse
by this happening. So it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah,
it's worth caring about all. Like, it's clearly an attempt
in order to to to arrest the kind of progressive

(02:12:42):
tilt that that society has gone through. All of this
is a reaction both too. I mean, the religious right
was initially, more than anything, a reaction to desegregation and
the women's liberation movement. Um. And what we're seeing now
is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people
have made in the lad us like twenty years, including
the legalization of gay marriage, um. And so the ultimate

(02:13:05):
goal of all of this is to stop progress towards
racial justice, to roll back gay rights, UM, to enshrine
white supremacy using violence. And that's why, that's why all
of these different school board meetings, like the the threat
of violence from these people is a constant factor. Um.
There's regular discussion of it. There's like, I mean, that's

(02:13:28):
why the Proud Boys are showing up. Is to be
a of like is to be a death squad. Um,
you know, a little precursor death squad. They're not quite
willing to start start pulling triggers yet, but they want
people to know that it's possible. They want to scare
people away from getting involved in local politics unless they
adhere to a very specific far right political ideas. It's

(02:13:49):
working because a lot of these school boards are getting
these school meanings are just getting shut down, like they
just can't have them in person or sometimes not at
all because they'll just they'll like zoom bam. Like it's
not like they're just shutting down so they cannot place
or at school by members are afraid to go out
in public because these people are are going to hurt them. Um.
And this is like a lot of people involved in

(02:14:11):
this are maybe not themselves like proud boys like they
they're they're they're they're not super like they're individually, are
more kind of regular Republicans in these states. But the
reason why it gets so extreme and it accelted so
quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place,
and also because of stuff like Fox News and news
Max and on it and O A n like pushing

(02:14:31):
people further right in the past few years, but like
specifically the method of organizing on apps like Telegram and
Facebook groups. This this is, this is the thing common
on the Internet, but like it rewards accelerationism, it rewards
the most extreme takes. Those are ones to get shared
the most. So even if you know this is just
some mom and her forties who's not a proud boy

(02:14:52):
by any means she's she still poses a threat in
this in this way because she's who boosting this same
rhetoric and as part of these same organizing channels that
are full of like actual fascists. Uh. There's a decent
amount of very popular posts from very popular channels I
pulled that talks about the Jews and the school boards

(02:15:13):
and we'll we'll get to that kind of stuff shortly. Um.
So there, Robert, do you wanna start on the telegram
with the whole the whole school board Telegram channel that
is popped up by no means the most popular Telegram
channel for organizing, but it is specifically dedicated to school boards.
Because of how Telegram works, this channel gets shared around

(02:15:35):
a lot in other much bigger channels. Yeah, and and
just so you know, So the way Telegram works, if
you're a decent person, um, and you don't live in
a country where Telegram is a legitimately good choice for you,
there's some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network,
but for the most part in the United States it's
used by fascists and weirdos. Um. So, if you're fortunate

(02:15:57):
enough to not use Telegram, the way it works is
you have open groups and closed groups. Open groups are
anyone can view them, Uh, you don't expose yourself by
looking at them, and people largely just kind of post images, memes,
videos and then can comment on them. And a lot
of what's posted in any given Telegram channel is shared
from another Telegram channel. So for people like Garrison and

(02:16:19):
I who research extremism. One of the uses of telegram
is that by looking at what's being shared in one
group from other groups, you can actually start to build
networks and see, oh, there's affinity between these two groups,
because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives,
but they're sharing all of this all of this content
from this far right, you know, PEP a group that's

(02:16:40):
also sharing a lot of neo Nazi content, and you
can see there's a lot of affinity between the other
thing that happens is that these channels that are getting
big and being you and you are being used for
this kind of like right wing organizing who present themselves
as more just like regular conservative channels. If you I've
been in this channel for like years at this point,
and this channel used to be a like Proud Boy channel.

(02:17:01):
They just changed their name. Like It's like that happens
all the time, where a lot of the big organizing
channels used to be like openly violent organizing, like for
different mobs to go beat up people, and now they've
rebranded to make them appeal more to like just regular
Trump voters. That is the other thing that happens all
the time, and one of the main channels that we're

(02:17:21):
talking about today is one of these one of these
channels that used to be a proud boy thing and
is now just kind of right wing organizing a general Yeah,
and it's um, I don't know, I'm just gonna get
into it. So actually, you know what I'm going to
get into before I start talking about fascists on telegram
trying to destroy the concept of democracy. You know what

(02:17:43):
else is trying to destroy the concept of democracy. That's right, Chris,
products and services, that's right. Oh my god, we are
just having a great time here. So let's talk about
Stand for Students, which is a telegram channel that Garrison
pointed out to me. And I spent more time than
I really wanted to. Yeah, that's never, never, never a

(02:18:04):
good idea. So the stuff in here, this is number one,
on the surface, a much more moderate group. These people
are not ranting about like Jews destroying civilization or the
need to like execute uh black people or something like that. Um,
the stuff in here runs the gamut from like one
of the first things I found was a clip from

(02:18:25):
Jesse Ventura, wrestler, predator star and former governor once had
a conspiracy TV show. There's a popular clip in anti
vaccine circles from it where he's talking with Alex Jones
about the Builderberg group and stuff. So I found that
in there, which is like pretty garden variety, like early
two thousands conspiracy nonsense. Definitely like, oh yeah, these are

(02:18:47):
like older people, like I don't think mostly boomers, but
definitely gen X and stuff, like folks who were in
like their forties and fifties. Um, this is the kind
of ship that they would have been like exposed to
in their late twenties and whatnot. Um. One of the
posters I found commenting on that video said, quote aired
onto TV in two that's a nine about a plan

(02:19:08):
for depopulation through a virus and injections. Too much of
a coincidence, And another responded to this. I was never
a huge Alex Jones fan, but he was right all along.
My kids were born in the early eighties and I
refused their vaxes way back then. Unfortunately, one of them
is now a late thirties CNN jabbed zombie and has
infected my grandkids with this inspiric experimental treatment. I'm done, um,

(02:19:30):
which is silly, but it also keeps you and like,
these are it's it's what you see a lot with
Q and on right, it's these folks who are getting
brought in onto telegraph. Yeah, it's great. It's terrible that
this person, this lady who has to be what in
her fifties sixties on my parents age, the boomer um

(02:19:51):
is on telegram, which two years ago even was the
only Americans you were would find were like extremely online
nazi weirdos. Um. Yeah, I remember doing like old training
is like, yeah, it was like over over two years ago,
and Telegram was nowhere near this prevalm for like regular organizing.
And this is a result of of the d platforming

