It Could Happen Here Weekly 97

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 got to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Wonderful good podcast introduction Boys of West part of the podcast.
Maybe that could be Harry Jo, Hi May, how are you?
We're doing a podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
I've been feed a The chess world has decided that
my chess powers are too strong, and.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
I'm now being discriminated against. It's a good time, very excited.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, having a great time with my biological advantage at chess.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah that's right. Well, you know you've got to reach
those chess pieces somehow, and it's all to do with
your hip angle.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
From transvestigators. My wrists are too powerful. This allows me
to write down my moves faster than my opponent, thus
giving me an advantage on the clock. I can also
reach the clock faster. Incredible stuff happening in the world
of chess, not.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Just chess sadly, but the fact the Turfs have got
their clause I guess, into many sports, which is what
we are talking about today. Specifically, I thought we could
talk about how the Turf's ruin cycling, because that is
the thing they have been trying to do for some time.
It's a thing I've written about before and hopefully a

(01:46):
thing I will be able to write about again. And
unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself over
to the Turfs, which doesn't seem to have done, to
be fair, generally generally dicycling press, I think it's fair
to say it's lacked an intersexual analysis of anything. But
they've been better on this than I had expected, especially
the outlets which are not run by white sis head

(02:09):
dudes in Boulder, which, to be fair, is a minority.
Yeah strange, that odd? How odd? But yeah, shouting in
particular to Outside for including a gear guide to the
gear the cops used at the twenty sixteen RNC, which
could perhaps be included as the most tone deaf article
ever written. Yeah, yeah, incredibly, and then to leave it

(02:34):
up in twenty twenty to not like cover your tracks.
You know this is one of those.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
This is one of those, like when the workers take
Boulder like no biker will go hungry moments.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Ah yeah, Boulder, Colorado is a special place for bad things.
I won't say bad things to happen because they had
not a format shooting. But like social yeah, intersexual analysis
has not made it to bolder savvy. Great, great shame.
But we're not talking about bout it today. We're starting
out with a little discussion of cyclo cross. So cycle across.

(03:09):
Are you familiar with cycling across?

Speaker 4 (03:11):
Mire?

Speaker 5 (03:12):
No?

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Okay, So it's a fundamentally silly sport in which I've competed,
of course. It's it's when competitors race skinny, tired drop
bar bikes on off ro course. Yeah, I would please google,
uh perhaps, Okay, I'm going to send you one one
cyclo cross video. It is iconic for people who are

(03:38):
who are at home. The videos called is joey. Okay,
we can we can have mere reacting live.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
The first picture that I saw when when I googled
this is two people not riding on their two people
carrying their bikes.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yes, so this is a thing, right, you get really
good at cyclic you train your entire life and then
and then in psychelocross, there are parts where you have
to get off. Unless you're very talented, you can't hop
the barriers. I've tried that with mixed success. You can
also you can ride the stairs, but you do have
to be a bit of a boss. So there are

(04:15):
barriers and challenges which you have to get off. It's
called field riding in Dutch, which is about riding. Have
you watched the video? Will include a link in the
note to everyone else of it. Did you watch it

(04:36):
with the sound on? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (04:40):
Okay, I'm trying to figure out how to describe this effectively.
What has happened is this guy Okay, so these guy's
like going at full speed and then while the bike
is still moving, he's attempting to get off the bike
before he gets to this barrier, and he like, he
just goes. He does not get off in time. The
bike's going too fast and he like she is she's

(05:00):
like sprawling. But in mid arees he's flying off his
bike over the sparricaane thing.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
It is incredible. Yeah. All the time people are shouting
his name, And that's what you're supposed to do. You're
supposed to dismount and just carry the speed you kind
of you can either thwing your leg through or throwing
your leg to the outside and then carry a speed
and jump and then hop back on. It's a very
strange sport, right, And a big part of cyclo cross

(05:28):
is heckling. So the crowd will heckle you, right, they will.
They'll do all kinds of things, like often the crowd.
Hand ups are a big thing in cycle across. So,
like I've been handed dollar bills beer. What is happening
in the sport? Oh yeah, it's very funny. And the

(05:48):
moment you're not competitive if you're just grabbing shit off
the spectators. So like, like I remember racing in Las
Vegas at night. There was a race in Las Vegas
at night, and I ain't gonna win right like then,
so I'm just grabbing dollar bills and shoving them down
my like like.

Speaker 5 (06:07):
It's like.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
People will hand you like drinks. I've had beer hand ups,
donut spake, and one notable occasion a cookie that was
not just a normal cookie, which you should fucking disclose
to someone before you get to Yeah, that was a
bad day. I also had a pretty rough traumatic brain
injury that day. Oh no, yeah, I'd already sustained the

(06:31):
brain injury that hit the cookie. I thought my blood
sugar was low, so I was like, yeah, I'm gonna
got that cookie and it's going to be great. It
was not. It wasn't the blood sugar. It was affected
my cognition. So cyclograss is fun and silly, and heckling
is part of it. But like heckling occurs within a
certain certain bounds, right, Like you're not supposed to be mean,

(06:52):
it's just supposed to be funny, Like everyone's supposed to laugh.
So I think in twenty twenty one everyone was rather
it's funny signed part of it too, right, But in
twenty twenty one we saw some shit that was distinctly
not funny when a group called Save Women's Sport posted
up at the race and held what were, as you
can probably guess by the name, transphobic science throughout the race.

(07:16):
So a lot of people were upset by this, and
by their own admission, nobody wanted them there. One woman
told the protesters your ship feminism isn't welcome here, which
I think would be a great T shirt. If she's listening,
please will license your.

Speaker 5 (07:33):
T shirt.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
And they were pretty rarely rejected by most of the community,
which is great, But the bigotry they bought really wasn't
a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online
discourse for a while, especially with respect to cycling. The
harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years. For
at least five or six years now. The governing body

(07:57):
USA Cycling has known about this and chosen to have done
nothing to stop it. Right, So, this particular focus on
cycling came about in twenty eighteen when anti transcadras began
to focus on the sport because of the success of
a woman named Veronica Ivy and that she wasn't called
Veronica Ivy at the time, and she was using she
had a different name then, but that's her name now,

(08:17):
so I'm going to use that name out of respect
for her choice for that to be her name. She
she won a world championship in the women's thirty five
to forty four spring category. Now, like, I have no
disrespect at all for masters athletes.

Speaker 5 (08:33):
It's great.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
I'm glad people are out there exercising. This is not
the same as an Olympic gold medal, right, Like the
big I would I mean, people may disagree. The biggest
determinant of your ability to win a master's track cycling
gold medal is the amount of free time you have
to exercise and the amount of money you have to
buy fast gear and get to the event. Right, what

(08:54):
is like the difference between masters is it's competitions for
older people. So it's so in cycling you have juniors
and there are various you know, obviously the eight year
olds don't compete with eighteen year olds, but up to
eighteen as juniors espoires is eighteen to twenty three. We
use a French name because you know, you want to
be call what is what's what? Jesus Christ? Yeah, yeah,

(09:20):
this French name under twenty three, right, you can call
it if you want it to be an angler phile.
And then from there you go into the elite competition.
Elite competition is it's actually eighteen and like an eighteen
year old could compete in an elite competition, so could
a fifty year old, right, but it's the highest level
of competition. And then you get protected age categories again

(09:44):
once you get to thirty five, So so thirty five
to forty four forty five to fifty four going ten
year blocks, right, and that's for people who are only
of that age. Now, it's the older you get, the
less competitive it gets, just because more people will people
will be racing, right, But thirty five plus masters sometimes

(10:04):
they call it baby masters, is.

Speaker 6 (10:07):
Not.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
You don't have a significant decrease in your endurance performance
at thirty five, So like some of these people are
still very good, and that's why they call it baby masters,
I guess. But like track cycling is not a big
sport to begin with, right, that's going around in circles
on an indoor velodrome. Masters track cycling, it's a smaller
sport and the amount I know some excellent masters track
cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds, right,

(10:29):
they've been professional cyclists, are very high level amateur cyclists,
and once you reach your mid forties, some people don't
care to travel and spend that money and do that competition. Right.
San Diego has a really great track scene. Some people
who I know very well have recently won multiple world
championships on the track. Like, we have a very thriving scene,
but not all of those people even care to go

(10:51):
to La to race worlds like let alone travel across
the world. Right, So it doesn't necessarily truly mean the
people who win Masters are the best athletes in the
world for the age group, And certainly I wouldn't say.
There are lots of things that make this competition unfair.
One of them is how much track bikes cost, how
much track time costs, and how much travel costs to
get to the event. But of course it didn't matter

(11:13):
to these people, right. What mattered is that a trans
woman had won, and she became the center of the
cultural war. And this was really, at least the first
one that I was aware of, the sort of instance
of someone a trans person winning a very a notable
event in cycling. And maybe trans people have been competing

(11:38):
in elite races in cycling for forty years, like Wally
Cameron was the first trans woman to race in a
World Cup, and Money's been racing for a while, and
no one said shit, no one cared, right, But around
twenty eighteen, the culture war around trans people was becoming heightened,
and so people got mad about her wing the race.

(12:00):
And since then there's been this steady increase in transphobic
sentiment towards by crisis. It's really the sort of leading
voice in this has been former probike grace at Inger Thompson.
She's been joined by a few amateur women in various
fields voicing their feelings about the participation of trans women.
And Thompson has made a lot of statements, some of

(12:21):
which you know, choose not to share with you. You
can google them if you want, but most of them
will be like she missgenderous people all the time, right,
that that's what you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people.
And I think that that is kind of the giveaway
that this isn't necessarily about sport, right, And I think
that it's really important that people, regardless of where you

(12:45):
stand on sport, understand that this is a wedge, and
it's a wedge that's designed to push trans people out
and away from femininity in a way, from inclusion.

Speaker 7 (12:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
I think one of the reasons why it's important is
it it's a way of focusing the discourse like on
trans people, on like really really weird interpretations of physical characteristics. Yeah,
and then this is something that you can use to

(13:17):
sort of like, you know, this, this is the wedge
that you can use to sort of like tear this
sort of issue open. It's been really really effective at
this and it's also been like you know, it's something
that's sort of like vaguely plausible, plausibly deniable, and it
also plays on a really kind of effective branding strategy
that these people had, which is that like you know,

(13:38):
if people remember what feminism was like in like the
twenty tens, it was almost entirely about you know, not
just in the twenty tens, like you even sort of
previous to this, right, Like the notion that like women
are weaker than men was something that was like like
broadly considered to be sexist, Like that was not a

(13:59):
feminist thing that was like like women are weaker than men.
And then you know what you're getre You're getting into
people complaining about like like trans women like being on
Jeopardy or like this ship that's happening in Chester that
we're going to talk about later. It's like, okay, like
if you go back in time to before sort of
trans arrangement syndrome set in, like and you told someone

(14:19):
that in the future, this person is going to be
arguing that like like like trans women have a biological
advantage in jeopardy because men are smarter than women. They'd
be like, what the fuck are you talking about, Like
this person is like a neo Nazi.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, it's oh that women are only defined by their
ability to bear children, right, and and then that is
your sole characteristic and value as a woman, Like yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
Like like this is and this is something that you know,
if you go back to like Simon before God, I
hate French. It's really a true it's a truly terrible language.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
That is the official stance of this podcast, Anti French action.

Speaker 8 (14:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, but like you know, I mean always has you know,
like you actually read.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
The Second Sex and like in the Second Sex is
talking about you know, we literally were like her famous
line is like women like no one is born a woman,
like women is made right because it's it's it's it's
it's it's a social process, not a biological one. And
then you know, and and but because there was like
a kind of cultural victory for feminism where it suddenly
became really really difficult to be a mainstream person and

(15:25):
like call yourself, uh, like call yourself an anti feminist,
like all of these people who believe all of the
same ship that like Phylishchlaffley did like have to relabel
themselves feminists, and you know, and sports is the sports
the thing they picked to do that because sports is
the like it's the area they can pick where they can,
like with some plausible deniability, start doing all of this

(15:49):
like oh, women are inherently weaker than men and have
to be protected from men, like shit again.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Yeah, yeah, and it's yes, it's very much like i'm
recontstractive stuff that we would have seen it not feminist
twenty years ago. Now sadly it's being advanced by people
laying claimed to feminism. I guess. Yeah. So, in the
most recent sight of Rouss Nationals, trans athlete Austin Killips
finished third at the event, local John Brown gun Club

(16:17):
members had attended to step in and protect trans athletes
where the sports governing body wouldn't, And it was actually
a really I mean, what you saw was a lot
of discourse online about Austin quote unquote blocking and a
SIS woman athlete, and then you saw like a lot
of people sort of saying that and like SIS women

(16:39):
had been I guess, like you know that Austin's inherent
biological advantage. I'm using heavy scare quotes here had allowed
her to come third. She got beaten by two sis girls, Right,
this is always the thing like that.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
There was one of these in skateboarding, where like this
turf skateboarder was like yelling about how she'd been beaten
by a trans woman, and you look at the results.
She lost to an eight year old.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
She was outplaced by an eight year old, Like, shut
the fuck up. It's this bullshit like and a lot
of the discourse about like Austin quote unquote blocking someone
like I don't know, but to me, it very clearly
seemed to come for people who hadn't watched many other
bicycle competitions, right, like that's what we do. You push

(17:23):
on each other, you lean on each other. Like if
you didn't do that, people would fallo over a whole
lot more. It's a race, you're trying to get to
the finish line first. But she didn't do anything that
anyone else wouldn't have done. And at the time Turfs
kind of tried to make this a big deal but
were unsuccessful. And it was not really until Austin won
a race in New Mexico, a big race tour of

(17:45):
the Healer that it became again, like like it wasn't
twenty eighteen a very big deal? Right? So one of
the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson. Inga
is a very accomplished cyclist. There's no doubt about that, right.
She's a Bicycle Hall of Fame inductee, five time national champion,
three time Olympic team member, a Tour de France firm,

(18:07):
and a podium finisher, a three time silver medallist at
the US World Championships. But I think she's arguably more
famous now for her anti trans bigotry and she's a
paid She tried to encourage cyclists to take a knee
in protest at the UCI's transgender inclusion yeah, which like.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
Fox News finally finds something that they're for.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, they've finally. She was actually removed from her role
on the board of a France based American protein for
her statements there. I thought that their statements kind of interesting.
They said shared in the absence of politics, her knowledge
and experience would benefit many in advanced cycling for everyone. However,
she has decided to dedicate her time to excluding people

(18:56):
that otherwise currently eligible to compete in UCI events. She
is also tempted to use our team as a platform
for political activity, which like is a very neutral stance,
but it's also it's also like it's fine, right, like
like our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people.
If you're going to use it for hating trans people,
please go somewhere else like it. It doesn't. You don't

(19:19):
have to, like I do take a hugely radical stance
to be like that this isn't a hate platform for
hate speech, like like go away and uh that they
added to be clear, Miss miss Thompson is entitled to
her opinions an advocacy, but her methods and personal attacks
are inconsistent with siniska's mission to advanced opportunities for women.
These methods, well documented on Miss Thompson's social media presence,

(19:42):
include dehumanization of transgender people, spreading misinformation, demagoguery, and personal
attacks on anyone who opposes her views spellow alert that
includes me. She doesn't like me it all, I don't
don't be mean to trans people, uh don't missgender my friends.
So I did think it was very funny that like
this team isn't like the like I don't note like

(20:02):
the woke team for woke people. They're just trying to
get along with helping women's cycle and they can't do
that if they're one of their board members. Is so
consumed by hate that no one wants to have anything
to do with it. So in the wake of this protest,
the twenty twenty one Save Women's Sport protest Fliletted they're

(20:23):
an official with USA Cycling, published an open letter calling
for the resignation of the organization's CEO and the Safe
Sport Coordinator, kelsy Erickson, who's responsible for preventing hate speech
and bullying. They gather one hundred and five signatures from
racists and other cyclists in support of their demands, and
a day after they sent the letter to Martini announced

(20:43):
he was stepping down. So he has a bit of
a failure of just like there's a statement he made
an interview where he said it would be different if
our athletes were going to be affected. When he was
talking about bands for trans athletes in interscholastic sports, he said,
we don't believe they will be which like in technical

(21:05):
and in technical sense because cyclists can bete for clubs,
not schools. They might not have done. But if you
think that a ban on trans kids playing at school
isn't going to affect participation in trans athletes in all
sports everywhere. You just either completely myopic or you're burying
your bigotry. He claimed he was quoted out of context,

(21:26):
but it was part of a pretty big block quote.
I don't see how that can be taken out of context.
They did say at that time that they're against any
legislation limit trans inclusion. It's worth pointing out that cycling
has a body as to all Olympic sports. It should
prevent hate, beach, bigotry, and bullying, right, And that's called
safe Sport set up in twenty seventeen, and that was

(21:48):
following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right, which was widespread
sexual abuse of athletes. People I'm sure will remember that
Safe Sport, I feel fairly confident in saying has completely
failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying. What it
has done is is perhaps given a legal shield to

(22:09):
governing bodies, so has prevented them getting sued. But it's
done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying, which is
why athletes and the community you've had to taken it
upon themselves to do that, right, Like, if there's one
thing you should expect a governing body to do, it's
to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But people
were legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew

(22:31):
there were a lot of not just turfs, but like
groups like the prowd boys, right, who have kind of
hung their hat on transphobia. I know people who didn't
go to races in areas where they were worried about that.
I know people who, like you know it, went out
of went to an effort every day to drive a
different way back to their hotel at races because they're

(22:52):
worried about Like, people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that
no one should feel unsafe doing, which is playing. So
as I said, you know who won't make you feel unsafe?

Speaker 3 (23:10):
I I'm going to say the products and services, and
then I'm gonna.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
They will wrap you up in a cocoon like blanket
of gold and coins and meal kits. How can do
you not feel so safe when you're surrounded by Reagan coins?
No one fact checked.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
This is a fact check free zone.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The following and preceding thirty seconds
have not been fact checked. All right, please enjoy these adverts,
and we are back and we're still talking about turfs.
So Saves Women's Sports, which is this organization that put
on the protests, presents itself as an organic reaction to
the participation of trans women, who it repeatedly misgenders in

(23:54):
women's categories. It claimed that several races in the cycle
across national championships privately did the organization to express concerns,
but only one, Ev Edwards, competed under the SWS team banner.
SWS at the time was not a nonprofit, so it
was relatively hard to find out what exactly their financial
ties to various other transphobic and right wing groups were.

(24:17):
It's registered in Minnesota as a business, but it appears
to be a sault. At the time, again, it was
a sole prop run by someone called best Steltzer. The
both Ev Edwards and SWS used the race to aggressively
fundraise for their campaign. Steltzer, for instance, at the time,
was making three hundred and eighty five bucks per month
on Patreon by quote creating awareness of males Invading female Spaces.

(24:43):
Page has been taken down since then. She turfed too
close to the sun. She also received donations on her
venmo page, which is very funny because I don't think
she realized hervenmo page was public checked it out in
the judgment. Yeah, that there is no there there was
no distinction made between advocacy spending and personal spending on

(25:04):
that account, I will say. And she was taking a
donations and you know, making emoji purchases on her Venmo
at the time. I think maybe since has made it private.

Speaker 3 (25:16):
But this is something that like if you ever want
to just like I don't know, if someone just like
appears in the news and they suck, like, go try
to find them on venmo because people just don't realize
that stuff. And oh yeah, you know, people like people
recently caught like I think we talked about Clarence tom
I think it was Clarence Thomas amazing paying his staffers

(25:39):
on venmo. Like you can find a bunch of very
funny stuff because people people are bad at doing crime.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Now, Yeah, I cannot tell you how many people literally
had things on their Venmo like travel to DC and
like on January sixth, right like ven bowing each other
for like revolution tacos after they'd evaded the capital smart

(26:08):
stuff and no, no, please keep doing that if you're
planning transphobia or coups. So much of this awareness that
that save women's sports awareness. Like, I think if you're
ever donating to someone who's promoting quote unquote awareness of anything,
there should be a large red flag. It's an extremely
nebulous concept that very ready does anything to help anyone.

(26:29):
But much of this awareness seem to be tied to
pre standard right wing anti trans talking points and not
the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances or transist women
happily compete alongside each other, have a nice time, do exercise,
go home, and don't engage in any bigotry. In the past,
WUS has worked with far right organizations like the Heritage

(26:49):
Foundation and the Family Research Council to prepare a guide
to quote help parents understand the transgender issue. Again, if
you're framing the existence of other people as an issue,
you know that far from flaming it as a question,
are you? Yeah? Like, I'm impressed the self awareness avoided
the transgender question, but like, only by you know, using

(27:12):
the thesaurus to reframe it as an issue. I guess
the guide refers to the transgender trend quote unquote and
repeatedly caused trans women men. They of course. Also you
know Steltzer in particular, it appears anti abortion rallies, anti
marriage equality rallies, things like that. Right, this is part
of a wider space of painting bigotry. It's not just

(27:32):
about support. Cyclists are taken it upon themselves to protect
trans riders, so access of solidarity, of range for blocking
SWS protesters and national Championships announces refusing to allegedly refusing
to mention races on the team. That's pretty funny, Yeah,
it is pretty funny. Also this Mney Cameron has this

(27:54):
organization called Ride, which is let trans kids ride and
money mate sees wristband which like a trans flag, the
transpride flag, and like one of my friends won the
biggest race in the US. It's cis guy with his
Transpride ristband on, which is you know a little thing.
But also like it's it's nice to see people show up,

(28:16):
Like yeah, it's nice to see and like it's rare
that you'll go to a race when people won't be
you won't see a few people wearing that, like in
pro men pro women, both like it's there are overwhelmingly
people don't give a fuck. They're just happy if you're
enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport.

Speaker 9 (28:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
The real threat cycling is all of us getting killed
by people in tesla's playing pong, Like it's not it's
not trans women. But unfortunately the solidarity hasn't extended to
the governing body. So two years after this initial protest, right,
the UCI effectively banned all trans women from participating in

(28:57):
elite level cycling. This happened just a few weeks before
the World Championships. Like, I have friends who had to
cancel their flights. Yeah, it was the most bungled, fucked
up pseudoscience kind of half fast, Like it was just
a mess. The whole thing was a fucking mess. They

(29:17):
had an extraordinary meeting in August, just a few weeks
before the World Championships, and like people previously had to
have a submit blood numbers to show a testosterone level
to compete, right, which is a thing lots of governing
bodies have been doing for a while now. They had
certified people, like weeks before this, they'd be like, yeah,
you're good to go for another year and then psych no,

(29:40):
you're not. You can't compete ever again. And like, this
is people's jobs, right, this is their livelihood, it's how
they pay rents. It's also like being an elite cyclist
is hard. It is most of your life, right, Like
you're you've got to sleep or you got to eat, right,
You've got to train all the fucking time. You can't
go out, you're going to be resting when you're not training.

(30:00):
To take all that away from someone with a click
of the fingers and bringing no consultation for them, it's
incredibly cruel. And the I'll just read their statement because
I think there's a couple of things in it we
should pick apart. Obviously, you can't take Woying for it
being inherently transphobic. From now on, female transgender athletes who
have transitioned after quote male puberty will be prohibited from

(30:23):
participating women's events on the UCI International Calendar in all
categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said it's
also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors
such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in
their limbs may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes. Yeah,
it's yea, there's a lot going on there, right, Like

(30:47):
they use female where where most people would use woman.
The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility
of an advantage, right, which is a very high barrier.
That's like a kind of guilty, and to improve it
innocent situation. Right, Like I'd also like the arrangement of
the bones in my limbs changed significantly when I was
racing bikes because I broke them all the fucking time. Like,

(31:09):
such such a strange category to choose. Also, the requirement
that you transition before puberty. That's not the same as
taking puberty blockers, right, They're requiring that you're taking the
hormones before puberty, like like eleven or twelve, yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
Which which is just also now illegal in an enormous
number of states, like.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, and even most from what I understand, most gender
affirming care takes the approach of taking puberty blockers rather
than yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
Well this is this is sort of like, I mean,
this is sort of the disaster that's been happening in
the last like four or five years on this, which
is that like like taking puberty blockers was the compromise position, yes,
like that was the position that was taken because people
thought it was too dangerous to like let kids do hot,

(31:56):
which it's not like it's completely fine.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
In fact, it's actually like you.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
Know, you're you're going to go through puberty anyways, right,
You're like like if if you are in a human body,
you are doing uncontrolled puberty, and that is less safe
than doing a controlled puberty, which is what you know,
doing like doing it turgy when you're a child is yeah,
but yeah, the young vice position was like, oh well
we're not we're gonna do those will do puberty blockers,

(32:20):
and then like everyone went insane about puberty blockers. And
now like even the compromised position has been sort of
like you know, I mean like when we're away that
and it's like okay, like you know, but and then
and then like and then you know, like now and
then having done this right and it's like, oh well,
now you can set up all of these rules that
are like require you to have done a thing you've

(32:41):
now made illegal. It's like this is great, yeah, exactly right.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
You now have a rule that basically bans almost anyone
from participation, like you have to begin transitioning at eleven.
It's also very nebulous, like male puberty, Like like what
does that mean? What what point are you to finding
you have been through male puberty? Like are we going
to aftereople to submit their fucking testosterone numbers from when
they were eight? Like yeah, Like it's it's just a man,

(33:11):
It's what it is, right, Like it it's a you
can't ever transition satisfactorily enough.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
Yeah, or like, for example, I don't know, so like
let's say you you you are on Like let's say
you don't start hormones until you're like twenty four, but
but you rearrange the bones in your body.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
It this allows you? Did you now have feminine bone arrangement?
Does this now allows you to cycle gender affirming orthopedic surgery?

Speaker 4 (33:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (33:40):
And like and also this, And I want to get
into this a little bit because it completely obfuscates or
ignores I guess what we know to be true that
there is not a binary puberty process, because there is not.
Humans don't exist in a binary sex nor egisted binary genders. Right,

(34:01):
So I think probably the best example of this would
be Malie Jose Martinez Patigno. If people aren't familiar with her. Obviously,
Google is right there for you. But she was dismissed
from a Spanish Olympic team in nineteen eighty six for
failing the gender test. She's publicly shamed for being like
a secret male. She loses her fiancee, she loses her funding,

(34:24):
she loses almost everything. She fought and won a successful
court battle, illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach.
But she's not a trans woman, to be clear. She's
an intersexual woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. But she
was able to They were using chromosome typing, right, Like
you'll often this is a thing that you'll still see

(34:45):
turf trotting out right, something that was outdated in nineteen
eighty six, that like xx or x Y, that is
that is not a binary that fits the entirety of
the human species.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah, there's like a lot of people for a lot
of other different kinds.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
It's like it's again, like I get it, you didn't.
You're not a biologist. That's fine, It's okay to shut
the fuck up if you don't understand something.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
Yeah, but this this is one of those things that
sucks because it's like like I wish these people had
decided to like try to build airplanes based off of
like pre Deutornian or something work, because it's like there's
no consequence for them for not understanding biology. But it's
like I don't know, like it like if if you,
if you, if you're trying to argue that like general
relativity doesn't exist, like you're you're like your satellite is

(35:30):
gonna fall on you. But this, this is the one
thing where you can just like you can say ship that.
It's not even like like people people make the joke
it's like high school biology. It's like it's not it's
just like elementary school biology. And it's not right, like
like YouTube biology, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
That's what it is? Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly.

