It Could Happen Here Weekly 14

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen here,

(00:27):
a podcast about things falling apart, how they came to
be that way. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and today
we're doing part three of our series of Neoliberalism. We're
gonna start today with one of the most famous episodes
in history of neoliberalism. September eleventh three Coup against Salat
or Ende was a democratic socialist of a type that

(00:48):
has broadly ceased to exist today. A committed Marxist to
believe that class of society could be created by means
of electoral democracy, he embarked on a campaign drastically more
radical than any modern social politician has done, more than
dream of mass nationalizations, in an attempt to develop a
technical system that would allow the government to democratically plan

(01:08):
as much of the economy as humanly possible. In part
his hand was forced by Chile's workers who had embarked
on their own unsanctioned campaign of takeovers of minds and factories,
which I Andy disapproved of and now sought to bring
under the national planning scheme. To do this, he brought
in British cybernetics theorists Stanford Beer, who embarked on an

(01:29):
operation called Project Cybersend to collect and coordinate information between
various factories and allow democratic planning at the ground level
in a way that would allow stantaneous reaction to crises
and immediate changes in production levels and conditions inside the
factories themselves to deal with them. All End, for all
of s. Bark's credentials, was fiercely critical of the bureaucratization

(01:50):
of the U. S s R, and, in particular in
the economic sphere, the way it's planning systems were essentially
unable to react to local changes quickly in a context
where plans were only created every five years. Cybersen would
solve these problems by workers participation at the factory level
and constant updated data flows to the planning office. As

(02:10):
the project went on, Beer became progressively more radical. Strike
by right wing truck workers backed by capitalists in the
CIA in nineteen two threatened to grind the nation to
a halt. In response, workers formed enormous cordonas industrialities or
industrial belts to help self organized production and bypass the
striking right wing workers. In coordination with the Andia's government

(02:32):
and a new cybers in control room, they were able
to outmaneuver the strike and maintain production and distribution and
nearly full capacity by tracking where goods were going and
where they needed to go along what roots. Beer rapidly
became convinced that quote the basic answer of cybermntics the
question of how the system should be organized is that
it ought to organize itself, in essence that Cyberson should

(02:56):
be used to eliminate the bureaucracy in the state entirely
and allow workers to directly or nights production themselves. Now,
Cyberson in theory is what the near a libals claim,
at least in public, to want, is an anti bureaucratic
system that uses the centralized control over the means of
production to combat totalitarianism and ensure that the state respects
individual rights and liberties. In fact, as a Vengi Motoro's

(03:19):
put it, Pierre and Hyak knew each other, as Beer
noted in his diary. Hyak even complimented him on his
vision for the cybernetic factory after Beer presented at a
conference in the nineteen in Illinois. So, naturally, when the
system was actually implemented, at least in part in Chile,
the new liberal position was that every single person involved
in the entire economic bearment needed to be killed. Chile

(03:40):
was put under economic blockade by the US and multinational
corporations with full neilerable support, an ironic position given Milton Friedman,
Hyak and Rope case pure and absolute opposition to economic
blockades of South Africa. Rhodesia to its eternal shame. The
a f l c i O s American Institute for
Free Labor Development provided training and fun to the right
wing unions that opposed the leftist government and others across

(04:03):
Latin America. In Chile, working directly with the CIA, the
a f l c i OS organizations to train the
right wing truckers. Here's nineteen seventy two strike we've already
discussed and he's nineteen seventy three strike would pave the
way for Pinochet's coup. In many cases, organized labor, especially
in the US, but also in places like Italy, spent
the seventies battling their own left flank in defensive capital.

(04:26):
The reward for their services was capital turning around and
dutting them like a fish. In the eighties two fought
a series of battles with his left flank. Disarming the
mass workers assemblies that had formed in nineteen seventy two
could have saved him from the coup. The results was
the other nine eleven, on which day in nineteen seventy three,
the military overthrew Allende and a coup, and Allen shot
himself in the presidential palace. The man who would emerge

(04:49):
on the top of the power struggle in the military
at the end of the coup was one Augusto Pinochet. Now.
Pinochet from the beginning had the support of Chile's own
domestic neo liberals, which they were a fairly large number.
Upon taking power, he carried out what would become the
standard neoliberal program, returning nationalized industries to the capitalists, eliminating

(05:09):
price controls, and increasing interest rates, but full scale neoliberalism
didn't come immediately. Inflation, which Pinochet had nominally in large
part taken power to control, continued unabated, and in nineteen
seventy four Milton Friedman arrived in Chile to argue for
neoliberal shock therapy. But it wasn't until Pinochet's desperation from

(05:29):
money drove him to the i m F that he
would fully embrace neoliberalism. Most of the world had refused
to do business with new dictatorial regime, with the exception
of the U S and oddly enough MAOS China, which
poured money into the regime and Pinochet's personal pockets. But
that money was insufficient, and the i m F was
the only remaining body who would actually lend money to

(05:49):
Pinochet without any requirements on improving Chile's at this point
of bismo human rights record, much of the full neoliberal
turn that hit Chile in nineteen seventy five came from
demands from the I m F itself, who demanded terconian
measures to control inflation. Here, Pinochet was aided by the
support of the neoliberals, whose legitimacy and academic standing allowed

(06:11):
them to negotiate and secure favor from the I m F,
which they had already begun to infiltrate. At this point,
the infamous Chicago Boys, economist trains at the University of
Chicago by Milton Friedman, were put in charge of the economy.
University of Chicago trained economist Sergio di Castro, known as
the Pinochet of the Economy, was put in charge of
the Ministry of Economics. The Castro privatized an enormous portion

(06:33):
of the remaining profitable state industries, eliminated tariffs and implemented
free trade policies, deregulated the finance sector, and eliminated any
remaining price controls. Chicago Boys would go on to do
things like privatizing the entire dele and pension system, with
the exception of the military, which is a good education
of any as to what the regime thought the actual
effects of privatization would be. In nineteen Pinochet declared something

(06:58):
called the Seven Modernizations, with quote reforms in labor, education, health,
regional decentralization, agriculture, and justice policy. The goal of these
reforms was to introduce the market into literally every aspect
of society. Now, in Episode one, I very briefly mentioned
the Virginia School as one of the major schools of

(07:19):
deal liberalism. The Virginia School the people behind public choice theory.
Their thing is essentially taking the absolutely absurd set of
beliefs Chicago School holds about people humans are all knowing, rational,
calculating gods, optimizing their behavior to get the most of
every single interaction to maximize the utility, and then applying
it to political science and then literally every other field.

(07:41):
If you've ever heard someone say, there's no rational reason
to vote, because if you're a rational, self interested person,
the cost of voting outweighs that benefit because your vote
only matters if it's deciding one. Therefore, it's against your
interest to vote. That's the Virginia School and their public
choice theory bullshit at work. Pinochet's seven Modernization was an
application of Virginia School doctrine to the entire Chilean state

(08:03):
and as much as the society is humanly possible, with
the goal of transforming it into a market. I'm going
to read a section from the Road to Mount Pelion
describing Virginia School titan James M. Buchanan's work quote ineffectual
consequences in the political market place were blamed solely on
the fallacies of political decision making. Quote. We can summarize

(08:25):
public choice as a theory of government failure end quote.
Buchanan delivered a highly abstract paper titled Limited or Untitled
Democracy to the Montpellion Society in Vinea del Mar in Chile,
which some constructed as a critique of the host country's
mobilization for action history. Buchanan stated that if limited democracy

(08:45):
was a polity predisposed to disable a political market that
would otherwise promote the most efficient allocation of resources, the
only meaningful task of the government would be to deprive
the polity of its ability to do so. Public choice
theory thus sought to limit democracy and deep politicize the
state in order to enable uncontraded market forces to guide
human interaction. Since the Pinochet regime was committed to using

(09:09):
its governmental powers in precisely this manner, Buchanan's paper provided
theoretical support for the regime, even if it did not
openly endorsed the authoritarian rule. Buchanan, of course, would spend
a bunch of time doing lectures in Chile throughout Pinochet's icatorship,
but he was not that regime's most vociferous neoliberal supporter.
That award goes to Frederick Hyak Chris Hiek when asked

(09:30):
about Chile, which had been to nineteen seventy eight and
that blessed with his approval. A dicatorship can restrict itself
in A edicatorship which deliberately is restricting itself can be
more liberal in its politics than a democratic assembly which
has due limits. Chile's nineteen eighty constitution was drafted in
part by one of Yek's friends. She has wrote Rode
Abount Pelion Again. The constitution was not only named after

(09:53):
hys book The Constitution of Liberty, but also incorporated significant
elements of hias thinking. Above all, the constitution placed a
strong emphasis on a neoliberal understanding of freedom. Guzman's version
of freedom is intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise,
and individual rights. Individual freedom, in his interpretation, can only

(10:13):
evolve in a radical market order. The Constitution was dedicated
to guarantee such an order without constraining any economic activities.
In order to protect free market conditions and individual freedoms
against totalitarian attacks or democratic interventions, the constitution stipulated a
necessity of a strong central state authority to guarantee the

(10:33):
established rule of law, and thus above all else is
hampered in the application of discretionary government power. Exempted were
measures to uphold the status quo, inasmuch as Guzman aggressively
supported continuing the state of emergency, which legalized the use
of whatever discretionary powers were deemed necessary to quial opposition.