(02:20:13):
of folks in the wake of the capital attack. But anyway,
we don't need to get too much into that right now.
So I want to talk a little bit more about
some of the things folks are sharing in this in
this channel, which is again kind of like I'm gonna
guess everyone here is kind of late thirties to maybe sixties,
fifties sixties. There's one local story that it was actually
very popular among a lot of like lefty folks on

(02:20:34):
Twitter of this like group of dads who showed up
to stop there's like an epidemic of fighting in their
school or something, and they showed up to do like
a community policing or a community self defense sort of thing.
It was celebrated by a lot of folks because it
was like, oh, hey, this is you know, a way
that communities can protect themselves without cops, YadA, YadA YadA,
which is a nice thing to see. It was also

(02:20:54):
celebrated um by these people, um, by by people in
this channel, and specifically the clip of the news story
covering this I found was from the Pepe Lives Matter channel,
which is, um, you know, an alt right channel like it. Again,
as we were talking about earlier, the Pepe Lives isn't
all like the way full Nazi pilled stuff, um, but

(02:21:17):
it shares a lot of stuff from the channels that
are straight up Nazis, And so you can you can
see already this like lady in her sixties who's probably
with some pretty normal boomer three years ago, is now
two steps away from Adam often type motherfucker's that's just
the way telegram works, um, and they're all kind of
bonding over again, this is not a bad story what

(02:21:39):
these local dads did, but it very much ties into
this idea of like, we gotta get all these parents
together and take action in the real world, like and
that's gonna that's gonna go towards taking action against the
people you don't want showing up in your school, meaning
like black children and like children. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
Community self defense is great, but also it really depends

(02:22:00):
on what community is defending itself from what. UM So
that's uh, we'll probably we'll have to talk about that
more at some point in the future. But yeah. Another
thing I found on that channel was video this This
I dug into a bit. So there was this video
that was claimed to be an ad. It was, in
fact an ad that Comcast had refused to air. UM

(02:22:22):
and the video this, this unaired ad claimed that it
was about. It was telling the story of a thirteen
year old girl, Maddie de garay Um, who was vaccinated.
She was part of a FASER trial and had, she claims,
like a disastrously bad reaction. UM an ad about her
situation was rejected by Comcast. UM and this girl like

(02:22:43):
has done the whole right wing in her I'm I'm
guessing her parents are the driver's done the whole right
wing media kind of circuit at this point. Um, the
fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people
in this telegram channel were yelling about. UM. And I
want to actually quote from the an article about why
Comcast rejected it, because it makes clear what's actually happening here.
Comcast is said to have told the ads buyer it

(02:23:05):
was rejected because it needed substantiation and all graphic images
needed to be removed. Documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included
the girls complete medical records, which are said to have
outlined symptoms such as erratic blood pressure and pulse, muscle spasms,
muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing up words, and the
inability to walk and cough. Um. So you've got this
case where number one there's graphic images, um, and number

(02:23:27):
two there's documentations that this girl has symptoms, but there's
not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine,
Like it's just one of these the Comcast is being
careful to not spread unsubstantiated shit about vaccine reactions and stuff. Um.
But within the telegram channel, the focus is entirely on

(02:23:48):
like how this is evidence of this conspiracy there suppressing
information suppressing information. Um. One response was why in Heaven's
name don't these parents do their research before having their
kids vaccinated. My heart goes out to the precious child
and family. What a lesson to learn for so many parents.
Never too late to educate yourselves people. Um. Also, I

(02:24:09):
want to point it just that the spelling and they
are incredible. There's an upsetting amount of emojis that. Yeah, honestly,
I couldn't never never two with one oh late to
educate your space selves. Uh, it's just again and now
I'm doing the doing the thing. I'm doing the thing

(02:24:29):
I tried not to. I did try to give it
a straight read through. You can be challenging when it's
like it's very funny content. It's it's very funny. Yeah,
but but but I think you know this. This is
this goes back to the who point about how this
pradicalization works, right, which is, you know you have, especially
with anti vax stuff that has this sort of larger

(02:24:50):
base from just like regular peer like hard right nazi stuff.
You get to see people who you know otherwise probably
would be a vaguely normal and very very quickly get
all this stuff and very quickly just go off the
deep end. They're not. Yeah, it's these It is it's
hard to like say, like, these are all extremists because
like they are themselves aren't extremists. There's surrounded by so

(02:25:11):
much content that is made by extremists that it's making
them do these things, which is how which is how
extremism works, right, But it's it's challenging because like when
you try to explain this to someone, you're like, no,
this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something, right,
And it's hard to explain to them how fast this
thing can move to the point where they're showing up
at a school board with their grand children yelling at
like teachers and stuff. Yeah, and it's not that this

(02:25:34):
lady is a Nazi. It's that this lady can be,
through the process you just outlined, convinced to stand up
next to a Nazi and like, uh, defend his his
right to do violence to people she has been convinced
are president a threat to the lives of her her grandchildren,
which is people may say like the whole like, oh,

(02:25:56):
it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing
next to a Nazi or a Nazi, But like I
would argue, no, what's actually the logistics of what is
happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got
radicalized into national socialism. Anyway, another meme I found it
was a screen grab from fucking um Shawshank Redemption with

(02:26:16):
Morgan Freeman and I don't know whatever one of the
white dudes in that movie in prison jumpsuits sitting next
to each other, and it's the text on it is
what are you in for? I spoke of at a
school board meeting, which you she see a lot of
stuff like this, this idea that they're going to jail,
they're going to get rated by the FBI because they're
like showing up at school boards to protest vaccine mandates

(02:26:36):
and mask mandates. Um. And then like in the middle
of all this stuff mostly talking about like anti vac shit,
there's also this post talking about how this post that's
a video of a woman at a school board talking
about how a book needed to be banned and she's
reading the book she's reading is a queer memoir. Um.