Speaker 4 (35:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
But unfortunately the consequences of people who are not them, Yeah,
and that's hugely unfortunate, right, Like even we see like
Cassa Semnia when a cult case this month or last month,
like allowing her to compete again, we found time and
again that this notion of a binary sex is as
nonsense to call as a motion of a binary gender.

(36:11):
And yet we continue to try and force people into
these different competitions. I just want to read a statement
that Austin made and like, it's very hard not to
see this as them, specifically seeing Austin winning a big
stage race in New Mexico and going like, right, we
can't fucking have that, Like as soon as trans women
win stuff, right, It's fine if they come and then

(36:33):
don't win, but as soon as they win stuff. And again,
if she had this inherent, massive biological advantage, she would
have won everything, which hasn't happened, she said. I'm devastated
by the UCI decision to renege on the policy and
framework it previously set out for inclusion. My journey in
professional racing has allowed me to see the world, build
lifelong friendships, and most importantly, if my absolutely or something

(36:54):
I find deeply fulfilling, no one should be denied the
opportunity to chase that same joy that I and others
found through racing, which I think is great, and I
think it's important to lift up her voice in this
and other transathlete voices. In theory, there is what's called
an open category, which is the men's category. The problem

(37:16):
is that there are no open races, and that this category,
like if you line up as a trans woman in
the fucking open category. You're being very clearly othered, right, Yeah,
you're being like you're Some of them also will have
women's licenses, like it's not clear what men's category they
can race in. But more importantly, I think, as Chris

(37:41):
Mosia pointed out, people will be familiar as Chris as
the first trans athlete tend Olympic trials in the US.
The open category contradicts both International Olympic committeeuidelines on fairness
and inclusion and extensive research of states trans women do
not have an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a
good follow on Twitter. It's to the Chris Mosia.

Speaker 8 (37:59):
But.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
It contradicts even like the IOC. Again, not like on
the bastions of wokeness, people who sent the Olympics to
the Nazis have a better policy than this. And yet
cycling has chosen to go above and beyond, and in
large part I can't not see that as because of

(38:21):
the attention paid to this by people who do not
give a fuck about cycling, because they've found a wedge,
because our community has generally been inclusive. Like even after
this at the World Championships, there were people with trans
flags course, you know, like world championship or which trans
women could not compete advocating for inclusion. Right, it was

(38:41):
in Glasgow, and as a rule, the sport I think
has been accepting Like I've never cycled, not known there
being trans people in cycling, and I've cycled a lot,
but this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when
trans people started describing these fucking bigots to make this
a wedge issue and that's why it's happening here. But

(39:04):
it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you want
to do you want to talk about chess?

Speaker 7 (39:08):
Man?

Speaker 2 (39:08):
This is this is insane, Okay.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
The weird part about the chess one is like I
I don't know, I had. This is not something that
anyone in chess was like talking about. Like chess has
like a lot of incredibly weird and bizarre political stuff
going on, but like they're I had, I don't know.
Maybe I just missed it, or maybe it was just

(39:31):
like a part of the chess discourse I wasn't following,
But like I I don't know, really truly weirdly, just
seemingly out of nowhere.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
I don't know what is going on with this seemingly out.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Of nowhere fee Day, which is like the International Chess
Federation released the statement, released this like policy that says
that like it has a lot of weird stuff and
effectively sets up fee Day as like what I can
only describe as an gender council, where like, if you
want to like change your gender, you have to like

(40:04):
submit it to fe DA and then fee DA gets
to decide what gender you are. So great, great things
happening here. And then also for some reason, Okay, so
chess has had this thing for a while where chess
has like there are like women's sections for stuff, and

(40:26):
there's a lot of some weird stuff going on here.
So like there's the regular title like Grandmaster, there's also
like a women's Grandmaster thing which has different qualification, is
slightly different, and this was this was set up basically
because like the guys who play chess are insane, Like
I've talked about this some of the Bobby Fisher episodes right,
like they're like most of the most famous chess players

(40:49):
in history are like utterly deranged Neo Nazis or like
like people who are even weirder than Neo Nazis, like
like like unreconstructed like nineteen seventeen czarists like people like that,
like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird
political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing, and you know,

(41:14):
and like part of part of what like happens here
is that like just chess in general is like unfathomably sexist,
Like it's it's really really bad, and you know, like
their solution to this effectively was like to create this
like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure, which kind of

(41:39):
works and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways.
And you know, like part of what's going on is
just like, okay, so a lot of girls, like young
girls play chess, but there's this bottleneck that happens around
when you're like thirteen or fourteen, while this is twelve
to thirteen, So there's fourteen where like the number of
girls playing chess just like collapses, right, And the reason

(42:02):
that happens is because boys are fucking dog.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
Shit Like this is this.

Speaker 3 (42:06):
Is like literally what's happening, right, is like you have
a bunch of sexist, like really sex as boys. And
then the product of this is that because there's so
many fewer like women who play chess and there are
men you play chess, Like there's just like the example,
like there's way less like women who are like really
high rated chess players. And that's because there's just like
like the barrier of institutional sexism to like become a

(42:29):
woman who's really good at chess is so high. And
then yeah, okay, so so this this is the sort
of background, So like there are these separate like women's
like tournaments and stuff like that, and so fee DA,
which is the Chess Federation, released this thing where Okay,

(42:49):
so they say a few things. One is that, okay,
the the the big one is that if you like,
if you are a trans woman, you cannot play in
official feed day events or women until fee Day does something.

(43:12):
And it's not entirely clear what that is.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
So is it like a testosterone level you have to submit?

Speaker 3 (43:17):
Wait, literally, I'm just gonna read this sentence because it's
it's utterly unclear what is going on here. In the
event that the gender was changed from male to female,
the player has no right to participate in official fee
day events or women until free Day's decision is made.
Such decision should be based on further analysis and should

(43:39):
and shall be taken by the fee Day Council at
the earliest possible time, but no longer than within a
two year period.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
So it's you can be out for two years. Well
yeah wait wait why what the fuck? Like what what what? What?

Speaker 10 (43:55):
Like?

Speaker 3 (43:55):
What what are they possibly like analyzing here?

Speaker 4 (43:59):
Right?

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Like I I is it?

Speaker 5 (44:02):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (44:02):
Like like what what? What? What?

Speaker 7 (44:04):
What it?

Speaker 3 (44:04):
What is supposed to be the thing that differentiates like
the genders that like lets you that makes you not
be able to compete in the women's category? Like is
it like like is it like if you played you
aggressively or some ship?

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Like what? What?

Speaker 5 (44:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (44:18):
Well it's baffling. Yeah, that is a bizarre decision like
and yeah, like you said, it's just completely It's not
even that they're not it's not an Olympic sport, right,
It's not like they have to conform to any IOC guidelines.

Speaker 3 (44:33):
It's yeah is the chess cartel right, like they can
do whatever they want, you know, I mean, like I know,
expecting FIDE to do stuff that isn't insane is like,
look like this is the organization that after uh that,
after Bobbie Fisher went on the radio in the Philippines

(44:55):
and said that he hopes that the government like rounds
up all Jewish people and kills them, like they let
him back into feed A after that. So, like, you know,
a great organization run by amazing people here. Yeah, but
this is I don't know, it's it's incredibly deeply weird.
Like the thing I keep thinking about is I don't know,

(45:19):
this is kind of a weird, kind of silly story
in some ways. But like so, like the first trans
person that I was like aware of it was a
trans StarCraft two player named Scarlett, and she's great, She's awesome,
Scarlet rules she actually she she she's she's one of

(45:39):
three non Korean players ever to win a tournament in Korea, which,
like I I don't know how to express how difficult
it is to win a StarCraft tournament Korea. Like it
would be like if a football team from like Siberia
showed up to the US was somehow allowed to play
in the NFL and then like won the Super Bowl.
Like that, That's about the level of difficulty it is
to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah. Yeah, Jamaica bove safe team moment.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
Yeah yeah, But like like yeah, so, like you know,
it's it's one of those sort of like really wild things.
But like one of the things I remember about that
was like she was always, as best I could tell,
like always allowed like StarCraft also had a women's division
because you know, very very similar like probably even more
intense sort of sexis going yeah, yeah, being pretty toxic

(46:24):
you know, and like like yeah, like it was actually
you know, over the arc of like the like the
like over a decade she's been playing, like you know,
like I've seen the scene get less transphobic. But like,
as much as I could tell, there was never like
a thing in the women's tournament. There always just like yeah, sure, hey,
look a girl wants to play StarCraft like this rips
and yeah yeah yeah, well more of us like yeah yeah,

(46:45):
like you know, and she's also like and she's like
again really really good at the game.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
But like you know, but like like this is the
thing that like historically.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
Hasn't I don't know, like like Jenny Wiley like in
in games like this that are like not well, okay,
StarCraft is enormously more athletic than Chess, but like yeah,
like you know, like this has been a thing where
people Like there's if you're in one of these like
incredibly sexist environments, there's like a real like really obvious

(47:17):
like both trans women and since women like we're all
in this together thing because you get to look at
like the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos
in like the twitch chat and be like, oh god,
they hate both of us. Yeah, yeah, which is also
like I think the other thing about this is like
it's unclear like who at feet day like decided this,

(47:42):
Like this doc just like appeared, and so there's like
a non zero chance this decision is being made by men,
Like pretty high that this is just like a decision
made by a bunch of men because fuck them, and
they've just decided that, like you know, just like literally
not giving a shit about women's jess for like the

(48:04):
entirety of its existence. They've finally decided to do something,
and they do something is make me not be able
to play women's tournaments.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Like right, yeah, you didn't take action when body Bobby
Fisher went full Nazi, but you decided to.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
Yeah, It's like okay, this is great, great, great things
are happening.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
I don't know, Yeah, talking of Nazis. There was a
it was I think actually a a again a nonbine
or like an intersex woman who competed for the Nazis
in nineteen thirty six at the Olympics. Yeah, with I'm
not entirely sure of her, like like external external sex presentation,

(48:47):
I guess, but later definitely served as a man in
the German Armed Forces. But that could have been a
forced social transition. But yeah, there's a long history of
us trying to work out gender ship through sport, and
I guess I just want to finish by, like, if
you don't give a shit about sport, you have to
understand this is still important because like sport's always about

(49:11):
like who's on our team and who's not right. That's
why we didn't let black people play baseball in this
fucking country. It's why they took like Olympic medals away
from indigenous people for violating stupid amateurism rules because they
were designed to only let people have a certain class pay.
It's why Colin Kafmack doesn't have a job, right, Yeah,

(49:33):
it's why people didn't want to go to the Nazi
Olympics and went to one in Barcelona, and it was bigger.
Like sports not just about being the best to exercise,
it's it's a social tool to include or exclude people.
And if you care about including people, then I think
you have to care about sport right now, because that
is a wedge that transfers are using to exclude people.

(49:59):
So yeah, that's that's what I have for you.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
If you have money, you can give it to Molly
Molly Cameron, you can. You can find her online. She
will help more trans kids ride or yeah, yeah, go
go ride a bike. It's fun.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
And uh, if, if, if, if, if you are one
of the seven people in the world who still thinks
that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job because he's not
good enough of football, come find Come find me in
the Bear's parking lot. I will force you to watch
an entire season of the Chicago Bears, like, like, watch
every quarterback we've ever fucking had in my lifetime, and
then I will beat you. You will you will you
will you will you you will be you will be

(50:33):
in a catatonic state after that.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
I just found proven right. Money's website is ridegroup dot.
People want to check that out? Oh oh yeah, find
find Connin Kaepernick on the internet watch videos.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
Okay, that was that was That was slightly longer of
an a total shriek. Now is it's back, And Robert
has been coming after me for not doing a total
shrieks to start the podcast enough so that that's how
we're starting this episode. It could happen here the podcast
where we taken into nowhere's victory lap because yeah, so
if you've been following the discourse about inflation over the

(51:29):
past about two two and a half years, and especially
in the last like maybe year or so, so very
interesting stuff has been happening, and the stuff that we've
talked about on this show, and then also stuff that's
been sort of moving around in the sort of broader
discourse and has now reached like the IMF. And the

(51:51):
thing that's been happening is that the theory of inflation
that I've we've been pushing on this show, and that
also very importantly I that has been being developed by
Strange Matters has been like incredibly vindicated to the point
of everyone else adopting it and then claiming that they
invented it. So yeah, we're this is this is this

(52:13):
is the this is the inflation Victory Lab episode and
to talk about the fact that these two people and
their colleagues were right about inflation and a bunch of
other stuff too. Is John Michael Kolan and Steve Mann,
who are both co editors of the magazine Strange Matters,
And yeah, both.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
FIJU, welcome to the show.

Speaker 7 (52:31):
Thanks so much for having USA.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
Yeah, and I'm excited about this because I've been wanting
to do this episode for like ever since. So the
the IMF tweeted out a graph that was arguing that like,
I think it's like like fifty percent of inflation and
the EU was based on corporate profits, which was like
them basically, and this is this is them, and like

(52:54):
all the mainstream economists are finally like having to admit
that we were fucking right about inflation.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Yeah, so I guess before we get into.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
What you two were arguing and what your colleagues are arguing,
we should talk a bit about, like I guess who
you two are, and also like talk about Strange Matters again,
because I think it's been a bit since y'all have
been on.

Speaker 7 (53:14):
Yeah. Absolutely, so Strange Matters is a this is our
kind of boiler plate, a magazine of new and unconventional
thinking in economics, politics, and culture. And we have a
political bent, so we are broadly speaking all some flavor
of libertarian. Socialist is kind of the umbrella term that

(53:35):
we've used for ourselves, but that varies depending on the
individual kind of members of the team. So we've got
people who are anarchists, We've got people who are inspired
by like democratic and federalism. We've got like people who
don't like a lot of those labels but are really
into like direct democracy stuff. But like you know, the
the four of us basically converge on the direct democracy,

(53:58):
you know, socialism is putting people in charge of the
decisions that affect them kind of school of things. So
in terms of our economics pages, however, we've for the
last couple of years been really dedicated to publishing heterodox economists,
economists who don't correspond to the usually quite right wing

(54:21):
mainstream of the economics discipline, but challenging in fundamental ways.
And there's a bunch of different schools of heterodox economics,
like you know, everyone knows about like Marxists, but there's
also post Kinesians and ecological economics and feminist economics, and
a whole bunch of different schools. We've been dedicated to
publishing people from all those different schools and trying to

(54:43):
kind of get them to write in a style that's
more accessible for ordinary people, so that some of those
ideas actually start not just reaching the public, but actually
reaching each other because they don't really talk to each
other very much.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
This is this is one of this is one of
the big problems is like, I mean, even just inside
of Marxism, like if you get six Marxists same we
all have nine different positions and they'll all be like
ready to murder each other over it. And that's that's
just the Marxists, and then you expand out to all
the rest of the other heterodoxicontaoust people, and there's a
lot of weird and sort of pointless rivalries going on

(55:14):
that prevents people from like fusing really useful theories together.

Speaker 11 (55:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (55:18):
Absolutely, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (55:19):
We tried to be a platform for diverging opinions to
actually be put into dialogue with each other. And we've
definitely I don't think there's been a single piece that
all of us have been in lockstep agreement on theoretically,
and I think that's a real strength. Actually, yeah, like
there's there's quite a there's quite a few pieces that

(55:40):
at least one of us is like, I still don't
really know about this thesis, but I've been there have
been times in which I've been down on a piece,
but it does amazing, so let's go with it.

Speaker 7 (55:52):
And also, you know, part of the reasoning for that
is not just to kind of like Lucy Goosey, let's
all get along and sing around a camp, but it's
actually a very principled thing because part of the story
that we're telling with the magazine is how we have
these enormous problems, you know, climate change, the whole crisis
that the democracies have been going through since the two

(56:12):
thousand and eight crisis, the whole and since like the
rise of global fascism in the twenty tens, like the
what are we going to do about like the Internet
and its future? What are we going to do about
these these horrible culture war type issues that like, you know,
people talk about it as the culture of war, but
actually it's these massive reconfigurations that we have to do

(56:34):
of our consciousness in order to think about you know, gender,
national identity, and ethnic identity and all these other things
in different in new ways that are actually like freeing
and emancipating and stuff like. Like all of these problems
are vast and nobody actually knows what the answer is,
and that includes leftists. Like there's a lot of these

(56:55):
problems that are either like too technical or too complex
for any one person to have the solution. So there
needs to be a space where we kind of come
together people who are kind of like of good faith
and who like are trying to kind of do the
whole democracy and egalitarianism thing, and we actually butt our
heads together across lines of difference and are like, Okay,
what are we going to do about this, and what
are our different perspectives and what's the what's the common ground,

(57:18):
and what are some little bits and pieces of things
that people have figured out that we can kind of
stitch together into something that will let us not just
get steamrolled by the fascists. And that that's the kind
of space that we're trying to be, and that's why
we try to accommodate these different perspectives, even though we
ourselves tend to come from rather strong perspectives both individually

(57:38):
and as a group.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
Yeah, well, and and I think we.

Speaker 3 (57:41):
Can like this inflation sort of argument that's been playing
over the past few years, I think is a really
like it's a really good indication of how well this
stuff can work. If it's if it's like, you.

Speaker 9 (57:53):
Know, like.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
The fact that y'all have basically had the inflation theory
that like a bunch of mainstream economists we're going to
stumble over in the last like eight months, had effectively
written we're discussing and we're writing it like two years ago.
Is a is a sign that something is going right?

Speaker 7 (58:13):
Yeah, we feel really vindicated.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Yeah, it's it's been very, very very funny to watch.
So I guess we should move into a bit about
what this.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
Theory actually is.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
And the very very short version of it is that
it's a supply chain theory of inflation. It's a theory
of inflation that tracks, you know, tracks price increases based
on like like price movement based on stuff happening like
backwards in the supply chain. And yeah, that turns out
to have been a really useful both predictive thing and

(58:46):
explanatory thing once the inflation actually started.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
Yeah, I just.

Speaker 7 (58:50):
Really wanted to highlight that it's Steve who wrote the
initial essay where we first put those pieces together. It's
it's Steve's supply chain theory of inflation, foren' anybody else
is So I definitely I defer to you in terms of,
you know, laying the groundwork for it.

Speaker 4 (59:04):
Well. I wrote a piece called Notes toward e Theory Inflation,
and it was kind of born partly out of frustration
over the fuzzy language in which economists will try to
speak about inflation. And when I was a grad student,
I would like encounter it not just from any particular school,
but from broadly speaking, most of the schools of economics.

(59:26):
And like it's been prior to this inflationary episode and history,
it's been almost forty years since we've experienced anything like this.
And you know, in the in the last period of
like runaway inflation in the eighties, people were having a
similar reckoning, although they didn't quite coalesce around supply gene

(59:50):
and cost puss related theories of inflation like they are
at this time. But like the theory like in a nutshell,
the supply chain theory of inflation is essentially saying that
along there are groups of businesses called supply chains who
buy inputs from each other in order to produce products

(01:00:11):
and sell them to either the next person in the
chain or to outside consumers that the end user and
over time, given stressful enough biophysical conditions that they all
find themselves in even if they don't want to raise prices.
And broadly speaking, we know from empirical studies that most

(01:00:32):
businesses most of the time are very biased towards not
raising prices. If the situation gets dire enough and they've
run they've exhausted all of their non price based mechanisms
for dealing with bottlenecks what are called bottlenecks in the
supply chain, Like they just don't have enough of the
inputs that they need in or to sell enough stuff
at assert at their normal price in order to make

(01:00:54):
enough revenue to socially reproduce themselves and their supply chain.
Eventually they will exhaust all options and there will be
one person who's kind of like the progenitor price increaser.
And because like every single and like, what is inflation, really,
it's a general rise in prices. What are prices? Prices
are things that people themselves inside of firms, it's their

(01:01:17):
job to set and so any theory of inflation needs
to start with a theory of price essentially. And like,
so these managers whose job it is to set prices,
when they change prices, why did they do it? Well,
we have answers going back many decades, almost a century
of the surveys of economists who have gone out and

(01:01:40):
actually conducted surveys asking under what conditions would you raise prices?
And at no time did anyone say, oh, I raise
prices because I looked at monetary aggregates and I saw
that there was too much money, so I raised prices
that and so like that was kind of a starting
point for me when I when I read those these

(01:02:01):
surveys conducted by Gardner Means, who is an economists and
doing this work in the twenties and thirties long. If
I don't burrow, I got really excited because I'm like, oh,
of course, well, of course it's inflation. There's so much
mysticism about like piles of money building up, and then
it's like demand pull and cost push, and like what

(01:02:24):
does this all mean? Right? Well, at the bottom of it,
it's what are pricing managers doing when they make that
fateful decision to be the first guy to raise prices,
because there is one. It has to start with someone,
and it's usually, like I was saying, they've exhausted all
of their other methods of dealing with this, such as

(01:02:44):
rationing inputs or economizing like increasing their efficiency and their production,
or diversifying their product lines and all this stuff in
order to maintain customer goodwill throughout a period of biophysical
stress to the supply chain. And they're just going to
raise prices because they have to get a certain amount
of revenue in order to make it as a business.

(01:03:07):
So that's essentially what the supply chain theory is is
that when that happens, it propagates along supply chains first
and then because nowadays our economy is so extremely integrated,
it's not just one supply line. It's an entire supply
chain network nowadays, and it's global in scope, so even
if it can't it's it's increasingly less constrained to just

(01:03:31):
like one industry or even one country these days.

Speaker 7 (01:03:36):
That was a that was a beautiful explanation. That's that's
probably the most concise that we've that we've accomplished yet
at boiling it down. I'll just because this is the
problem is that we could go on for like thirty
minutes about this. Yeah, just this, I guess I have
a couple of things to add that are just like
digging out a couple of nuances that I think are

(01:03:57):
important for listeners to understand. What Steve said about inflation
being about a continuous general increase in prices is really
really profound. I think the first person to articulate that
I'm aware of was John K. Galbraith in an essay
that he wrote about that, but in like the fifties.
But like, that's honestly not the way that we usually

(01:04:22):
think of it, right, Like, usually we think that inflation
is when money, the value of money goes down value
money buys you less than it usually does. And that
is not just because that's how we experience it in
our pocketbooks. Everything else is just scott more expensive. It
also has to do with the kind of history of
theories of inflation, because back in the day, the first

(01:04:44):
and og theory of inflation, which people still some of
them believe in, is the quantity theory of money, and
it basically envisions like the entire economic universe as a
bunch of like atomized individual agents. And by the way,
there's no like distinction between companies and how households or
anything like that here.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Everyone's kind of like funny.

Speaker 7 (01:05:03):
It's just everyone's an individual agent. And there's a bunch
of stuff that already exists out there in the economy.
How it was produced, I mean, you deal with that
in a production function. Other than that, like you don't
talk about it. So there's a bunch of existing stuff
out there in the economy and it's scarce, right, so
like how is it going to be distributed? Well, we're
trading the stuff that we have for the stuff that

(01:05:24):
we need. And when things are more scarce, they're more valuable.
When things are more abundant, they're less valuable. And when
we want them more they're more valuable, we want them less,
they're less valuable. So that's kind of like like the
very basic universe that they're kind of like operating in.
And money was just seen to be one one good

(01:05:50):
being traded like any other. It just so happens to
be the one that we trade in exchange for everything else.
So rather than doing barter like like of everything, you know,
many chickens for this amount of haircut, you know, like instead,
it's like, you know, we choose one thing to be
exchangeable for everything else, but it still has a value,

(01:06:12):
which is basically determined, according to this theory, by how
much of it there is. So if you increase the
money supply, money gets less valuable, which is why you know,
everything becomes more expensive, prices go up. Whereas if the
money supply shrinks, you know, then the value of money
is higher relative to the goods that it buys, so

(01:06:34):
therefore prices will go down. This was the theory that
was developed in like the sixteen and seventeen hundreds to
try to explain a massive global inflation that happened then
in the so called price revolution of the seventeenth century.
And frankly everyone by the twentieth century knows that there's
huge issues with this, so they start trying to evolve

(01:06:55):
away from it, away from the quantity theory of money,
because it has no real empure goal basis. I mean,
some people tried to kind of like, you know, juke
the stats to make it look like there was but like, really,
our best estimates of the money supply have no real
good correspondence to prices in the economy. It's not it
doesn't really work that way.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
So yeah, this is this is the sort of modern
version of this is called monetarism, which is like that's real. Yeah,
And this is like, this is maybe the only thing
I have ever seen even like most neoclassical economists drop
because it's empirically wrong, like it's stunning, Like you do
you know how wrong something has to be for neo

(01:07:33):
classical economists to go, wait, hold on, maybe this isn't right,
Like it's it's incredible.

Speaker 7 (01:07:41):
But the problem is that they retreated into theories that
are not necessarily right either. Yeah, perhaps perhaps groping their
way clumsily towards the truth, but not really that right.
So this is this is where all that pull and
push stuff comes in, and it's it's it's a little
too technical to get into. Steve Essay has like the

(01:08:02):
full version of it, but basically they started evolving away
from a theory where the absolute amount of money in
the economy is what matters most, and towards theories where,
for example, it's the amount of money relative to the
goods that can be bought by it. So if you
have a bunch of people spending money to buy stuff,
but there's not enough stuff to meet that demand, then

(01:08:25):
that will basically mean that there's like scarcity and shortages
and things like that, and that will cost prices to
go up. Although why they do, like the underlying microeconomics
of why prices go up when they're shortages and stuff,
this theory doesn't really address because it's a macro theory
and it'll kind of like fall back on supply and
demand stuff or various kind of weird hydraulic metaphors about

(01:08:47):
like well, god, yeah, yeah, you know, it's really like like,
you know, different people will have different versions of this
that have totally different explanations of why it's happening, but
they'll generally say, if you look at the economy as
a whole, if the stuff that's being made is less
than the orders being put in for it, then that

(01:09:09):
costs inflation because you're just not producing enough stuff. And
they call that demand pull because the poll of basically
it's like demand pulling, you know, for stuff that isn't
being produced, so it's like okay, well that that causes
price rises. There was a parallel development where they're trying
to get away from the QTM another way, where some
people were like, well, what's the most important single cost

(01:09:32):
for businesses across the economy And they say labor obviously, right,
like everyone needs to pay somebody to do wages to
keep the business going. So they just said, okay, well,
if the cost of labor goes up across the economy,
then that will cause prices to go up. So that's
called cost push, which now theoretically this could be true

(01:09:52):
of any cost. And this is kind of like where
you know Steve's theory comes in is because it actually
like starts talking realistically about what the cost of businesses are.
But originally this was again a macro theory, so they
picked the one cost that's common to all the things
in the economy and they said that basically, inflation is
the cost of workers agitating for higher pages, which leads
wages to go up, which causes cost push inflation. The

(01:10:15):
cost go up, so that pushes puts pressure down the
supply chain because it's a it's a cost for everybody
downstream of it, so then it causes it to the
prices to go up. Now, the problem with these theories
is that like they're very like rigid. It's like it
has one cause and it's also like, you know, and
it's this one thing and it has to operate across

(01:10:36):
the entire economy, right, But that's not actually how our
economy is put together. Because our economy is not this
general equilibrium produced by the trading of individual agents who
are buying cheap and selling deer to each other. That
whole universe doesn't really exist. The universe that we actually
live in is one where businesses are not isolated. They're interdependent.
Right Like the the you know, the people who collect sands,

(01:11:03):
you know, from the earth and other minerals, feed into
the factories that turn it into glass, which feeds into
the construction industry that puts those glass well actually, no,
sorry I missed a step there. You know, it feeds
into the factories that turn that glass into windows, which
then feeds into the construction industry, which puts them into
buildings that then feeds into like real estate conglomerates that

(01:11:27):
rent it, which then feeds into businesses and households that
live there. Right Like, that's the entire supply chain, and
all those businesses depend upon each other because they're each
other's customers. So how much glass do they make in
the in the glass factory. It depends on how much
how many windows the window factories that are all their
customers order. That's what determines how much they're going to make.