(10:54):
That Folks is a high achi in constitution used the
state to murder any one once democracy or God to
help them wants to control the production they're forced to
serve every day. Chile is near liberalisms voltron by binding
the power of all four major schools of neoliberalism Chicago
School and Monetary and Economic policy, Australian School Constitutional order order,

(11:15):
liberal reliance on the international bureaucracy and legal institutions like
the i m F in order to promote a market economy,
and Virginia School public choice theory running the state. You
get a neoliberal, right wing military dictatorship. Now most conventional
accounts of neoliberalism will move from Chile to Reagan and
Thatcher and next episode will cover the neoliberal kind of

(11:37):
revolution in the angle sphere, But focusing on purely national
events gives a skewed perception of how neoliberalism actually spreads,
and in order to correct that, we're going to look
at Venezuela. I'm going to be drawing heavily here from
the work of the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando core and
Neil in his book The Magical State, which I highly
recommend as one of the best things that are written

(11:59):
about oil and the Venezuelan state. So readers be warned.
Chapter one is an absolute slog that, on the one hand,
is one of the most interesting explanations of what oiler
rents are have ever encountered, but also features Corneal inventing
a new trielectic and then stubbornly refusing to explain what
it is or literally anything about how it works. So
read The Magical State skip chapter one now the guiding

(12:22):
principles of the new mass capitalists, democratic parties and posted statorship.
Venezuela since the nineties sixties had been developing sovereignty by
economic independence. The keystone of this project was an attempt
to use the power of the state in new oil
rents to develop an automotive industry. The project has sort
of stalled out from its origins in the sixties until

(12:43):
the rise of the G seventy seven Opeque Alliance in
nineteen nineteen seventy four that we discussed last episode. In
nineteen seventy five, Venezuela's Assembly passed a law that granted
the president's special powers to speed up the developments of
the Auto Industry Corp. The Auto Industry in Venezuela Corinial
described it thus quote. The central goal was to have

(13:04):
of the vehicle's value, including the drive train, produced locally.
By nineteen five, major components would be produced by enterprises
having at least fifty one percent of their capital from
local private sources. Existing foreign companies would have to become
mixed or national firms in accord within day Impact regulations
if they wanted to benefit from the common market. Now,

(13:24):
this plan is what's called industrial import substitution. Developing countries
would attempt to develop industries, in this case, auto manufacturers
inside of a country to produce cars for internal consumption
instead of importing them from other countries. The other key
of this plan is Danda Impact, an association of Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru,
and Chile that was collaborating to develop a regional industrial

(13:47):
economy that we use local resources to build a local
industrial economy producing industrial goods made entirely inside of the
countries themselves from their resources. Now, Venezuela joins the pack
in nineteen seventy three, and Peano Shane notably leaves in
the key sticking points in this joint and day impact
venezuela attempts to build an auto industry was that Venezuela

(14:09):
needed technology held by multinational corporations in order to actually
produce the vehicles. Multinational car companies were willing to go
ahead with the project to build cars in Venezuela in
the short term because they were hurting from the oil
shock and thus were willing to help national plans develop
cars as long as they could use the parts to
build their own cars with parts sourced from around the world.
And this is where the neoliberal defensive intellectual property rights

(14:30):
becomes extremely important, because the companies who held the patents
for the drive trains essentially had a technological strangleholder for
car development. Now, Venezuela conducted an extensive bidding process for
companies to make cars in Venezuela, but the car companies
essentially sabotaged by submitting designs that failed specs. The result

(14:50):
was a kind of political war inside Venezuela and particularly
inside the Venezuela and ruling class, between national developments and
international profits. The Venezuelan developmentalists needed a breakthrough. What they needed,
in essence, was new international economic order and its corporate regulations,
debt relief, and technology transfers. Without them, even a third

(15:13):
World country like Venezuela, flush with oil money, was incapable
of developing an industrial economy. The new international Economic Order
never came. All the G seven had to do in
order to stop it was stalled the G seventy seven
out until commodity power faded. The G seventy seven had
to fundamentally change the structure of the economy in order
to allow them to industrialize before the sort of damocles

(15:35):
hanging over all their heads the mounting Third World debt
fell and decapitated them. The G seven strategy to outlast
the G seventy seven was to pull the various factions
in the seventy seven apart, in particular pulling the moderate
governments away from the radical wing of OPEC and the
African Socialists. They attacked OPEC by using Saudi Arabia to
undermine its unity, and attempted to peel the so called

(15:58):
less developed countries away from their alliance with OPEC with
a promise of aid to patch up the damage dealt
by increased oil prices. Neither worked incredibly well, but when
combined with the US essentially shutting the u N down
by refusing to let any business get done, refusing to
vote for or even vetoing routine matters, the stalling worked.

(16:19):
No new international economic order was forthcoming. Instead, the world
would get neoliberalism. Neoliberalism arrived on the world stage in
the form of the Vulcar Shock. In nineteen seventy nine,
Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Vulcar as the Chairman of the
Federal Reserve for the broad mandate to do whatever he
wanted to reduce inflation. Vulcar had become a disciple of monitorism,

(16:41):
a Freedman Night Chicago School belief about the role of
the money supply in the economy considered to be absolutely
crank even by modern neoliberals. His solution, which became known
as the Vulcar Shock, was to increase interest rate. This
essentially blew a crater in the American economy and immediately
sent it into recession. And we'll get to vulcar at
Reagan's efforts to roy American labor in the next episode.

(17:02):
But the damage to the Third World was even worse.
G seventy seven governments had for decades taking on adjustable
rate loans pecked to something called the lybor rate. When
they took the loans out, interest rates were virtually negative,
but when the Vulgar Shock hit, the skyrocketed. Now, as
we talked about last episode, a major part of the

(17:22):
crisis of the seventies was enormous piles of oil money,
mostly from the Gulf States, floating around that nobody could
actually get returns on because of declining manufacturing profit rates.
This money wound up flowing back into the American finance system.
When capital controls were lifted nineteen sevent the banks through
the money at loans in the Third World. Now, some
of that money had been put into industrial development that

(17:42):
had yet to pay off. Some of the money had
simply been put directly into dictator's bank accounts, but the
bank's essentially didn't care if the loans they were making
had little to no chance of being repaid without some
kind of structure reformed. Because in control of the I
m F fell to an arch neo liberal named Jacques
de la Rosier. I really don't know if that's how

(18:03):
to pronounce his name, but he is evil. So neo
liberals further took control of the World Bank in knee
from the I m F and the World Bank, a
sepsia of ne liberals enshrined the key principle of the
new neoliberal order Debtors must always pay back their debts.
Creditors would no longer assume risk for their loans. Instead,
loans would be repaid at gunpoint. This was no mere

(18:24):
rhetorical slogan, As the G seventy seven imploded as a
political body under the weight of hundreds of billions of
dollars of debt now with interest. Thomas Sankara, the socialist
president of Burkina FOSSO, attempted to rally its remains to
collectively negotiate debt relief. Sakara was promptly shot by a
former ally who accused him of threatening Borkino Fossil's relationship

(18:45):
with France. With all resistance slaughtered, entire nations were reduced
to debt servicing machines, as tax dollars were directed from health, education,
and social security programs into the coffers of international banks,
which used the newly neo liberal controlled International Knowledge Very
Fund as their enforcer. The anthropologist David Graeber described the
consequence of one such IMF hosterity program in debt the

(19:06):
first five thousand years. Quote. For almost two years I
had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived,
there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a
particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in
Highlight Madagascar many years before, so that after a couple
of generations, most people had lost their immunity. The problem
was it took money to maintain those mosquito radication programs,

(19:29):
since there had to be periodic tests to make sure
mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again, and spraying campaigns if
it was discovered that they were not a lot of money.
But owing to IMF impost austerity programs, the government had
to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I
met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think
it would be hard to make a case that the

(19:50):
loss of ten thousand human lives is really justified in
order to ensure that City Bank wouldn't have to cut
his losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn't particularly important
to its balance sheet anyways. Following the old old or
liberal dream of a legal framework to ensure neoliberal market economies,
the new generation of neoliberals used the I m F,
World Bank and other bureaucratic institutions to act as dead

(20:11):
enforcers and the the imposed neoliberal policies from above, without anything
so petty as democracy interfering with it. In fact, one
of the first new liberal structural adjustments, one of a
bewildering new array of terms for I m F and
force austerity programs, was implemented by the Jamaican socialist Michael
Manly in nineteen seventy seven, which in a single year

(20:32):
wiped out every gain in education in public health that
Madly had spent his first term building up. Similar faith
would be fall health, education, and justice programs across the world.
The death toll remains unknown. Venezuela would fall victim to
a similar fate without the new International Economic Order. Venezuela's
industrial policy imploded. As post VOLCRA shock, government debt skyrocketed.

(20:57):
In the nineteen eighties, the government began to impose im
st ctraal adjustments. Carlos Andres Perez, the man who led
the industrial pushing in the nineteen seventies, was elected a
second time in nineteen eighty nine, running a campaign that
I've seen euphemistically described as quote against liberalization policy. It
was somewhat more extreme than that, featuring lines such as

(21:18):
calling the I M F quote a bomb that only
kills people. But Perez was negotiating with the I m
F behind the scenes and imposed even harsher I m
F Asteria measures upon winning the election, leading to a
mass uprising in nineteen eighty nine that was suppressed in
a bath of blood, with hundreds killed by the army.
But even more structural adjustments were imposed after Perez was
deposed for corruption Nino, implemented ironically by the founder of

(21:43):
the movement towards Socialism, Teodoro Petkoff, the head of Venezuela's
planning agency in nineteen ninety six. All of Venezuela's economic
crisis from the nineteen eighties until now stem from the
failures of nineteen seventies industrialization without any kind of industrial economy.
Even the socialist that took power in the national level
were reduced to shuffling oil rents around, and with the

(22:07):
market economy still in place, the economy is simply imploded
again when wild prices fell. This is how neoliberalism comes
to most countries, not as policies implemented by anything even
remotely resembling the will of the people, but enforced by
the international economic system itself and the bureaucrats the I
m F, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

(22:27):
It is imposed by enormous states at gunpoints, constituted by
the mass looting of the population in order to pay
corporate debt. Masters new liberals have effectively achieved their goal
and transcendent democratic politics entirely from their purchase in the
international bureaucracy. They can dictate policy to even hostile leaders.
But tomorrow we'll see what happens when they take power domestically.