(02:26:58):
And I'll talk about this more are at the end,
but you can definitely mention it here because it gets
up a lot it's it's a gay it's a gay
coming of age story, right, And as a result, there's
a couple of semi graphic scenes in it, and she
like gets up in front of the school board and
reads this and argues that it's basically like pornography their children.
They think it's child pornography. Yeah, that's what they're marching

(02:27:20):
mistaken what child pornography is. They're trying to they're trying
to get all the people at the school board either
killed or arrested over this. That is that is their goal.
And I'll talk about this specific instance later because it
keeps coming up with all of these channels, and it's
one of the main things that links someone from like
a sodden red channel to a channel like this. This
is like one of the main things they've been using
the past few weeks as this is the current, this

(02:27:41):
is like the past, and and this is this though,
has been going on for a while. You've seen a
lot of like a libertarian right wing, a lot of
like kill your local pedophile shirts because who's gonna a
lot most people don't think, like who's going to defend
a pedophile pedophiles? Yeah, the proud boy at the Portland
School Board who was standing and ready to fight the
ready to fight scurity guards and stuff. He was wearing

(02:28:01):
a kill your local pedophile. Uh, it's this is this
is the thing. This is the thing the right wing
figured out. And if they figured this out a long
time ago, which is that Okay, if if you want
to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal
to do like absolutely horrible violence, the way you do
it is to tell them that they're threatening kids and
it doesn't matter what work. So well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(02:28:25):
and you know, and this once and once you've convinced
you know, like this, this is this is just a
very I think a very important thing about media messaging
in general is that the literally the instant someone says
think of the children, you need to stop and you
need to disregard everything they're about to say after that. Yeah,
like of the time that person is like about to

(02:28:49):
try to convince you that like you need to like
we need to murder the gauge or something like that.
Like That's that. That's the thing that follows from I
feel confident saying no one has ever advocated thinking of
the children and meant anything, But I want to kill
this specific group of people. Um, just like I that's
not even really hyperbole. It's it's a a trite and

(02:29:12):
true organizing tactic for these people. And it's part of
the reason why, like the famous white nationalist catchphrase is
focused around, we need to secure a future for white children, right, Like,
that's what they're always talking about with all of this
ship and it's it's about being able to demonize a
group in a way that they can't be defended. It's
about ending any sort of debate or conversation, and it's

(02:29:33):
about justifying thoughtless violence because it's you're protecting children. Um.
You know who else protects children, Robert definitely not the
advertisers of this show, um, because we are sponsored by
raytheon brand. School bus seeking missiles the only missiles that
only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank,

(02:29:54):
at a at a technical at a at a terrorist
training camp. They go right for school buses no matter
where you aim them. So in that way, there are
a fire and forget kind of weapon as long as
you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school
bus with a with a missile. Okay, here's here's the
check it out. All right, well we're back still talking
about this. Uh so last segment for this episode. As

(02:30:17):
we as we as I was talking about, there's a
post and in the post is a video of a
woman from a different school board meeting reading out a
graphics graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir and
ranting about how it's it's child pornography. Comments include fucking
monsters running these schools, satanic and disgusting an elementary school. Unreal.

(02:30:39):
Why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing pornography
to minors? It's not even read they can It's just
available from some other library, like because you can request
a lot of books at libraries in all caps. Where's
the sheriffs? Where are the city, county, state and federal
task forces? And uh yeah, it's I'll talk about this

(02:31:03):
more in the next episode. Tied to the overarching anti
anti queer, anti trans, anti gay school board side of things,
and of course other things I found there's like video
of them celebrating capital rioters, celebrating Josh Holly for defending
capital rioters. Um. I went into some other channels that
were adjacent that I saw shared, you know, in this channel.

(02:31:23):
One of them was Oscar's Midnight Writer Patriot Post channel,
which actually thousands and thousands of followers. Average post would
get two to three thousand views. Um, here's one. I'm
considered a domestic terrorist if I tell a school board
that I don't want my eight year old daughter watching
sex videos in her third grade classroom. Um, and that
post was right above this post. The constitution actually says

(02:31:44):
you can legally overthrow your government if they are tyrannical.
And that post was right above this post, which was
a screen which was a screen grab from a Twitter
account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard's seventeen
seventy six. The FBI didn't rate Epstein islander protect hundreds
of young female gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years,
But they'll raid your PTA meetings when you questioned the

(02:32:06):
curriculum and on scientific mask mandates and their indoctrination camps,
I mean public schools. And of course this from Twitter
user named Emerald Robinson. And again this is all shared
in that channel. It's like a screen grab from Twitter.
When the FBI starts arresting parents at school board meetings,
just remember the GOP senators who made it happen by
confirming Merritt Gardland as Attorney General. And then it's a

(02:32:26):
list of Republican u Emerald Eard Robinson is the White
House correspondent for News Max. Oh right, Oh my god, yeah,
you're right. Uh huh great great. So I don't know,
that's probably all I should get into. Well, no, there's
a we can one more things. So Oscar's Midnight Writer,

(02:32:46):
which was shared in in that uh that school board
channel took me to the Western Chauvinist school Board Channel,
which took me to a post which with a video
UM with a link to a video. The text with
the video was woman it's cool board meeting calls out
Jewish power by name. Um and it's a woman ranting
about how the Jews are behind all of the critical
race theory in schools. Um. So again not hard to

(02:33:10):
get to this kind of ship. Another post was it
was in the Western Chauvinist Telegram. It was sharing a
post from the Murder the Media Telegram, who were part
of the Capital riot. UM. That post from Murder the
Media was National school Board Association apology letter for calling
you domestic terrorists. It was we'll talk about this later,
but the comment in the Western Chauvinist was like, we

(02:33:31):
don't apologize for being like for being domestic terrorists, Like
we're yeah, we we think it's rad that they called
us domestic terrorists. Because the Chavinist channel, by the way,
has over fifty subscribers UM and used to be a
Proud Boy channel, which is now just a general kind
of farther right wing organizing channel that it's probably it's
one of the most shared Telegram channels in this whole network. UM.

(02:33:55):
And they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals
to Trump voter while slipping in a lot of accelerationist
talking points UM to slowly lead people on that redcrumb
trail to make them be okay with mass silence. There
was a comment in there, forwarded from another from the
telegram account of a guy named Eric Striker UM, and

(02:34:15):
this was a post Striker made commenting on a video
of a father being dragged out of a quote woke
school board meeting. UM for uh complaining of complaining about
this kind of ship UM. The post from Eric Striker
I think is worth reading, and I'm going to read
it now for now, all we can do is impotently

(02:34:36):
watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting. We
must build our political organization to the point where we
can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations,
sent him free legal support, and make people realize that
the time of fucking with whites is over. We need
our own media, civil society groups and activists. We need
money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything

(02:34:56):
in the conservative movement. It never will be. We need
to build it from scrap. We are well underway National
Justice Party. We must quietly and patiently build. Eventually we
will have the capacity to come on the scene when
they at least expect it and will be and we
will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where
we should end for today. Yep. That that's a good

(02:35:17):
part on good sad intro into the current problem of
schoolboary meetings. We'll get into a lot more like accelerating
rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind
of where the stuff originated from and the other other
side of things beyond, just like the CRT and UH
and and mask stuff, because it branches out into a
lot of other kind of adjacent cultural war bullshit issues. Um, anyway, yeah,

(02:35:40):
we'll do that tomorrow. Um you can all the show
on Twitter and Instagram, it happen here, pod and cool
Zone Media if you want to be on those apps,
which I don't know why you would. Yeah, don't be
on those apps. Get you know, I just found out
they'll deliver skinned gators to your door. Get into cooking gators.
That's what I plan to do. Getting off Twitter and
I'm Gator is the new social network. So Gator from

(02:36:13):
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(02:36:33):
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(02:37:19):
unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills, and you just
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(02:37:39):
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a spr e a k E R. Hustle on over Today.