(01:11:51):
You know, this whole picture of the world as supply
chains is common sense to anybody who actually like works
a job, especially if they're like in a management position
where they have to maybe be dealing with some of
the supplier relations stuff or customer relations stuff. Economists just
don't talk about it. It's not really in their models
because their models are developed from the ground up from

(01:12:12):
this kind of like everybody's just trading as individuals perspective.
And that's a great deal of the reason why Steve's
theory is so powerful. Now, a lot of this supply
chain picture that I'm painting, besides coming from the real world,
it also came from a particular heterodox economist that I
wrote a very long profile of, called Frederick S. Lee.

Speaker 3 (01:12:33):
Before we get into Lee, we unfortunately do need to
take an ad break because capitalism. But do you know
what Frederick Lee would have hated? And it's this ad
break we're about to do right now, all right, and
we're back to talk about Frederick Lee, who was very
cool and I'm very excited about Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:12:52):
Well, unfortunately started a little wait, we're not going to
talk a ton about him. The only really important thing
so he was. He was a great guy. He was
an anarcho syndicalist. He was a lifelong member of the IWW.
He actually helped recover Joe Hill's ashes from the federal
government and properly bury them. That's not in Part one
of my profile, which is published. It's in part two,

(01:13:14):
which is coming up. But in addition to that, he
was also a great economic theorist, and part of what
he did is that he put together the bits and
pieces of this alternative picture of the economy, where, for example,
prices are not this thing that allocates resources automatically through
supply and demand, and their price changes are telling us

(01:13:34):
what to how much to produce and how much to consume,
which is the kind of like mainstream neoclassical picture. But
rather prices are a markup that businesses like set themselves.
They're not receiving it from the market. They set a
price markup over their total costs of production in order
to get the money that they need to keep the
lights on and stay in business. This all sounds very trivial,

(01:13:55):
I know, but believe it or not, in economics, this
is like a revolutionary idea. So well then it's like, okay, well,
if that's the way that an individual company is, how
are the companies linked together? He basically comes to he
doesn't call it this, but to a supply chain view
of the economy, especially in his last textbook, which tries
to create a model of the economy as a whole,
and he says that the entire economy is basically just

(01:14:18):
a circuit of supply chains. It's all the businesses sort
of linked up together, forming a closed circuit that loops
back on itself. And that is the economy that we
use to produce the goods and services that just keep
society going day to day, week to week, year to year.
So he Lee basically had all of that and that
was the main ingredient that we used. But it was

(01:14:40):
Steve who then took that framework and used it to
create a new theory of inflation, because if you have
a world of the supply chains, then it becomes very
obvious that if prices are going to rise all across
the economy, it's going to be because people's cost go
up so then the question becomes why how do people's

(01:15:00):
costs go up? And the answer is almost always what
Steve called his progenitor price increase. This this first guy
who chooses to raise his prices if and only if
that person is even only if that person is in
the uh you know, in a position in the supply chamber,

(01:15:21):
a bunch of people are downstream of them. And that
tends to happen when, for example, an input that goes
into the entire economy, like energy, suddenly goes up in
price or becomes scarce, or it happens when a natural
disaster causes disruptions in a couple of businesses that everybody
else depends upon, or when there's an adverse shift in

(01:15:42):
the balance of payments, you know, the the Let's say
that the peso you know starts becoming you know, versus
the dollar. You know, the dollar becomes much more expensive,
So imports become much more expensive. So any business that
depends upon imports, you know, will suddenly will suddenly have

(01:16:02):
their costs go up. These are the kinds of events
that are like an external shock that leads to a
rise in prices, and key nodes in the supply chain
that because so many people are connected to them as customers,
their costs become more expensive, and that's these costs increase
travel across particular supply chain. So you have to actually
know how all the businesses are linked together so that

(01:16:24):
you can identify what the origin of the stress was
and see which particular supply chain is traveling down. It's
not this like this thing that has to do with
a single factor across the whole economy or this or
much less the amount of money that's being printed. The
amount of money is almost like irrelevant in this situation basically.
I mean, it maybe has relevance inasmuch as, like you know,

(01:16:48):
if people have the amount of money in their pockets
that they have, usually they might start purchasing more things
than can be produced at this moment. But that's usually
like like usually it balances out normal situations. The only
reason why that would be true is because there was
some kind of disruption upstream, so that what's normally produced
isn't being produced, And so you always have to look

(01:17:09):
at the particular supply chains and the kinds of stress
that they might have. Did I did I communicate that roughly?

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Right?

Speaker 7 (01:17:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:17:16):
Yeah, that was a fantastic summary. I have like a
few small notes just to add to it in the
in the sort of survey of existing theories of inflation
that I did in the paper of the JMC, like
very ably summaries for us, like specifically for the cost
push guys. They I think they have a tendency to

(01:17:40):
focus on like macrodynamic forces at work in the lens
of cost push, like partly because it is like it
really it relies on high profile fights between labor unions
and companies that the audience already kind of understands, and
it makes a lot of sense that you would go

(01:18:01):
to union fights in particular since they're like one of
the big items that they typically fight over is cost
of living adjustments built into their wage increases. And so
that's like an obvious like, Okay, if there is ever
a time in which macrodemic forces would convene in to
specifically to raise inflation, it would probably be fought over

(01:18:24):
like the cola adjustments, cost living adjustments, and like the
that leaves so much of the story untold. Focusing on
cola adjustments in these union fights leaves so much of
the story untold because it's it's putting like, what's really
this incredibly interdependent, micro based phenomenon onto the backs of

(01:18:46):
like one union against one company fighting over one contract,
and the way they make it work in like a
lot a lot of the modern interpretations of cost push
in this macrodynamic sense, the way they square, the way
they square how it gets from that fight to become
a generalized inflationary episode, which is what people want to

(01:19:08):
know about, Like they don't want to know about one well,
they want to know about politically about a union fight,
but in terms of the economics, they want to know
about the inflationary episode. The way they square that is
that there's typically like in what they call an information
diffusional component to this, it's where and that's a fancy

(01:19:28):
way of saying people learn about the outcome of the
fight and then replicate.

Speaker 7 (01:19:32):
It monkey see monkey doo.

Speaker 4 (01:19:34):
Yeah, So one union fight or one or one company
backclash against a union fight, word gets out, it spreads,
and it's all over the place. And that's really like
when you look at the economic history of the data
of inflationary episodes, although there are union fights going on,

(01:19:56):
inflation is not springing up specifically from those fights in
the way that they're describing.

Speaker 3 (01:20:01):
Yeah, and I mean, one of the things you can
tell this is obviously wrong is that they're just they're like,
at no point in the US's history has there ever
been enough percentage of the US population who are in
unions for this to mix, this to actually work, Like,
at no point even if you were to be really
generous to them and only look at union density and
like steel production union density and stuff that are like

(01:20:23):
like an important part to the supply chain, Like, it's
just not enough people, Like it can't it literally cannot
be true that it is purely like a union cost
testment thing because they're just not enough people.

Speaker 4 (01:20:34):
Yeah, So in these models, one of the important tasks
that they've given themselves is to estimate the coefficient of
information diffusional content from these union fights and like, so
they will try to estimate that coefficient and thereby out
build a model that outputs what price increase we can
expect from like labor militancy if you're on the right wing,

(01:20:57):
or company price gouging if you're on the left.

Speaker 7 (01:21:00):
Between Yeah, and this is this is really just like
a perfect example. I think that Steve could have possibly
put it better of the way that certain things that
sound super sophisticated and intelligent, because you know, you can
have like, you know, rather rather pink economists using this framework, right,
like you know, social democratic ones, you know. But the

(01:21:21):
thing is that, like it sounds really fancy to be
talking about like the district what was it, the informational
informational communication coefficient or whatever like that sounds that sounds
incredibly sophisticated, right, but like, actually what it is is
that it's this kind of like Nutsoe story about how
the reason why price rises happen across the economy is
because people are picking union fights when like empirically and

(01:21:46):
labor economists often do this, like you know, the ones
who work for unions and stuff. It's like it is
almost always the case that wages lagh cost of living,
you know, like significantly, so cost of living goes up,
and that that's why people at some point, usually years later,
will try to, if they're organized, agitate for for for

(01:22:06):
higher wages to catch up with costs of living. So
like the causality of it of cost push, you know,
probably is not labor action. Like that's a sort of
macro brain superstition. But funnily enough, this is kind of
like like the devil is in the details. Because cost
push as a general framework ought to probably be the

(01:22:28):
basis for any reasonable theory of inflation, because the idea
that it's costs going up, that then whatever prices now
stream of those costs also go up, that is probably true.
It's just that you have to look at particular supply
chains and their costs and not just like their labor costs,
but all the costs that they have and what cost

(01:22:48):
in particular went up that affects those particular supply chains.
Like that's but that's a different story, and it's a
story that looks more like Steve's and also a story
that looks more like what's been going on in the
world since twenty two.

Speaker 4 (01:23:00):
Yeah, some of the critics when my paper and subsequent
papers that we're we're on the same vein as this
came out, is saying that we're just conflate, Like how
are you guys really different than the cost push guys
that you're critiquing for part of your paper, And it's
really comes down to this kind of macro brain mecrodynamic

(01:23:21):
interpretation based on just wages or just like one union
fight and then some like people see it and just
copy it or something, and it's just a least so
much of a story, I'm told, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:31):
I mean, like I think, I think this is like
the strength of looking at it through a supplush and
it's like you can have it, you know, it has
the what like for what for a normal person is
a really simple idea, but for an economist is like
unbelievably galaxy brain absolutely impossible to comprehend idea that something
can have multiple causes at the same time and those

(01:23:56):
multiple like you can't literally just reduce an entire like
thing that's happening to exactly one driver, which you know,
you would think would be a pretty like not that
controversial thing. But then economists can't tell the difference between

(01:24:17):
a theory in which you can have multiple different things
that are working on a supply chain and a theory
where you can have like a thing.

Speaker 7 (01:24:25):
Yeah, yeah exactly.

Speaker 9 (01:24:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:24:26):
So like in in the COVID inflation that was that
transpired just after the first of these pieces of ours
came out, like it wasn't into full swing anyway in
terms of in terms of being like a national phenomenon
until just after like there, yes, there there there's a

(01:24:48):
beginning of the labor militancy upsurge happily, but does like
some people tried to light like the the people who
were predicting no inflation, but then we started to see
a little bit of it, started to attribute it to
this like macrodynamic cost push story eventually of like well,
either like but you can you can tell that they

(01:25:09):
are kind of hedging because there will be there's like
a bifurcation of interpretations of it, like one is the
like it really is, just you can tell it's not
that strong of a theory because there are two like
diametrically opposed interpretations saying that like, oh, you'res this corporate
price gouging or it's workers uh causing inflation themselves, which

(01:25:36):
like if like James was saying, there's a lag typically
associated that workers are just trying to catch up with
the prices that were being raised by firms in order
to keep up with inflation they generate.

Speaker 7 (01:25:49):
Yeah, if actually, if we could talk more, I was
I was hoping that I could actually get into the
COVID inflation and it's caused us a little bit. If
that's okay with books, because not only because it's important
in itself, but because I think this was actually one
of our first successes as a magazine. So we launched
as a magazine in April I think it was of

(01:26:11):
twenty twenty two, but we've been working on the magazine
from like twenty twenty on, so like there was twenty two,
it was March of twenty twenty two. The that's right,
but we'd been working on the magazine all through like
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one and twenty And the

(01:26:35):
thing is that Steve's Peace was kind of like taking shape,
and you know, we as editors but then also as
people who are like helping with the research and talking
things out internally and talking with other people outside the collective,
we're all kind of like sort of imbibing it and
thinking about it. When COVID hit right and one of

(01:26:57):
the things that was rather magical, And there is written
evidence of this, funnily enough, not as an article because
the magazine didn't exist yet, but as a Twitter thread
that I made actually on March third of twenty twenty one.
And the reason I'm being so specific about dates is
because of what happened where we and I was just
summarizing basically conversations that we had been having inside the

(01:27:18):
magazine internally. You know, that was when some of the
news stories were starting to come out about shortages that
were being caused by COVID. So most famously the chips
shortage were semiconductors, which take like a year to make,
like from the moment that the order is put in
to the moment when the thing is actually shipped, it's

(01:27:39):
like a year. And if that process is disrupted, you
have to start from the beginning. So the shutdowns in
China shut down semiconductor production, and actually I say China,
but it was really China and Taiwan because both of
those places have major chips companies, and that basically screwed

(01:28:00):
up ships production for like as long as the shutdown happened,
and then after that at a lag of like a
year at least, and then that in turn caused a
bunch of other shortages. The fact that we were all
inside meant that like there was a huge problem in food,
both in agriculture itself and in food processing factories, you know,

(01:28:21):
where the raw products that we take out of the
earth are turned into the packaged you know, bits and
bobs that you know, go to restaurants or to you know,
food product factories and things like that, Like you couldn't
get people to work there, or if they did, you know,
and you tried to like pay them measure or whatever,
they would get sick so they would stop production. So

(01:28:42):
there was a labor shortage in agriculture as well. Then
there was a container shortage right in in shipping, where
we weren't producing enough containers to actually ship stuff around
the world. And if you can't do that, well, everything
is made. Everything that somebody needs to make something is
often now made in another kind of or at least
another part of a country, you know, that's connected by trucks.

(01:29:03):
So if there's no containers, how do you get stuff
from one place to the other? And the answers that
you don't So they were just piling up like mountains
in the in the docks of various countries, including here
on the West Coast and the East coast. So all
of these shortages caused by the pandemic. Basically we're hitting
key sectors of the economy, right that everybody depends upon.

(01:29:26):
So transportation, everybody needs it, you know, semiconductors, a whole
bunch of manufacturing needs it. So that's that's why cars
suddenly got super expensive, is because the chips in the
machines that make the cars got more expensive and scarce,
and not just expensive, it's scarce, like you just couldn't
get them. And then food everybody depends on, and you know,

(01:29:46):
like everybody buys groceries. Restaurants need it, so restaurant prices
went up. So you can see how specific sectors having
these problems traveled down specific supply chains to produce the
cost increases that we all start and seeing. But here's
the thing. All that stuff was happening from twenty twenty on.
I did this thread on March third of twenty twenty one.

(01:30:11):
But the thing is that at that point there was
not yet inflation. We predicted that there was going to
be inflation, and there was a lot of people, like
including left wingers, including heterodox economists, who got really angry
about this because for them, inflation fear mongering. You know,
this was in the context of the government printing out
all the stimmy checks, right, so inflation fear mongering for

(01:30:32):
them is kind of like something that a right winger
would do, you know, by saying the government's printing too
much money, so there's going to be inflation, you know,
quantity theory of money stuff, Milton Friedman stuff, the stuff
that they had experienced in the turn to neoliberalism from
the seventies to the eighties. Right. I understand that fear.
But the thing is, this wasn't fear mongering. These shortages

(01:30:54):
for very clear reasons that were clear if you had
the supply chain theory of inflation framework, which unfortunately we
did because we hadn't published it yet. Like you know,
it was very clear that these shortages were going to
cause cost increases in very well linked together, you know,
nodes within supply chains that we're going to travel down
those supply chains and basically be economy wide. So I

(01:31:17):
said so because I had a hunch that it was
going to be true, and that it would be a
big deal if it was true, for you know, validating
these discussions that we were having internally. So I said,
some predictions. One, there's going to be inflation in the
next year or two, potentially lots. Two it will be
caused by cost increases due to the chips shortage and
COVID induced bottlenecks, and agriculture and manufacturing. Three, they'll try

(01:31:40):
to blame the stimmy checks and attempt to implement austerity. Now,
at the time of that first tweet, inflation was at
two point six percent, which is like within normal bounds,
although slightly higher than have been before. By the end
of that year, even actually, I think just a few
months later, it was at four point seven percent, and

(01:32:01):
in twenty twenty two it would peak at eight point
seventy three percent, which was like the most inflation that
we've seen since the Crisis of the seventies fifty years ago. Like,
so we you know, the first success that we had
as the magazine, before we even came out as a magazine,
is that we successfully predicted the biggest inflationary crisis since

(01:32:23):
the Crisis of the seventies, and not only predicted it,
but predicted its specific causes. Because as the thread kind
of was continually updated over over the course of that
next year, like you know, people started looking digging in
and actually, like a lot of journalism was uncovering that
precisely those bottlenecks were leading to cost increases, you know,

(01:32:44):
the and there were other ones that were kind of
added to it. So when the Ukraine War started in
twenty twenty two. That increased global inflation because Ukraine is
the world's single biggest and by a lot, supplier of wheat,
which is a key staple in diets across the planet.
So the shortages that were created by the Ukraine War,
by Russia's blockades and also just by bombing and you know,

(01:33:07):
the war disrupting the labor market over there and all
these other kinds of things that meant that there was
less wheat being exported, which created bottlenecks in those supply chains,
which led to the global increase in the price of wheat,
which led to the global increase anything that uses wheat, bread,
you know, and other food products. So beer, actually, well

(01:33:32):
does I'm not wrong about that?

Speaker 9 (01:33:34):
Right?

Speaker 7 (01:33:34):
Beer uses wheat? I should actually know that, Yeah, I
think I think so. I had to do a double
take there. So anyway, the point is that this was
like a really big deal because like there were a
lot of people, including like in the Biden administration, who
were denying that inflation was happening even as it was happening.

(01:33:57):
And eventually the kind of shifted to a story where
it was like, well, it'll be transitional because only demand
pull inflation is real, right, this is clearly a cost
push thing created by these shortages. But like demand pull is,
the real form of inflation is when there's like too
much money in people's pockets. And that's not what's happening clearly,
so we'll be fine. You just have to wait, right,

(01:34:19):
which is not Actually the attitude that you have to take.
Inflation is inflation and like you know, the the if
the causes or these disruptions and supply chains. You actually,
i mean, this is like the really edgy take. You
actually have to spend more money in order to unplug
these bottlenecks. You know, It's far from inflation being a

(01:34:39):
product of there being too much money in the economy.
You might actually need to do government spending too, for example,
hire people you know, and and take extra steps for
precaution for their safety to unplug bottlenecks created by labor shortages.
Or you might have to like you know, rapidly invest
you know, on a large scale, almost as if you're
in a war are in order to create a new

(01:35:01):
industry to like, you know, to to replace something like
containers that that that you would normally import, you know,
or something like that so like like these are these
are the kinds of actions that a more muscular approach
to the inflation would have would have been. But instead
they basically just waited for the supply chains to fix themselves,
even when multinational corporations and their boards of directors were

(01:35:24):
begging the government to actually intervene more. Uh, which is
insane with economic planning. You know, you would never expect
to hear something like that, but it was in the
things like the pages of the Financial.

Speaker 3 (01:35:36):
Times, speaking of the Financial Times, we do we do
need to take another ad break unfortunately. Yeah, do you
know what the Financial Times will not be doing buying
ads on this show hasn't happened yet. Could happen, would
be very funny, but it has not happened yet. All right,
we're we are now back from ads. Yeah, I endeavored

(01:35:57):
to have better ad pivots, but you know, you get
what you get.

Speaker 4 (01:36:02):
Speaking of like what they could have done differently, like
they there's a whole World War two playbook essentially that
they just didn't chose, they're ignorant of or chose to
ignore of, like a system of price controls, rationing and
rapid redeployment of resources, to unstuck the bottlenecks along and

(01:36:22):
across supply chains on the domestic side to support the warfront.
There's no war going on for us directly right now,
but it could it could have easily been replicated.

Speaker 3 (01:36:33):
Yeah, and that's something I think is really interesting because eventually,
like as the inflationary crisis sort of went on, like
you did see a little bit of people trying stuff
like this, like you saw Germany, if I remembering by
Germany did these price controls on uh on, like natural
gas prices and stuff. But that that that gets into

(01:36:55):
another interesting thing is which is that So Yeah, I
think we should get into a bit of this sort.

Speaker 1 (01:37:02):
Of like.

Speaker 2 (01:37:04):
The I don't know how you describe it, the.

Speaker 3 (01:37:09):
Mainstream adoption of like a version of y'all's theory that
eventually started happening, that eventually started to push like some
of this stuff, which, yeah, I guess we should introduce
another person who I don't know the relationship between exactly
what of your stuff she read is sort of unclear.

(01:37:31):
But one of the things that happens in this sort
of period is this this German economist named Isabella Weber
who wrote a like fine like mostly reasonable book about
like the economists behind the like the reform period in
the eighties and China like started pushing well, actually, this

(01:37:57):
is the thing where I'm sort of unclear at the timeline.
I started pushing the greedflation thing, although she had a
different name for it. Yeah, I wasn't really talking about
that sort of whole thing, because that was really interesting,
sort of like turn in the whole inflationary discourse inflation.

Speaker 4 (01:38:15):
Yeah, I think the prior so like prior to Waber's
peace coming out in the earliest phases of COVID in
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, before there was any inflation,
there was a group of left wing like a fairly
large swath of like left wing academics, progressives and liberals,

(01:38:38):
and also Biden, the Biden administration itself, saying that inflation
would be transitory and that we should it will if anything,
it would be moderates, but would come right back down
because like, supply chings are so much more nimble now
than they were in like the seventies and eighties, and
like liquidity sources are so much more plentiful, they have

(01:39:00):
so many Like I'm probably giving them too much credit. Actually,
I think they literally just were like.

Speaker 7 (01:39:06):
Yeah, there was no because that I remember, like that would.

Speaker 4 (01:39:08):
Be basically have it because actually I'm filling the in
the blanks for them as I go. I think they
were just saying it's going to be transitory because it
hasn't happened. Yeah, and like when it obviously in late
twenty twenty two to to through the middle of twenty
twenty three, when there's obvious evidence that that wasn't the case,

(01:39:29):
then they like really didn't, like they went like hard
to starboard and said, like, Okay, the inflation that we see,
it's because of corporate greed and it just reduces to
that now. Yeah, and so it's like a purely opportunistic
thing between of like the largest corporations. And then you know,
maybe later people saw that and did monkey see monkey do,

(01:39:50):
but it's it's because of.

Speaker 7 (01:39:51):
Them, And to be fair, like the tricky thing here
is that, like so I'll preface this by saying that, like,
you know, and I think this is true Steve too,
Like I really respect us of Bella Vapor's work when
it's good, you know, and which is often you know,
Like I think that that she's a very solid headerdox
economist who has some really important refutations of mainstream ideas,

(01:40:16):
and as an example of the good stuff. For example,
she actually uh one of her one of the underrated
aspects of a paper that kind of pushes what is
popularly known as the greenflation thing. The better part of
that paper is that it actually creates a map of
the current to today's supply chains in the US, like

(01:40:38):
you know, and and identifies the keynodes you know. And
she's a method called input output input output tables, which
Steve and I have written about and we're gonna write
about it more on the magazine. This is like the
main tool that you can use to do real economic planning.

Speaker 3 (01:40:52):
JMC has been setting the input output tables for like
seven years now.

Speaker 7 (01:40:58):
Yeah, I just scream about it.

Speaker 4 (01:41:01):
Yeah, I should make it clear. It's like the iotable
stuff is amazing, and I think I think people just
latched onto kind of really not like hardly the most
important part of your piece.

Speaker 7 (01:41:13):
Yeah, and that that, by the way, I mean, I
don't know if she read Steve's Peace or not, but
it is a huge vindication of Steve's piece, which came
out like a year and a half before you know
because because it's basically mapping the supply chains that Steve
talks about using io tables and saying, Okay, these are
the nodes. If prices go up here, everything downstream of

(01:41:35):
them will go up, and those the and and that
basically hits most sectors of the economy, like and knowing
what those nodes are is like super important because then
you can figure out how to protect them, you know,
like that's that's actually like one of the key things
that you know, one wishes that that that that governments
were doing, it would be one of the few useful

(01:41:56):
things that they could do in a situation like this, right,
But unfortunately there's another aspect of her work which is
more and this also comes from heterodox theory, but it's
just not good theory in my opinion. And it's this
whole deal with like, okay, inflation, with prices going up.

(01:42:16):
So why are the prices going up? Well, a lot
of them are going up because corporate management sees that
everybody's talking about inflation. Now, maybe their costs. They're not
in one of these sectors where upstream their suppliers are
raising prices. They're actually getting the same prices for their
ingredients as always. But because everybody's talking about inflation, they're

(01:42:39):
expecting prices to go up, right, so why not just
raise prices, you know, like like the and so like.
That basically ended up that basically ended up being a
theory of like, well, a lot of the price rises
that going up is because of corporate greed, and corporations

(01:43:02):
are always greedy. But a situation where people are talking
about inflation means that they can that they can basically
do a price get away with a price rise that
they wouldn't be able to get away with normally. Now,
there might be situations like this. I'm not even denying
that that's the case. Like there are clearly, you know,

(01:43:23):
based on a couple of journalistic exposees some companies whose
costs have not really gone up, but they're raising the
prices opportunistically so that they can do higher payoffs for
the shareholders and upper management. However, as a primary explanation
for why the inflation happened, as an argument for the
main cause of the inflation, and therefore for what the

(01:43:45):
main solution should be, which is slapping on price controls
and saying no, you can't do this, I don't think
that that's tenable because there are clearly biophysical stressors in
at least the places that are experiencing them, that are
traveling down supply where if you slap price controls down,
that's not going to get you more chips that at
least not by itself, and in itself, price control should

(01:44:07):
be part of the picture, but that's not, especially in
situations where there is corporate greed sort of driven price rises.
But that's just not an explanation for everything. And some
of Weber's followers, not not necessarily her, but some of
the people who are like promoting this perspective are doing
so again partly in order to avoid conversation, in my opinion,

(01:44:27):
about these kinds of biophysical bottlenecks and how they might
be they might be undone, and it's and it's a
huge issue. One thing to kind of like conclude is
that like in you know, this, this whole thing that
we've been saying about the supply chain as disruptions to

(01:44:47):
the supply chain as the cause of a progenitor and
price increased by people in the affected sectors, which in turn,
through their connections to a bunch of customers, leads to
price rises across at least second of the economy. That
whole story allowed us to kind of see all this.
A lot of the inflation that's happened in the world

(01:45:08):
since twenty twenty, we saw it coming, and we saw
specific causes coming. And now no less a capitalist institution
than the imf right has kind of been forced reluctantly,
I would say, in some ways to admit that, as
Christine Legard said recently, you know, energy played a significant role,

(01:45:31):
then food kicked in, and energy is now fading. You know.
Now they still want to make it about wages, right,
I mean, that's the thing that ends up happening in
a crisis like this, is that they do want to
blame wage increases. But it is quite clear that even
the authorities have needed to kind of admit that these specific,

(01:45:54):
measurable biophysical crises have been the source, the main source
of the inflation. And then a great deal of the
of the battle has been over who's going to kind
of like who who's going to have to narrow their
ambitions for their goals as a result of it, capital

(01:46:14):
or labor. And this is where I think VAPOR is
on firmer ground, not as an explanation for the inflation.
But afterwards, and then after inflation is already kicked in,
who ends up having to quote unquote foot the bill,
right is there's now like less money coming in in
these companies. So do you give it to workers so

(01:46:36):
that they can, you know, since their money buys them less,
you know, compared to rising costs of living, you give
them a little bit more so that they can like
kind of like balance it out. Or do you give
it to management? You know, Now, obviously if it's management
making the decision about what to do with the company surplus,
because we live in a capitalist economy, that's a dictatorship
with the big owners, guess what they're gonna say, you know,

(01:46:58):
and now and now you have a therefore a class struggle,
the distributional conflict that some of the kind of traditional
cost push theories always talk about between capital and labor
over what to do with these rising markups in firms. Now,
they would say that's why the inflation happened. I think

(01:47:19):
I would say, and I think Steve would be in
agreement with this, that it's what happens after inflation, an
inflationary crisis kicks in, and then there's a battle between
capital and labor over who gets screwed as a result.
I think that that's kind of the way that we
should think about a lot of the labor struggles that
have taken place since COVID.