(22:48):
As we would conclude our Neoliberalism series with a man
rotting in Hell with Paul Walker Ronald Reagan, Yeah, welcome

(23:08):
to it could happen here a show about things falling
apart and is for one final time this week about
why and how things have fallen apart in this specific way. Um,
I'm I'm I'm your host, Christopher, and today with me
I have Garrison. Well, Garrison, Hello, how you doing. I'm

(23:30):
doing fine. We're gonna talk about something that is not fine.
It's not fine at all, is in fact extremely grim
and bad, which is part four of our series of
deal Liberalism, i e. All of the bad things happened
at once, so in in in in all last episode
we talked about how throughout throughout most of the Third
World or you know, what was at the time known

(23:52):
as the Third World, new liberalism is not really imposed
by people voting for it. It's mostly imposed by either
external fours is, via coup or by just the I
M f going okay, just we're running the country now. Um,
but this this, yeah, We're we're gonna shift our focus
a bit this episode with the people who were I

(24:14):
don't know, unfortunate enough, misguided enough decided that they hated
each other enough to actually choose neoliberalism for themselves. Now,
one of the sort of stories we've been tracing here
on sort of a very broad arc is the reaction
by Neil Bulls to kind of kind of compromise. It
has been worked out between labor and capital, particularly the
US after sort of the open class warfare in the

(24:36):
directeen thirties. And you know, there's essentially there's there's a
kind of deal that's set up informally, which is so
the we're working class will stop literally constantly going on
strike and showing up the strikes with like enormous numbers
of guns and shooting at people, and they will you know,
stop trying to overshow the government in exchange, the state

(24:57):
gives you welfare programs. The state will give you a house.
And this is the is particularly after what we'd two
the Americans say it just you know, does this massive
homeownersial campaign. And you know, if if you're if you're
if you're you know, a union worker, particularly if you're
a white man, like this, this you know, working working,
working one of these union jobs will put you into
the middle class. You can take vacations, you can have
a house, um, you can get pensions. Your unions are

(25:18):
legal now, which is the thing that like you know,
hadn't happened before. And this is essentially you know, this
is essentially a kind of insurgency tool um. The goal
of this is to stop people from you know, doing
the kinds of revolts. So we're happening in at the dirties,
but by the nineteen seventies it's becoming very clear that
this sort of the like can't it can't really be

(25:40):
maintained because it's too expensive for sort of the capital
states to maintain and trying to maintain both well. And
you know, the secondary thing here is is, you know, okay,
so this deal specifically goes out to white men right
now throughout the sixties and seventies, you get a bunch
of other people who are not white men attempting to
enter the workplace in time when you get the same bargain,

(26:01):
and you know, they're in a lot of ways significantly
on militants, and this causes en normal sponsetermentional strife. You
get you know, the US is murdering the black panthers.
You get similar stuff in the UK. And the neoliberals
basically are the people who just fully called this to

(26:22):
tant off and are you know, essentially going to return
to full scale class war. And so now now we
are we are finally getting to Reagan and Thatcher and
one day we will do a full episode about how
Ronald Reagan, in a weird, shadowy cabal of Italian intelligence
services rigged the nineteen eighty election by planting fake stories
about Jimmy Carter's brother and the press, which is if

(26:42):
you hear the story, Garrison, No, but it sounds like
regular media manipulation that happens all the time. Now, Yeah, yeah,
it's it's yeah, there, there's, there's there's there's there's a
whole three line there because you know a lot of
those like same kind of intelligence tactics are gonna be
used South I Rock war, and there's there's this whole
sort of thing. Then you know that there's also the

(27:03):
specific Italian angle of uh yeah, the Italian States being
run by this rogue Masonic lodge led by a fascist
and it's it's a time this is all going on there.
But that's you know, I'm just I'm just thinking like
Hunter Biden laptop and all of that. Yeah, yeah stuff.
It's like, oh so that's just the same playbook. Yeah,

(27:23):
it's it's the same thing, except like they were like
actual intelligence people running it instead of just sort of
like whatever. Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlos said, Glenn Greenwall trying
to get people care about this thing that just nobody
gives a single ship about. Yeah, you know, it was,
it was, but the Ages version of it was significantly
more effective. And you know the product of this is

(27:45):
that Reagan sort of Reagan finds like the secret sauce
for right wing politics, which is kind of you know,
in in in some ways, and Nixon had been trying
to develop it hadn't quite gotten right, which is no, yeah, yeah, yeah,
he he figures out that you know, if you want
to do ne liberalism, if you want to destroy the unions,
you want to stroy the welfare state, the way you

(28:06):
do it is basically a combination of racist tax and
welfare recipients and you mobilize new religious right. And this
is extremely effective and it's but I think it's also
interesting in worth noting that, you know, if if you
got all the back to episode one, like this is
this is rope keys like white nationalism, like sure German
white nationalism. Thing is this is explicitly a ropeky sort

(28:27):
of strategy for implenting the liberalism. Was the problem is
he was German and Catholic, which meant that like it
could never work in the US, but you know, you
get Reagan, suddenly you get the American version of it,
that is, you know, white but American, and then also
works off the sort of of off of the sort
of mass Protestantism in the US, and this becomes a

(28:50):
force study is responsible for like almost every bad thing
that exists today in some form or another, a lot
of them. Yeah, I mean not not often, but you know,
I the thing, things go extremely badly. And so Reagan
wins this election and then almost exactly the same time,
Margaret Thatcher wins the wins her election in in the UK,

(29:14):
and that the combination of those two things, and also,
as we talked about last episode, the Vulcar Shock, where
Vulcar raises the interest rates raised, defendation become so Vulcar
is installed weirdly, not by Ronald Reagan but by Jimmy Carter,
but is given this sort of mandate to just do whatever,
literally do whatever you have to to to get inflation

(29:35):
under control. The thing that he decides to do is
just literally nuke the entire world economy. You know, when
we talked about the effects of this had on sort
of the world in the last episode. But in the
US this sets off a recession at last, basically from
like nineteen seventy nine to Night two. At the height
of it, it's like it's I think we finally got
more people unemployed during the pandemic, but I'm like sure

(29:59):
that between World War two, in the pandemic, that was
the single largest number of people who have been unemployed
in the US, which just yeah, it was just apocle,
just apocle devastation. And you know, there's there's there's a
whole thing here where the head of the a f
l c. I oh is literally begging Vulcar like, please
don't do this, like we can get inflation under control after,
you know, after the economy recovers, and vocals just like no.

(30:20):
The consequence of this is that you have you have
an economy in which is no MOUs number people unemployed,
and the unions are weak, and both Reagan and Thatcher
sort of see this. Now the unions in the UK
are in a snifful better position of the American unions.
Reagan is able to sort of smash the American unions

(30:42):
very quickly. There's there's the you know, the famous air
traffic control strike where a bunch of American air traffic
controllers go on strike technically illegally, and Reagan just has
literally every single one of them fired and replaces them
with just like like like people from flight school, like
people who just just like literally anyone he can just
like pull off the street who sort of kind of

(31:03):
knows how to how to land an aircraft, like they
put on people from the military. It's it's just like
this absolutely wild sort of feet of strike breaking. And
then you know, and when when when that falls and
that that strike fails, you know, the air traffic controllers, well, okay,
funnily so, the air traff controllers had actually backed Reagan.
They were like the only union that backed Reagan in
the election, and they immediately just get you know, they

(31:26):
get gutted for it, which, like I have mixed feelings
about because like, on the one hand, like, yeah, that's that's,
that's what you get. But on the other hand, this
is basically what the stories this, this is the consequences
that this is basically what the stories like trade unions
in the US because at this at this point, everyone
realizes that the unions a week and they just start.

(31:47):
You know, there's you get to the point where employers
are deliberately provoking strikes so that they can just fire
all the unionized employees. And it's extremely effective. In in Britain,
the fight is a lot more intense um in in
in Ninity four, Thatcher cuts cold, Like basically Thatchery wants
to provoke a fight with with the coal unions, and

(32:08):
so she basically wants to shut down a whole bunch
of coal production and fire like twenty miners, and the
miners go on strike, and they go on strike for
over a year. But Thatcher had basically stockpiled enough cold
to stay off the worst effects of the strike. And
then she makes these incredibly elaborate network of deals with
like She's like this this whole scab driver like union,

(32:29):
like basical basically this whole network of scab drivers, like
make sure you can move the coal around while the
strike's going on. There there's all of this stuff, and
you know, and and she eventually is able to trust
the coal strike and this also just just completely annihilates
like the British trade union movement, I mean union participation,
I think dreaming Thatcher's term alone falls by and it's

(32:52):
gotten way worse since then. So so with with those
two incidents, the air traffic control and the coal did
did those just and of make people be disillusioned? Or
did that just like pave the way for similar tactics
to be acceptable for every other union that tried to
do the same thing both And then the everthing was
fear because you know, so with the air traffic controllers, right,

(33:15):
the air traffic controllers are you know, these are the
most highly skilled like people people in there there. These
are a bunch of people who are incredibly highly skilled,
and they're in there, in there in a logistic industry, right,
so you know, in theory, these are the people who
have like the maximum amount of impact if they would
go on strike. And when Reagan shows that you can
literally just fire twenty four thousand people of like the

(33:35):
most highly skilled sort of workers in the in the US,
you can fire them and just break the strike and
nothing will happen, and you know the result is total
defeat and none of these people ever work. Again. That
basically spreads this massive wave of fear through the union
movements because you know, if they can fire those guys,
that can fire anyone and then you know, the the
employers should start doing it. And the other thing that's

(33:57):
been happening here is that for really since the end
of the forties, the unions have kind of So we'll
we'll talk about this more in in in an interview
that's gonna come out probably next week about the sort
of the history American union movements, but American unions basically
so American, like the union movement was built by radical

(34:20):
organizers and in the forties and sort of moving on
from there, all these people get expelled from the labor
movement and labor fights this basically incredibly intense battle against
its own left flank, and you have you know, like,
for example, in in there's this thing called the Dodge

(34:40):
Revolutionary Union Movement, right, which is a bunch of mostly
black workers in Detroit, who are you know, there there
there there there forming unions. They're going on strike, but
they're also fighting against the the u a W because
the U a W is cooperating too closer but the
bosses etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And there's there's there's these you know,
there's there's there's basically this battle between like not even
just basically between the unions ranked and file and the

(35:03):
radicals and the sort of business union management, and in
fighting that battle, the unions had basically like massively weakened
themselves and then you know, and bye bye bye. By
the time you hit the eighties, especially in the US,
the unions are just sort of a shell out their
form ourselves, and and Reagan just sort of like smashes
them aside. And Thatcher the British unions are much stronger,

(35:25):
but you know, I mean that Thatcher is preparing to
like like there she she has plans to like the
army is going to come in and suppress the strike.
There's these and especially there's there's just, i mean just
an absolutely incredible amount of police violence. Um that's you know,
I mean, this is this is something that had happened
before dream strikes, but the the the the level of

(35:45):
intensity of it is just like massively increased. And there's
also another thing that's happening basically at the same time
with this, which is squeezing the unions from the other side,
which is there's this, I guess you could call it
like an internal class war inside the ruling class between

(36:06):
well specifically inside inside of the sort of corporate management
between the sort of traditional like manager CEO class and
the sort of like I guess you could call them,
I don't know, the sort of Wall Street finance bank
types and so so yeah. So one of the other
things that that happens at the end of you know,
basically after the war is the sort of class compromise

(36:29):
was talking about like this, this happens inside of the
company too, and people start to see the corporation as
like a social institution and it has you know, it's like, well, okay,
so there's this alliance between middle management and the workers,
and you know, it's like, okay, so we we both
worked with each other, and you know, the compromises that
you guys got to have unions, but the unions won't
sort of disrupt production. Will all work together and we'll

(36:49):
just make like I don't know, we'll we'll make really
really good ballpoint pens together. And so yeah, you have
this alliance between sort of middle managements and these unions
and and this this is embedded into the structure of
the corporation because you know, you not you not only
have the unions, but you have corporations paying pensions. One
of the things that that Reagan does is that Reagan starts,