(02:38:20):
What second? My part of this episode on right Wing
attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order
to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups
and also erode democratic institutions from the ground. Uh stage title, Yeah, yeah,

(02:38:43):
that'll that'll click. Well Ah, I'm so glad we don't
have to worry about clicking and titles. And that took
up a lot of my mind back in the day, Garrison,
back when, back when the internet was different. Now we
don't have to worry about that anymore, but we do
have to worry about our moms of fascists attacking school
board meetings. Happens every week, keeps happening more often. School

(02:39:06):
boards are calling for assistance. That they seem pretty, they
seem pretty not thrilled. Yeah, they seem not psyched about. Yeah.
So where where where? When we left off, I was
talking about some things I found on the gram Telegram. Uh, Garrison,
what's next. I'll go into my preliminary research on Telegram

(02:39:27):
and particularly response. Basically, I looked through every single Telegram
post and all of the main fascist channels I lurk
on that mentioned school boards from like the past two weeks. Um,
so like, yeah, this is like current current stuff on ongoing. Um,
I got to a lot of the channels I was
already familiar with, like you know, the Western Shovinist channel,
which is uh subs um, the Standard Students channel, which

(02:39:51):
was a when I was less familiar with, specifically dedicated
to this school board issue. UM. One of one of
the posts we have on there is U says, your
enemy isn't some far off ship whole country. Your enemy
is just down the street at your local school board meeting,
teaching your kids to hate their ancestors, you and themselves.

(02:40:11):
So like again, that is a very much white supremacist
dog whistle just right there, um talking about producing Hollywood
movies writing there No, basically it's basically just a whistle. UM.
So yeah, they then they, you know, the same post
talks about you know, masks and shot down businesses and
the vaccines and stuff and saying the fight is here
and the fight is now. So just in terms of like, yeah,

(02:40:33):
they're really wanting to hype people up for doing this
thing at school boards. They're trying to really hammer down
the school board points. So like I found this, I
found this post. This is this is a post from
the Standford Students channel UM and I saw this one
re shared in a lot of different channels. One of
the other first ones that I saw pop off was
from Ron watkins channel like Code monkey z. He is

(02:40:56):
one of the one of the architects or one of
the you know people who really pushed went on stuff
into He's the guy who ran like the physical infrastructure
of Chan chan in eight Coon for years. Yeah. He
and he's trying to pivot into being like having his
just his face be like a kind of alternative right
wing figure right now. He's gonna be running for office

(02:41:18):
in Arizona, I believe. Anyway, he has a very popular
Telegram channel. Um, and he made he made this post
that had over a thousand, over a thousand comments on it,
which is a lot for telegram. A thousand comments on
telegram post, especially telegram post of of code mackezs size
in't see how many substance So Ron just his context.

(02:41:38):
Ron Watkins has four hundred and thirty two thousand subscribers
on his on his Telegram channel. So yeah. Anyway, uh
CRT is being rebranded as s e L a Social
Emotional learning. If you are attending school board meetings, as
you should be, do what you can to make you

(02:42:00):
stop both s e L and CRT and keep them
and make sure that they are banned in your school districts.
So again, just direct calls to action for getting people
to show up to these school boards. And also, social
emotional learning is not CRT, and of course security is
not even taught in schools. I think everyone who listens
to this podcast knows that sr TY, actually critical theory

(02:42:21):
isn't taught in schools. This isn't an actual thing, it's
it is like a legal theory. We'll get into more
of how this gout like pushed towards the end. I
think Chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's again these none of these things are actually real.
It's a complex legal theory. What they're really mad about
is their people are teaching that racism is like an
issue that's built into a lot of American institutions and

(02:42:42):
it's an ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past.
That's what they're actually mad about, and they just call
that CRT. Some some of the comments from the Ron
Wapkins post, stuff like these snowflakes are so annoying, I'm
about to start cutting power to any school in my
community that teaches this. Um so yeah or again that's
just a direct, a direct threat of doing terrorism shouting,

(02:43:04):
I mean, less of a threat and more of a promise.
Yeah do that it be no, sure it doesn't. All right,
Well I don't understand things the same way you zoomers do.
Please continue. Yeah, a lot of a lot of posts
being a shipped around from channel to channel, including this
full Nazi channels were like trying to trying to of course,

(02:43:25):
like lots of Nazis are actually you know, I thought
it was pretty funny that that the school board union
put in a call to assistance to the federal government
to deal with this issue. They of course they thought
that was funny. But they're gonna use this to like
spread networks to be like, hey, the government wants to
stop you. They're calling you a terrorist. You like regular
folk are being called terrorists because you're showing up with
school boards, Right, that's the kind of message that they're

(02:43:45):
going to shoot out. So they a lot of Nazi
channels crafted a lot of posts like that that got
shared around a lot. Yeah, in trying to basically all
time critical race theory and if you approached against critical
race theory. They're calling you a domestic terrorist, that that
type of thing. And this got this got shared in
like the school Boards channel, and a whole bunch of
whole bunch of other stuff being being talking about how

(02:44:08):
if you, if you stand up, you're gonna be a
domestic terrorist. You have to be brave and do this.
A few days after the school board uh not a
few days, I guess this. This was this was in
like in October um the school Association retracted some of
the some of the words that they used in their
letter because of this backlash that was created. And this
was also shared in shared in uh lots of fascist channels.