Speaker 4 (01:47:37):
Yeah, I also like to add that there's kind of
like a distinction that needs to be drawn between companies,
typically small and medium sized ones within who exist within
larger supply chains, who are sort of like doing what
they must, versus large corporations, often multinational who there's documented

(01:48:01):
evidence that yes, there's some opportunistic price price increases that
they are administering at the same time. So there's a mixture,
i would say, bias towards the former group, those who
have to do what they have to do in order
to socially provision themselves. But there's a mixture of them,

(01:48:22):
And so you have to look at like that, who
are the price leaders and are they opportunistically raising prices
and are people copying that? Yes? Sometimes, but as far
as like the progenitor price increase that we keep talking about,
you know, in our pieces like that, very often like

(01:48:42):
and this is born out in the surveys, like when
they're asked like for their reasoning as to why they
raise prices. It was typically like for the for reasons
like that are quote unquote socially acceptable at least to say,
And for the most part, they were just defending their margins,

(01:49:03):
like they they were at risk of going under right, Yeah,
and so you have to you have to weigh there's
a dynamic, there's an interplay between those that group and
then the opportunistic group, and so it really doesn't like
reduce neatly into the greed inflation sort of like vestardization
of vapors. Otherwise, really excellent piece that goes through some

(01:49:26):
like interesting and out but analysis.

Speaker 7 (01:49:29):
Yeah, and I think that like this is a really
important thing for listeners because I think a lot of
left wing listeners they if they ask what's inflation and
a left wing economist tells them because of corporate greed,
they'll be like yeah, but and and and they might
listen to us and be like, well, it looks like
it sounds like you're defending corporations, And I would argue, no,

(01:49:52):
we're not. We're trying to understand the actual causes for things,
and we think that actually help you because, for example,
if a company, let's say that you're in a company
that is part of this wave of unionizations where you know,
let's say you're a Starbucks worker and people want to
start up a Starbucks union. Maybe one of the ways

(01:50:14):
that management is trying to kind of like screw over
your union is to tell people who are on the fence, well, like,
the reason why there's so much inflation is because of
these unions, like we we have to all stick together,
and you know, the company's got your best interests at heart,
so you like, don't join this union that's going to
be pushing for for wages that are ultimately just going

(01:50:36):
to get eaten up by inflation. Like like, let let
let management figure out what'll what's best, because otherwise you'll
just end up screwing up the whole economy. And which
is not unheard of. You know, it might be something
they'll fall back on the negotiations and their anti union
propaganda if you know that the actual cause of the
inflation has to do with disrupted supply chains and that

(01:50:58):
really the question is who's going to be screwed over
and who's not. Within the company, you can go back
and say, hey, wages are always chasing. Cost of living increases,
the cost of living increases happened before the big unionization
wave kicked off, and we can tell that it's specific
causes in logistics, and its specific causes in chips, and
specific causes in agriculture that are causing the price of this,

(01:51:20):
that and the other thing. You can even map out
your company's supply chain and maybe point out certain cost
increases that caused it, and you can say, okay, so
we're going to have to raise our prices. But where's
that money going to go? Not all of us should
go to management. Some of this should go to us.
So this is what a materialist understanding of how the
actual causes of the thing worked out can help you
in organizing your workplace and in pushing back against the

(01:51:42):
kinds of things that your boss might try to tell you.
So that's what I would say to somebody who's like, oh, well,
you're just defending corporations. No, I'm absolutely not. But I
don't think that we can actually have power, we can
actually kind of like take direct actions that really matter
because they're actually going to make life better for us
and our friends and our loved ones. Like, I don't

(01:52:03):
think that we can actually do that unless we understand
how the world works, and sometimes the world works in
a way that doesn't necessarily look like we would most
expect it to or most wish it to. But nevertheless,
you have to kind of see how it works so
that you can then figure out what's the best intervention
that I can make into it, given where I'm at,
the institutions that I work through, the coalitions that I

(01:52:24):
can put together, and that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:52:27):
Yeah, and I think this is this is a kind
of like left field, like take on this too, but
like there are lots of sort of you know, if
you go through like an economic price history or like
an economic history of like the socialist period in China, right,
like you will find them having to deal with like
basically exactly the same ship where they have these like

(01:52:49):
massive inflationary spikes that have to do with like basically
these I mean for them, it was less supply chain
bottle like supply chain breakdowns is like you know, they'd
get the supply chain bottle now because they just didn't
have way through them, and like people fucking that up,
Like there was a like there is a decent argument
that like that's part of what caused the Great Leap

(01:53:09):
Forward was people not fucking understanding that, like not quite
understanding how to deal with their supply chain stuff and
seeing this kind of like inflation like issue kicking in
and being like fuck it were to do something that's
completely nuts, and you know, that went like about as
badly as like any attempt anyone has ever tried to do,

(01:53:32):
like to fix any problem has ever gone. And the
larger the number of people who actually understand how this
stuff works, even in sort of like you know, even
even on a kind of like not enormously grandeur level,
the more likely you are to have someone who's in
and it has the ability to make a decision where
this stuff matters and you know it and like yeah,

(01:53:55):
you could be like, oh well, like the odds that
we're ever gonna be in a place for this matters
is like direct, you're gonna be the one making the
decisons pretty low.

Speaker 2 (01:54:01):
But like, you know, it's not zero.

Speaker 3 (01:54:02):
It's happened to people before, and them not knowing about
it was like a really apocable disaster, and we can
you know, avoid doing stuff like that by having a
better understanding of like how our supply chains function and
what effect that has on sort of economic distribution and
stuff like that. So yeah, that's that's one of my

(01:54:23):
two pitches, And my other pitch on this is, I
I don't know how. It's hard to actually gauge the
influence of discourse on policy makers, especially when they're as
opaque as like the chairman of the Federal Reserve, but
it is worth noting that we didn't get a like

(01:54:46):
Vulgar style fifteen percent like interest rate increase, And I
think there's a non zero argument the fact that there
were other alternative explanations to inflation like around and that
enough people were pushing them, like is a reason why
we didn't get one of these, like a Vulcar style thing,
which would have pushed employment to like unemployment to like
twenty five percent, destroy the entire global economy. And that,

(01:55:10):
you know, like we could count that as a fucking
w because as as bad as things are right now,
like the world, the world where Jerome Powell pulls the
trigger and hits the like hey, I'm now a monitorist,
like I'm gonna I'm gonna decrease the money supply button
and Jack's the interest wrapped like a dew percent, Like
that world is so much worse than this one. It

(01:55:32):
is it is difficult to imagine.

Speaker 4 (01:55:37):
Yeah, I think we dodged a bullet of like twelve
percent federal funds rate this time. Yeah, we've surpassed Monashers
and to an extent anyway, there's they're still doing some
quantitative tightening. Yeah, they but uh, I don't know, at
least as like a mortgage industry professional. I'm kind of
hoping he keeps it under six for the federal funds, right.

Speaker 2 (01:56:02):
Yeah, we'll see what happens there.

Speaker 3 (01:56:03):
But it hasn't been We haven't gotten the apocalyptic reaction
that we very very easily could have, like to the
extent that, like, I'm pretty sure if this, if this
had happened under Obama, we'd be in like a recession
that would have made two thousand and eight look like
a joke right now.

Speaker 2 (01:56:19):
So yeah, okay, I.

Speaker 7 (01:56:24):
I think that there's a lot more to discuss about
it because and it seems like we're gonna probably have
a part two to this at some point. Yeah, So
we can probably get into it there because we have
actually an essay that we published about interest rates which
hadn't even bigger influence than this, Yeah, than these early
essays that we're talking about. But but you know, like

(01:56:46):
at the end of the day, I think that what's important,
what's most important about what we've discussed, is this for me,
like having this model which we developed, you know obviously,
like steve've developed it out of as an expansion of
the logic of Fred Lee's work. And fred Lee was

(01:57:07):
not actually particularly original. He just synthesized a whole bunch
of stuff that existed previously, like these pricing studies by
Gardner Means in the thirties and pricing studies over the
next hundred years from all sorts of different people, you know,
into his post Kanteene price theory and stuff like that,
the cost plus markup stuff. But like like having a

(01:57:31):
theory that's developed by looking at the world and building
your abstractions up out of things that you can see,
particularly in a field like economics that's so complex that
you have to kind of start with like observable relations
between actual institutions that exist in the world that empowered us,
you know, that allowed us who really were just like

(01:57:52):
four weirdos started a magazine right like four anarchistish weirdos, But.

Speaker 12 (01:57:58):
That allowed us to see earlier than like most people,
including a lot of like credential professionals, what was going
to happen in the future, at least the near future,
like you know, the next like like like two to
five years from that vantage point, which was like twenty
twenty one. That is really incredible, And I'm not saying
that to brag, like, although it is certainly something that

(01:58:21):
I that I take a sick pleasure in. It's also
informative because think about all the things about which we
don't have that concrete material picture. The question of how
we're going to get fossil fuels out of agricultural production
without causing famines, right, the question of what do you

(01:58:42):
do now that we have the Internet, Like how do
you govern that?

Speaker 7 (01:58:45):
Because it's clearly not working under these giant vertically integrated
media Oligo believes with the platforms, but it's also not
going to work if we put it under the government,
So what the hell do we do about it? You know?
It's it's like there's all these key questions that we
just don't have have even like working models like of
like what the world is even like right now, much
less like you know, what could plausibly be done with it?

(01:59:09):
Right to make it a better place. And obviously, like
you know, some of this sounds like stuff that the
government should do, but a lot of this is actually
stuff that social movements need. If you think the rent
is too damn high in your city, and you organize
a tenancy union that has real political muscle and you
actually like have the ability to do stoppages or other
actions that can really like bully the local city government. Okay,

(01:59:31):
but what do you ask for, what do you demand
or what do you try to put into place yourself
using your own money? Like, what do you do if
the rent is too damn high? How do you get
it lower? And it's like, oh, well, there shouldn't be rent,
we should abolish it, Okay, how do you do that?
You know, you need models of the world, and that's
what we've been trying to kind of build in the

(01:59:52):
magazine more than anything else, especially in our ECON coverage.
So there's a lot more that happened after this. We'll
probably have a part two, but I just to wrap
up the story up to then. So we did launch
the magazine, we did put out Steve's essay, but then
a really remarkable thing happened, which is that we started getting,
like all magazines do, people who came in into the

(02:00:13):
slush pile who were inspired by Steve's work, and we're like,
this makes the most sense of anything that I've heard,
and I want to build on it too. So we
started publishing other essays that we're kind of building on
the research program that Steve kind of got us started on.
And although our sort of influence was difficult to calculate

(02:00:34):
in terms of, like, you know, how much we influenced
the discussion, you know, in these early stages before the
magazine was even up and running. Afterwards, after we kind
of publish the people that I'm talking about, some of
those pieces have actually definitely influenced the conversation in really
exciting ways, and I think that we can talk about
some of that next time.

Speaker 3 (02:00:52):
Yeah, so that will be at some point in the future.
I don't all I'm going up put down a definitive
date when it happens, because I don't know the world
is chaos and this. Yeah, but however, Comma, this story
will continue in part two dot dot dot dot dot Yeah,
So Steve Jamc, thank you both so much for joining me.

(02:01:14):
And yeah, do you have where where can people go
to find the magazine and you two if they want
to find you.

Speaker 4 (02:01:22):
Oh, you can go to Strangemagers dot coop. That's our
main website. If you want to subscribe, we have digital
subscriptions starting at five dollars and Prince monthly is seven
ninety nine. There are also annual subscriptions too.

Speaker 7 (02:01:37):
Yeah, and please do consider subscribing or donating. You can
actually donate any amount of money to us. We're not
a nonprofit, so it's not tax deductible, but it would
be a really helpful donation because any dollar that we
get that doesn't go to our capitalist overlords, you know,
for the services that we have to use to keep
the magazine going, all of that goes right now to

(02:01:58):
our writers. And we try to pay writers above market
rate for magazines of our size, and you know, to
do that is very difficult, you know, we need we
need to So if you want to support worker controlled
media production that's financially independent. We don't have any big foundations,
you know, like telling us what to write or things

(02:02:20):
like that. It's all like basically small donations and subscriptions,
like you know, if you want to keep that kind
of media alive and keep this kind of economic analysis
alive along with our cultural philosophy, philosophical, historical, anthropological, literary stuff.
Then then please consider it because we could really use
the support.

Speaker 3 (02:02:39):
Yeah, so go do that. Yeah, and go read some
of the some of the work that you all have
done on inflation, because it's really good. And yeah, this
is prediculate apple.

Speaker 7 (02:02:51):
Here.

Speaker 3 (02:02:51):
You can find us in the usual places. And yes,
go go, go into the world and cause mischief.

Speaker 8 (02:03:16):
This summer has been a critical junction in the fight
against Copp City, the Atlanta Police Foundation's massive proposed training
facility Indicab County, which is slated to begin construction later
this very month. The last week of action in March
of twenty twenty three drew in over a thousand people
against Copp City and saw hundreds of force defenders attack

(02:03:38):
in mass the construction equipment and police infrastructure stored on
the site in a pretty successful action. The police repression
came down hard, but the militancy of the force defenders
left a pretty impressionable mark. Later that month, to Cab
County closed and barricaded in Trenchment Creek Park citing public

(02:03:58):
safety concerns, and allegedly found booby traps police did an
exhaustive sweep of the forest and established a relatively firm
control of the territory. After a year and a half
of there being a nearly continuous presence in the Mulani
by forest defenders, now the police began a forest occupation
of their own. During the month that followed, the Atlanta

(02:04:22):
Police Foundation, or the APF, rushed to clear cut around
ninety acres of the Mulani Forest, seemingly in a ploy
to show investors and the city that they are committed
to the project and to crush the spirits of those
who spent years opposing the facility and defending the forest.
People then set their sights on the Atlanta's City Council,

(02:04:45):
who in early June was to vote on whether or
not to provide taxpayer funding for the APF's project. Over
twenty three hours of public comment across multiple days, almost
universally against copp City, culminated at the June fifth City
Council meeting, which lasted into the early hours of the
next morning. Despite the record breaking turnout opposing the facility,

(02:05:09):
in the early morning of Tuesday, June sixth, the Atlanta
City Council voted eleven to four in favor of the
sixty seven million dollar funding package to build cop City.
The next day, a group of community organizers announced a
referendum campaign to collect tens of thousands of petition signatures
from Atlanta voters to put the cop City land lease

(02:05:32):
on the upcoming ballot. City council approving public funds for
cop City was certainly disappointing, but not quite unexpected, because
another Week of action to stop cop City was already
planned for later that same month. This is it could
happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. In this three part series,

(02:05:53):
I'll be talking about what's been happening in Atlanta this
summer to stop cop City. If you want to hear
more about the background of this movement. In the month
of May, we put out a five part series on
the Week of Action from that spring, along with the
few other previous Defend the Forest and Stop Cup City
mini series published over the course of the last year

(02:06:13):
and a half. With much of the forest already destroyed
and no easy access to Entrenchment Creek Park, this Week
of Action in June was set to be very unlike
any that had come before. The kickoff rally was to
begin on Saturday, June twenty fourth, at Brownwood Park in
East Atlanta. I made my way there and met up

(02:06:34):
with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. My first
feeling walking in is like it felt very society of
the spectacle in terms of like the ratio of cameras
to participants was the most extreme that I've really ever
ever seen for like, you know, a week of action,
like there was there was an outside of like a
press conference, yeah, and like it felt like there was
so many just cameras looming around, and it's like there's

(02:06:58):
so many people trying to make a similar from the
movements to sell back to other people at this point
in time, and like there's just a very like that's
just a very large, pervasive feeling, and that combined with
the more kind of the more liberalization of certain of
certain aspects, again compared to the last week of Action,
which felt there was a strong militant continuent.

Speaker 5 (02:07:18):
And like the liberal continued was still there.

Speaker 11 (02:07:21):
If you build it, we will burn it.

Speaker 8 (02:07:23):
And that's not the vibe here. That's not the vibe here.
There's definitely a big separation in terms of what types
of people are at what side of the park.

Speaker 11 (02:07:31):
Right now.

Speaker 8 (02:07:32):
There's a more like more like forested section of the
park with a creek on the south side, which is
where people are setting up. Some camping sites have of
a kitchen that's where the well content is. And then
there's the other side of the park that has like
the rec center and the playground, which seems more like
family friendly stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:07:47):
Yeah, there are kids there, there's the popcorn setup.

Speaker 8 (02:07:49):
It's more like house so there is a bouncy house,
which is great return.

Speaker 11 (02:07:54):
They couldn't, they couldn't keep this moving down. I won't.

Speaker 8 (02:07:59):
I won't rest until destroyed until the contrastory Everybounty Castle
in Atlanta, till every bouncy castle is deflated.

Speaker 5 (02:08:11):
That is, that is the new movement's so good.

Speaker 8 (02:08:13):
In contrast to the last kickoff rally at Gresham Park,
which felt very unified, this time there was a noticeable
separation in terms of what types of people are on
the two sides of the park. People wearing camouflage and
masks were more situated on the south side of the
park where tents were being set up, versus people by
the playground who were going around with the referendum sign

(02:08:36):
up sheet and where all the food was being handed out.

Speaker 5 (02:08:39):
It's so separated the game, the two groups.

Speaker 8 (02:08:43):
Cannot cannot, cannot counsel each other, and even like people
like turnout seemed to be a bit lower than some
people expected, and it was definitely much lower compared to
the previous few weeks of action, and overall the rally
was very muted and lacked a sense of energy or focus,

(02:09:05):
Like the rallies start at eleven, which kind of kind
of like nothing happened, like it just it felt very directionless,
felt like people did not quite know why they were
there at this point in.

Speaker 5 (02:09:14):
Times, almost Nune before anyone really spoke on the bullhorn,
and the music didn't start until noon and then what
was it like a half hour ago, so like twelve
thirty probably when when the first like speaker said anything
from the Faith Coalition, I don't know.

Speaker 8 (02:09:33):
So far, the rally kind of feels like a microcosmum
of the entire movement at this point, just not quite
sure where to direct the energy to.

Speaker 11 (02:09:41):
There's a feeling that like people should do something, but
they don't quite know how to.

Speaker 8 (02:09:46):
They haven't decided how that should be directed yet, and
so like there's some people showing up, but it's just
like it feels kind of stagnant and like there's this
there's this need to evolve right now.

Speaker 3 (02:09:54):
And I don't know.

Speaker 8 (02:09:58):
I think maybe people got burnt out from this council
things that there's a lot of energy being pumped into that.

Speaker 5 (02:10:02):
Yeah, and then I guess some people that.

Speaker 8 (02:10:04):
Was like three weeks of pushing energy and that and
that was only like two weeks ago, like that that's
still very recently. Three weeks now, it still feels it
still feels very raw. Walking down the pathway on the
south side of Brownwood you can see people setting up tents,
carrying camping supplies and.

Speaker 3 (02:10:20):
Big jugs of water.

Speaker 8 (02:10:22):
Other people were assembling a makeshift kitchen in the tree line,
and all of that was physically reminiscent of the last
week of action. But being four miles away from the
forest at Brownwood Park instead of the wallani impacted the
feeling on the ground. We're both we're so far away
from the forest. But if there's like that separation of space,

(02:10:42):
like it feels so distant.

Speaker 5 (02:10:44):
And distant, even more than than Gresham Park, even with
the Gresham Like if this were happening in Gresham Park,
I think that might even be a different feeling, yeah,
because at least you're attached to your Luilani.

Speaker 8 (02:11:01):
There was more determination on like the south side of
of the park and you could feel like the people
want at least people want to do something physically, and
they were. But it's even still unclear how it's going
to get directed towards, like like what is this doing.

Speaker 11 (02:11:13):
To stop prop city right now? Like that is that's
the big thing.

Speaker 8 (02:11:16):
Is like people are trying to figure that out and
there's people here, but like what are what are people
actually going to be doing?

Speaker 5 (02:11:23):
Like I that's that's the question that is You're going
to be un answered at least today.

Speaker 8 (02:11:31):
I would say the last week of action in March
was very important in terms of setting the stage for
what the next few months would look like. The direct
action that happened on Sunday during the music festival was
very important and successful, but also carried large ramifications for
how the rest of the movement would be shaped in

(02:11:51):
terms of the police repression and increase police presence in
the forest. The weeks of action definitely have this ability
to affect how the movement as a whole evolves in
the subsequent months. On Saturday, there were worries that if
things were simply going to continue to be like this
kickoff rally, that wouldn't be a positive direction and would

(02:12:13):
be a bad sign. It's just so I mean, it's
hard not to convey this to the to the last
Week of Action kickoff rally at Gresham, which just felt
so different like that, there was like almost ten times
as many people. There was like a feeling of like motion.
There was a feeling of like we can, we have
we have to go do a thing, and we're gonna
do it no matter what, Like we don't know it's
gonna be on the other side of the tunnel, but

(02:12:34):
we're going there to do it anyway.

Speaker 5 (02:12:36):
We're gonna find it out together.

Speaker 11 (02:12:37):
And there was that was a lot of determination, and
then there was a lot.

Speaker 8 (02:12:40):
Of like there was like a pointed nes like they
knew where they were going, and this does not It
lacks that pointedness. It feels like people aren't quite sure
why they're here or what to do at this point
in time. And if the movement wants to be able
to continue in its goals, it has to find some
way to evolve in the next two months, as construction
is gonna about and.

Speaker 11 (02:13:03):
I guess this was weak, kind.

Speaker 5 (02:13:04):
Of wild the bell weather either well, either a bell
weather or a learning experience. Yeah, it might not be
any sort of death now, but it will have to
be a learning experience probably. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:13:18):
That's that's kind of most of most of my thoughts
so far based on walking through both places.

Speaker 11 (02:13:24):
There's just not much else talkulaks and how much is happening?

Speaker 7 (02:13:26):
Like it?

Speaker 8 (02:13:27):
Soon enough, however, other things did start happening thanks to
the Atlanta Police Department, but throughout that afternoon things remained
mostly low key, and as the day went on, the
gathering at Brownwood Park turned into a community barbecue and
people started to get a much more clear idea of
what the expectations for that day were. As people settled

(02:13:48):
into the park, there seemed to be any big anticipation
for what everyone was going to be doing that first day.
There wasn't supposed to be a vigil for Tortighita in
the park that evening, which was in terrupted by Atlanta
Police officers who swept through the park issuing a quote
unquote friendly reminder that the park closed at eleven pm.

(02:14:08):
All right, it's around eight thirty, about forty police officers
just walked through Brownwood Park telling people that are gathered
here that the park closes at eleven and everyone's basically
anticipating that police are going to try to sweep the
entirety of the park, including the sections where people are
trying to camp out. Around eleven PM, the cops were
walking south through the park as the crowd was walking

(02:14:28):
and chanting along the way as well. Cops left under
the heels of like maybe seventy five to two hundred
people who were chanting along the south side of Brownwood.
They've been staging around Brownwood Park and Portland Avenue for
the past hour or so. They had like twenty thirty cars,

(02:14:49):
it's around forty fifty officers. People decided they did not
wish to stand their ground and fight off a possible
police raid at Brownwood Park, so they spent the next
few hours packing up all the supplies and equipment that
they just spent all day setting up, and then evacuated
from the area. Okay, it is eleven ten PM. It

(02:15:10):
seems like the cops essentially just did what I'm referring
to as advanced bluffing. So they walk through it on
eight thirty warning people hey, park closes at eleven, which
very much, very much indicating that, hey, we're.

Speaker 11 (02:15:21):
Going to sweep through and fuck with your shit if
you're still here.

Speaker 8 (02:15:23):
So the next few hours people spent time you know,
packing up, breaking down the tents, of leaving, heading to
other locations. And then at eleven, we kind of just
expected police to do a standard sweep through, you know,
destroy anything they find. If they find people, tell them
to leave or else get arrested. Standard stuff. At this point,
there's about seven or eight police cruisers staged around the

(02:15:44):
south side of the park, but they're not actually sweeping
through because it's pretty clear that there's like no one
actually in the park at this point. It's just very
clearly like empty and quiet, So I don't even I
don't even think cops are going to sweep through. It's
it's been already like ten to fifteen minutes, so we
expected them to kind of sweep on the hour, but
they just like don't need to because it's very clear

(02:16:04):
that no one's in the park, so they just kind
of like successfully bluffed themselves into getting everyone to leave.
I mean, if there were people still here in visible capacity,
I'm sure police would sweep through, but there's really there's
no one visible in the park from many of like
the perimeters around, so they're not even gonna bother sweeping through.
But yeah, it looks like this is the end of
Brownwood Day one and the very kind of low key

(02:16:29):
kickoff rally. Still, the week definitely is lacking a sense
of direction. There's been a cab swat doing perimeter sweeps
around the Wailani Forest and the round Grressian Park where
there's some future events planned. We will see how that
plays out in these next few days. It certainly seems
like police wanted to make some show of force early

(02:16:50):
on in the week to stifle the week of action.
The threat of array the very first tonight was indeed
disruptive to the logistics for the week, but ultimately peopeople
were able to band together to keep each other safe
and cared for. During this current general sense of directionlessness,
there were a lot of questions on how the movement

(02:17:10):
will change during this turning point. With little in the
way of obvious answers or new paths of resistance, The
following Sunday and Monday of the week continued to be
mostly low key. People used those days to facilitate workshops
and discussions to work through the shift the movement was
going through. At the end of the week, I sat

(02:17:31):
down with Matt in East Atlanta Village to talk about
the week as a whole and compare notes. Here's a
bit of our conversation talking about the discussions that started
happening during those first few days. This was a week
of discussions, like it was, it really was. There was
a lot of meetings, There was a lot of discussions happening,
people figuring out what do we do, Like if we

(02:17:52):
actually want to stop cop City and it's going to
get built in these next few months, like now.

Speaker 11 (02:17:57):
Is the time to figure out what the fuck to
do next.