(37:12):
you know, Reagan does this massive series of financial deregulations.
And the other part of this agreement basically had been
that like the high level of finance class has sort
of stayed out of the way of management, and so
management kind of like you know, the you get this
like this independent sort of CEO class that that's that's
a distinct thing that you know that there people who
come up through the company who managers and worked away

(37:34):
at the top. And this is a distinct thing from
sort of the finance people who are like they're not
supposed to be allowed, like you know, the touch production.
But in the nineteen eighties, the finance people start to
look at this and go, wait, hold on, why are
we not running things? And the finance people have because
they have there are two things on their side. One
they have a sort of neoliberal ideology, and the second

(37:55):
thing they have is so Michael Milken he figures out
how to do this thing called a leverage buyout option.
It's it's it's a it's a kind of complicated financial instrument.
The short and simple explanation of what it is is
he figures out a way too basically go into a
bunch of debt and he he gets he gets people

(38:17):
to givehim a bunch of money, like in the form
of these bonds, and then he uses it just buy
out entire companies. He buys one percent of the company.
And if you own fitment of the company, now you control,
you have controlling interest. And so he goes in and
she just he just raises the stock prices of all
these companies. And now you know, but I mean, now
he's gone into an enormous amount of debts right in

(38:38):
order to buy in order to buy this company, and
so you know, in order to pay off that debt,
he just starts strip money in the company. And so
he starts, you know, anything that can be sold for
money that he can put in his pocket to pay
off his debt starts getting sold. And you know, every
every anything the corporate that the company is doing, it
doesn't immediately make money or doesn't immediately raise the stock
price gets cut. And so you know, there there, there,

(39:00):
there are. There are two major things that a company
has that don't immediately make money and don't raise the
stock price, and that is pensions and research and development.
And this this has you know, this, this, this, this,
this becomes known as the sort of this is the
hustle takeover waves. It gets rebranded as mergers and acquisitions
in the nineties, but it's it's this huge sort of

(39:22):
wave that's these corporate scripts corporate America, and it turns
the corporation from this kind of social body where it's like, well,
everyone's cooperating and companies sort of have this responsibility to
like provide for their workers and provide sort of for
like the social good into literally the only like the
single entire purpose of any company is to raise the

(39:44):
stock price. And this, yeah, this is really bad. Yeah,
and and and you know, the part about it that's
awful is that, you know, okay, so all all literally
all a corporate rad has to do in order to
buy out one of these companies is be able to
is be able to offer a price for the stock

(40:05):
that's higher from the stock price of the company now.
And this means even so they're they're they're there's a
very famous series of battles they buy out. An enormous
number of companies get bought out into strip minds like this,
and you know, and the over and again, these are
these are very very profitable companies. Right. These are companies
with large research development budget. These are companies that are
making enormous amounts of money and they're just completely destroyed

(40:28):
in order to sort of just like satiate these just
like absolute ghoul corporate like vulture rader people. This is
you know, if you remember, might be too young for this,
but Romney's campaign for so yeah, one of one of
the reasons why Mitt Romney loses is that like he's
one of these guys like he's he's like he's the
big bang capital guy and everyone's kind of looked at

(40:49):
him and goes like, you're the reason we'd like guide
to this mess in the first place. But the problem,
the problem is that these people who have enough money
and they have enough power if they were able to
do this and in order to stop them, So either
there there there's a massive there's a massive fight. A
bunch of people try to take over good Year, who
you know, they make the tires, they have the blimps,

(41:10):
and Goodyear CEO is like fanatically opposed to all of
this because you know, he's he's from the old ceo
crop who's like, well, okay, we're here to like make
things instead of you know, increased stock prices. But the
problem is the only way he can save off the
raiders is by increasing a stock price. And the only
way to increase stock prices is by doing the things

(41:30):
the corporate raiders already doing. So he starts slashing contains,
he starts slashing with your development budgets. Yeah, and this
and this, this sort of cycles because now you have
you know, there's there, there's it's it's it's you're not
only having pressure from you know, like the government that's
that's anti union. The corporations themselves are being forced to
become more anti union because they're you know, they now
have this pressure on them from the top down, from

(41:52):
from these sort of these sort of finance schools, and
the finance schools in a lot of ways just the
perfect nilable subjects, right because they they only see the
world in money. They see everything as a market that
they literally think that like they they are like these
like shamans if if if there's a really good ethnography
that I've plugged before on here called liquidated and an

(42:12):
ethnography and void yet liquidated an ethnography of Wall Street,
where an anthropologist goes onto Wall Street and works there
for a while and then you cannot a bunch of interviews,
doesn't it doesn't adempological stuff. And the way they talk
about the market, they literally talk about as if they're
channeling it, right, like it's like something and they're like,
these are yeah, these are these are that's what's one

(42:32):
of the new gods of of our world? That yeah,
that's I mean, that's that's not a uncommon term of
phrase to describe stuff like this. Yeah, and and what
what what What I think is interesting about it, though,
is that you know that conception of the market of
like every person is just like a peer like completely
socially unbounds like thing of capital that you, oh, well, okay,

(42:55):
if you lose your job here, you can just move
another firm. Right, So this makes sense side of the
context of Wall Street, because these people like like these
Wall Street firms they have they have like like thirty
turned over a year, and so all these people are
constantly being fired and shuffle onto the next job, and
fired and shuffle on to the next job, and so
you know, they so they they do they do this
very common sort of fallacy thing where they assume that

(43:17):
because this is the way that it works for them,
but this is the way it's gonna work for everyone else.
And then they genuine and a lot of these people
genuinely believe this. They're like, well, okay, so the things
we're gonna with, things that we're about to do, like
you know, when we destroy these workers entire lives, when
we you know, when we close their factories, when we
take their pensions, when we literally destroyed like every community
and every like thing that's every just in your lives,
they're like, oh, they'll just pick themselves up and go

(43:38):
to another place and they'll be fine, because you know,
if you're if you're you know, a Wall Street finance school, like, yeah,
that's that's what happens when you get fired every three months.
And so these people, these people basically take control of
the entire corporate sector. They do they do this very
quickly by you know, they start this and in the
sort of early eighties and uh, Milliken, the guy who

(44:02):
comes up with the junk bonds leveraged buyout scheme, like
he he goes to jail for I think securities fraud.
They get him for fraud, but it doesn't it a
lot of those guys got yeah, all of these people,
Like again, all of these people are just doing crime,
Like now, yeah, that's how finance standards, this is how

(44:25):
this is how the Action Park guy got kicked out.
You got kicked out doing all the same stuff. And again,
I want to put this out, like the stuff they're
doing is so illegal that like even the Reagan administration
was like, no, we have to prosecute you. Like it's like,
this is the this is the Ronald Reagan Justice Departments,
and they're like it was it was so much crib. Yeah,

(44:49):
it's it's really bad. And and you know the result
of this is just basically the total visceration of of
the working class, just like at and movements and you know,
all the left wing parties are sort of shaped by this.
And you know, and you know, we we've been focusing
on the US and UH and the UK here, but

(45:11):
this is not the only place this happens. And you know,
so one of the you know, like this, this happens, this,
this also starts happening like in socialist states. Um and
we talked about this in more detail in our interview
with Arnessa Kusutra about Bosnia, but one of the big
things that Miloshevik is doing in Yugoslavia. And when when
he takes power and he starts like actually being a

(45:31):
real political force in nink in eighties, is he starts
doing basically all of the same stuff that that that
reagaan at thatacher doing. He starts, he starts implemented shock adoction,
he starts privatization, he starts um like marketization, he starts
cutting studying, cutting price controls, he starts, he starts doing
I don't know if decollectivization is quite the right word,
because Yugoslavia's economic system is complicated and weirder than uh

(45:58):
the USSRS. But you know, he does this, and this
is one of the things that starts Yugoslavia's death spiral,
because you know, you have this enormous economic devastation from
the increase in oil prices for the oil shock, and
then that gets paired with, you know, the the economic
devastation from everyone losing their benefits, people losing de pensions,

(46:19):
these state own industries going under, getting privatized, um the
sort of like collective ownership structures imploding. And the product
of this is that you know, melos Vic looks at
this and it's like, Okay, how can I stay in power?
And his answer is just genocide on that. It's just
genocide on nationalism. And this sort of collapse or sort

(46:41):
of state in social life is you know, and and
the leaders at the top realizing that they can weaponize
sort of nationalism is one of the things at least
directly to the Boston and genocide. Now, towards the end
of the eighties, the whole Soviet block starts coming apart um. Yeah,
you know, the Berlin Wall falls and eventually, you know,
the Soviet Union dissolves, and the people who are trying

(47:03):
to end the Soviet Union, the things that they want
basically are like freedom of speech, uh, the ability to
like leave the country, and basically like Scandinavian style social democracy.
And it was like reasonable from the Soviet Union. Yeah yeah,
and you know, I mean these these people like you know,
this is these you know, like they they they wanted

(47:27):
to live in Scandinavia and instead they got hey, welcome
to the US, but like even worse. Yeah, and so yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's it's really bad. And you know what they get
said is just these this enormous way of privatizations, Uh,
the worldfare state just vanishes and you know this this

(47:48):
causes basically like total societal collapse. Um. Like one of
my one of my professors, and this this happens basically
across the whole Soviet block. One of professors in college,
and I think she was fumble Gary. Um. She she
told me about how dream the nineties like when she
when she was growing up, like she and her family
would just the only thing they had to eat was
raw millet because there's no food. There's there's literally no

(48:09):
food anywhere. The entire economy is collapsed. Nobody has any money,
and so you know, I was like, well, okay, everyone
just eating raw grain because you know that that's what
that's that's the only thing you can you can you
have to survive. And you know, it's this it's it's
literally so bad that in Russia it causes the single
largest life expectancy drop in post World War Europe. It's

(48:29):
like like it's the life expected to decrease is about
like four years because so many people die from this. Um.
You know, and on one of the one of the
ways this happens is that there's so the way they're
they're going to deal with like the state owned industry
thing is they they okay? And I've never been able
to figure this figure out if it was like they
they actually took Murray Rothbar's plan for this, or if

(48:52):
they just independently developed were a Rothbar's plan for for
for dissolving state own the industries, which is give like
everyone who worked in it a share of the company.
And so they do this right, and everyone has these shares,
but these shares are just like paper, and you can't
eat this paper. So a bunch of sort of like
organized crime guys and the people who have been you know,
like like the sort of the people who've been richer

(49:13):
or like had been sort of connected party people who
were just like I'm just gonna cash out start, you know,
just just going through cities and they're they'll you know,
they'll be like, okay, we'll give you a pair of gene,
like we'll give you some food if you give us
their share, and you know, everyone people just give up
their shares. And the result of this is that like
just every industry at Russia immediately falls under the control
of just just like absolutely psychotic oligarchs. And you know,

(49:36):
the the West definitely sharing this on that this this
whole process is engineered by just a bunch of just
like pure neoliberal ghoul like Harvards, like weird Harvard grads
who gets sent into Russia and who are like, oh,
we're gonna we're gonna run the Russian economy and we're
gonna like fix everything, and they just just absolutely destroy it.