(02:44:31):
The main one who was shared in that I saw
was the Honk Pills channel UM, which is just another
type of Peppe meme um, one of the other one
of the other big, big kind of groups active in
this in this whole sphere. And this this has been
a group going on for a while and we haven't
talked about on the pod, but we probably should do
something eventually. Is this group called White Rose, so this

(02:44:54):
is a White Rose is a COVID conspiracy group that
has been very uh successful in creating on the ground
organizers who are regular people. They do a lot of
like sticker bombs and lots of neighborhoods. If you have
if you ever seen anti like COVID or COVID conspiracy
stickers in your neighborhood, it was probably a white Road sticker. UM.
These are all over the States and basically everything. As

(02:45:16):
a quick heads up, the original White Rose was a
student protest organization that existed in Nazi Germany UM and
protested illegally, and its organizers were executed by the Nazis.
And I think it was the mid forty I mean
it would be like like forty three, maybe maybe forty four. Um.
Sophie Shoal was the person most associated with them. So

(02:45:38):
they've they're they're they've taken the names of these these heroes,
UM in order to it's just disgusting. It's very gross.
There's there's a decent amount of decent amount of researchers
in this field. Thinks that there's like actual bad people
behind White Rose. Of course, with like bad people because
they're spending COVID stuff, but like wait, like like more

(02:45:58):
like bad actors used by the astroturfing this thing. But
at White roasters of its own piece later. But because
they have such a big following on Telegram, they are
of course using using this to using the school board
thing to gain more support. They have about subscribers to
their specific telegram channel. They should have post a few

(02:46:19):
weeks ago saying thank you to all the brave parents
going out to their school boards and standing up for
the children. UM. And they try that, you know, get
people to do sticker bombs and stuff, but the fact
that there's like specifically calling out people in school boards
is like an extra step of like beyond just putting
stickers up in your neighborhood. UM. Another another another white

(02:46:39):
right Rose post. They shared a shared a video UM
that was captioned as concerned parent absolutely destroys school board
with facts The school boards are the battlefield of our time.
This is how it's done. And just the increasing rhetoric
around like battle fields, this is where like the fight
is at all that kind of stuff. Um. There was

(02:47:02):
another another uh, the White White Chauvinist channel shared a
video from Fox News. UM and they they the Western
Chauvinist channel, which is again it's one of the most
shared ones in this whole network. They captioned as saying
parents and Virginia are trying to fight back against the
school board that is anti white. Um, every every school
district in America needs to have an anti mandate pro

(02:47:24):
right parents running for the school board. So that's just
the It's this type of stuff all over and this
this this post was got it has like an eleven
eleven thousand, eleven thousand views. Um. So these things are
spreading to a lot of a lot of these specific networks.
And I mean, I I have so many of this
kind of stuff. I'm not going to go through every

(02:47:46):
single one in detail. There's ones that are way more
like openly anti Semitic, uh, you know, saying, you know
the Jews that run you know, ex school board, um
are trying to force vaccinations on every student over twelve. Um.
Other another there's this fake this is this this fake
Clint Eastwood channel on Telegram that's pretty popular. Someone who's
pretending to be Clint Eastwood. That spread all right stuff. Um.

(02:48:10):
He had a post that was shared a lot that
started by saying, starts taking over school boards, start taking
over city council, start taking over city boards, um, start
to start being poll watchers, start being poll workers, start
taking over sheriff's departments. It's not enough just to vote.
So this, this is the other thing that we're going
to see a lot more of, is rhetoric around voting.
Isn't enough, you need to start doing more things. Um,

(02:48:32):
there is one of it. Yeah, here, here's here's one.
This is gonna this is a referencing some of the
trans stuff. I'll discussing a bit. I just want to
tie it in now. A post from the Western Chavenist
channel saying there is no political solution, which is a
direct Nazi, a direct Nazi lie. I mean that. That's
what I did an article early this year on Riley Williams,

(02:48:53):
the Nazi who stole Pelosi's laptop during the Capitol riot,
and then, like the video that we were able to
I did to fire her as a sig hiling Nazi,
and that's how she opened her quote, there is no
political solution. It's a very common catchphrase among like the
the fast right. Yeah. So there's been a lot of
stuff around harassing like specific school board members, harassing specific teachers.

(02:49:16):
There was this teacher in uh I think in California
that was trying to like introduced like like anti fascist
type rhetoric and talking about how fascism is a modern thing.
They got absolutely bashed um and like docs um, and
they got it, I think fired because there was like
hundreds of parents organizing on on apps like telegram to
harass this one teacher at school board's like you know,
they took over massive school board meetings and just talked

(02:49:38):
about this one teacher endlessly um. And it was even
It's interesting because like all the parents were like, yeah, Mike,
my I got worried because my student actually really like
liked the teacher and said that they were doing like
giving really interesting points about like systemic issues. And the
parents were like and they like brought their kids to
the school board meeting and there's the kids are standing
in the back as their parents are ranting about this

(02:49:59):
and talking about how the kids actually, like I thought
they were learning things about systemic issues. And then that
got people mad. So you know what else gets people mad? Uh?
This is a advertisements. Yeah, and we're bad. We're gonna

(02:50:21):
we're gonna touch on the uh, the specifics, like all
the stuff we've been talking about. Most of the modern
most most of like the current organizing is a lot
of it's around like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Um.
Like all of this called like you know, the the
the stool board channel. All of this kind of stuff
is usually around vaccine, vaccines and mask stuff. Uh, of

(02:50:42):
course there's critic Royce theory was the way more popular
thing a few months ago. Right now is the vaccine thing.
The other kind of like ever present thing is being
upset that trans kids exist and being very fearful that
that there are trans kids around your kids. Uh. This
is a thing that's been, you know, a thing for
years that people have been fighting against. And since the

(02:51:05):
school board thing is becoming more popular, people are are
starting to uh bring Laiceally do these kind of flash
mobs specifically around trans issues. Um. One of like the
more like astro turf type things was people getting mad
that there were like two specific books available in certain
high school and some middle school libraries. Um that one

(02:51:26):
of it was like a like one of it was
the memoir that Robert mentioned. The other one was like
a graphic novel memorial about someone realizing their gender queer.
So these are books that are not in curriculums. These
are just books that are available at the library. Um.
And basically there was people who just who found these

(02:51:47):
out and got turned it into like like a meme
on telegram essentially, like people like sharing information about this.
Then you like look it up, see if it's in
your library. So then we have all of these like
coordinated attacks on school boards by these mobs of people
all but these same two books. Um, and the goals
to not only just get the books like banned, but
they're also trying to like fire or arrest the teachers

(02:52:08):
and school bar members for allowing these books to happen.
There has been school boy members who have like stepped
down because of just how much harassment is about these things.
Quote from the Western Chavinist channel, Jesus Christ straight up
pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again, the Jewish
school board member gets mad and trying to shut them down.
How can you not connect the dots here? There's no
political solution. Voting will not remove these people. Um. There

(02:52:30):
was the mayor of Houston, uh so in the mayor
of Houston, Ohio heard about this, and he went to
a school board meeting and instructed all of them, all
of the board members to resign um quoting the quoting
the Proud Boy right wing organizing channel Western Chavenista. This
comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the system