Speaker 8 (02:18:00):
So people have been having those discussions this week, and
if anything, the Week of Action has been useful in
this in this sense that it's brought a lot of
people together so they can have these generative conversations. And
there was a lot more conversations during this week than
last week. There was one on like what the state
of the movement is now, especially with the referendum taking
up more visibility, how are like radical is going to

(02:18:21):
navigate this space and this movement with a lot of
things in flux, and I think that that was definitely
my first read. Even even on the Cookoff rally, I
felt like there's a lot of people like not sure
what to do, as very directionless. People were asking a
lot of questions, and more questions were being asked all
throughout the week. There's a lot of discussions, a lot
of meetings about like what do we do now, Like
if construction is going to start in the next two months,

(02:18:42):
like what is this movement going to do? Like that
people can chant if you build it, we will burn it.
But chanting it and doing it two different things. And
the movement is it's going to go through a period
of evolution and then in these next few months, and
with all of those questions being asked, I feel like
the answer to those questions is going to be the
actions people do take in these next few months. In

(02:19:04):
the aftermath of the clear cutting, it felt like in
some ways that the window of possibility for this movement
was closing as options seemed to be getting smaller. More
people started pursuing the referendum as a potential means of
stopping Copcity, but those in the more militant anarchist wing
of the movement were left questioning, after two years of

(02:19:25):
employing a diversity of tactics largely led by direct action,
if it's the right and move to switch to an
electoral strategy now when the situation is approaching its most
dire but since it is happening whether they like it
or not, anarchists were wondering, what can people do so
that the referendum doesn't completely dominate the narrative of the
movement or disincentivize other evolutions of the struggle. Now, obviously,

(02:19:49):
a group of people pursuing a referendum does not prohibit
other people from engaging in direct action, but there still
were worries that the referendum could become a sort of
release mechanism for the move both in terms of new
people's involvement being pushed toward this more liberalized electoral strategy
instead of radical action, or if the petition or even

(02:20:09):
potential ballot vote fails, then that being used as an
indicator that most people in the city actually do want copcity.
But through all this, what anarchists can do, and what
they typically do, is to encourage radical autonomy and self determination,
regardless of electoral strategies or outcomes, whether or not a

(02:20:30):
petition gets sixty some thousand signatures does not affect a
burning construction vehicle. Just as these sort of discussions were happening.
It's kind of fitting that on Monday, June twenty sixth,
we saw the first communication in months claiming responsibility for
equipment sabotage. After the last week of Action in March

(02:20:51):
and subsequent police raids on the forest, increased security, the
rapid clear cutting and big push for city council public
comment followed by the start of the referendum. Throughout that
series of events, there really hadn't been much in the
way of nocturnal direct action sabotage happening in Atlanta or
across the country. In solidarity once a core component of

(02:21:12):
this movement was seriously lacking in the months leading up
to this summer, and then suddenly, after the June Week
of Action's mostly uneventful start, a post went up on
the sketchu web site scene stott no blogs dot org
claiming that a group of anonymous individuals snuck into a
subcontractor's machine storage lot and poured hydrochloric acid into the

(02:21:33):
oil tanks of three vehicles. The target was Brent Scarborough, company,
a Georgia based subcontractor who was hired to clear cut
the Wallani forest and was currently engaged in mass land
grading on the site. I drove by the site on
Monday and I saw like over twenty machines like actively

(02:21:56):
working on the land.

Speaker 5 (02:21:57):
Very avatar was.

Speaker 8 (02:22:00):
Yes, y or Fer and Gully the superior film, but no,
like it's like the site's being very actively worked on.
Like I've never seen that many machines doing active work,
like all moving at the same time. Early Monday morning,
the Stop Cop City referendum put out a strong statement
of solidarity with quote all tactics on the road to

(02:22:21):
collective liberation unquote and openly rejected the state's framing of
quote unquote violent and nonviolent resistance. To briefly quote a
few of the last sentences of the statement, quote, the
cop City vote referendum campaign is grounded in the values
of abolitionist organizing and racial and environmental justice. We also
recognize our chosen tactic is a single intervention in a

(02:22:44):
wide rainbow of fighting state repression. We seek to use
the Cop City referendum to leverage local power, educate and
activate our communities, and build networks that can strengthen our
city and future mobilizations. The referendum is one piece of
a vibrant, into multifaceted movement, one that defies respectable categorization

(02:23:04):
as well as its state violence and repression. The Cop
City Vote Referendum Coalition stands in solidarity and full support
of the Stop Cop City Week of Action, the larger
movement and abolitionist organizers and activists across this city.

Speaker 5 (02:23:20):
Unintentionally, these two things coincided. There was the release of
the scenes like the first sabotage in months, and then
the referendum released that same day, the solidarity statement for
all Yes actions taken to stock Coop City. No, just
think that needs the statement itself needs to be highlighted,
and yeah, I think it seems like they're going to

(02:23:42):
stick to that.

Speaker 8 (02:23:42):
The solidarity statement was widely applauded and seen as a
good sign regarding the referendum's place in the larger fight
against Cop City and how it was not intending to
take space away from other aspects of the movement. Tuesday morning,
there was a small protest outside the Cab County Commissioner's
Building to call for the reopening of entrenchment Creek Park.

(02:24:05):
The park was a common gathering spot for the movement
at where many people camped during previous weeks of action.
An executive order from DECAB CEO Michael Thurmond closed the
park late last March as the police geared up to
fortify Bolauni and speed run all of the tree felling.

Speaker 5 (02:24:22):
So I sat in the Board of Commissioners meeting and
it's different than a city council meeting, where like anybody
who signs up to do public comment can do public comment.
They only a lot thirty minutes of public comment, so
about that amounts to ten speakers, and I think about
six of them were actually there for, you know, to
talk about opening the park. And then the rally, I

(02:24:43):
think it was something like thirty thirty people. It was
a student organized rally, and they did a couple speakers
and then that was that was it. Not much from
the cab, Like the cab only came out to make
sure that they were blocking a pathway okay, And it
was kind of hands off. I did get a parking ticket,

(02:25:04):
that was my fault, you did. Yeah, I let my
parking expire for twelve minutes. A legalist mascot at the ACPC. Wow.
Uh and yeah, the minute I do something illegal, I
get a traving ticket.

Speaker 8 (02:25:17):
Previously in June that a CAB CEO proposed a one
point eight million dollar construction plan necessary to reopen the park,
but no clear date on when that would happen. One
County commissioner has been trying to fast track reopening the park,
but their resolution has repeatedly been deferred by the county Board.
The soonest it will be reconsidered is October tenth. Meanwhile,

(02:25:40):
the park will remain indefinitely closed. Throughout the first few
days of the Week of action, there was something kind
of looming over everyone's heads. There was a march planned
from Gresham Park towards Bolani that was to take place
on the evening of Wednesday, June twenty eighth. The police
response to this action was prime to be the most

(02:26:01):
intense out of the week. The path to Entrenchment Creek
Park is a pretty closed in bike path with a
tunnel going under an overpass where police have been staging
to prevent people from entering the forest.

Speaker 6 (02:26:13):
No.

Speaker 8 (02:26:13):
I definitely felt like on Monday and Tuesday everyone was
everyone was still like thinking about what would happen on Wednesday,
what would happen on the march from Gresham Park.

Speaker 11 (02:26:22):
That was that was the big unknown, That was the
big danger.

Speaker 5 (02:26:25):
Like very palpable. Yeah, concern about how that was going
to play out. Yeah, that probably, I mean all the
way back to Saturday. That was probably like playing through
people's minds and causing some of that like uncertainty.

Speaker 8 (02:26:41):
Police were setting up perimeters around the forest in an
increased capacity than the usual detail. Pretty early on in
the day, there was a Dacab County SWAT mobile command
center posted up in a school parking lot next to
the tunnel and bike path leading from Gresham to Wolani.
Kind of as expected, this entire section of South Atlanta
was crawling with police before people even gathered at Gresham Park.

(02:27:06):
The day began with an unfortunately rocky start and the
first arrest of the week outside Cadence Bank in Midtown.
The protest was calling on the bank to cancel their
twenty million dollar construction loan given to the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Speaker 5 (02:27:20):
So there was this action at Cadence Bank that they
specifically didn't want media and so none of us were there. Yeah,
and that was early in the morning. I don't I
think We found out about it after renoon or something,
so after I woke up. Yeah, I think it was
like they said, thirty people, kind of like we saw

(02:27:44):
the other day Friday, Yeah, on Friday. But as they
were walking away, somebody gets well multiple they try to
arrest multiple p.

Speaker 11 (02:27:51):
Please start chasing people.

Speaker 8 (02:27:53):
Someone gets grabbed and arrested, another person gets detained and
then let go.

Speaker 11 (02:27:59):
Seemed like a pretty chaotic scene.

Speaker 8 (02:28:01):
That's not a great way to start off the day
where you have your most stressful action plan for later.
You wake up, you get chased by cops, and you're
expecting to go do a march in a few hours. Yeah,
in the most heavily police area of Atlanta right now.
The march was to take place on the same bike
path from Gresham Park to Intrenchment Creek Park that people
took during the kickoff rally at the last week of Action,

(02:28:24):
but much has changed on the ground since then. As
people started to gather at Gresham Park on Wednesday evening,
the numbers were quite small. As I progressed, around one
hundred and fifty people eventually amassed, but it was still
a small fraction of the number of people at the
previous Gresham Park March and with a much greater police presence.

(02:28:45):
The exact plan for the night was heavily dependent on
a lot of factors that it was impossible to explicitly
know beforehand, like how many people would show up and
what they would feel comfortable doing based on the police response.

Speaker 11 (02:28:59):
Right, this is.

Speaker 8 (02:29:00):
Wednesday, June twenty eighth. Me and Matt from the Community
Press Collective are gathered at Gresham Park. Overhead you can
hear the Dacab helicopter circle at favorite sound, our favorite sound. Yes,
there's about I don't know, maybe seventy five or more,
close to one hundred, close to one hundred people gathered

(02:29:22):
here in Gresham Park and people have plans to march
towards Wolani or at least to the tunnel. And then
what happens after that's kind of a big mystery. Definitely
very different than the last time we were gathered in
Gresham Park with a crowd of people.

Speaker 5 (02:29:38):
We're missing the music, we're missing the duwali like paint clouds,
we're missing the kids. We're missing maybe the vibes just
in general.

Speaker 8 (02:29:47):
Another eight hundred people or so, but I mean people
are setting out science and some banners. Police have a
decent presence around the around like the tunnel, or like
the overpass over the tunnel, and around Wilani.

Speaker 5 (02:30:02):
Right now, all around the Wi Lanni triangle there's there
APD and the cab County police just hanging out more
than usual. And at the fire station there was more
cops than I've seen since March fifth, since the last
week of action.

Speaker 8 (02:30:21):
Yeah, earlier this morning I saw a d KEB County
swat nobile command unit at the school next to the
tunnel overpass, but I do not know where that is now.
It was It was not parked there last time we
drove by about half an hour ago. So yeah, just
that is. That is the update as of as of
six thirty. So I'm guessing this crowd will start moving

(02:30:43):
the next thirty minutes to forty minutes.

Speaker 5 (02:30:45):
Probably have hour. Yeah all right.

Speaker 8 (02:30:48):
Right, as the crowd was about to set off, someone
made an announcement that due to small numbers and large
police presence, there was to be a change of plans.
Instead of going all the way to Entrenchment Creek Park
or even the tunnel, they were going to march one
third of the way and stop on the bike path.
All right, it's around seven to twenty pm, About one

(02:31:09):
hundred and fifty people are leaving Gresham Park and they
announce they're going to be going to hold a small
vigil near one of one of the felled trees on
the bike path. For a little while, the march was
getting along fine, there was music and chanting, when suddenly
police made an early appearance. Okay, so it's what seven

(02:31:31):
seven fifty seven forty one on Wednesday, June twenty eighth.
We are walking on the bike path and staged.

Speaker 5 (02:31:40):
Twenty five minutes into the walk and here we come
on our first police presence of the day along our path.
So too, thinking to Cab County. Yeah, two Decab County
SuDS part side by side along the path, but they
are not out of their vehicles.

Speaker 8 (02:31:57):
No oh, I think the crowd spears order.

Speaker 11 (02:32:03):
They might try to give you a sporsal order because
there's too many people.

Speaker 5 (02:32:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:32:07):
I didn't think they would try to fuck with it
this soon. I thought they would wait to the tunnel.
A small number of police were posted up right before
the first bridge on the bike path, roughly about halfway
to the tunnel. If they wanted to the crowd could
have marched past the police as they were not blocking
the path. The two cop cars couldn't even follow behind

(02:32:28):
because there was big metal bulgards preventing vehicles from going
on the Wooden bridge. But the visible police caused the
group to pause.

Speaker 5 (02:32:35):
There was that one speech that we need to touch
on from that night, and that was the speaker said,
in order to win, we have to let go of
the idea of losing while looking good. Yeah, And that
I think is going to inform whatever the direct action
side of things are for the next this next phase
of the movement.

Speaker 8 (02:32:56):
While paused in front of the police cruisers, the crowd
deliberated on what they wanted to do and what they
thought they could accomplish. After a few minutes of discussion,
they decided that they were not prepared to unnecessarily sacrifice themselves.
One of the people from the crowd spoke briefly not
only on this decision, but also how it fits into

(02:33:17):
the difficult situation the movement has found itself in. Right now,
I'm going to quote a little bit from this impromptu
speech quote. We shouldn't come away from this feeling demoralized.
We should feel clarity because we believe we set out
to participate in a movement to obstruct the construction of
a police militarization site, but that is not being allowed

(02:33:38):
to happen. The people we're fighting against believe we are
a domestic insurgency. They are treating us like an insurgency.
The state is using militaristic language like denying anarchists operating space.
And so we're going to great lengths to be safe,
to play it safe, and to go slow, and to
proceed rationally and defend one another. But we're coming under

(02:34:01):
constant attack everything we do. We're under attack unquote. Just
earlier that morning, people were attacked by the state and
arrested as they stood on the sidewalk outside of a bank.
Those who work to bail activists out of jail are attacked.
People doing on the ground jail support are physically attacked
and face police intimidation.

Speaker 2 (02:34:21):
Quote.

Speaker 8 (02:34:22):
We don't want to be engaged in a failing struggle.
Our enemy is treating us like terrorists. That's what they're
calling us, and that's what they believe we are. It's
not just a rhetorical trick. That's how they're treating the movement.
And so we have to figure out how we're gonna win,
because we intend to win, but you can't just only
defend yourself. The safest thing for us to do is

(02:34:45):
to never go to a protest about this movement. Again,
if our top priority is safety, everyone who's not currently
facing charges should move away, should not go to events
or actions. But if we have a higher priority than
safety alone, we're gonna have to figure out what we're
going to do to achieve that, which is going to
require going on the offense when we're able and how

(02:35:06):
we're able. This movement has been very creative, and we're
going to have to continue to be more and more creative,
and we're going to have to continue to deploy all
available means in order to have this kind of offensive, victorious,
and strong movement that we all deserve when we fight,
when we attack the enemy, when we have our offensive actions,

(02:35:27):
we have to follow through with them. We have to
go all the way with them. We have to be
willing to believe in ourselves to believe that we can win.
And so I believe that we are going to win
this movement, and I think you guys believe that we're
going to win this movement. But that's going to require
us to abandon the idea of looking good while losing.
We can't look good losing. So are we going to

(02:35:50):
look good losing or are we going to win?

Speaker 2 (02:35:54):
Unquote?

Speaker 11 (02:35:55):
All right, it is eight o'clock.

Speaker 8 (02:35:56):
The crowd sat in the middle of the trail behind
the first bridge, where two decap County vehicles are parked.
They deliberated for a little bit, and then a few
people spoke, and now the crowd has turned around at
a marching back to Greshiam Park, marching back.

Speaker 5 (02:36:11):
No arrests. We do have two helicopters now hanging out
over us. That's my favorite thing.

Speaker 6 (02:36:16):
In the world.

Speaker 8 (02:36:18):
And a lot of other decav on the ground and
other parts of the bike path in the trails.

Speaker 5 (02:36:23):
Yeah, they would have walked directly into what looked like
a full swat team above the bridge. So they made
the right choice, is what it seems like to me.

Speaker 8 (02:36:35):
Yeah, And they talked about their intentionality of the decision,
and it's how it's important to not just keep losing
while trying to look cool and throw yourself out a
line of police.

Speaker 5 (02:36:48):
Yeah, and that hopefully, I mean, what does that look
like in practice? I guess we'll see you over the
next few months.

Speaker 8 (02:36:55):
Three days, three days to two months, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:36:58):
Three days, It several months. But it does sound like
there's some attempt now at directionality. That wasn't I wasn't
sing yeah until.

Speaker 8 (02:37:10):
This is the exact same March people tried to do
back in March, and they did it, and they're trying
to do it here again in June.

Speaker 11 (02:37:17):
And it doesn't work.

Speaker 5 (02:37:18):
It didn't.

Speaker 11 (02:37:18):
It doesn't work the first time.

Speaker 5 (02:37:20):
It doesn't work.

Speaker 11 (02:37:21):
It worked the first time, it does mean the second time.
So now it's time to change something.

Speaker 5 (02:37:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:37:26):
On the walk back to Gresham Park, we got clear
photos of the amount of riot police waiting for us
at the tunnel, and it was a great many.

Speaker 11 (02:37:34):
Oh yeah, there is a lot.

Speaker 5 (02:37:35):
That's a lot of a lot of a lot of riot.

Speaker 4 (02:37:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:37:39):
And that was when of the vans posted above the tunnel.

Speaker 5 (02:37:41):
Yeah. So that trailer, Yeah, that's what they bring all
their riots shields in.

Speaker 7 (02:37:46):
OK.

Speaker 11 (02:37:48):
Yeah, that that would have sucked.

Speaker 5 (02:37:50):
That would not have been fun.

Speaker 11 (02:37:51):
No, that would have gone very poorly.

Speaker 5 (02:37:53):
Would have been tear gas though, and I do miss
being tear gas.

Speaker 11 (02:37:56):
I can like spray with pepper spray.

Speaker 5 (02:37:58):
If you want. It's not the same as tears I guess.

Speaker 11 (02:38:00):
Pretty right now if you want.

Speaker 8 (02:38:02):
Matt ultimately declined to be pepper sprayed. Tortia Guita's mother,
Belquise Tearran, came to Gresham Park to also join the march.

Speaker 5 (02:38:10):
So what we had was one hundred and fifty people
in Belquist turn and I think that that, yeah, plays
a role in how this goes on.

Speaker 11 (02:38:19):
No having belle Keise.

Speaker 8 (02:38:23):
Very like visibly present, like walking up to everybody there
and greeting them. Just having her presence there affects what
people want to do, and it reminds you of what's
actually like the actual stakes at hand, so you're caring
for everyone around you in a much more like conscious capacity.
Belcise spoke, a few other people spoke, and then they

(02:38:45):
turned around and headed back to Gresham and that was
the decision that was.

Speaker 11 (02:38:48):
Made, and no one was hurt, no one was arrested.

Speaker 8 (02:38:52):
People got back to Gresham Park, some people had ice cream.

Speaker 5 (02:38:57):
Two people in particular had ice cream, and they were
very happy about it. It definitely wasn't maybe it was us.

Speaker 11 (02:39:03):
Other people also had ice cream.

Speaker 5 (02:39:04):
Other people did have ice cream. I don't think they
were quite as excited.

Speaker 8 (02:39:09):
Throughout the week, you could tell that people were really
wanting to be back in the forest and Willani People's Park.
People made do gathering at Brownwood Park, but it wasn't
the same. There was an undeniable distance between where people
were gathered this week of action and the sight of
all the previous battles in the Wilani. The fact that
so much of the forest had already been destroyed loomed

(02:39:31):
heavily over the week, and that's something that people are
still processing and are still comprehending. Another big aspect of
the week, like this is this is the first week
of action where people haven't gone in the gone in
the Wilani, Like.

Speaker 5 (02:39:43):
Yeah, there's no action, which feels weird, well, we should
say in the triangle because you know, but like the site.

Speaker 8 (02:39:52):
Like this is the first time that people haven't been
like in the forest, and that's a new thing to navigate,
that a new feeling to navigate, Like there's there's a
different there's a different.

Speaker 5 (02:40:03):
Sense multiple chances.

Speaker 8 (02:40:05):
There's multiple chance being like not one lead, don't cut
down the trees and like the trees are gone, like
it's the site's been cleared, and I think people are
still catching up to that and like relight, Like it's
still something that people are processing and they're gonna have
to process that if they want to like continue, like
they have to like look at the situation being like
this is we have to accept what has happened. Then

(02:40:26):
we can choose what's to do, because you can't.

Speaker 5 (02:40:28):
Act as can't deny what the reality is.

Speaker 8 (02:40:31):
No, and you can't act as if the trees are
still there, because that's going to change the type of
the types of like actions you do, Like.

Speaker 11 (02:40:37):
You can't tree set in the trees.

Speaker 8 (02:40:40):
It's it's changing the actual actions people are going to
take to try to stop copsitting. Yeah, I think the
Wednesday action almost needed to happen. So many people still
dream about what if we could reoccupy Wallawi. People are
still caught in that headspace because they got so used
to that over the course of almost two years. So
it never there was going to be an attempt where

(02:41:01):
a few hundred people try to re enter Wilani People's Park.
They're almost needed to be an attempt just to see
what would happen. And we saw what would happen, and
now people can use that action as reference when making
future plans and decisions about actions, because you can point
back to this and demonstrate what the police response will

(02:41:23):
be when people march to Wolani. Massive amounts of SWAT
riot police waiting for you, SWAT mobile command centers, heavily
armed police estanged on roads, overpasses, entrances, and all around
the forest specifically waiting for people to try to cross
over or through the tunnel. So now people know what
will happen if they try and do the same thing again.

(02:41:45):
In some ways, it kind of needed to not just
be theoretical speculation, but actually happen so that people can
now truly allow themselves to evolve, so that you don't
have this question in the back of your head, because
now that question has been answered, you would be throwing
yourself at a wall of swat and riot gear. And
now everyone can let themselves evolve and start figuring out

(02:42:07):
what new things can be fostered and imagined. We'll hear
more about those evolutions and conclude my coverage of the
week of action.

Speaker 11 (02:42:17):
In the next episode.

Speaker 8 (02:42:19):
See you on the other side, Welcome back to it
could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. This is part two
of my mini series about what's been happening this summer
in Atlanta to stop cop City. Last episode, we left

(02:42:42):
off with the attempted march from Gresham Park to Entrenchman
Creek Park, which some might say was a disappointment, but
it also gave everyone more clarity about the current state
of these types of direct action marches in Atlanta and
the necessity for evolution. The main event on Thursday, June
twenty ninth was a protest outside the Home Depot in

(02:43:03):
the upscale retail district off of Ponce de Leon Avenue.
Home Depot is one of the Atlanta Police Foundation's financial backers.

Speaker 5 (02:43:11):
There had been a rumor that Home Depot was was
gonna be close earlier in the day. I got there
four thirty. It wasn't closed, so I didn't see any signage.
So I went and parked my car and came back
and like, I think I got there for fifty and
people were starting to line up along the road, like, uh,
there's a Starbucks. And they were lining up along Ponce

(02:43:32):
next to the Starbucks, and you know, I'm I'm talking
to them watching this. They're chanting, they're they're pulling out banners,
and we get a call that they are arresting Lorraine Fontana. So,
Lorraine Fontana is a seventy six year old activist in Atlanta,
and she's great like she she pops up everywhere. She's
beloved by everyone. And so we get this call that

(02:43:56):
Lorraine Fontana is being arrested, and uh, I bolts as
far as my little legs will take me in. Then
I have to stop and catch my breath, like right
before I get there. But Lorraine and one other person
were arrested in the parking lot right outside the home depot.

Speaker 13 (02:44:13):
It's a store called.

Speaker 14 (02:44:14):
Me called four Prays here, and they did not want
anybody protests in the store. When they start reading out
the layer, I asked them to boy handed and said
the practices at that time. I'll also usually the look
from a trust past warning telling them their how people
cannot want their faces or inside the store.

Speaker 8 (02:44:32):
After protesters left the store, they stood by a corner
in the parking lot to holding signs, where they were
then approached by APD officers who then arrested two people
without warning.

Speaker 5 (02:44:44):
It does kind of just show APD like basically doing
exactly what they would with anyone, except in this case
it's the seventy six year old woman who's like five
or four eleven or something like that.

Speaker 8 (02:44:58):
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean it was a lot of
people were like surprised that this happened, Like how could.

Speaker 5 (02:45:06):
The police do this?

Speaker 8 (02:45:07):
I think others were like not as surprised, be like, no,
it's the APD. They like it was a good demonstration
for people being like showing that they do not care.

Speaker 11 (02:45:16):
They don't really care if you're a.

Speaker 8 (02:45:17):
Seventy seven year old woman or if you're a nineteen
year old eco terrorist, they're gonna treat you roughly the same.

Speaker 5 (02:45:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:45:25):
After Lorraine's arrest, more and more people began showing up
across the street from home Depot calling for their divestment
from the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Speaker 5 (02:45:35):
It got up to like thirty maybe forty people mostly
just like chanting on the sidewalks sidewalk, but then they
started to like walk back and forth when the crosswalk
was like there, yeah, and they were pushing the limit,
like seeing what they could get. But there was also
my favorite part was the APD officer who was sitting
in his I'm sorry. My favorite part was, fuck, I

(02:46:00):
gotta do this about breaking down in the middle.

Speaker 11 (02:46:04):
I did hear a little bit about this, all right?

Speaker 5 (02:46:07):
Take three, Take three? Uh, there was the APD officer
that was sitting in his Ford Explorer on Ponts and
at one point he calls out on his you know,
loud speaker, I'm not an idiot. I swear I'm not
an idiot. While he's backing up on Ponts with his
lights on, just like what are you doing?

Speaker 11 (02:46:30):
People are asking a lot of questions.

Speaker 2 (02:46:32):
They are already answered, I'm on an idiots shirt.

Speaker 5 (02:46:36):
Oh it was great. So I caught like the briefest
snippet of that audio, thankfully. That's funny.

Speaker 8 (02:46:44):
On Thursday night, after the Home Depot rally, there was
a jail vigil around ten pm for Lorraine at the
Rice Street Fulton County Jail.

Speaker 5 (02:46:53):
So there are two jails. There's Adventas City Detention Center
and then there's Fulton County Jail, which we just Rice
Street because it's off off Rice Street. Okay, so when
you get charged with criminal trespassed, it's like a misdemeanor charge,
and typically you would go to Atlantic City Detention Center,
which still a jail is still terrible, but relatively like better. Okay,

(02:47:15):
Fulton County Jail is you know atrocious it is, you
know Leshawan Thompson. Of course that the guy who was
eaten alive in his in his cell by bugs because
of neglect. That is Rice Street Jail. That's the Fulton
County Jail. That's the Fulton County Jail. So we get
worried that Lorraine is at Fulton County Jail and not ACDC,

(02:47:38):
which is pretty striking. So everybody goes down to do
a jail vigil and noise demo for context.