(49:57):
And you know, the West has the thing whether they're
they're you know, they're they're they're cheering on this whole process.
They have this thing about how like everyone has to
do belt tightening and it's you're gonna suffer for a
bit and it'll all be worth it. And meanwhile Boris
Jelson is just completely drunk off his asked like shelling
the parliament with tanks, while like the U. S. Press

(50:17):
is cheering, and you know there's the sort of like
you know, the tragedy this is like it's not really
like Russia got like more free, you know, like they
still they still torture and disappeared anarchists and secret prisons,
like you know, there's there They still just like randomly
assassinate political dissidence with through increasingly bizarre like poison bullshit.

(50:40):
Yeah they sure do. Yeah, but you know, the big
difference is that a bunch of Harvard grads made an
indescribable amount of money. You now, no one has any pensions,
um and there's there's this is great like this is
a great Russian joke from this period that goes he's
talking about the communists. Everything they ever told us about
communism was alive, but everything they ever told is about
capitalism was absolutely true. Yeah, that's that seems to be

(51:05):
roughly accurate. Yeah, it's basically true. And you know, and
and the product is sort of neoliberalism coming to Russia
is that by by by the end of the nineties,
Russia is just literally controlled by the mob and these
monsters oligarchs. And Putin's campaign is like, I am better
than the mob, and I will bring them. I will
bring the mob and the oligarchs under control. And this

(51:26):
is you know that, this is how Putin takes power
because and he has failed to hold up to that
probless to be fair, to be fair, the you are
significantly less likely to just like randomly be kidnapped in ransoms.
Not me, No I have, I have wrote for a website.
He does not, like I cannot That's true. That's true. Yeah,
if yeah, if you kiss off Putin, you might be

(51:50):
held for ransom. But it's like, you know, the number
of random people who don't do anything political, who are
just like randomly held for ransom did kind of go
down a bit, and like, Okay, that's I mean, all right,
all right, you gotta hand it to Putin, Okay, I
give him. Yeah, well, okay. The thing on hand to
Putin is that he restored the state's monopoly on violence.

(52:11):
Now that's not a good thing now, but he did it. Yeah,
he well he did it. And you know this this
was the basis of sort of because his power and
political support was that and sort of nationalism. And this
is like you know, and and there's always just the
sort of liberal line on on on Putin. He's like,
oh he's an SKGB guy, and like oh, it's still

(52:32):
communism again, and it's like no, like no, no, and
that this this brings me back to the single thing
that I need everyone to understand about need liberalism, which
is that near liberalism does not decrease the size of
the state. Like there there were more there were more
bureaucrats now in the Russian state than there were under
the Soviet Union. No, and it definitely in order for

(52:53):
it to operate, it definitely extends drastically like the hands
of the states in terms of like like like military, police,
law enforcement, like all those things. In order to keep
this weird market driven thing alive, you need to have
a lot of like enforcement on people who don't have
but both both people who like actually make money and

(53:14):
but most of the people who don't make very much money.
So it increases not only like the bureaucratic state, but
also like the enforcement armor of the state. Yeah, and
I think there's there's there's there's there's two interesting ways
this happens. One is that, well, okay, there's three ways happens.
One is that anytime someone says they're gonna they're gonna
do deregulation, like deregulation does not mean that they're going

(53:35):
to decrease the number of regulations there are. What it
means is that the regulations are bad for this company,
and so they're they're going they're going to they're going
to add more regulations in a way that is good
for this company. And the thing is this actually this
you know, this net increases the size of the state
right there, They're not like they're not like they're not
decreasing the number of laws or whatever. They're you know,

(53:55):
they're they're they're they're they're writing like incredibly like absolutely
in comprehensible banking legislation that like, let's banks charge like
interest rates that previously only organized crime could do. And
then there's there's another aspect of this, which is that,
you know, so the welfare that remains right, you know,
it becomes means tested, and you know that means that

(54:16):
there's so you have the bureaucracy right that like gives
you things, and then you have another bureaucracy on top
of that that decides whether or not you should be
allowed to do the thing it puts you. You know,
there's this this is just just this like process of
abject humiliation that you have to go through to receive anything, yeah,
from the state. And it's like and that sucks. And
then because that is so awful, there's another layer of bureaucracy,

(54:38):
which is like social workers and stuff, whose job it
is in large part is to help you bypass the
second layer of bureaucracy. So that creates another layer. Yeah,
there's there's there's there's so much. Yeah it is, and
but but this is you know this, this this is
one of the things that the liberals do, which is okay,
So you know, you you have you have you have
your two doctrines. Right, you have the thing they actually believe,
which is enormous bureaucrat military state, and then you have

(55:02):
the thing they claim to believe, which is, oh, the
state needs to be smaller, state needs to be decentralized,
the state, shouldn't you fear in the market. And so whenever, whenever,
like the things that they do get too bad, they
have this other thing that can turn to you to go, oh, yeah,
the reason there's too much bureaucracy is because the state's
getting involved too much. Elect us and we will get
rid of the bureaucracy. And then you elect them and
they make the state bigger, and you know, you get

(55:23):
this started perpetual cycle. I think the reason people get
confused by this is that when when people when most
people think of the state, right, they think of the
state is something that provide services. You know that the
quintessential thing of state does is build roads roads. Yeah,
and you know, and you know, when we can talk
about how like the US building roads probably doomed the

(55:47):
entire earth climate change. Oh yeah, no, like the way
that we've done roads around cars and the type of
things we make roads. Yeah, it's horrible, but yeah it's awful. Yeah,
but but there there's there's there's another thing about roads
which is interesting, which is that roads are you know,
so the original reason why states built roads was they
can move armies around. And and this comes back to

(56:08):
the core of what a state is. Right, there is
nothing in the actual core definition of a state, which
is basically it's a hierarch couple of localized monopoly on violence. Right,
there's nothing in that that has that like says at
all the state has to do anything for you, right
like if if you know, if if two guys with
guns show up and sees a place, right, they can

(56:30):
create a state. They don't have to give you anything.
The state is the fundamental core of the state is
just a bunch of armed people who can order people around.
And you know, but people people sort of can people
sort of confuse the two and the neoliberalisms entire thing
is increasing the increasing the military. You know that the
part of the state that takes things from you at

(56:51):
gunpoint and decreasing the part of the states that like
gives you things. And you know, one of one of
the there's one of one of the other things that
that happens in this period is that labor increasingly stops
being about making or doing anything and just becomes pure
guard labor. So, you know, the the the last big

(57:18):
neoliberal project that doesn't really get talked about as a
deliberal project ever, is that mass incarceration is a deliberal project.
It started under under Nixon and under Carter. But you know,
so when when Reagan takes office that the American prison
population is about three thousand. When he leaves office, he
has basically doubled it to uh six, seven thousand. We

(57:39):
have now more than doubled it again. And you know
it it basically it you know when whenever you get
a large nealiberal administration that they you know, they double it, right,
it basically doubles again drained bedween the Clinton administration. You know,
it keeps accelerating and you know this is this is
this is the other thing that that neoliberalism brings in,

(58:00):
which is that Okay, so neil libils and produces this
enormous population of people who don't have any jobs, have
no opportunities whatsoever, are just screwed. So what do you
do with them? And the answer is slavery. And basically
everywhere that you stay using neoliberalism, you see massive increases
into prison population. Espect like the US is by far
the worst example of this, but this happens. You know

(58:21):
that the seven is basically across the world and what
what what you see is in place of you know,
it's this is this one of the things that drives
politics in sort of in rural reasons in the US,
which is that you have these places that used to
sort of have industry is used to particularly like coal mining,
things like that, and it gets replaced by prisons because prisons,

(58:42):
you know, having a prison in your sort of rural
town is is the only way to sort of ensure
that you have a large economic base. And so you know,
like local local city councils are you know, incredibly pro
prison because it's like, oh, well, the president will bring
your jobs and you know, this means that okay, so
so so the people a lot of people who are
prison guards are just you know, fascists, but there's also

(59:05):
people who are prison guards who normally would just be workers. Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah,
who have just been sort of but you know, there's
nothing left right and they they're fighting, uh Mike Davis
talks about this, that they're fighting. This just incredibly desperate,
ferocious struggle to like stay in the places they love
and stay with their families, and stay with their friends,
stay with their communities. And the only way they can

(59:26):
do this is, you know, by becoming part of this
like just the neo liberal health state. And you know
they don't like it either, but that's you know, that's
what the liberalism is, right, is you no longer have
a job. The only job available to you is picking
up a gun and pointing it at someone who is
exactly the same as you, except you know, they've been

(59:49):
thrown into the slavery part of the system instead of
the people holding the guns at the slavery part of
the system. And one of the things that that happens
a lot of people just really conflu late about what
neoliberalism is they can use it libertarianism and they're not
the same thing. And and this this is a condus
is a very confusing problem because well, a the term

(01:00:12):
nea liberals don't get used in the US all that much.
When people use it, they usually use it to mean
something bad. And that's just about it. Yeah, yeah, and
and you know and and also another part of the
problem is that even if you go into like the
Montpellion Society, right, which you know this is this is
this is the arch new liberal institution, and it's just
like basically like a think tank generator, there are there

(01:00:36):
are libertarians in there. There there are there are narco
capitalists in the Montpellion Society, and the one Pellion Society
is fighting this sort of constant internal battle between the
people who actually believe the things that they say publicly,
like you actually believe you should have a small state
blah blah blah blah, and the people who understand that
all the small states stuff is just like stuff you
tell the masses in order to get them to like

(01:00:58):
slash welfare things while you just hire more cops. And
probably the single biggest distinction between the libertarians and and
the New Liberals is about border control. Now, if if
you listen to New Liberals on Twitter, or you listen
to Neil, or you listen to libertarians, right, capitalism is
supposed to have open borders, is supposed to be free
moving to people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Um, if you look

(01:01:20):
at literally everything every neo liberal government has ever done,
it's exactly the opposite. It's they don't like that. Yeah, yeah,
they hit it. And and and you know this whole thing
about like oh you need workers to uh yeah, if
if you, if you, if you let workers from other
countries go into into the US, like oh they'll they'll,
they'll decrease wages, blah blah blah blah. So the period