(02:52:50):
called educators, instructed kids to describe a sex scene that
they wouldn't show their mom. Of course this didn't happen.
This is this is they these these things are not
are not These books are not used in any kind
of curriculum anyway. So even even if they were that that,
we were not even we're not even in that reality.
Um So the mayor of this town basically got these instructed,

(02:53:12):
these instructed all of these people to resign. Um earlier,
I think in mark No. In August of this year,
pride flags were banned at a at a school school
district inside south west Oregon. Um, I think around I
think around Newburg. The Newberg school district banned but banded

(02:53:33):
pride flegs. So all this kind of stuff and and
of course that is in a lot of states. But
the yeah, the fact that it's in like Oregon, a
blue state, is people got made like you know, there's
like you know, NBC articles about it because it's it's Oregon.
It's not it's it's it's not it's it's not a
red state. So it's all big, it's all Portland, it's
all Antifa, right yeah, yeah, so again the stuff is
not not not like contained to one thing. And like yeah,

(02:53:56):
if you google the stuff around these books, if you
google like j under queer book, uh school boards, you'll
find this in so many school districts. You'll see just
mobs of people lined up yelling and screaming um and
like like printing out giant, like giant cardboard prints of
of this comic book showing like like with like you know,

(02:54:19):
there's like a dick on it, Like there's like a
drawn a drawn dick, because that's what human bodies look like.
Like you can look at like a lot of like yeah,
like what are you gonna banned the statue of David
because he has his dick outs too, like like come on.
And also, these are the same people who talk about
like oh, they're you know, banning books, burning books. You know,

(02:54:39):
right there was that there was that tweet from like
James Woods about like these are the books that people
want banned. That means they're the most important ones. But
these people love. These people love like burning books. These
people love banning books. They love canceler culture. That the
cultures that I was that I was in as a kid,
they would have like massive like book and like c
D and DVD burnings for like unlike unholy and sinful
media that you would like bring in and like throw

(02:55:01):
like your sinful music onto this giant fire. Like these
people love love burning books, they love they love banning stuff,
they love cancel culture. Um, but they just like that. Yeah,
So that was that was most of my stuff around
the kind of the ongoing queer and trans stuff. Of course,
you know, this ties into the bathroom stuff as well,
with the people showing up to school board meetings to

(02:55:23):
scream about you know, kids going ship in the bathroom
that they want to and feel comfortable in. Um. You know.
And again like it doesn't it's not gonna stop with
trans people either. Right as soon as they ban trans people,
the next thing is going to be oh, gay students. Right,
it says it never it's never stops, it always keeps going. Um.
And it's just an ever present problem that it's gonna

(02:55:43):
require a lot more, a lot more dealing with. And
again with all of these flash mobs, like no one,
no one's gonna stop them because they're like the people
in power. They're the people that have all of the privilege.
There's no really effective counter organizing for these school board
meetings right now. Um, the cops aren't gonna do ship.
Security guards aren't gonna do ship. Uh and regular libs

(02:56:04):
and regular regular people aren't gonna do it either. And
it's hard to figure out how to actually combat this
because there's a lot of times that the people in
school boards were like, no, we don't want this to
turn into a giant like fistfights, Like, don't don't come
in mass to start fistfighting them. But there needs to
be something to combat, whether that be you know, running
running for school boards, just showing up outside school boards,

(02:56:26):
having just more people there in, having more presence there, uh,
so that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob
of two hundred anti mask people showing up. Right, there
needs to be some type of thing happening because no
one else needs to be countered and yeah, you know what,
they might need to get the ship kicked out of them.
I'm sorry, but like I don't, like I don't think

(02:56:47):
that would actually help in this instance, probably, but like
there needs to be fucking something like they they are.
The level of boldness that they have is evidence that
they they feel, they are confident that there is no
counter to what they're is going to be done. And
perhaps if they were being met by a wall of

(02:57:10):
people in the community who were willing, if they tried
to force their way into fucking throw down, you know,
to say, you're not entering this building without a goddamn mask,
You're not shutting down this meeting. Um. I don't know,
maybe that would do something. I don't actually know what
would do something. If it was people just as regular people,
I think that would be. Yeah, it's certainly not going
to help of its antifa. Um, for the love of God,

(02:57:32):
don't show up in fucking black block at a school
board meeting. Um, Like what would work is a bunch
of other middle aged parents showing up and being willing
to confront these people if and like, everything that is
worth mentioning is that a lot of the people at
these protests like are not parents at all. Like they're
not they're not there, not even from the same school district.

(02:57:52):
They're just sort of like this This is just how
this is just how this sort of right wing outrage
machine has worked and this is where they're drawing people. Yeah,
I mean and again like it's it's a lot of
the people and there there's gonna be big dudes who
want to fight, but a lot of the people like
screaming are are like you know, middle aged women. The
people who are like really like leading the charge on

(02:58:13):
this because they're able to use their privilege because like
no one's gonna stop them, right, So that that's like
when they're leading the charge of two people who are
gonna like scream and harass and chase out black security guards,
chase out, chase out the all this all the school
remembers no one's they're they're very effective at using their
privilege to gain political ground by just like doing stuff

(02:58:36):
on the ground. It's like, you know, it's like this
is like the January six thing. It's like the January
six thing. This is the new future of political action
is just showing up in mass two places where no
one's gonna stop you because you're like you're the you know,
the good, relatable you know every day Yeah you're anyway,
That's that's the stuff I had. Will probably have an

(02:58:57):
ad break and then talk about maybe some of how
the stuff start speaking of using your privilege, you know,
what is the greatest privilege being able to purchase the
products that Yeah, that's exactly right. There's no privilege higher
than being able to engage with these consumables. And we're back,

(02:59:21):
all right, Chris, you want to close this out. Yeah,
So the last thing I want to talk about that
is interesting about this whole thing is, you know, we
we've we've been mostly been focusing on the very furthest
right elements of this, but a lot of the school
board stuff is tied to i mean just straight a
Republican party operatives and people who work in this sort

(02:59:44):
of you know, I mean there's there's literally a bunch
of people who work for the the Publican parties we'll get into.
And then there's also this sort of network of of
Republican think tanks, Republicans sort of yea dark money dumps.
That's a lot of a lot of AstroTurf groups and
that kind of stuff. Yeah, And and so I want
to talk about a few of these people because I
think they're interesting. Um, I think we can start with

(03:00:05):
Nicole Nelly, who's an interesting person. She's so she she
most recently founded Parents Defending Education who are They're They're
one of the big groups to sort of like spreads
this this sort of attack on school board stuff over
the country. They have chapters, they organize people, and they
also you know, they do this thing where they collect
incident reports from from school districts that they you know,

(03:00:26):
just distribute to all these people and they put them online.
They have all of these they they they have a
lot of stuff they do. They do a lot of
anti mask mandate stuff. So they have these like template letters,
like template like fakely performing letter things that you can
send to schools that if you don't want to wear
a masks. That's the staple of this type of organizing. Now. Yeah,
and and the interesting thing about Nicolenelly is that so

(03:00:47):
this is not like her first organ like three years
eighteen back in the Halcyon days of of you know,
I I'm not quite going to say it was before
mask fully came off, but it was well the mask
was like a little bit more on. She she previously
founded a speech first. Yeah you might remember, yeah, as

(03:01:08):
republic speech was the big talking point, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And so she ran that for a while. Now she's
you know, organizing with the Holy people who just wants
to Yeah, they just move on, They move on to
the new things. It was. It was free speech, it
was christ theory. Right now it's anti mask stuff. Next
up it is gonna be trans stuff going real hard.