Speaker 8 (02:47:47):
Last September, Lashawan Thompson, a thirty five year old man,
was found dead after spending three months in an infested
Fulton County Jail psychiatric cell. His body was covered in
a thousand bug bites and were found in his mouth, ears, nose,
and all across his body. Such inhumane incidents are not
in irregularity in Fulton County Jail. Just earlier this month,

(02:48:10):
a thirty five year old named Christopher Smith died in
Fulton County Jail. He had been held in custody since
October sixth, twenty nineteen, without bond on several unspecified felony
and misdemeanor charges. According to the County Sheriff's Office, last month,
a nineteen year old girl died in Fulton County custody
after being arrested on a minor misdemeanor charge. This past

(02:48:32):
year alone, six people have died in the Fulton County
jail system. People in Atlanta have been doing jail vigils
and noise demos for years and it's never really been
a problem. Cops might tell people to move off to
the side if the crowd gets to a certain size,
but they have typically gone on without issue. But this
time Fulton County deputies came out and declared that people

(02:48:54):
are not allowed to protest outside the jail and ordered
everyone to completely leave the parking and go all the
way to the other side of this big hill off
of Rice Street to jail property in order to continue protesting,
which no one was really keen on doing, so this
kind of game of chicken began.

Speaker 5 (02:49:14):
They eventually they pull on a bunch more sheriff's deputies
and threatened arrest. So people start making their way up
the hill linking arms, and they get to the top
of the hill and they're met with another group of
protesters who had tried to come down, but they were
stopped by police at the top of the hill. So
now the crowd size like essentially doubled. Yeah, and the

(02:49:36):
energy just goes through the roof. You know, both sides
are just going back and forth. This This deputy is
like completely overmatched, doesn't really They didn't seem like Fulton
County had a plan. You know, usually APD or the
cat they have some sort of protest planned. Fulton was
flying by the seat of their pants. And so all

(02:49:57):
of our cars were down at the bottom with the hill.
They were back in the Rice Street parking lot. And
this this becomes like an issue because some of the
protesters cars are there, all of the media cars are there,
like down at the bottom of this hill, and they're
not letting anyone go down there. And this woman shows
up to like put I think money on her son's

(02:50:20):
commissary car and they don't let her. Now she's like
they're just shutting down jail rage aloud, Yeah exactly. So
they finally first they're like we're gonna let you go
down one by one, and everyone's like hell no, like
we are not trusting you.

Speaker 2 (02:50:37):
Yeah, sure, sure, sure, buddy, let's go.

Speaker 8 (02:50:40):
Let's isolate, isolated move through this police fortress in an isolated.

Speaker 5 (02:50:48):
Uh So then they're like, okay, you can go as
a group. Yeah, okay, as long as you have your
vehicles down there, you can go as a group. So
they slowly start to make their way down.

Speaker 10 (02:50:55):
They do not see in the next five minutes we
want to.

Speaker 5 (02:50:59):
Start up to do They get all the way to
the bottom hill. They're in the parking lot and just
like on the edge of where the cars are, and
they kind of stop moving and the Shaff's deputy is like, yeah,
I gotta keep moving, and so they start moving again
and then stop again, and then the shriffs deputy says,
all right, get them, and so then the deputy start

(02:51:21):
moving in to make a rest and quickly, you know this,
this march kind of becomes this backward moving thing. Yeah
I can't see that. I'm moving my hands to Showcarrison,
but it becomes this backward moving thing up up the hill.
That's the bottom line.

Speaker 2 (02:51:36):
You in the street and we will be taking in fush,
Get out the street, Get.

Speaker 9 (02:51:42):
Out the street.

Speaker 8 (02:51:44):
The crowd was able to leave before anyone was detained,
but it was a quite tense situation. The sort of
dynamic we saw at the jail vigil and home Depot
protest led directly into the next event on Friday morning,
a previously announced second pro test outside of Cadence Bank
in Midtown calling on Cadence Bank to cancel the Atlanta

(02:52:05):
Police Foundation's twenty million dollar construction loan. All right, people
had a protest on Friday morning at Cadence Bank in
Midtown Atlanta.

Speaker 11 (02:52:14):
There's maybe like.

Speaker 8 (02:52:17):
Around a dozen people here, uh, canting outside of the building.
Also about a dozen APD officers walking walking down from
up the street, preparing to meet the crowd. They're moving
in closer that they're walking in again. People still, I
don't think anyone's even touched touched the class door. Most

(02:52:39):
of the people are just standing here on the sidewalk.

Speaker 5 (02:52:42):
You know that game you play with your cats where
they come at you, but they stop when you're watching them. Yeah,
that's the game we're playing.

Speaker 11 (02:52:49):
Yeah, yeah, yea yeah yeah, we turn away. The cops advanced.

Speaker 8 (02:52:52):
We like this is also like half of like the
lo Ney tunes gags is they're doing a Michelin frog
all right, and they're they're now on the King's Bank property.
They're starting to advance. Police were yelling at people that
they couldn't touch any of the steps leading up to
the bank entrance, and that you weren't allowed to lean

(02:53:13):
against any hand rails because the metal poll was bank property.
So once again we got this little game of back
and forth, except one side has guns and the power
to arrest you.

Speaker 15 (02:53:29):
Propera this coup said in the crowds trying to incite

(02:53:50):
a riot.

Speaker 5 (02:53:51):
It feels very much like what you saw I guess
in Portland. Obviously I wasn't there. There's an object that
becomes this sacred goal.

Speaker 11 (02:53:58):
And then you're you're battling over the thing because the
thing is now been.

Speaker 5 (02:54:03):
Given something like me actual physical like presence, and that
is the thing that you are now fighting for.

Speaker 16 (02:54:08):
It.

Speaker 2 (02:54:09):
It becomes a symbolic in front of a building.

Speaker 5 (02:54:11):
It don't matter, but the police gave it significent.

Speaker 8 (02:54:14):
Because the police turn it into this like symbolic thing,
it now means more than it just just being stepped.

Speaker 5 (02:54:19):
So there was this camera guy who like kept kind
of stepping up and like pushing the envelope.

Speaker 8 (02:54:24):
And eventually more activists put one foot on the steps,
being like okay, if you're gonna come after us for
putting a foot on the bank steps, fine, come at us,
like call call the bluff.

Speaker 11 (02:54:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:54:35):
So there was like people yelling at the CoP's face
for like forty five minutes, maybe maybe longer.

Speaker 11 (02:54:40):
Time always stretches during these sorts of things.

Speaker 5 (02:54:42):
It's hard to it's hard to keep it.

Speaker 8 (02:54:44):
It's hard to keep a sense of like temporal stability,
even just during during weeks of action in general, it's
always hard to keep a sense of temporal stability. That's
the sense of time warps around. Days blend into each other.
A day feels like a week, a week feels like
a day. It's it's very it gets very fuzzy, it gets.

Speaker 5 (02:55:00):
Incredibly trippy, and you're like yeah, and the exhaustion right,
like just no, there's a lot of things.

Speaker 11 (02:55:06):
That feed into it.

Speaker 8 (02:55:07):
Despite about a dozen people putting their foot on the
sacred steps, the police did not decide to arrest anyone
at this protest, and after about an hour of disruption,
the crowd departed. The week of action ended much like
the last one, with the final rally being the youth
march back at Brownwood Park. Lorraine just got out on

(02:55:29):
bail and spoke about the jail conditions to the crowd
of one hundred or so people gathered in the park
on the morning of July first.

Speaker 17 (02:55:37):
And I don't want people to forget that our movement
is connected with lots of other stone, one of which
is prison abolition.

Speaker 7 (02:55:45):
Yeah, the idea that are.

Speaker 17 (02:55:50):
So quote criminal justice system is such that people get
just shoved behind bars. We don't want to see them.

Speaker 18 (02:55:57):
We don't care what happens to them.

Speaker 2 (02:55:59):
And even if they're not.

Speaker 17 (02:56:00):
Hadn't gone to trial yet, and they're in a jail
awaiting hearing or awaiting a trial, they're treated like.

Speaker 7 (02:56:07):
They're already on the people with at they're a criminal. See,
we don't have to care as much about them.

Speaker 8 (02:56:13):
They're kind of the other the bad people in Lorraine
said that she was in a crowded holding cell with
twenty two other women and just a few metal benches,
nothing else. This is where nearly two dozen people had
to sleep, had to eat, use the bathroom, all in
one place for days on end. Women were trying to

(02:56:33):
sit or sleep on either of the hard benches or
the floor. Some were attempting to use menstrul pads in
place of a mattress. If they were lucky enough to
be asleep, they were woken up at two am for
breakfast and then again at four am for head counting.

Speaker 17 (02:56:49):
They were so full they didn't have room for the
people that were arrested, so they were in this holding sale.

Speaker 11 (02:56:57):
Some of them been there three days.

Speaker 17 (02:56:59):
It was eighteen feet by six feet across. The last
six feet were behind a divider.

Speaker 9 (02:57:07):
The had of toylets toys, so with.

Speaker 17 (02:57:09):
Even less room, the prison system is every day doing
these kind of being union treatments to people that get
arrested or not yet guilty of anything.

Speaker 8 (02:57:19):
Student organizers and parents also briefly spoke on why people
are fighting against copp City.

Speaker 2 (02:57:25):
I don't want to live in a city.

Speaker 16 (02:57:27):
I don't want to live in a country in a
world that prioritizes the protection of private property through murder
and state violence over the fundamental building blocks of life. Okay,
I think we need to be focusing on giving people
places to live, giving people food to eat, water to drink,
not on giving the police playgrounds where they can blow.

Speaker 2 (02:57:48):
Up bombs and shoot their guns.

Speaker 16 (02:57:50):
And that's why all of us together here need to
come together, be as one here in beautiful community, with children,
with elders, everything in between, doing this amazing community.

Speaker 5 (02:58:01):
Beldor I love being out here with y'all.

Speaker 2 (02:58:02):
It's so much fun to just like be working the
popcorn machines and all that.

Speaker 16 (02:58:07):
And that's why we're all here together, because we know
that community is the key for us to stop cop city.

Speaker 2 (02:58:13):
Stop cop city.

Speaker 18 (02:58:16):
And so as we fight to stop cop City, we
are fighting for investment in the things that make families
thrive in this city.

Speaker 7 (02:58:24):
We tell them's right, chickens.

Speaker 18 (02:58:25):
We tell the little police foundations, and we demand that
money be reinvested.

Speaker 2 (02:58:29):
And they're housing for the people, shall care for.

Speaker 18 (02:58:33):
The people, education for the people, health care for the people.
But those are the things that make our communities truly safe.
And if they won't give it to us, we're gonna
build those networks of care in our communities ourselves. That
is what makes days like today so beautiful, the fact.

Speaker 2 (02:58:50):
That the people have the capacity to feel and feed
the people.

Speaker 18 (02:58:53):
The people have the capacity to make sure that people say,
hy drating, people have the capacity to give each other
medical care. And as we build out those networks of care,
we make the government irrelevance.

Speaker 2 (02:59:05):
You kind of tellup for the new all day long.

Speaker 18 (02:59:08):
But if we continue to build people's power, well they
have to say don't even matter, So are you ready
to build.

Speaker 7 (02:59:15):
That kind of world?

Speaker 8 (02:59:17):
As people got ready to depart, the energy was noticeably
higher than most other events that week. All right, it
is Saturday morning on July first. This is the last
day of the sixth week of action of the Youth Rally.
Just left Brownwood Park and is now marching through East
Atlanta Village. Shortly before the Youth Rally, news started to

(02:59:40):
circulate that early early that morning, just after midnight, several
Atlanta police motorcycles and cop cars suffered mysterious damages, which
possibly could have contributed to the more bolsterous energy among
some of the radical attendees. People are driving by and

(03:00:02):
honking in support. As about seventy five people, maybe one
hundred are marked as about seventy five or one hundred
people are marching next to Metropolitan Avenue.

Speaker 5 (03:00:19):
Take a fire truck would pull their air horn.

Speaker 2 (03:00:24):
The fire trucks were kind of busy last night.

Speaker 19 (03:00:26):
Actually, I'm not sure the fire trucks were busy doing
what There's well, it seems like a lot of police
motorcycles were found to be set on fire at the
sight of the old Police Trading Academy.

Speaker 5 (03:00:37):
Sounded like some police suck cruisers were wrecked somewhere else
in the city too.

Speaker 11 (03:00:40):
On Memorial Drive Southeast, it sounded like three cop cars
were also smashed up.

Speaker 5 (03:00:44):
Is you think there's something going around?

Speaker 2 (03:00:46):
Is it contagious?

Speaker 11 (03:00:49):
So, Yeah, the fire crews were a little bit busy
last night.

Speaker 5 (03:00:53):
Spontaneous vehicle vandalism.

Speaker 8 (03:00:55):
Yeah, that's certainly one way to end this week of action.
This definitely feels like the most positive part of the
Week of action so far. Yeah, people have been marching
for about twenty minutes now. The march is now turned

(03:01:17):
down Glenwood and is heading back towards Brownwood Park. No
police presence at all so far. There was just complete
I've not seen a single cop car in this in
this section of town. There's also three less cop cars
in Atlanta than there usually is, so that that might
have something to do with it.

Speaker 5 (03:01:38):
It was from this zone too, that the second one
where the cop cars are it was like a mile
and a half away. Yeah, it's very very close, but yeah,
very different than what we saw on last Saturday. Yes,
where I like, even on my way in, I saw
apd here every you know, twenty feet Yeah, and do
not see a single no, a beauty vehicle is notable.

Speaker 8 (03:02:04):
The youth rally that closed the last week of action
in March kind of felt like the end of an era.
This one on July first felt very different, much more
like a beginning of a new era. After a very
scattered week, the movement finally started to feel like it
had multiple directions to grow. This week definitely started on

(03:02:25):
I would say, a muted note, and it's ended with
a bit more directionality for the future and a bit
more positivity.

Speaker 4 (03:02:32):
I think.

Speaker 8 (03:02:33):
I think people were able to think of ways that
the movement can evolve and grow from here and recognize
the necessity for that and now change and yet recognized
the necessity for change, and people are ready to continue
and evolve as the situation on the ground is also changing.

Speaker 5 (03:02:50):
And I mean adaptability was a part of the movement
from the get go. Yes, just I think we got
the movement got very tied to certain modes of operation
that are not available anymore.

Speaker 7 (03:03:02):
Yep.

Speaker 8 (03:03:03):
You know, for the past like a few months, people
have been it felt like people have been playing on
the police's like board like they've been they've been following
that and both both of the action last night and
the sort of talks that are happening throughout the city.

Speaker 11 (03:03:19):
I think that is probably going to change.

Speaker 5 (03:03:22):
All right.

Speaker 8 (03:03:22):
We are about a block away from Brownwood Park on
Portland Avenue and Gresham Avenue.

Speaker 5 (03:03:29):
Where there is pizza and water waiting.

Speaker 8 (03:03:33):
That is, that is I'm excited for water. I don't
think I can have hot pizza right now. I think
I would just faint. But cold water is certainly, certainly enticeing.
Certain Yeah, and there's music back here in Brownwood. Tables
set up giving out literature, giving out food, water, lots
of bubbles. Earlier, earlier, at the earlier, at the rally

(03:03:56):
before the march, there was a water balloon fight which
was very interest.

Speaker 5 (03:04:00):
Yeah, I left it. I don't know why you've stayed around.

Speaker 2 (03:04:02):
The water moved.

Speaker 5 (03:04:04):
I took my laptop and left.

Speaker 11 (03:04:05):
There was there was there was a few very close
moments there.

Speaker 2 (03:04:09):
But yeah, no, there's food.

Speaker 8 (03:04:10):
There's lots of signs, banners, what a lot of Little
Caesar's pizza. There was much more energy here compared to
the kickoff rally, which happened in the very same park
exactly a week beforehand, which felt sort of reversed from
the previous week of action this past March, which is
interesting because like last week of action, you know, the

(03:04:32):
kickoff rally was like the biggest thing, was the biggest
energy point, and the youth rally was kind of the
more like muted clothes And this has kind of been inversed.

Speaker 5 (03:04:40):
Which honestly for when you're looking at like what has
happened over the last few months, maybe reading leading beating
out with a high note is yeah, is the idea.

Speaker 8 (03:04:51):
I like, we're also ending with the bouncy castle, which
is very very important.

Speaker 5 (03:04:54):
Yeah, for the full flip, we have to end with
the bouncy castle.

Speaker 8 (03:04:59):
Yes, We've although we should move the bouncy castle to
eight to ninety Memorial Drive south east.

Speaker 2 (03:05:06):
Oh my god. Stop.

Speaker 8 (03:05:11):
After the youth rally, Matt and I got some coffee
in East Atlanta Village and talked about the broad strokes
of the week and the general state of the movement.
But like I said, I think this week started with
a lot of questions being had, and it's ended with
some of those questions being being answered and people figuring
out that to answer some of some of those other questions,

(03:05:32):
the answer will will will take the form of actions
that happened in these next few months, and I feel
like there's it's it's it's ended with a bit more
directionality than what it began, which is interesting for a
week of action. Yeah, it was needed, though it was
absolutely needed. Like at like the first rally just felt
so weird that for the first kickoff rally that the

(03:05:54):
first day, that the first few days felt just very
very like very scattered. It was unclear how what was
happening was related to stop in Cop City. And in
some ways, this week of Action feels like the reverse
of the last week of Action, where like the last
week of Action, it started with a point of directionality,
like we are going to retake Kolani and they did.

Speaker 11 (03:06:14):
And then they're like, we are.

Speaker 8 (03:06:16):
Going to do an action to physically stop the construction
of Cop City, and they did, Like they was doing
all these things. And I think that week ended with
more questions and what it started with because the police
did the rate of the forest, there was a lot
of there was more uncertainty by the end of the
week because there was so much over policing.

Speaker 5 (03:06:33):
There was a lot of changes throughout throughout that week.

Speaker 8 (03:06:37):
And I think this week started in like an inverse
is people started this week with a directionless of sense,
and they had a lot of questions going into this week,
and I feel like some people have started to kind
of figure out how the movement will evolve.

Speaker 11 (03:06:51):
In these next few months, and it feels like people
have a.

Speaker 8 (03:06:54):
Better idea of where, of like how they're going to
move forward in these next three months six months, and
like the month and a half when construction is slated
to begin in August.

Speaker 5 (03:07:05):
Wait to begin. And you know, this referendum is looking
like it's doing pretty well, so hopefully that that does delay.
But yeah, of course we also ended with bouncy castle.
We can't do it so acknowledging the importance of bouncy
castles to this movement, or at least to Garrison, and
I yes.

Speaker 8 (03:07:25):
I think the other thing that makes it interesting in
terms of this week being an inverse of the last
week is that, you know, on the last week, day two,
there was this very fiery action with vehicles being smashed.
And then on the second to last day, which is
like late last night, either like late Friday night or

(03:07:45):
early Saturday morning, at like one am, two am, there
was three Atlanta police cars smashed by Reynoldstown.

Speaker 4 (03:07:52):
I believe.

Speaker 5 (03:07:53):
Yeah, just right, like a mile and a half away
from from Brownwood Park, yep.

Speaker 8 (03:07:56):
And close to the airport at the old Police Trade Academy,
there was a it looks like a good fleet of
Atlanta police motorcycles.

Speaker 5 (03:08:06):
Yeah, that's where the motorcycle Like, that's where the motors
the quarters.

Speaker 8 (03:08:10):
Ye is one outside and those motorcycles are going to
be no longer functioning. Yes, they are all charged to
a crisp with like incendiary devices found there.

Speaker 5 (03:08:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (03:08:20):
One of the most noticeable differences about this week of
action compared to the previous one was the turnout out
of state support did not show up in similar numbers
as to the last week of action in March. There's
a lot of potential reasons for this. This week may
have simply happened too soon, It coincided with other events
across the country. Its messaging may not have reflected an

(03:08:40):
adequate level of planning. There was probably some demoralization from
the ninety acres of trees cut down and with Entrenchment
Creek Park closed and under police occupation. Launching options in
Atlanta was more of a mystery for those coming from
outside the city. More time away from the death of
Tortigita is probably also a factor. People in Atlanta may

(03:09:03):
have to reconcile that the movement may not have as
much widespread national support and all the ground numbers as
it did last March.

Speaker 5 (03:09:12):
This is the smallest week of action we've had in
over a year in recent memory.

Speaker 11 (03:09:17):
This is the smallest one I've reported on.

Speaker 5 (03:09:19):
Right, Yeah, you know, I think it might have even
been comparable to the first week of Action, like it
was around there, but it also felt more local.

Speaker 11 (03:09:27):
It did feel way more local.

Speaker 5 (03:09:29):
Once you go from like something so big as the
last week of action to something more constrained, that is
that sets a like a vibe shift that I think
you've got to kind of come to terms with. And
it's one of those moments where you're like, Okay, we
are in a different paradigm.

Speaker 8 (03:09:47):
Yeah, fewer numbers is not necessarily a bad thing. A
group of five to ten people can sometimes be much
more effective at doing certain things than a crowd of
two hundred or even a thousand. You just have to
specifically prepare for the numbers that you know that you'll
have for such a long time. I felt like this

(03:10:08):
was this movement was extremely effective in delay and construction
like that was like extremely effective. Deadline year and a half,
deadlines kept getting pushed back every single thing. Like the
occupation was very good at doing what it attempted to do,
and at a certain point that became no longer viable
and things are now changing gears. Yeah, and you have

(03:10:29):
to allow yourself that evolution, Like it has to the
same way people started occupying the forest in October after
the city council stuff in September twenty twenty one.

Speaker 11 (03:10:39):
Like as the things changed, you have to change your
tactics with it.

Speaker 5 (03:10:42):
And as I mean, as revolutionary strategy goes, that's just
that should be a baseline, yea. And adapting to what
the situation is and not what the situation what you
want it to be.

Speaker 8 (03:10:52):
Yeah, And I think more people are talking about that
this week and realizing that, like maybe even another week
of Action does not make sense for this new paradigm
that we're existing in Atlanta. I've talked about the possibility
of changing the week of Action structure before in previous episodes,
and I really only brought that up because that's what
people were conveying to me at the time. And this

(03:11:14):
has continued to be a topic of debate both during
and since June, what do you.

Speaker 5 (03:11:20):
Do with the Week of Action format? And I know
that we kind of talked about this during the last
YEP recap episode where you brought up that that might
have been the last Week of Action, but it wasn't.

Speaker 8 (03:11:32):
It wasn't because as I was making as episodes this
Week of Action what was announced, I've heard more people
say that they don't think the Week of Action format
is applicable.

Speaker 11 (03:11:41):
Aim.

Speaker 8 (03:11:42):
I've heard more people say that than I did last week.
What if Atlanta has kind of outgrown this format? This
format's proved to be very useful in these past few years.
It's been very positive parts, it's been very negative parts.
And what if there's time for what if it's time
for something like completely new, something that the police don't.

Speaker 5 (03:12:00):
Know how to respond to, because something that matches the
new paradigm.

Speaker 8 (03:12:02):
Yeah, because that's That's the other thing is like people
have been doing this for like two years now, Like
not only have people gotten used to a pattern, but
like police have gotten used to a pattern. Like police
have gotten very good at repressing the Week of Action
like they have they have had two years to practice,
they have they know how to do this now? So
why why keep playing on their battlefield? Like why why

(03:12:24):
keep doing what APD.

Speaker 5 (03:12:25):
Is expecting you to do.

Speaker 8 (03:12:27):
That's part of what's you know, interesting about this resurgence
of these nocturnal hit and run sabotages that are unannounced.
That we saw the ones earlier in this week with
the with the Brent scarboroughs machines, when we saw the
APD vehicles get hit last night, So perhaps there there
will be more of that. Perhaps they'll be just new
things that we can't even predict, like there's so many

(03:12:48):
other avenues that things could that things could go. Even
during the use March, Matt and I were wondering if
this new spike in sabotage actions would break the spell
and we'd see a return this type of action happening
more frequently.

Speaker 19 (03:13:03):
You know.

Speaker 5 (03:13:03):
It's the sort of direct action that has really been
missing over the last several months.

Speaker 11 (03:13:09):
Yeah, and no, we've been talking about a lot this
past week.

Speaker 8 (03:13:12):
We're talking about how there's been a lack of these
sorts of like nocturnal hit and run direct actions, and
late last night it seems like there was a resurgence.

Speaker 5 (03:13:22):
So we'll see how that continues, you know, after the
Week of Action, if it continues or if it was
a Week of Action inspired element. But I have a
feeling we'll see some of those continue to crop up.

Speaker 11 (03:13:35):
Absolutely and this did indeed turn out to be the case.
All right.

Speaker 8 (03:13:41):
I will do my best to go over a short
list of the claimed attacks against contractors building cop City
and corporations that fund the Atlanta Police Foundation from after
this week of action. On a July first, over half
a dozen Bank of America buildings in the Bay Area
were vandalized and a dozen or so ATMs were smashed.
In late June to early July, a group of friends

(03:14:04):
visited the home of copp City architect Anthony Kenny in Norcross, Georgia,
while another group paid a visit to ambush Basil Walla,
a member of the boarder trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation.
People painted messages around their homes and tires were slashed.
On the night of July second, Keith Johnson, the Eastern

(03:14:25):
regional president for Brassfield and Gory, the contracting firm who
broadly oversaw the destruction of the forest and who has
decided to physically build cop City, also received a mysterious visit.
Late in the night, an unknown number of people evaded
security guards and spread blood red paint around his pool
and left a message reading cop City will never be built.

(03:14:48):
Drop the contract and you can't hide. According to an
online communicate, rotten fish and dirty motor oil were left
hidden somewhere on the property. Part of the communicat addressed
to Keith reads, quote, we know things haven't been feeling
great in the office. You're losing money. Subcontractors are upset.

(03:15:09):
There are fractures everywhere in the cop City project, and
all of that weight and procarity is on your fragile shoulders.
Each time you think of us or see the reminders
we left you, remember this is your own doing. You
can make all of this stop by dropping the Copcity
contract unquote. On July fourth, in lieu of fireworks, people

(03:15:32):
claimed to have set two Brent Scarborough machines on fire
in broad daylight due to the lack of security during daytime.
Scarborough is the subcontractor who physically leveled the ninety sum
acres of forest in the Wallani The same day, in Michigan,
Chase Bank ATMs were sabotaged with glue and the bank

(03:15:52):
was vandalized with messages of resistance. Chase Bank's head of
Regional Investment Banking serves on the board of the Atlanta
Police found and on July eighth, a Bank of America
in Berkeley was vandalized with stopcop city slogans and three
ATMs were smashed. During the start of this little wave
of actions, the Mayor's office and APD were none too happy,

(03:16:17):
so on July fifth, Mayor Andre Dickens and Atlanta Police
Chief Darren Shecherbaum put on a press conference with the ATS,
Georgia Bureau of Investigation and FBI to discuss the recent
surge of direct actions.

Speaker 10 (03:16:30):
Our public safety facilities and property were the target of
an extremely violent and dangerous attack on Saturday, July first,
and there were several other destructive acts of extreme vandalism
on public and private property property that occurred that we
have reason to believe are related to the construction of

(03:16:52):
the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in Decab County. The
current Atlanta Police Training Center at W one eighty south
Side Industrial Parkway was set ablaze in the early morning
hours of Saturday, July first. The targeted attack utilized extremely
dangerous homemade incendiary devices to set a fire to the

(03:17:17):
building and completely destroyed eight police motorcycle motorcycles. As shocking
as this is, this was not an isolated incident of violence.
This group actually took credit for these incidents and they
stated it as I quote, we are vengeful wing nuts

(03:17:37):
with nothing left to lose.