(01:01:42):
in which the US like had strong unions and strong
wages and stuff, with the period where there was like
basically no militarization on the Mexican border. I mean there
were some and you know there there's there's there's a
build up sort of dream the Vietnam War and they're
they're they're sort of been one back like around election
revolution era. But you know it's it's nothing. It's literally
nothing like it is today. Today. The US border is

(01:02:05):
this just absolute hellscape. Um. I mean just like there's
there's there's this enormous perimeter of the U. S border
where just the Constitution doesn't apply, where like the Bill
of Rights just doesn't exist. If if if you're, if you're,
if you're close enough to the border, it's just it's
all suspended. Uh, it's not entirely supended, but like basically
the border patrol can just do whatever the funk they
want to you, and you know, like this, this, this

(01:02:25):
is this is how the border patrol was able to
be deployed in Portland, right because Portland's technically on the border,
and the border patrol has increased power is there and
the actual goal is so people people are always going
to move, right, And what the new labels figured out
was that you know, these these these enormous market labor populations,

(01:02:47):
the best way you can exploit them as if they're
just absolutely terrorized by just this, you know, an incredible
sort of ferociously hostile, murderous just border regime run by fascists.
And it works, like they kill, they kill enormous numbers
of people, They do horrible things, They put people with
concentration camps, they sterilize people they like, they sexually assault children,

(01:03:11):
they disappear people they like, still people's babies. And this
is you know, this is what neoliberalism is, right, This,
this is what it actually is in practice. This is
you know, like, this is the this is the this
is the policy that has imposed money liberal states. And
I think I want to end on that, and I

(01:03:32):
want to end on a note about what the quintessential
sort of figure of neoliberalism is, because I think, you know,
in the neoliberals mind, right, the quintessential neoliberal figure is
like the small entrepreneur who's like guy who's you know,
turned their own creativity and like harnessed it into like

(01:03:53):
the ability to create value, and you know, they're creating
things for the world and they're reaching themselves. And I
think a lot of just think of it as like
the quintessional The liberal is you know, a Chicago, Chicago
School of Economics person. Yeah, and I want to suggest
that they quit. The single quintessential like neo liberal figure

(01:04:15):
is a riot cop, and specifically specifically that the you know,
if if you know, if every everyone by now knows
what a riot cop looks like, right, I want everyone
to go back and even even from from like two
thousand one, look at what a riot police officer looks
like in two thousand one versus what they look like now,

(01:04:37):
and then go back to even like the nineteen sixties
and look look at look at what those guys look like. Yeah,
I know, looking at the footage from the sixties and
riot cops is like really depressed it because they're like,
I could take these guys. They're they're just wearing T shirts.
They're just guys. It's it's way more of a fair fight.
They have T shirts and sticks. We could have T

(01:04:57):
shirts and sticks. That is a that's like the arriety
of the sixties. It sounds like now they also in
some cases will be much more willing just to murder
tons of people. Now there is that exception, but in
like a big street brawl, it is it is generally
a bit of a fair fight. I mean, I will
say also, sixties police love love dogs. They love like

(01:05:18):
sicking dogs on people, which is really bad. Yeah, I'm
I'm looking at it, looking at it at the two
thousand one riot cops, and yeah, they are not nearly
as robo copy. That's what they are now. Drin the
Twin Chilean uprising in I was talking to someone in
Chile and they were talking about how like they were

(01:05:40):
describing it as like the cops were just like like
something had a change, beating Ninja turtles like it was
like fighting the Shredder. There's yea. Even even even the
L A. P. D. Riot cops for the nineteen ninety
two riots, they're also still just wearing like shirts like
they just have they just have colored shirts and one stick. Yeah.

(01:06:00):
Now now they're wearing there whatever dumb armor they have. Yeah.
But you know, and this is this is you know
and this, this is this is if if you want
to trace the path in neo liberalism, it's this. It's
a lot of the army surplus stuff that like the
police have gotten a lot of. It's really scary. A
lot of it also sucks, like a lot of those
a t v S every like everyone who's ever had

(01:06:21):
the drive them hates them. But you know, like like
my my like absolutely tiny dinky town has a bear
cat and that shouldn't that shouldn't be. And I know
where it is too, Like I know where the bear
cat is. It's like, there shouldn't be a bear cat.
My town is a tax cutout, like it's it's literally

(01:06:42):
a tax carve out like that that's the reason, that's
really reason it exists. And it has a bear cat,
and like, you know, this is this is sort of
the this is the consequence of of of what neo liberalism,
isn't it. Vicky usta Well talked about this on on
on the Occupy episode. It's it's the comps become more
like become more like the army. The army becomes more
like the cops. And you know, the result is this

(01:07:06):
sort of pen out to con surveillance states, where like
if you and seven people stand on a sidewalk, sixteen
cops will show up. Yeah, they've they've really excelled in
making the capitalist realism Dumer philosophy be almost like the
base philosophy for anyone who takes two seconds to think
about the world that they live in. And you know,

(01:07:28):
and this has been really effective in a lot of ways.
But you know, David Graeber point pointed this out, which
is that the problem with doing this is that, you know, Okay,
so like the the the enormous amount of guard labor, right,
the enormous amount of sort of prison guards. Like that's
all unproductive labor, right. You know, you you you make

(01:07:48):
you make some of that money back off that the
companies make some of the money back off the slave labor. Right,
But like, but that in general. There the guards aren't
adding anything. They're not they're not they're not produced any
goods um and not really much service either. No. And
and this is you know this, this this is a problem,
right because because neoliberalism is profit driven, and so you know,

(01:08:10):
what what you have is is that the system has
a choice between either it functioning or it making it
appear as if it's the only system. And that's the
thing is that it's it's it's kind of profit driven.
But honestly, the more that I the more that you've
been talking like, no, it's just about eliminating any alternative.
So it's not not even profit driven. It's that it's

(01:08:32):
forcing itself to be the only acceptable option. Yeah, that's
how it gets so much of its power. Yeah. But
but you know the problem with this is that all
of that sort of ideological coercion only last as long
as the police can hold the streets, which is which

(01:08:52):
is they're good at it. They're they're sometimes they're decent,
you know. And one one of the story I want
to end on is so there's you know, there there
has been in some with more varying degrees of success,
there has actually been resistance in neoliberalism, and there are
places where people have won the people. There are places

(01:09:14):
where people have run the I m f out those people.
There's places where people have you know, defeated coups, where
they've like you know, where where they've where they've they've
they've successfully sort of taken over the state. There's places
where you know, I mean there's there's there's places like
you know, we're gonna talk about couple of things in Mexico,
but yeah, I mean there's there's the Appetistas who have
you know, are constantly besieged, but have carved out a

(01:09:35):
territory in which they have you know, like totally defeated
the Mexican almost really defeated the Mexican state. And I
think one of the sort of forgotten incidents in in
the two thousands is this uprising in Wahaka where they, yeah,
there's a there's an enormous sort of a bunch of
teachers are going on strike. And you know, Wahawka's teaching

(01:09:57):
unions are enormously powerful, incredibly radical, and so you know
that they one of the things they do is that
they go into the city and they have these like
these giants started protest tents that they showed up and
they have these like giant camps and she just in
six the police attack them, and so they start attacking
and and the teachers fight back, and so you have
this you know this, this this massive battle erupts um

(01:10:20):
it's just in the city and you know this is
this is all the police attack it like three in
the morning, right, but then they there's not enough of them,
the clear teachers out and the teachers hold and they
hold and they hold, and the city of Wahaka wakes
up to this just enormous battle in the streets between
a bunch of just like teachers and the cops. And
when Wahawka wakes up, they are just like what the

(01:10:45):
fuck is this? And you know, they joined the teachers
and they go fight the cops and they they they're
largely successful in like like they beat them. They drive,
they drive the police from the city, and you know,
and and for for for for for several months, the
city is basically under the control of these like direct
democratic councils and like they're there are these there are

(01:11:07):
these things they call the mega marshes, which just a
million people will do a march to the streets and
the police there's the police just can't stop them because
you know, there's a million people. And yeah, that's that's
the only way that I've seen it be successful, whether
it be you know, just to sure sheer massive people
driving cops out of a police station, or you know,
an entire city rallying behind people like in in in

(01:11:29):
Portland when the fence came, it's like you need to
have like everybody to show up, because they could fight
two hundred like twin canarchists very pretty easily. You usually, um,
but when you have like all of the moms and
dads and regular people come up, that is much more
of a complicated of fight on like on on their end,

(01:11:50):
because yeah, we'll still have the teenage front liners throwing
at the cops, but when you have like regular people
behind them, that creates the whole median sative to be
something totally different. And it got the Feds to back
down in Portland when Trump really wanted to not happen.
And I think also the thing the thing that that

(01:12:12):
was increding incredible aba hawkause it wasn't just people sort
of like standing behind them, like like tens of thousands
of people just joined the fight in in a way
that you know it like if you know, if if
there's like fifty thou people in a city throwing bricks
at you, like you you either have to start shooting
into the crowd or try to hold them. Can't You can't.
And even when he start shooting into the crowd, Yeah,
they tried it. And the disaster it made it made

(01:12:34):
even people the crowds were larger, and like, you know,
one of the things that happens is, uh, the the
revolutionaries try to like you know, they go to the
radio station or like okay, well you broadcast this. The
radio station says no, and so they start seizing radio
stations all over all over the city. Yeah, and they yeah,
and then you know, and then they had they had
these they had these like bonfire at the edge of
the city where if one's at a meets and like
they're there's they're they're sending their they're they're sending radio

(01:12:57):
like messages like over the radio stations they've taken over
from like barricade to barricade, and you know, eventually the
police and like the like the Mexican Army shows up
and at that point they're able to sort of retake
the city. And there's a couple of other things happening
in Mexico at this point that are sort of this
is giants are left wing tied, and the way that

(01:13:19):
it gets stopped is that the Mexican army basically fully
kicks off the drug war and they kill I mean,
I've seen numbers up to like eight hundred thousand people
in ten years. They just they basic they basically genocides
the indigenous population of of of Mexico. And you know,

(01:13:44):
I think I think that's that's that's sort of a
place to leave it because more big hopeful note to
end to the show on. Yeah, but I mean I
think I think it is it is worth it is
you know, it's it's it's it's worth thinking about. Is one,
it is possible to beat the police to the ruling
class will literally bathe the entire country in blood, like

(01:14:05):
they will destroy their own company. Is different. The way
I mean this gets discussed and season will happen here,
but like the way the American military works, I think
it will be less likely to do that. Yeah. Well,
I mean, and I want I want to put this
oide like, so the thing that the Army doesn't directly
murder people. What they do is but what they do
is basically like they they set off a bunch of