(03:01:28):
Just today we had the fucking person who BBC platforms,
the fucking lincum. Yeah, Lily K, the rapist Lily k
manifesto where she details which specific trans women she wants
to personally kill. Yeah, I used to know Lily Um.
Oh yeah, yeah yeah, uh real dark turned Um, I

(03:01:51):
don't know. I guess it's not super surprising. She was
definitely interviewed her for a documentary and it was she
was a bit off putting. Uh, didn't realize this was
going on. I mean yeah, there's just a lot of
a lot a lot of reports of people in like
the sex book industry of talking about her, like raping
people in bathrooms, which again it's like, yeah, the people

(03:02:11):
it's always can screaming about oh no trans woman or
in bathrooms. Yet the people the person screaming about this
is an actual rapist, Like like when when we say
rapists here, like she she she raped so many people
that like on Twitter, like I was scrolling through my feet,
and I saw multiple people who were like, oh I
know this person she assaulted me. Yeah, it's really bad.
The people who the turfs are like pushing Yeah, this

(03:02:32):
is the BBC was platform. So like, yeah, like trans
stuff is as soon as as soon as the anti
mask anti back stuff like dies down in the next
five months or whatever. Uh I I foresee a massive
pivot towards specifically anti anti trans antiqueer antique stuff, because
that's gonna be the new thing. Yep, and and and

(03:02:53):
and I think it's it's worth bearing in mind that
this stuff. Yeah, and you know, with with the cold
NAILI specifically, so she she worked she like worked at
the Cato Institute, which is like Murray Rothbart and Charles Cokes.
Now it's it's yeah, it's it's it's basic. It's basically
this is a slight oversupplication, but it's basically one of
the Cokes sort of like money laundering like money operation things.
She also worked at Freedom Works, who yeah, yeah this

(03:03:17):
is great. So um this is this is one of
the fun parts of this, which is that so Freedom
Works is another one of the Coke's sort of dark
money laundering machine things and freedom Works are basically the
people who created the Tea Party. Like there are the
people who turned the Tea Party from like a bunch
of weird guys, like like six weirdos into like, you know,
the basically the the the the entirety of the pre

(03:03:40):
Trumps conservative political machine who like built a publican party
after it was like completely discredited um in the the
two thousand's. And this is true of a lot of
the people who are in charge of these big organs
have connections like this, um the person you found in
No Left Turn, which is No Left Turn you knowe
for an education. They're they're they're They're not one of

(03:04:02):
these big sort of anti school board things. I mean
they they're the people. They're one of people who like
they have a list of books on their website that
they want banned. Wow, yeah, it's great. And their founder
rights for the heritage foundations like magazine. So they're there.
There's there's all of this stuff. And I think maybe
the most implematic one is this guy is Mark Ruffo
who Rufo. Yeah, so so he's he's the guy who

(03:04:25):
just created the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing.
He like threw together a bunch of like in just
like these incredibly tenuous connections, Like there's a bunch of
sort of old cultural Marxism conspiracy stuff in there. Yeah,
it's a lot of like Frankfurt's school type ship. Yeah. Yeah.
And and but but what I think is interesting about him,

(03:04:47):
it's less his ideas, which are just pseudo intellectual. Yeah,
he doesn't he's not actually super smart in what he
says that there's a lot of videos of him talking
to actual philosopher is getting schooled about what race theory is.
Like he's he's actually not that intelligent in this, in
this side of things. But but you know that the
thing is that there's nothing more dangerous than an idiot
with a trick up his sleeve exactly. And you know,

(03:05:09):
and then the trick basically is Fox News. And you know,
the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that
this was you know, Mark Ruffo, He's very very explicit
about this, that this this this was his solution to
the George Floyd uprising was that, oh, we we need
we need to we need to find this thing to
stop the medicinum of this uprising. And this is this
is who Tucker Carlson brings On and starts bring onwy

(03:05:30):
and this blows up, and he immediately gets hired by
the Manhattan Institute, which is a very not that old
but they're from the eighties, but a very an old,
extremely powerful conservative thing tank that I don't think. I
think it's less known than things like the Heritage Foundation
or the kid who wants to Yeah, I would say so, yeah,
but he gets They hired him like immediately because you know,
the sort of mainline at the Republican Party very quickly

(03:05:53):
is like this is the thing that we can use
as like a hammer, right, And so the Manhattan Institute
publishes this group of work for them. Now I can't
I'm not actually sure if you I don't know if
he specifically wrote this or he was just involved in it.
I think it's it's the Bye line is just the
Manhattan Institute. But had they have this incredibly detailed tool
kit explaining how you know, both both explaining what the

(03:06:16):
sort of right wing like line on critical race theory is,
and they have like a bunch of explainers, have like
list of terms I have you ever seen yeah, yeah,
it's actually yeah, if you've ever seen like list of
terms of people want band like it's all just pulled
from this document, right, so that add stuff. Um. But
but the interesting part of about this is the other
thing is this this is an organizing manual, right, It's
it's a specific thing that tells you how to go

(03:06:38):
and how to find other people, like other other people.
You know, if if you're like an incensed right wing
like freaking one of these school districts, it's like, okay,
well here's here's how you like talk to other people
in your districts. Here's here's a list of options of
like things you can do going public. And then there's
a very interesting thing part of this that that I
think is really disturbing and outlines like really what's going

(03:07:00):
on here, which is there's this whole like freak out
thing about this thing called minority rule, where like, oh,
the left has this like they have this like militant
minority that that will compel the majority to follow them
by because they keep on showing up, they keep on
doing things. And if if this minority like it keeps
keep keeps you know, being more in transient than everyone else,