Speaker 20 (03:17:40):
Prior to that, about one hour prior to the event
that one of the South Side industrial we had another
precinct that was targeted in the city. This is our
Path Force precinct Memorial Drive and the eight hundred block
of Memorial. These officers control the belt line which many
of you all visit frequently. At that location, we had
multiple windows broken on police vehicles. We believe the intent
was to set those vehicles on fires. Well, there's a

(03:18:00):
burgraff and fire off of the red fuse on the
ground that has been used by this group in the
past to set police vehicles on fire that was dropped
when a citizen observed the criminal actions progress and actually
interrupted the crimes that were occurring there. So we believe
that the fire attack that was planned on Memorial Drive
was thwarted by an observant citizen. A short time later,

(03:18:22):
about an hour, we had the fire at our facility
on South Side Industrial. Our training center has housed there
most recently, and then our special operations precinct is there.
The intent was for all forty to be destroyed, and
had all those forty vehicles caught on fire, that police
facility would have been gravely damaged, if not destroyed in
the fire. And we are thankful for a police officer

(03:18:43):
that saw this unfolding and likely interrupted that plan for
being able.

Speaker 7 (03:18:47):
To play out in its fullness.

Speaker 20 (03:18:48):
There's an indication that this was likely committed by the
exact same individuals.

Speaker 2 (03:18:52):
We will let and see where the fact takets.

Speaker 8 (03:18:54):
According to Chief Sheerbaum and Mayor Dickens, the actions against
Atlanta Police on July first, over the course of just
a few hours, equalled over three hundred thousand dollars in Damages's.

Speaker 20 (03:19:06):
Way around thirty five thousand. And they want you outfit
us a little bit more. So do that times eight?
That's going to put you in the ballpark.

Speaker 10 (03:19:13):
Yeah, and that's not even including the rest of the
smoke and damage and other things and the broken windows
on the police car, etc.

Speaker 20 (03:19:22):
So the group that struck this weekend is a dedicated
group of professional anarchists, and I know that may seem
a contradiction in terms. So this is a group of
individuals that don't pray, play by any rules, and we'll
go to any links they need to to carry out
and this is their words. We will wage a campaign
of violence and destruction, and so what we saw this
weekend was part of that campaign.

Speaker 8 (03:19:41):
It's always funny when police make anarchists sound very cool
and scary. But Chief Shecherbam also pretty clearly explained the
reasoned methodology behind the pressure campaigns targeting contractors and APF
financial sponsors.

Speaker 20 (03:19:56):
We know from the postings of this group their intent
to stop the Public Safety Training Center has left the
democratic process of the city Council and is now moving
to intimidate and force out contractors that are committed to
building the public Safety Training Center. This weekend, during the
week of action, three different locations private residences were targeted.

(03:20:20):
Tires were flattened on a contractors home, a home of
an executive for Brassalgory was significantly vanalyzed in another jurisdiction,
and then we had another location where graffiti was used
to intimidate. And then yesterday morning, slightly after seven o'clock
in the morning. A location at four eighteen McDonough Boulevard
belonging into Brent Scarborough's company, which is a key provider

(03:20:41):
of work and this training centers was also targeted and
attacked and equipment was set on fire at that location.
These acts are of a small, determined group. These are
small individuals from across the country that are using violence
and fear and intimidation to stop a public safety training center.
And this group cannot hide behind the dark of night

(03:21:02):
or the home address and feel that they are not
going to be held accountable. I have standing at this
podium with me today representings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
the ATF, and we are also partner with the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation. These agencies are working together to determine
where federal laws violated this weekend and ensure that the
full expertise of American law enforcement is present right here

(03:21:23):
in Atlanta to stop this group, stop this group across
the region, stop their ability to impact the public safety
network of Atlanta, and hold them accountable.

Speaker 8 (03:21:32):
Despite continued threats from law enforcement, the only arrests that
have happened so far in relation to this movement are
from daytime protests, forest raids, and bail fund organizers. We've
yet to see anyone arrested in Atlanta for doing like
a specific one of these nocturnal night sabotage actions that

(03:21:53):
has not happened. Yeah, I mean, the scariest indictments everyone's
expecting are going to come in these next few years,
after you give the FBI two three, four years to investigate,
after you interview more people who've been arrested, see if
anyone stitches, see if anyone turns state's witness. But so far,
it's been safer to do nocturnal sabotage actions than it
has been to attend a public protest. And that is

(03:22:17):
an interesting paradigm as well, is that no one's actually
got arrested for lighting like cop cars and fire in
the middle of the night. No one's been arrested for
sabotaging equipment in the middle of the night. All of
the arrests that are you know, are being tied to
like violent crime, are from like daytime protests, which is
an interesting factor about this movement. Direct action in the

(03:22:39):
most surveiled city in America can be tricky and even
just managing cell phones and Internet search data is a
huge factor, but as much real security there is out
in the world, the amount of security theater is arguably
a stronger aspect in getting people to not go out
and do direct action. The implicit threat of the opticon

(03:23:00):
is often enough to stifle people's potential action, but these
things are beatable. Guides for how to do it exist
either at your local anarchist book fair or online as
long as the computer is running tour browser and a
reputable VPN.

Speaker 11 (03:23:16):
The Internet.

Speaker 8 (03:23:17):
The internet's a fun place. That's there is a lot
of no blogs and sites and the zines that tell
you how to do that. I don't know, I mean
they people always make mistakes, people get caught, sometimes make mistakes.

Speaker 5 (03:23:29):
It's risky, and there are cameras everywhere in the city.
You have to Yeah, some of them, don't worry. But
it's like, do you really want to play Russian Roulette?

Speaker 8 (03:23:38):
No, That's a part of that's a part of when
people like plan these nocturnal actions is like just because
it's nighttime doesn't mean you're not sick getting watched or
you're not Like it's there's a lot of things that
go into that. There's a lot of ways to get
got whether you're like buying supplies and you keep a
receipt and people please find a receipt, They track back,
they find security acount of you'll be purchasing things and

(03:23:59):
then they're like, oh, this bottle is bought at this
place because you have this receipt in your house and
blah blah, bah blah blah. Like there's there's lots of
ways that that stuff happens. So like I'm not going
to give a guide on how to do it right now,
but like this anarchists have been.

Speaker 11 (03:24:13):
Doing this for a long time.

Speaker 8 (03:24:15):
After you do that crime, you've never done that crime,
Like it's it's not something that you do as a person,
Like you cease to become a person, you become like.

Speaker 5 (03:24:23):
You are that action. It issued the action, and then
and then you never talked about it ever again it's
gone or else you end up going to prison yep,
and risking like not just your safety, the safety everyone's
safety just by remembering that you did it.

Speaker 8 (03:24:41):
No, you know, like these become standards and anarchist communities,
like you never brag about something, you never allude to anything,
like it's it's it's not it's it's not a game,
like you're it's not a game, you're it is your
your life and other people's lives on the line. When
when when you're doing stuff like this and it's yeah,
you never do it to like be cool. You never

(03:25:04):
do it to brag about it like that. That's just
not how this works, which is why there's like kind
of a much more like kind of insular culture around
some anarchists, especially anarchists to identify as like illegalists or
like the types of like like green nihilists or green anarchists.
That kind of pioneered the militancy of this movement, both
slightly even slightly before the first city council vote and

(03:25:27):
then definitely after the first city council vote where we
saw a massive explosion no pun intended in the number
of type of sabotages happening in the Wlani Forest. Yeah,
which I think that drew a lot of anarchists do
come to Atlanta because it was like, oh, they're doing a.

Speaker 5 (03:25:43):
Thing that's been the thing since the end of the
Green Scare.

Speaker 3 (03:25:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (03:25:46):
No, this is like the thing that I believe in
that this is like this is my politics. Now there's
a spot where I can do my politics and still
no one's been caught for that. And I think that
that was a big part of why Atlanta got so
big last year, is that people have the ability to
like live free in the forest and then do crazy
shit at night. Like you can you live in this

(03:26:07):
like autonomous zone during the day, you're able, whether you're
you have housing instability, whether you just want like an
escape from like horrible police state living like where in whatever,
wherever the city you're in, you can go live in
the Wilane Forest. You can live in a tent, you
can have friends, you can defend this force during the day,

(03:26:27):
and then you can do crazy, crazy shit at night.
And that drew a lot of people to Atlanta, and
now with the forest not being there, that that also
changes that that changes the type of people who are
come who are who want to come to the city
because that that was a big draw for people and
now that that's no longer an option, you can't really
sleep in the Wilani Forest as easily anymore. Yeah, that
changes the types of people who want to come to

(03:26:47):
Atlanta and who are gonna like do crazy shit because
that's just how and further own safety they're not here.

Speaker 11 (03:26:54):
Yeah, No, absolutely.

Speaker 8 (03:26:55):
As the referendum is hoping to stop cop City by
having Atlantas voute on whether to cancel the land lease.
Others in the Diverse movement have continued their efforts to
pressure contractors and funders to drop out of the cop
City project. This tactic has already demonstrated its ability to succeed,
with Reeve's Young Construction dropping out of the project in

(03:27:17):
April of twenty twenty two, and some material suppliers have
since cut ties with cop City. This is something that
APD Chief Darren Sheerbaum certainly seems worried about.

Speaker 20 (03:27:29):
This effort of fear was not going to succeed, and
the coalition of law enforcement from the GBI to the FBI,
to the ATF, Atlanta Police Department, and a slew of
regional agencies is going to stop that campaign so it
doesn't happen and individuals.

Speaker 2 (03:27:43):
Do not leave the project.

Speaker 8 (03:27:45):
On July second, protesters in Minnesota visited the homes of
Atlas Technical Consultants employees during daylight. People marched around the
neighborhoods with instruments and banners, knocked on doors, talked with neighbors,
and lets a letter of demands to drop the contract
and cut ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The project

(03:28:06):
manager for Atlas Technical Consultants engaged with protesters in the
street and told them that Atlas had indeed already dropped
out of the project due to mounting pressure.

Speaker 13 (03:28:17):
Then we want Atlas is no longer involved.

Speaker 5 (03:28:23):
Why did they decide to get out of it?

Speaker 7 (03:28:26):
We stopped doing that.

Speaker 21 (03:28:28):
Why because you guys are fucking nightmares and you broke
all our fucking windows. So I don't care what you
want to say to my house and knock on my
door and do this ship. My company is not involved
in this, So get the fuck away from me, Okay.

Speaker 13 (03:28:51):
I'm glad.

Speaker 8 (03:28:53):
Get A few days later, Atlas and Long Engineering released
an official statement saying that they would no longer be
working on the cop City project. Anarchists and those on
the left in general seem to have a hard time
calling wins, but I'm not sure if it gets any
more definitive than that audio clip in showing that this

(03:29:15):
type of direct action can absolutely work in getting businesses
to leave the project. In the next episode, we'll talk
more about the referendum, the city's attempts to divide the
movement and the growing pr battle over the fate of
Cop City. See you on the other side, Welcome back

(03:29:43):
to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this
is the last episode in my trilogy covering what's been
happening this summer in Atlanta to stop Cop City. Last
episode we covered the end of the Week of Action,
the resurgence of nighttime sabotage, and at Las long Engineering
dropping out of the Cop City project. A relatively new,

(03:30:05):
big aspect of the movement that I've really only mentioned
peripherally is the Cop City vote referendum. The goal of
the referendum is to let the people of Atlanta vote
on whether to repeal an ordinance authorizing the land lease
of three hundred and eighty one acres of forest into
Cab County that was given to the Atlanta Police Foundation
in twenty twenty one to use the land for the

(03:30:27):
construction of Cop City. In order to get the referendum
on an upcoming ballot, the petition had to gather sixty
thousand signatures in sixty days. Every signature must be from
an Atlanta resident who was registered to vote in twenty
twenty one, and initially those who gathered signatures had to
also be Atlanta residents. Sixty thousand signatures in sixty days

(03:30:49):
was a lofty goal, but volunteers around the city were
being increasingly mobilized during and after the week of action.
For the first few weeks of the referendum, the city
stayed mostly quiet, but then on the July fifth APD
press conference, Mayor Andre Dickens addressed the referendum.

Speaker 9 (03:31:08):
Man, are some of these protesters and posts of the
training center have bigger collecting signatures in the hope of
having a referendum putting the November boundary. What's your reaction
to that?

Speaker 7 (03:31:17):
What's your comment on that?

Speaker 9 (03:31:19):
Will you allow them to do what they're doing right
now and constantly have the referendum?

Speaker 10 (03:31:25):
Absolutely, the referendum process is one that's legally documented. It's
in the city code, and anybody can attempt to get
the petition going and get the necessary signatures. We asked
that they do so with honesty and truth, collect the
signatures from real people, with sharing the truth about what
they are looking to do. And so I don't personally

(03:31:47):
believe they're going to be successful. I believe that based
on what we know about the citizens of Atlanta. They
are a supportive of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
We know that this is going to be unsuccessful if
it's done honestly, and so we're making sure that we
continue to monitor the process.

Speaker 8 (03:32:03):
This statement by the Democrat mayor of Atlanta, I don't
think has been highlighted enough. The mayor is trying to
frame a successful referendum as a fraudulent one. Dickens is
priming propaganda channels and testing the waters for blatant election
fraud style messaging in the future by very clearly insinuating

(03:32:24):
that if you win this, that means you're cheating.

Speaker 5 (03:32:27):
The referendum kept popping up like throughout the Week of
Action without it was ling up space.

Speaker 2 (03:32:33):
It was never it was never, never the focus.

Speaker 11 (03:32:35):
It was always just like on the sideline.

Speaker 5 (03:32:36):
Yeah, but it was everywhere, Like every I think every
event the referendum was in some way, shape or form.
You know, they're like the Home Depot rally and people
walking by they were talking about the referendum and talking
about the Week of Action collecting signatures.

Speaker 8 (03:32:51):
It did not feel like it was taking space away
from any of the other aspects of the movement. I'm
trying to I think some people were definitely worried about that,
Like people worried that the referendum might act as like
a release sylve for both the movement and like the
people who are like out of the movement and still
like looking at cop City being like, how can you
get involved.

Speaker 11 (03:33:09):
In this thing?

Speaker 8 (03:33:09):
And you see this like very like above for electoral
strategy of planning stuff like what if people's efforts just
get funneled into that and they missed that on the
other much more expansive aspects.

Speaker 11 (03:33:19):
Of the movement.

Speaker 8 (03:33:20):
One of the few more referendum focused events during the
Week of Action was a community town hall discussion put
on by the Hip Hop Caucus at the Gathering Spot
on the evening of Friday, June thirtieth. Before the panel discussion,
myself and Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective talked
with two members of the Hip Hop Caucus about the

(03:33:42):
event and their hopes for the referendum. This is Brandy Williams,
an organizer with the Hip Hop Caucus.

Speaker 22 (03:33:49):
So the Hip Hop Coccus is a national nonpart is
a nonprofit organization that uses hip hop culture to connect
people to the civic and political process and essentially we
do that in four areas. We do that with I
think one hundred percent climbate and environmental justice work. We
were founded as a voting and democracy organization out of

(03:34:09):
the Voter Die movement, so we still do that work
under our respect My Vote platform. We also have our
Good Trouble civil and human rights work. It's our multi
isssue platform and we look at it as the justice
department for hip hop, so we do it. We work
on everything from police reform to education and healthcare, and
then our Justice Paid in Full, which is our economic

(03:34:30):
justice platform, So how do we achieve economic justice. We
actually started our activation like on the groundwork in LA
last week during bet weekend, so we did a similar
event in LA. We're doing this one here and we're
planning to be here in Atlanta and through the referendum
and through the election.

Speaker 8 (03:34:50):
We also talked with Theondajaha Lone Wolf and Atlanta resident
and national community organizer. Recently she had been working de
spread awareness across the country about what's been going on
in Atlanta.

Speaker 13 (03:35:01):
Myself, hip Hop Quark is movement for Black Lives until Freedom,
community movement builders. We all came up with this idea
to to create this photo shoot campaign similar to voter
Die or in anything, you know, with these where you
have a nice shirt or a sticker and you're taking
and just being there in solidarity. So we s did

(03:35:23):
it during La BT Awards weekend last weekend. We had
a nice turnout of folks that came. I was in
LA for the Hollywood Climate Summit. I spoke on the
panel with Jane Fonda, so there was a lot of
people from Hollywood that came and said, oh my god,
that's what's happening in in Georgia. We have to be
if we cannot sign for on the referendum, but we

(03:35:44):
w we stand with you all because what we are
also educating people at is that if Cop City is built,
they already having contracts with police nationally to come here.
This would be the largest farm police training facility in
the United States. I went to Universal Studios, Hollywood, Universal Studios.

(03:36:06):
Roller Coaster's huge, just nice. It's four hundred acres. That's
fifty acres less will be Cop City then, you know,
and I'm like, that's an amusement park of nothing but real,
real gunfire, real bombs, real real everything. It's not gonna

(03:36:26):
be fake. It's not amusement park in that way, but
this is their call of duty.

Speaker 5 (03:36:31):
In real life, and it's in the middle of a
residential neighborhood.

Speaker 13 (03:36:34):
They're not here to protect and serve. They're here to
shoot to kill. And so police from all across this
nation will be coming here to Georgia for this militarized
police training and that's a problem for me. And the
turnout in California showed that that's a problem for them too.
So we had a lot of people that came for that,

(03:36:55):
and today we're doing the same thing and we're having
a community town hall discussion because I think there's a
lot of people that don't understand why is cop city
because the mayor. I want to meet the mayor's publicists
because the way that this whole thing has been spinned
on his side that no, it would be great for
the EMT and the firefighters, and and they're pushing EMT

(03:37:18):
firefighters more than the police part, but the police part
is a huge part. I think these type of conversations
need to be talked about, and so that's what this
community town hall is all about as well. For those
that are kind of wavering neutral, maybe don't know, maybe
they know it a lot, you know, because the number
one thing that we've been seeing, like I was on
V one oh three yesterday on the radio station, and

(03:37:40):
I also have been doing a couple of other media
and call ins, and a lot of people don't understand,
like they a lot of people don't understand, like why
is this a bad thing? You know, you can move
it somewhere else, they say. But even if it's moved
somewhere else, I'm still gonna fight against cop city, you know,
just because I have this hits home for me too.

(03:38:02):
Many of my friends and family have been murdered by
the hands of radical power hungry, gun happy, trigger happy
police officers. And I feel that there is and then
also another thing too, there is answers, you know, in
regards to we don't need more police, we need resources.

(03:38:22):
They shut down our hospital, they shut down the shelters.
It's not like they don't know, right, Like we tell them,
we need more jobs, not just any job, good quality jobs.
We need pristine health care, not just affordable healthcare. And
then most importantly, it just are unsheltered friends to see

(03:38:43):
that they put bulldozers. They this administration, this city continues
to ignore, ignore, the people. We have the hugest, the
biggest wealth gap in the nation. They and they call
it Wakanda, the blackest city. But if this is how

(03:39:03):
you treat us, our people, our people need resources. That's
where this sixty seven million dollars should be going. It
should not be going towards a more police. We don't
need more police because when you go to Cobb County,
when you go over to Alpharetta, they don't have a
lot of police. They don't have a lot of Why
would they mean a lot of police because they already

(03:39:25):
got the resources.

Speaker 8 (03:39:27):
On top of the community town hall discussion, there were
a few other things to do at the event that
Euanajaha talked about.

Speaker 13 (03:39:33):
Stop cop City photo campaign, So everyone you come and
take your photo and just showing that you stand in solidarity,
and then most importantly is to get some signatures as.

Speaker 8 (03:39:43):
Well throughout the referendum process. It's been interesting how many people,
even in Atlanta are just now learning about cop City.

Speaker 5 (03:39:52):
When did you first hear about cop City?

Speaker 22 (03:39:55):
Honestly earlier this year, And and like a lot of
the people that I am talking to now, I was
also kind of confused about the issue. I wasn't really
sure why you know, they were so opposed until I

(03:40:18):
started learning a little more about what actually was going
to happen at this training facility. So, the idea of
building a mini city with the helicopter landing pad with
a shooting range or a firing range military grade in
a community. So this is not on the outskirts. This

(03:40:38):
is in a community and in a community of color,
and you're bringing police from around the country in to
learn military tactics, tactics that we use in foreign countries
to protect citizens. We should not be thinking about our citizens,
our residents as people who need to be protect did

(03:41:00):
from them sales, if I'm making sense, you know what
I mean.

Speaker 5 (03:41:04):
So it's sort of like enemy combatants in your own
and you're.

Speaker 22 (03:41:07):
All backyard, but you're training them up in a black community.
So I can only imagine that some of that many
cities going to spill over into the communities. Then you're
bringing police officers from around the country here, so they're
taking that back.

Speaker 8 (03:41:22):
The specific community where the Atlanta Police Foundation is trying
to build cop City has already been traumatized by the
violence of the state.

Speaker 2 (03:41:30):
For hundreds of years.

Speaker 10 (03:41:31):
Now.

Speaker 8 (03:41:32):
This whole area was violently stolen from Muskogee Creek. Then
it became a slave plantation, and then part of it
was sold to the city of Atlanta, and then it
became a prison farm. Since then, the land has been
home to two landfills and three detention facilities. This is
the history of just this neighborhood for the last few

(03:41:53):
hundred years. Now the car sort of violence inflicted on
this land is attempting to be exported as police the
Beast will soon come from around the country and even
the world to train at copp City.

Speaker 22 (03:42:05):
No one wants it in their community, but you're going
to continue to burden this particular community with the same
thing over and over and over again. The people of
that community for generations have experienced all kinds of harm
at the hands of the people that they supposedly are
electing to represent and protect them from these types of things,

(03:42:28):
and they're actually the ones doing it to them. You
were elected by people to represent them, and they've told
you for two years, we don't want this, and you
are ignoring their voice.

Speaker 8 (03:42:38):
On the day of the Hip Hopcoccus panel and their
quality alert was issued due to incoming smoke from wildfires
up north in Atlanta. The AQI reached one hundred and
fifty the ocean.

Speaker 13 (03:42:50):
These fish, these birds, they're screaming at us right now.
What we are doing to Mother Earth right now is
we are from cutting down the trees, fossil fuels, everything,
this is, this is, and especially this being the lungs
of Atlanta today, I'm wearing my mask because on my

(03:43:11):
weather advisory it said it said the air quality is
not good today for sensitive people. And that is just
with the trees, and they keep on cutting down these trees.
I moved here because of the trees. I'm from Arizona,
so I needed trees. That was nothing but desert. But
I moved here because of these trees, because I love

(03:43:34):
the life force that trees give us. Even when we
see a tree, the earth is talking back to us, saying,
stop doing what you're doing. The dolphins, the orcas, the wells,
they're all migrant. They're like, you're the ocean is hot
right now, so they are they're yelling at us. And

(03:43:54):
when not listening. And as a native in my native way,
our elders, our chiefs have said that we plan for
seven generations from now. I am a mother of two
sons and what this administration is doing and what these
corporations are doing. They're not looking at seven generations from now.

(03:44:15):
They're not looking at how this is going to affect
us on the long run. And I love the fact
of everyone that is standing firm and saying stop cop
City because we see the vision. We know what this
Uchi Marka, this mother Earth is going to look like
seven generations from now. And we're fighting to our death
because of the fact that we want to make sure

(03:44:38):
that our children's children's children's children could still live here
and be in a peaceful, safe place and environment to live.

Speaker 8 (03:44:46):
Since being elected as the Progressive candidate in twenty twenty one,
there's been an ever growing animosity towards Mayor Dickens from
all of his unfulfilled promises. When talking with Nashaha, she
expressed that she felt disappointed that herself and this big
block of people helped Andre get elected and now Mayor

(03:45:08):
Dickens is fully committed to the cop City project and
is even having conversations with other black leaders in the
city to bring them on board and prevent them from
opposing Cop City.

Speaker 13 (03:45:19):
The mayor is in his position because of the blood,
sweat and tears and arrest and beat ups that we
got during freedom summer twenty twenty. He used the social
justice the civil rights organizations and activists and voices to
get him in the position that he used them and say,
y'all help me. I'm going to be there for you all,

(03:45:42):
And it's all a slap in the face. So I
don't like hypocrisy. And I see hypocrites all throughout this
and on this administration side, from the governor all the
way down, even when we try to help our unsheltered friends.
In December, when it was so cold out here, I

(03:46:03):
went on social media. I raised five thousand dollars in
two hours. I went and went, Me and my friends
went and got them all tents, tents, sleeping bags, everything.
The mayor called my comrade. Mayor Andre called my comrade
and was all like, why are you saying that they
don't have no heating stations? And I set up a

(03:46:24):
heating station. Not everyone wants to go there, because so
is there. Where is your mental health services? Where's the
transitioning team that you should have on the ground to
help transition them. Don't just open up a temporary heating shelter.
Where's the transition team to go and talk to the
people of saying, hey, let me walk you in to

(03:46:45):
go get heated. There was none of that. You're just
expecting people to just go in there or they knew.

Speaker 7 (03:46:50):
Where it was at.

Speaker 13 (03:46:51):
So we went to the cab. We went to the
cab and we also went down to Atlanta. We gave
them tents. The police went down there. The Atlanta PD
went down there and put holes all in their tents.
They slight, They used a knife and put and slice
their tents open so it wouldn't they couldn't even stay
in it. Yes, yes, while it was still below freezing.

(03:47:15):
This is all under the administration of Mayor Andre. So no,
we can't trust We can't trust them.

Speaker 5 (03:47:22):
Do you feel betrayed by Andre? Yes?

Speaker 13 (03:47:25):
Because I voted for him. I voted for him. I
voted for him because I think I voted for him
like every other person voted for vote for someone. Is
that their charismatic They talk an amazing game, and on
top of it, my friends that were close with him

(03:47:45):
vote for him. My friends in the movement after this,
people that I look up to from as mentorship, they said, man, Andre,
he's gonna he's gonna have fund a lot of the
things that we're doing.

Speaker 8 (03:47:58):
Leonaja Haw spoke about how many Dickens works to build
mutually beneficial relationships between the city and non governmental quote
unquote progressive organizations. So while some NGOs have received money
from the city, now many of these big quote unquote
civil rights orgs are scared of jeopardizing potential funding and

(03:48:19):
are now currently refusing to speak out against cop City.

Speaker 13 (03:48:23):
Yeah. When I talked so, the same people that have
spoken to Andre are the same people. I'm like, why
don't you involved, you know, and they're just like, I
think it's going to be built, and at least I'm
at the table. A lot of them think that way.
They was like, I was there at the beginning fighting,
I had to sit down with the mayor. I believe

(03:48:43):
this is going to be built. So since this is
going to be built, let me figure out at least
I'm at the table in the community and there's community engagement.
At least there's some type of ridging happening. That's their angle.
Anyone that said Black Lives Matter was on the front
line with us in twenty twenty, that that was horrified
by the videos that they saw this we are at

(03:49:05):
prime time. This is the epicenter of police terrorism being built.
This is it, this is this is it.

Speaker 2 (03:49:16):
This is not each individual.

Speaker 13 (03:49:17):
We're trying to prevent more families, because if they build this,
it's gonna be a lot more families that's gonna be
crying and saying, they killed my baby. So we're out
the epicenter of a cop city and you are silent.
You're silent, But you was there for these families. You
was there posting black lives matter. You was there saying

(03:49:41):
stop police terrorism. But they're building a they're building a
terrorist headquarters, and you don't have nothing to say. You're
a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite, period, point blank.