(01:14:28):
fighting between the cartels and then and the cartels fucking
murder enormous members people. But you know, we will happily
murder each other. But yeah, yeah, well and also you know,
I mean it's it's also this is this is you know,
it's the thing with the Mexican state. It's it's very
very difficult to tell where the cartels stop and where
the Mexican Army begins because a lot of them are
the same thing. And like you know that there's Yeah,

(01:14:49):
that's not to end on and just but just to
make the ending a bit better, I do want to
say I'm no longer going to call anyone U a liberal.
I made this joke in the group chat yesterday and
nobody responded to it, so it was set. So I'll
say it now. I'm only going they called them Thomas
Anderson liberals. That that that that's that's that is what

(01:15:12):
I'm calling them now. Um, And I'll make everyone wait
two seconds to understand what's going on and then sigh
and then motion to get me out of the room.
So thank you Chris for talking about them, and thank
thank thank thank you all for joining us. This this
has been ni could happen here? Um. You can find

(01:15:34):
us on Instagram and Twitter. If you so desire, if
you want to get if you want, if you want
people to know that, you follow us and create a
whole network of surveillance based so everyone knows what you're
watching and what you're listening to, to create a better
picture who you are online so you can get get
better advertisements. Yeah, follow us online, joined the Panopticon. Throw
bricks at it. It is pretty funny how they tricked

(01:15:55):
everyone into carrying around gps is wherever they go. It's
pretty funny. Yeah, it's it's amazing. It's like, oh everyone everyone,
everyone in my town is like, oh, we can't get
the vaccine. They have micro chips in it's like you
have a phone. It's hilarious. They tricked us into carry
around speakers, cabras and gps is everywhere we go. It

(01:16:16):
is really funny. It's amazing. All right, Well, bye funny Fye,
welcome to it could happen here? Um. The show that

(01:16:37):
is normally introduced by me shouting a tonally, but today
I did like a professional. Um, because today myself and
my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone I'm
very excited to chat with Mr Corey. Doctor Oh Corey,
welcome the show. Thank you very much. It is my
pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you

(01:16:58):
all in to be talking to you today. Corey. You
do a lot of writing about kind of technology and
surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author.
You've written some great fiction. I think today will probably
talk most around books like Attack Service and walk Away,
but you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. Um. And
you've also worked with the e f F for years

(01:17:19):
and years. UM. So you you you're coming at what
I love about. I mean, we're gonna be talking today
broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of
the Internet. Will probably talk about some metaverse e stuff.
What I love about the way in which you think
and write about the future is that you're kind of
coming about it from a number of angles, both as
like a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining

(01:17:42):
the future, and as somebody who's kind of weighted in
as an activist to this and um, I'm kind of wondering,
where do you see like the greatest potential for actual
like change. Um? Is it? Is it in kind of
is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist, or
is it in sort of imagining as a as a
as a fiction writer? What might be? So I I

(01:18:05):
see them as adjuncts uh, you know, diversity of tactics
and all that stuff. Um. The thing is that tech
policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, And they are
only visceral for the people who would provide the kind
of political will to do something about them. Usually that

(01:18:28):
that comes when it's too late, right, people, people care
about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five
giant websites filled with scripted shots of text from the
other four. But not when Yahoo is on a buying
spree of tech companies and we're saying, oh, that's how
tech companies grow, and all tech companies will grow in
the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling
them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly, which is

(01:18:50):
kind of how we got Facebook and Google and the
rest of it. And um, you need to be able
to make policy arguments to policy people but you also
need to be able to put uh, some some sinew
and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind
of argument. And and that's where fiction comes in. It's
kind of a like a fly through of like an

(01:19:12):
emotional architects rendering of what things might look like if
we get it wrong or if we change it. It
preserves the sense of possibility. You know. I think one
of the great enemies of change is the inevitable is
um of capitalist realism and the idea that there is
no alternative. So if you can make people believe in
an alternative, then they might work for one. And certainly
the opposite is true. If people don't believe there is

(01:19:35):
any alternative possible, they won't work for one. Why why
would you? Uh? And so all of that together, I
think is part of how you mobilize people to care
about stuff. Yeah, I mean that makes that makes total sense,
and it is It's difficult, I think because I first
came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult

(01:19:58):
to get people to care about out stuff. And I
think in particular privacy, which there was it has been
one of the most interesting cases of like the kind
of thought leaders in in an industry freaking out over
something and people not really having an issue with it
because we kind of all agreed to hand over all
of our data to a number of big side not all,

(01:20:19):
but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts and
that I understand the idea that like fiction is um
is a much better way to try to get people
to care about these things because it makes them feel
as opposed to kind of reporting on I think people
can get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions
and like uh pivots and you know, tech companies acquiring
each other and whatnot. Well, look, I think that the

(01:20:41):
part of the problem with privacy, the reason that we
we're late to wake up and do something about it,
is because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever
seen the maps of like how an ad tech stock works,
the flow diagrams, uh, you know, there are some things
that are complicated because um, there are some things that
are hard to understand because they're complicated. And then there

(01:21:03):
are some things that are made complicated so they will
be hard to understand. And I think in the case
of the surveillance industry, the latter is true and it
wasn't just that they were trying to play us for suckers,
they were also playing their customers for suckers. Right. One
of the reasons that the ad tex st Act is
such a snarled hair ball is so that the people

(01:21:26):
who buy ads and the publishers who run ads can't
tell how badly they're being ripped off by their intermediaries.
But this also has the side effect of making it
very hard for us to know as the as the
kind of inputs to that system, how our own dignity
and private lives and safety and integrity are being put
to risk by these systems as well. Um. And you know,

(01:21:50):
it may be that people, if they had been well
informed about what was going on, they might have been
indifferent as well. But I think that when most people
were very poorly informed, right when all theirs was this
kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff as
being your personal information is being siphoned up, but no
kind of specifics on how that was being used and

(01:22:12):
how that was being done and how it might bring
you to harm. Um, it's not clear that that you
can say that that the reason they were indifferent is
because they were fully informed. It didn't care if you
know that they weren't fully informed. If you know that
they were barely informed. M hm, I mean yeah, I
think you're absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge Analytic Is

(01:22:32):
scandal broke, which was I think one of the first
times that there was a really huge international story that
made it clear some of the consequences of all this, Like,
it did provoke a lot of a lot of anger.
Um I I do you worry at all that, Like
there's a degree to which because it because people got
tricked or whatever you want to frame it, and it's

(01:22:53):
gone the the kind of um, financialization of people's private data,
people's like personal information. Because that has gone so far,
there's a risk that people are just kind of inured
to it. Um yeah, well, well, I mean that kind
of gets to my theory change here, which is that
there is always going to be uh a point of

(01:23:16):
maximum and difference peak indifference. You know, Um, if you
think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood that
you care about cancer goes up the longer you smoke
and the more health effects you feel. And certainly there
will come a point in your life when you will

(01:23:37):
only ever grow more worried about the effects of smoking
on your life. But there's also a point of no return.
Right If the point at which you you're you're concern
reaches the point where you're actually going to do something
about smoking is the day you get diagnosed with stage
four lung cancer, then that um denialism can slide into nihilism.

(01:24:00):
You can say, why bother, right, it's too late. It's
like if if we spend years arguing about the crashing
population of rhinos and then finally there's only one left,
and you say you're right, there was a problem, you
might as well say, like, why don't we eat him
and find out what he tastes like? It's not like
the rhinos are ever going to come back, right, And
so for me, so much of the work is about

(01:24:24):
shifting the point of peak indifference to the left of
the point of no return on the timeline, so that
people actually start to care earlier, because it's it's it's
if you haven't a genuine problem, right, like the overcollection
of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse
of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible effects

(01:24:45):
that are undeniable, right that the the our ability to
ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing about
the climate emergency. You know, even if Shell had not
our Exxon had not hidden the data had had on
the role that it's products were playing in climate change
in the seventies, it would have been hard to muster
a sense of urgency in the seventies, right, because the

(01:25:07):
story is that in fifty years something bad's going to happen.
But here we are, fifty years on something bad is
really happening, and a lot of people are caring about it.
They still don't seem to care about it enough, or
maybe they've slid into nihilism. There's certainly, I think on
the part of the elites, a kind of nihilistic sense
that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and

(01:25:27):
build fortresses and breathe their children by harrier jet, you know,
and and and you know that nihilism, I think is
is what you get when the point of no return
has passed before peak denial. Uh and the privacy um
catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't

(01:25:49):
quite reached yet. I mean, we've just had the first
kind of trickles of the dam breaking that's in our future.
It hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it.
But but we might be getting there, right, We might
We might eventually be able to do something about it.
And one of the things that will hasten that moment
is um restoring competition to those industries. That one of

(01:26:14):
the reasons that uh, the industry that spies on us
is able to foster denial and indifference is because it
is a monopolized industry. To companies control eighty percent of
the ad market, Google and Facebook, and as as monopolist,
they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the

(01:26:35):
most profitable companies in the history of the world. And
some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders,
can be mobilized to distort policy, to to make us
think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they
collect data and use it to forestall regulation, to pay
Nick Clegg four million a year to go around Europe
and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime

(01:26:56):
Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you
that Facebook is a friend of the democratic regimes of
the world. And and you know, if if the anti
monopoly movement, which is a thing I've become very involved
with is able to go from strength to strength. It's
surging now. Then one of the things that we might
do is is destroy the ammunition that's being used by

(01:27:21):
these large monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm
us in these ways with impunity, and and then maybe
we can actually take the the nascent and natural alarm
that people do feel about the invasions of their privacy
and and actually turn that into privacy policy that is

(01:27:42):
meaningful in respect of these big companies that actually reigns
them in. Yeah, And I think I like that you
frame it as a privacy catastrophe because I think, I mean,
what I just exhibited earlier in this episode, is this
this tendency that I certainly see in myself and I
see in other people to get kind of eaten down
by the continued um excesses of this industry and the

(01:28:04):
continued kind of failure of anything to be done to
curb it. And I think you're right, it has to
be viewed as um as a calamity. And I and
nothing I think makes that clearer than some of the
watching some of the stuff Facebook in particular has put
out about their plans for the metaverse and kind of
thinking back from all of these sensors they want to
store in your house, all of the ways in which

(01:28:24):
they want to map everything around you. Um, they never
you know, they they kind of advertise as like you'll
be able to play basketball with somebody who's in a
different state, But really what it is is you're giving
Facebook access to every measurement of your body and you know,
the pulse of the beat of your heart and all
this this stuff that like maybe we don't quite know
what it would be useful for from financialization standpoint, but

(01:28:47):
they it's unsettling to think that they'll have to find
a way because they'll have it. You know, I don't know.
I don't know what is to be done about that,
other than, as you say, kind of breaking up these monopolies.
Well and and I mean breaking up is like one
of the things we can do to monopolies. And and
it takes a long time, you know, Um A T
and T. The first enforcement action against it happened sixty

(01:29:09):
nine years before it was broken up in nineteen two.
I don't think we can wait that long. But there's
a lot of intermediate steps, right like we can force
them to do interoperability. We can block them from from
predatory acquisitions. We can force them to divest of companies
and engage in structural separation. We can do all kinds
of things. It actually looks like the United Kingdom is

(01:29:30):
going to stop them from buying Giffee, which might seem
trivial after all, it's just like animated jifts, but um,
what it actually is a surveillance beacons in every social
media application, right because if you're hosting a Jeff from
Giffee in your message to someone else, Facebook has telemetry

(01:29:50):
about that message. Um. And so the the the not
the i c O, the Competition Competition and Markets Authority
in the UK was like, yeah, this is just going
to strengthen your market power. That's why you're buying this company.
You have too much market power already. We're not gonna
let you do it. Um. It was almost the case
that the Fitbit merger was blocked Google's Fitbit merger. I

(01:30:11):
think it's still not too late to roll it back.
And Lena Cohn, who's the new fire breathing dragon in
charge of the FTC, who is an astonishing person who
was a law student three years ago. Uh, she has said,
oh yeah, this this like one point three trillion dollars
worth of mergers and acquisitions that you're doing right now
to get in under the wire before we start enforcing.