(03:07:22):
then they will inevitably win. And this the three quarters
of this section is this like weird fear mongering thing
about it. But then the last part of it is
a bunch is the thing that's saying, oh, we need
to do this ourselves, right, this is how we win.
We win by being more in transient, win more often
of course. Yeah, and you know, and this is this
is the other thing is this is from like last year.
I think this is like this summer. So yeah, okay,

(03:07:46):
that's sorry. This is this is this is really this ship.
But it's interesting because it's like this is the sort
of you know, this, this is this is the Republican
Party essentially, I mean the institute, very very mainstre Republican Party. This. Yeah,
this is how the effective in person organizing. We we
talked about this a bit in our episodes um about
the like in the aftermath of the abortion ruling in

(03:08:07):
Texas and how and how like the religious right ring
organizing has worked in local districts. Yeah, this this is
how they are able to get things done, which is
why there's been so many school by members who either
get fired, who have had to step down, who have
been harassed off the job and are now there's people,
you know, a lot of a lot of like people
I would describe as people holding very extreme views are
now running and taking these spots. Um because if you

(03:08:30):
can do if you can do this type of like again,
it's not grassroots, but it's it's it is it is
like astroturp, so like it appears grassroots. But if can
do this type of like faux grassroots organizing, you can
gain a lot of power over specific areas and make
a lot of people's lives a lot more miserable. And
that's that's that's what the goal is, right, The goal
is to make the trans kids lives miserable. The goals
to get people to not wear masks and dive COVID

(03:08:52):
like that those are the results of these actions. Well,
I think I think there's an interesting interplace here, so
because I think because so freedom works, like like even
even a lot of the specific protests that are happening,
and this is especially true of of the very earlier,
earliest ones. I think, like when when like the very
first school board protests that were happening, Yeah, like like
a lot of these similar to follow was when they

(03:09:15):
started to start up. Yeah, and and those a lot
of those were directly organized by by people who work
for Freedom Works. And and this is this is what
a lot of the RT ones Yeah yeah, yeah, they
see the R T one are ever very specifically freedom Works.
And this is what I think is interesting about this
is that you know, okay, freedom Works. It's like, okay,
so what does freedom Works out of this? Freedom Works
wants the T party again, right, because you know that

(03:09:36):
this is this is what freedom Works does. Right there.
They're they're they're basically the group that comes in when
when the Republicans start losing election cycles. They're like, okay,
well now we need to get the balance of power back.
We need to bring drawn the Democrats out. So they're
they're they're largely trying to build a sort of electoral base.
And and again like this, this this will look familiar
to people who remember two thousand and ten because it's
the same thing except and this is the thing that

(03:09:58):
I I I this is the part where I genuine
and they can't tell whether the Freedom Works people, whether
the Cokes, whether that whether this sort of dark whening
network either I don't I can't tell whether they understand
what they're doing and like it or they're just incredibly naive.
But you know, this is not two thousand ten, right,
you can't when when you start mobilizing people, like mobilizing

(03:10:21):
people on the right wing to go to a place,
they don't just like sit there and hold signs anymore.
You cannot you cannot contain them at this point. You
cannot control the spread like you have once you've you've
opened this can, and there's no way of putting them
back in because as soon as they start organizing on
opposite telegram, they're one step away from skull masks. And

(03:10:41):
then they're being okay with cheering around people that are
going to go beat up that are going to go
beat up people in these meetings. Yeah, and this is
this is this is really the thing that I think
it's not just January six that we live in the
shadow January six, but it's also about you know, if
you look at how how the anti lockdown protest went in, right,
you a bunch people showing up with the capitals and

(03:11:02):
that stuff was extremely effective. And that in the conformation
between that in January six has you know, it's open
the floodgates and now that was that was six being possible.
Is the more and more protests around capitals of people
showing up in mass to overwhelm anyone. And because they're
all white, and because they're all like middle class conservatives,
no one's gonna stop them. Yeah, and and you know,

(03:11:23):
and this is the thing, right, you know, the Cokes.
I I genuinely don't know what the Cokes want out
of this. My guess is that the thing that they
want is is a new based Republican voters. But that's
not what they're creating. The thing that they're creating is
a new core fascist street fighters. And ye, you know it.
At some point, it doesn't it literally doesn't matter whether

(03:11:44):
or not this is what the Cokes are trying to
do or like not trying to do, because they're in
the end it's it's just pushing people towards thinking there's
no political solution. It's still only only violence and overwhelming
people in mass is the only way to get the
change that they want. The change they want is to
have trans kids not exists. And yeah, just more more

(03:12:05):
and more like fecistic policies. Um, whether that be you know,
banning books that mentioned gay people existing or what it's
like to be a gay person, whether that be teaching
people that racism is still an actual thing that exists,
or that be putting a masculine so you don't kill
your grandma or whatever. Yep. Well, and you know, and
I think I think one last thing, right, you know,

(03:12:27):
we saw what happened last time they were in power, right,
and it was you know, and like you can you
can talk about how a lot of the worst stuff
is still happening. Was like, yeah, they put a bunch
of people in concentration camps, right, and if they if
they take back power again, and there's a good chance
that they're going to because you know, the Democrats are

(03:12:48):
being they you know, the Democrats never want to be
in power. The thing, they want to be a minority
oppositions they can do fundraising, right and if you know,
when when when these people, if these people take power again,
it's going to be even worse than it was last time. Yeah.
The thing looking at looking at the Virginia election, the
night of recording is a great example of that. Yeah.

(03:13:10):
Uh in terms of yeah, it turns out when democrats
just do nothing and just sit around in office, you
don't convince young people to want to vote for them
because they're not actually doing anything. So then they just
sit out then the Republicans actually do vote in people.
Then we get uh we anti CRT person elected to
be the governor of Virginia. And that's the episode. Good Times. Well,

(03:13:33):
I hope everybody's optimistic feeling nice. Well, um, we'll be
back with something else. Research your school boards, who is
in it, and just protests around it and maybe show
up with some of your I don't know buddies with
your lattes and stand in front of the building and
be like, no, we don't want you, we don't want
you to shut stuff down because no one else is

(03:13:53):
going to stop them. It has to be just like
regular people. You can't it's not going to be any
elected Democrats, and like, you can't rely on teens and
black block to do this. That this isn't this isn't
what they need to be doing. It should be like yeah,
it'd be like millennials and Gen X need to be like, hey, no,
we're not gonna We're not gonna have you doing this. Well,

(03:14:14):
that's the that's the episode. That's the episode. Hey, we'll
be back Monday with more episodes every week from now
until the heat death of the Universe. It could happen.

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