Speaker 8 (03:49:55):
Brandy also talked about the hypocrisy of pushing forward cop
city after the George Floyd uprising in twenty twenty.

Speaker 22 (03:50:03):
You know, three years ago, just in May, all these
companies were sending out these emails saying that black lives matter.
After George Floyd. They were pouring money into the community
to show their support for black lives. But some of
those same communities Home Depot, Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, waffle House.
You guys, are I'm sure sent those emails out, and

(03:50:26):
now you're putting money into something that does not respect
black lives. So I think there's just this huge contradiction
in who these companies say they are how they're showing up.

Speaker 8 (03:50:38):
Part of the growing propaganda battle over cop City is
an attempt to frame this state of the arched militarized
police training facility as a quote unquote public safety training center,
embodying the call for police reform that liberals protested for
in twenty twenty. Not only does this erase the abolitionist
core of the twenty twenty uprising, but it also obfuscates

(03:51:01):
the fact that cop City is indeed a direct response
to twenty twenty, not in terms of police reform, but
in the aftermath of the neoliberal police state being under
genuine threat. Corporate America and police have made this pact
to maintain each other's legitimacy, as one cannot survive without
the other. Cop City is to ensure that what happened

(03:51:24):
in twenty twenty will never happen again. After the clear
cutting of around eighty acres in the Wallani Forest, there's
been more of a focus on the stop Coop City
wing of the movement than defend the forest. Sure, there
are still three hundred acres to defend and eighty acres
to restore, but as construction is getting more imminent, the

(03:51:46):
specific cop city focus has taken center stage in messaging.

Speaker 22 (03:51:50):
When it was initially talked about, it was all about
the environment. They're tearing down the forest and as marginalized
poor people. If I am hearing that, I'm not seeing
it as important. I'm trying to figure ou how much
pay my rent, how muchy my kids, how I'm i
pay my bills, how I'm getting to and from work,

(03:52:12):
and so those things I think made it difficult to
break into the households of people who really need to
be paying attention. And I would dare to say even
the people in the community. I watched some of the
testimony from the city council meeting several weeks ago.

Speaker 7 (03:52:29):
In the.

Speaker 22 (03:52:32):
State representative that spoke first talked about how the church
right next door to the facility didn't even know what
was happening next door to them. So for the City
of Atlanta to say, oh, we've done outreach people in
the community, No, that's not true, right. But part of
that is the way that the narrative has started, and

(03:52:54):
I think they were like, Okay, that ain't got nothing
to do with me. And then also the fact that
the faces that they saw on t it was they're
thinking this is a white lead, white organization, white problem.
It's not our problem. So they haven't engaged. So I
think those are all things that we have to consider
that and let people know this is a diverse problem.
It impacts everybody. It's going to impact people of color

(03:53:16):
and poor and marginalized communities more than anybody else, just
because of the nature of how policing is done in
America and so and the and the problems that we
still have with that. So our program is from Red
Dogs to cop City, the Dirty South history of over
policing Atlanta. So helping them understand how this is just

(03:53:37):
a new iteration of what's been happening. So the Red
Dog Unit was at some call it a gang within
Atlanta PD for many years. It was disbanded in twenty eleven,
but they were terrorizing low poor communities of color, and
so cop City in the way that they're thinking about

(03:53:59):
training these officers would be just a new iteration of that.
So helping them understand that just because we have come
far with the civil rights, with our civil rights, and
I'm not even talking specifically about the sixties movement, but
civil rights for people of color, women, LGBTQI plus communities.

(03:54:22):
Just because we've come far doesn't mean it can't go back.

Speaker 8 (03:54:25):
Atlanta's Red Dogs inspired the Scorpion Unit in Memphis that
killed Tyree Nichols this past January, and the current iteration
of the Red Dogs in Atlanta is the Apex Unit,
who have been very active in suppressing stop Cop City protests.
I'm going to play three brief clips from the panel discussion.

(03:54:46):
The first is from Mariah Parker, a local activist and
former Georgia County commissioner.

Speaker 7 (03:54:51):
This is a war on the uprise in twenty twenty.

Speaker 5 (03:54:55):
Okay, this is.

Speaker 7 (03:54:58):
Of the law of suprise in North America.

Speaker 6 (03:55:02):
The Atlanta Police Foundation, who is the main driver and
living funder and actually the.

Speaker 7 (03:55:09):
Owner of prop City. I keep forgetting the fact that
this is not actually going to go busy.

Speaker 6 (03:55:14):
The old Police Foundation trying to reassert their control over
black communities at a time when people are starting to
understand that communities are made safe for by afordable housing
and healthcare and childcare and education, and where They're supremacy
in the public safety apparatus has been challenged, their dominance

(03:55:36):
has been challenged, and so in response to that uprising,
they seized hold of the narrative that more police training,
more diversity in our officers would be the magic key
to heal all the wounds in our communities and to

(03:55:58):
actually deliver.

Speaker 7 (03:56:01):
A style of policing that serves some people.

Speaker 6 (03:56:05):
And so with that they were able to make arguments
that cop city would be the answer to right.

Speaker 7 (03:56:12):
Allegedly rising crime rates.

Speaker 6 (03:56:16):
He always divides, et cetera, et cetera, when at the
end of the day, they it's like it's a form
of counter insurgency. The people rose up, and so this
is the police rising up in response to reassert their dominance.

Speaker 8 (03:56:30):
Next is kJ Henson, an Atlanta local and organizer with
Black Men Build and Blackmail Initiative Georgia.

Speaker 7 (03:56:38):
Where's clear that the police are not our protectors.

Speaker 5 (03:56:42):
Right, we.

Speaker 7 (03:56:45):
Suffered at the hands of the system on a daily basis.

Speaker 10 (03:56:49):
Right, the system was built upon our backs literally.

Speaker 23 (03:56:54):
So we see that we've been discarded, we've been abused
by the system.

Speaker 7 (03:57:01):
And that's the point. It's not that we're disengaged because
we don't care. We're disengaged because we do care. Right,
every election cycle, it's black voters to the rescue. We're
the folks that are most.

Speaker 23 (03:57:13):
Impacted by the decisions of the same elected officials that
beg us to put them in position.

Speaker 7 (03:57:20):
We suffer because these people come to us and beg
for votes, for canvassers, for money, and they turn around
and they sell us out the first chance they need.

Speaker 2 (03:57:33):
So we're disengaged of a.

Speaker 8 (03:57:36):
Matter of.

Speaker 7 (03:57:38):
I can't get what I need from these people that
say that they're for me. Right, the very means of
the people are at risk.

Speaker 23 (03:57:46):
Cop city threatenings are very right to protest.

Speaker 7 (03:57:49):
Right, cop city threatens the.

Speaker 23 (03:57:51):
Right for us to stand in the street and use
our voice as a means of building collective power as a.

Speaker 7 (03:57:59):
Viata cool for making societal change.

Speaker 2 (03:58:02):
You become a domestic terrorist, you get.

Speaker 7 (03:58:04):
Jailed without bail, without bond, you won't have a court date.
I've been there myself, not for proestic terrorism.

Speaker 11 (03:58:09):
But just beco recording.

Speaker 23 (03:58:12):
So we're seeing the rise of fascism in a very
real way.

Speaker 7 (03:58:19):
Like in the realistic ways.

Speaker 23 (03:58:21):
Comp City, like you said, is ground and zero for
what would become a very popular trend, not just in
America but across the world right.

Speaker 2 (03:58:29):
So it's on us to make sure that we do
everything that's in our.

Speaker 7 (03:58:33):
Power to make sure that this day is stopped. Cop
City is.

Speaker 23 (03:58:38):
Giving police the training and the ability to have urban
warfare and suppression tactics at their will to.

Speaker 7 (03:58:48):
Be used against the people. Urban warfare and suppression not
like thinking, not unlike what we.

Speaker 23 (03:58:54):
See in other countries, in other cities with organized resistance.

Speaker 8 (03:58:59):
Every Lastly, we have Reverend Keana Jones, member of the
Faith Coalition Do Stop Cop City, whom we've heard from
on this show before.

Speaker 7 (03:59:09):
I want every Black Atlanta to think about what you
don't have.

Speaker 24 (03:59:13):
If you don't have affordable housing, it's because they putting
the money.

Speaker 7 (03:59:16):
In the cop CI.

Speaker 6 (03:59:17):
If you can't pay your life bill, it's because that
assistance got given back to the federal government, but they
paying for cop C.

Speaker 25 (03:59:25):
If there are no policing alternatives and no urgent initiatives
getting your communities, if they've given the money to cop sick,
If you fell into that pop hoole on Posilion, it's
because they give it the money to top C. If
you can't walk out of your door and breath clean
airs because they rather get it to top C.

Speaker 7 (03:59:45):
So Andre Diickins does not care about black people. I'm
gonna do a Kanye West right now, but.

Speaker 24 (03:59:52):
I'm saying, I'm Murray Gigons don't care about black people.

Speaker 25 (03:59:55):
And Andre Nickens ain't no different than nobody else and
some of those other so people out there who have.

Speaker 6 (04:00:01):
Those soul called names ain't doing nothing but black people.
So once the game, what is Andre Diga is doing
for you?

Speaker 24 (04:00:08):
If he is willing to say police and make sure
that they got slot takes to roll around they walking
around the ars in your neighborhood, your children walking out
the house to hearing good shots constantly, What the Andre
giggets care about you?

Speaker 7 (04:00:23):
Does his children hear that?

Speaker 13 (04:00:25):
Okay?

Speaker 10 (04:00:26):
God?

Speaker 8 (04:00:30):
It is important to mention the venue that that this
was that this panel took place in, because this is
like a very much like a it feels it feels
like a black excellent type of like space, like that
is the space.

Speaker 9 (04:00:43):
That it is.

Speaker 11 (04:00:43):
It's it is, it is a private club. It holds
like an amount.

Speaker 5 (04:00:48):
Of like respect there cultural significance.

Speaker 8 (04:00:51):
And on this panel at at the gathering spot, the
panelists were we're talking about how why Why is the
mayor who meant many these people helped get elected because
he had promises about, you know, helping out the community,
giving millions of dollars to affordable housing. Why is he
using now like sixty seventy million dollars that could go
to affordable housing, that could go towards supporting black people

(04:01:13):
in Atlanta. This is funneling all of that money into
the police and into not even like the police department,
a private police foundation, like funding the APFS.

Speaker 11 (04:01:25):
Project, not a city project.

Speaker 8 (04:01:26):
I think it was Keana who said that Andre Dickens
does not care about black people. Yeah, and having that
be said at the gathering spot, I think actually is
very important and is worth worth talking about. As the
referendum was progressing and people from across all sides of
the movement, we're working in conjunction to spread awareness of
Copcity and engage in action, the mayor was making attempts

(04:01:48):
to divide the movement.

Speaker 10 (04:01:50):
Criminals are hiding in the middle of peaceful protests and
sometimes they are doing their own separate acts of violence.
Some of them are career arsonists and vandals from across
the nation. Local activists have been alerted to this numerous times.

(04:02:10):
These are the actions of blatantly outrageous, dangerous, and violent criminals.
How are arsonists, vandals, violent actors able to be alongside
peaceful protesters. You have individuals that will burn up construction equipment,
light a fire to police vehicles, and then have a

(04:02:34):
bouncy house party the next day with peaceful protesters at
a park. So they will go to a park by day,
and then by night they're burning up police equipment or
setting fires or trying to destroy construction equipment. So these
individuals are trying to use the guys of peaceful protests

(04:02:55):
that maybe some local Atlantans may actually be engaged in
desired conversation about their views on public safety. But these
individuals have different views than those folks. These individuals are anarchists.
They want to destroy. So these individuals are alongside these arsonists,
these criminals are alongside peaceful protesters, and sometimes the peaceful

(04:03:18):
protesters are aware of it, and sometimes they are not.
We have made it clear to local activists that we
know and individuals that tend to be peaceful, We're letting
them know that we are aware that there are individuals
that are in our city that have committed crimes across
the nation, and that they are on your social media
or in your network saying they're coming to your event

(04:03:40):
to do the same.

Speaker 8 (04:03:41):
Mayor Dickens went further and essentially threatened that if you
are a so called activist and you don't snitch, then
the APD will treat you the same as a violent criminal.

Speaker 10 (04:03:52):
So when we give you that heads up as a
local organizer, you should take that heads up and also
see something, say something as we're asking any other the
citizen to do. When peaceful protesters, when organizers are not
utilizing their best judgment, then bad things can happen with
them being alongside them, and it makes it real tough

(04:04:12):
for APD to know who was the one with the
dirty hands, so to speak. And so that's what the
message that we want to get out to the public
is that these individuals mean harm and you don't want
to be around them or associated with them. When you are,
it makes it difficult to tell who's who.

Speaker 8 (04:04:28):
The city wants the various wings of the fight to
stop cop City to turn on each other, to resent
each other, to so distrust and undermine any collective power.
That's why the referendum's statement of solidarity explicitly rejecting respectability
politics and the framing of violent and nonviolent resistance was

(04:04:49):
so important, and online communicate claiming responsibility for torching police
motorcycles on the last day of the Week of action
addressed this dynamic quote. We took action after non combative
demonstrations at Cadence Bank and Home Depot. The police attacked
those demonstrations with no cause, as they do wherever and

(04:05:10):
however the movement gathers. There can be no separation of
time and space for tactics when police have turned society
into a war zone. Despite this, we dispersed our activity
as much as possible across their area of control. We
encourage those who are pursuing a strategy of referendum to

(04:05:30):
continue supporting all methods to stop cop City. If you
defy the state's unilateral authority in any way, you will
be seen as a valid target. As demonstrated throughout the
history of this movement, including during this last Week of action,
police will treat you like a violent criminal, whether you're

(04:05:51):
holding a sign in a parking lot, bailing activists out
of jail, or smashing a cop car. Only a group
of activists in unincorporated Decab County, near the potential site
of cop City, filed a lawsuit against the City of
Atlanta and the State of Georgia, claiming the requirement that
signature gatherers must themselves be Atlanta residents violated their First

(04:06:15):
Amendment right to free speech and petition the government. Due
to the potential constitutional violation, the lawsuit also requested the
court reset the sixty day clock for gathering signatures while
still counting the signatures that were already gathered.

Speaker 11 (04:06:32):
In mid July, the.

Speaker 8 (04:06:33):
City of Atlanta filed a reply in federal court arguing
that the cop City referendum was wholly invalid since it
seeks to revoke a land lease that has already been signed.
The filing reads, in part, quote, repeal of a year's
old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that
has already been done. But if the referendum could claim

(04:06:56):
to result in a revocation or cancelation of the lease,
they would still be invalid because it would amount to
an impermissible impairment of that contract unquote. The city also
argued that if the court does deem the Atlanta residency
requirement for gathering signatures unconstitutional, then the entire referendum should
be deemed unlawful. A rebuttal by the plaintiffs said that

(04:07:20):
the city did not provide factual or legal evidence for
its claims and misread the cited precedence. According to the plaintiffs,
the land lease contract is ongoing, not an irreversible quote
unquote one time event, and since the city authorized and
issued the petition form, they skipped their chance to argue

(04:07:40):
that the referendum is somehow invalid by already approving the
language of the petition and letting the referendum process begin.
Near the end of July, US District Court Judge Mark
Cohen ruled in favor of the cop city referendum, allowing
non Atlanta residents to collect signature and reset the sixty

(04:08:01):
day clock to collect the roughly sixty thousand signatures needed
to put the land lease on the ballot. In his ruling,
Judge Mark Cohen said, quote requiring signature gatherers to be
residents of the city imposes a severe burden on core
political speech and does little to protect the city's interest
in self governance unquote. Mary hooks. The tactical lead of

(04:08:23):
the referendum coalition reacted to the ruling, saying quote, we
are thrilled by Judge Cohen's ruling and the expansion of
democracy to include our cab neighbors and level the playing
field for our coalition unquote. The city quickly filed for
an appeal, which was subsequently denied on August fourteenth, with
the judge stating quote, the city's real concern may be

(04:08:46):
that now that non residents have the ability to gather
signatures on the petition for the entire time that they
would have been permitted to do so had their initial
request been granted, there is an increased possibility that a
sufficient number of valid signatures could be obtained. As liberals
cheered on the Fulton County District Attorney in Atlanta for
indicting Trump and co conspirators for election tampering under rico charges,

(04:09:11):
the same exact sort of charges that this office has
used against young black rappers and have been wielded against
the Stop Cop City movement, the City of Atlanta's own
election interference by repressing the referendum has been largely ignored.
Fulton County Court set Trump's bond for two hundred thousand
dollars for attempting to overthrow a federal election. The same

(04:09:33):
court set bond at three hundred and fifty five thousand
dollars each for multiple protesters arrested for being merely present
at a protest. After Georgia State Patrol killed force defender
Torteguita in January of this year, during all of the
glowing press for District Attorney Fanny Willis and the City

(04:09:54):
of Atlanta, it was revealed that on August eleventh, the
Atlanta Police Department killed a sixty two year old, unarmed
black man named Johnny Holman while responding to a minor
traffic accident. Both Holman and the unnamed second driver called
nine one one after the accident. Holman told nine one
one operators, quote, somebody ran into my truck unquote. After

(04:10:19):
waiting for over an hour for police to arrive, twenty
three year old officer Kiaran Kimbro responded to the scene.
Kimbro joined APD in March of twenty twenty one and
currently has an open complaint for quote sexual misconduct non
criminal unquote. Johnny Holman, who served as a deacon in
his church, called his kids to listen to how the

(04:10:41):
officer was escalating the situation, and then an unknown witness
helped this APD officer wrestle sixty two year old Johnny
Holman to the ground and put him in handcuffs as
the officer used his taser. To quote the Atlantic Community
Press Collective quote, the children listen for seventeen minutes as

(04:11:01):
they drove to the scene of the accident, hearing their
father call for help after officer kimbro tased him. When
they arrived on scene, they found officers giving chest compressions
to their father.

Speaker 3 (04:11:13):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (04:11:14):
Johnny Holman was then pronounced dead at Grady Hospital. A
week after APD killed Holman, Another person incarcerated at Fulton
County Jail died while being held on five thousand dollars
bond after being denied seing the trebond for shoplifting less
than five hundred dollars of goods. The City of Atlanta's

(04:11:36):
own alleged voter suppression has continued. Initially, the cop city
vote referendum hoped to not have to use the extra
day is granted by the judge and submit the collected
signatures on August twenty first, with the intention of getting
them verified in time. To put the cop city vote
on the upcoming November ballot come Monday, August twenty first,

(04:11:58):
the referendum of put out statement that, despite collecting over
one hundred thousand signatures, that they are delaying submitting the
petition due to concerns that the city was going to
employ voter suppression tactics during the validation process. The statement reads,
in part quote, In recent days, we began to hear
from reporters and sources inside city Hall that the City

(04:12:20):
of Atlanta is planning to argue for a higher than
previously reported legal minimum signature count for ballot access. More
concerning were reports that they also planned to utilize signature
match in their verification process, an archaic and widely abandoned
tool of voter suppression that has been widely condemned across
the political spectrum, including by the Republican controlled Georgia State legislature.

(04:12:45):
Signature matching is a subjective form of a vote validation,
which uses election workers to visually match signatures on a
ballot or in this case of petition, to a previous
signature on their driver's license or voter registration card. Hours
after the referendum's statement, the city of Atlanta officially announced
their intention to use his signature matching for the cop

(04:13:08):
city vote referendum. Back in twenty eighteen, a federal judge
in Georgia ruled that signature matching did not serve any
legitimate interest and disenfranchised black and brown voters disproportionately. For years,
the ACLU has advocated against and won multiple court cases
against discriminatory signature matching processes. Fair Fight Action, a Georgia

(04:13:32):
based voting rights organization founded by Stacy Abrams, responded to
the news Atlanta would be using signature matching with a
statement saying, quote, signature matching is a tool of voter
suppression that litigated extensively in Georgia and removed from the
mail in ballot process because of its harm to voters
resulting in mass disenfranchisement. Using the discredited process of signature

(04:13:55):
matching is unacceptable and risks unfairly rejecting thousands of valid petitions.
Signature of verification is notoriously subjective, disproportionately impacts voters of color,
and as biased against disabled and elderly voters. There is
extensive precedent in Georgia showing the harms of this process,
it must be relegated to the past. Fair Fight calls

(04:14:19):
on the City of Atlanta to rescind their intent to
use this process and to enact steps that fairly evaluate
these petitions unquote. Facing the City of Atlanta's quote open
and ongoing hostility to the cop city vote referendum, the
coalition has decided to use the time extension granted by
federal Judge Mark Cohen to continue collecting signatures to quote

(04:14:43):
leave no doubt as to the will of Atlantic voters unquote.
They now plan to submit petition signatures on September twenty third.
The City Council will then have fifty days to validate
the signatures, which means that, if successful, and assuming the
city doesn't further interf the referendum would get put on
the ballot during the March primary election in twenty twenty four.

(04:15:07):
The vote being pushed into March adds a few complications.
Turnout may skew more Republican as it's unlikely there will
be a Democratic presidential primary, and the vote being seven
months away disrupts the momentum that the campaign has been
gaining over the past couple of months. People who sign
the petition back in June would have to wait almost

(04:15:28):
a whole year to vote on the ballot. The few
extra months does give more time to educate the public
about Cop City during a lead up to the election,
but that goes both ways, which means that after two
years of this movement mostly taking form as a ground
war over territory, now for the time being, much of

(04:15:48):
the fight to stop Cop City will change into a
pr war in the public sphere. This shift from a
physical offense to a metaphysical offense was something that I
already felt coming back during the Week of action in
terms of like cameras and spectacle the other The big
feeling I had on the Saturday kickoff rally was like

(04:16:10):
this just feels like society of the spectacle, Like.

Speaker 5 (04:16:12):
There's such a performance.

Speaker 8 (04:16:14):
It was very performative, but it was like almost like
with all of the cameras looking at everything all the time,
it was like are people trying to make a proximily
of this movement for the cameras? Like is that has
become almost more important?

Speaker 5 (04:16:30):
Or like it felt that way.

Speaker 8 (04:16:32):
This is a conversation that people have, like is it
worth creating moments where we expect the police to lash
out violently, Like, is that effective as a propaganda tactic?

Speaker 5 (04:16:42):
Yeah, and that if comes with losing while looking good,
it does.

Speaker 8 (04:16:49):
Yeah, that is like, that is losing while looking good.
But also I don't think that's nearly as effective as
people think it is. I think after twenty twenty, I
think people are kind of desensitized to a lot of
police violence at protests. The visual the visuals of police
hurting protesters, I don't think is nearly as impactful as
it was even three years ago. So I think people

(04:17:11):
are also realizing that and realizing that, hey, the sacrifice
inherent in setting up actions where you know that you're
probably going to get fucked up by police, that's not
worth it. That one, it treats people as like tools.
It treats people as disposable, which is, you know, that's
not great if you want to build a long lasting movement,

(04:17:32):
And that's not even very effective. As the public relations
battle over the fate of cop City intensifies in the
lead up to the vote, with the City of Atlanta
undoubtedly ready to run a full election propaganda campaign, strategies
of resistance cannot overlook the physical construction of the facility.
Pre construction has been active and ongoing for a few

(04:17:54):
months now, mostly in the form of tree clearing and
land grading. Just a few days ago, the Atlanta Police
Foundation updated their construction timeline, saying that they had just
began installing a stone base for the main roadway, that
irrigation and site lighting is now underway, and full lawn
construction is set to quote begin in the next week

(04:18:16):
or so. Unquote That now may be out of date,
but based on the progress being made on the site,
it's clear that construction is now imminent, and with the
threat of the referendum, the APF will try to get
as much built as quickly as possible to help with
the pro cop city side of election messaging. One of

(04:18:38):
the original goals of the referendum was to try to
place an injunction on further construction until the ballot vote,
but it's unknown if or when that would happen. In
the meantime, activists may take a queue from Earth First
and instead of trying to occupy the site, instead they
might find creative ways to make the construction site hard
to work on with the increased element of spectacle, placing

(04:19:02):
a lot of extra eyes on pre announced public demonstrations,
more secretive actions may start becoming more common. There's other
actions that can happen more covertly, like if you're doing
sabotage where you don't need to invite a camera crew
to film.

Speaker 5 (04:19:16):
You do crimes. Why is move Why is?

Speaker 8 (04:19:21):
But no, it's also like as a rule, like why
That's the other thing is like so many of these
events during during these weeks of action are pre planned.
That not only gives media heads up on like we're
gonna film this, and this is also gonna that's gonna
change the actions that happened while this is happening because
everyone knows they're being launched, it also gives police heads.

Speaker 7 (04:19:39):
Up to.

Speaker 5 (04:19:40):
Shut down the paths your intrudgment career.

Speaker 8 (04:19:43):
So that I think that comes with the Week of
Action format because if people coming in from out of town,
they don't know where to go, if they're not already
tied in with the movement, they don't know what what
what exactly to do. So that's that's another thing that
thinks could change during future actions that may not be.

Speaker 11 (04:19:58):
Part of the Week of Action is more covert.

Speaker 8 (04:20:01):
Let's pre planned, pre announced actions that are maybe a
little bit more mischievous. In their recent statement on voter suppression,
the referendum also announced, quote the coalition will consider using
upcoming opportunities for non violent direct actions to direct the
people's frustration with the city council's obstruction of the democratic
process unquote. Camal Franklin of Community Movement Builders added quote,

(04:20:26):
if the city needs to see a demonstration of the
people's commitment to the issue, we're happy to provide one.

Speaker 2 (04:20:32):
Unquote.

Speaker 8 (04:20:33):
Police intentionally denying anarchists operating space by occupying the Wolani
themselves may shift the more liberal side of the movement
to now focus on rallies and events around the construction site,
which could also inadvertently draw eyeballs away and open up
other territory across the city that might be more vulnerable

(04:20:55):
to attack by small groups to quote the direct action
communicate claiming respont onsibility for torching the police motorcade on
July first. Quote, while signatures are collected, the police are
still killing. We cannot wait. If the referendum fails, actions
like ours and Boulder will be the only means available unquote.

(04:21:17):
With construction imminent, subcontractor tensions increasing and the City of
Atlanta gambling with voter suppression. Right now, the movement really
cannot afford to alienate the green anarchists that pioneered the
early legitimacy of this movement with bold direct action. The
Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to snatch a victory from
the jaws of defeat. What happens in the next few

(04:21:40):
months may push Atlanta to a dangerous tipping point. No
matter the endpoint of this particular struggle, victory or defeat
cannot be imagined as the end. The fight against Coppcity
is one large battle in an ongoing war, a war
of police militarization, racism, environmental justice, and against the incestuous

(04:22:03):
neoliberal police state in its leviathan like formation. Based on
what happens here in Atlanta, similar police project proposals will
be recalibrated. As the South goes, so goes the nation.
Capitalist realism posits that history is over, that it's a
literal thing of the past, But it turns out you're

(04:22:24):
living through it right now, so what will you do
to create it? You can read more about the fights
to stop Coopcity at Atlpresscollective dot com and donate to
the Atlanta Solidarity Fund at atlsolidarity dot org.

Speaker 11 (04:22:40):
See you on the other side.

Speaker 1 (04:22:43):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe. It
Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at

(04:23:03):
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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