(01:30:33):
Guess what, We're gonna unwind those fucking mergers if it
looks like they were anti competitive. And not only are
you going to lose all the money you spent on
the M and A due diligence and the paperwork and
the corporate stuff, but all that integration you're going to
do between now and then, you're gonna have to de
integrate those companies when we tell you that you don't
have uh, you don't have merger approval and you're on notice.

(01:30:53):
You can't come and complain later, right Like, you can
either get in line and wait for us to tell
you whether an out your merger is legal, or you
can roll the dice. But I tell you what, if
you come up sneake, guys, you are fucked. And that
is amazing, right, That is a powerful change in American
industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah, I mean,

(01:31:15):
and that is a beautiful thing to think of being
in place and actually hitting as hard as it could. Obviously,
the concern is that like who will be you know,
picking the head of the FTC in three years in change?
And like how how how much influence is Peter tal
going to have their in the Like um, yeah, well,
and Peter Til of course loves monopolies. He says competition

(01:31:35):
is for losers. So you're right, I mean, obviously elections
have consequences, but you know, one of the ways that
you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives,
and so you know, if people are policy, then uh.
One of the most important policies Biden has set so
far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues cantor at

(01:31:58):
the d o J and Tim Wu and the White House. Yeah,
I mean I would I would love nothing more than
to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point
because I'm one of the casualties of the of the
of the the ad market like crash of started in
like two sixteen seventeen. It feels like the odds of
them being able to like, I don't know, we we've

(01:32:21):
got three years where we know, you know, theoretically these
policies will be in place, and and I don't know,
I'm hopeful, Like when I when I because the Republicans
are talking a lot about regulating social media too, about
even breaking up these companies, but they often tend to
be talking about it in a very different way and
with a very different kind of end goal in mind. Um,

(01:32:42):
And I guess you know, obviously they know that, right Facebook,
they are well aware that like this might be a
weight out the clock situation for them, and they have
some arrows in that quiver. I mean that may be so,
but also remember that Facebook's users are outside of the US,
and that even a change in a minister aation here
won't won't um put Marguerite vest Dagger, who's the Competition

(01:33:04):
commissioner in the EU, back in the bottle. And she's
another fire breather, right, She's another amazing person, And so
you know, I wouldn't be too quick to write that off.
I mean, Facebook needs its foreign markets. Yes, It's U
S customers are worth more to anyone else because we
have the most primitive privacy frameworks, so it can extract
a lot more data for like we're the we're the
richest people with the worst privacy. So that's that's um,

(01:33:28):
you know, it's a real home court advantage for Facebook.
But it needs that other eight percent of its users.
It wouldn't be what it is without them, and that
makes it subject to their jurisdiction. And you know, one
of the things about ad driven firms like Facebook, UM
is that they really need sales offices in country. Uh
So you know, even before we we had the proliferation

(01:33:49):
national firewalls, which don't get me wrong, I don't think
it's a good thing. UM. These large global firms that
operated UM sales offices in country, in every territory they
worked in, were vulnerable to regulation because if you have
staff in a country, then you have someone that can
be arrested, right, And so it's not like they can

(01:34:12):
just be like I don't know, like the Tour Project,
which just you know, it has people um who who
sit and hack on tour who are close to lawyers
who can defend people who sit on hack and on tour. Uh.
You know, if the Tour Project had to have staff
full time in Turkey and China and Russia and Syria

(01:34:33):
in order to operate, it would be a very different project.
But you know, Facebook and Twitter and Google, they all
have staff in those countries, and it makes them vulnerable
to regulation and So you know, China is really interesting
because because m jin Ping, for his own reasons, which
are not my reasons and distinct from the Democrats and

(01:34:55):
the Republicans reasons, is doing stuff to rein in big
tech in China. And it's a actually quite interesting because
you know the argument that Nick Klegg makes when he
says why we shouldn't break up Facebook, as he says, uh,
you know, China is coming for your UM, for your
I P and for your industrial competitiveness with its big
tech giants that it treats as national champions that projects

(01:35:17):
soft power around the world. Meanwhile, China is like these
tech giants, we hate these tech giants. They present a
countervailing force to the hedgeminy of the the Communist Party
and the and the executive branch that she should bring
sets at the top of We're gonna neuter them and
we're gonna we're gonna disappear their founders like Jack Montt
fucking googlogs right Like, they're like, we don't want national

(01:35:39):
champions because the nation that you know, we Bow and
Ali Baba is the champion four is we Bow and
Ali Baba and ten Cent. They're not They're not champions
for China by any stretch of the imagination. They don't
give a shit about China, and so you know, they're
all of these companies are going to face regulatory pressure,
anti monopoly, regular tory pressure all over the world, and

(01:36:02):
you're you're so much more um optimistic. I guess about
about the potential for that to bite than a lot
of people I talked to, and I think more knowledgeable
as well. And I kind of wonder because there's this
very strong, obviously influenced by decades of cyberpunk attitude that like,
we're in this age of mega corporations whose power is
you know, there's nothing that can stop Amazon from doing

(01:36:25):
what Amazon wants to do, right, Facebook is going to
keep doing whatever they want to do forever. You you
clearly don't believe that, and I you know you, you
clearly know your stuff. I'm wondering why you think that
that image is still persist, so persistent that like attitude
in our heads of these these these are kind of
monolithic forces in our society that um just have to

(01:36:48):
be endured. So I think it's a belief in the
great forces of history, right, UM, and the great man theory.
You know that the the these um uh you know
that these rich people are driving history. Yeah, these these
these powerful figures are driving history. They're in charge there

(01:37:08):
in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind of what's
behind Trump arrangement syndrome, right, the idea that Trump is
a uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to just
like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that fit in the
demagogue shaped hole that was left by the collapse of
credibility of capitalism. Uh. And you know, a man who
is clearly too stupid to be a cause of anything,

(01:37:30):
that will only ever be the effect of something. And uh,
you know the for me, the theory of of history
and how it goes was really transformed by an exercise
that my friend Ada Palmer does. So. Aida is a
science fiction novelist. She's she's just published the fourth book
of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series. It's in

(01:37:52):
an incredible series of books. But she's a real like
kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a librettist
and singer who's pretty album length operas based on the
Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of UM, a
tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the University
of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft,

(01:38:16):
and so on. During the inquisitions and every year with
her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live
action role playing game, the Election of the Medici's Pope,
and each of her students takes on the role of
a cardinal from a great family and the in the
actual election of the I forget what year was, uh fifteen,

(01:38:39):
fourteen ninety or something, I forget, but they each take
on this role and they have a character sheet and
has motivations like a dinner party, murder mystery. But for
four weeks they make alliances, break alliances, stab each other
in the back uh stage surprise reversals, and at the

(01:38:59):
end of the weeks there's a u faux Gothic cathedral
on campus and they dress up in costume. Aida has
a a Google alert for theater companies that are getting
rid of their costumes, so she clothes them in the
garb of the Medici's cardinals, and they gather and they

(01:39:19):
go into a room and then a puff of smoke
emerges and you get the new Pope and every year
four of the final candidates, uh, there are four final
candidates rather, and two of them are always the same
because the great forces of history bear down on that
moment to say those people will absolutely be in the
running for the for the papacy, and two of them

(01:39:42):
have never once been the same, because human action still
has space to alter the outcomes that are prefigured by
the great forces of history. And so for me, the
idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has always
felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea that

(01:40:03):
the great forces of history have determined the outcome and
human action has no bearing on it. And I think
that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful.
And that's the word you use before. Hope is the
idea not that you can see a path from here
to the place you want to get to, but rather
that you haven't run out of things that you can
do to advance your your goal, right, Because if you

(01:40:24):
can take a step to advance your goal, you can
ascend the gradient towards the peak that you're trying to reach,
then you will attain a new vantage point, and from
that vantage point you may have revealed to you courses
of action that you didn't suspect before you took that step.
So so long as the step is available, there's always
another step lurking in the wings that you can't see

(01:40:46):
from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about
this is I can think of like fifty things that
could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now,
and it's up from thirty things last year. And so
even though I don't know how we get from here
to a better future, and even though I absolutely see
the blockers you're talking about Trump landslide, uh losing Congress

(01:41:08):
because they let Joe Mansion and Christmas Cinema newter the
build back better, Bill, Um, you know all of those
things that can happen. I have hope, you know, which
is not the same as optimism or a belief that
things will be great, or even even like a sense
a lack of a sense of foreboding. I have that
in spades. But I have hoped that when the next

(01:41:31):
phase of the fight begins, that we will have many
um vulnerable spots we can strike at, and that we
can capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more
vulnerabilities and move on. I think that's so important and
I think it goes in line with to bring up
climate change again. The idea that like one of the
most toxic things you can think are e climate change

(01:41:52):
is that there's nothing to do. We're already past every
point of no return and there's no there's no positive
action because it just leads you to doing the same
thing as the people who deny it. UM and it's
it's yeah, I think it's it's very important to um
recognized that like, not only are there things you can do,
but when you do those things, you start taking those steps,
other steps reveal themselves. Yeah, and you know what, if

(01:42:17):
you're feeling nihilistic about about climate I'm nearly through Saul
Griffith's book Electrify Uh. Saul's an old friend of mine.
He's MacArthur Winner's electrical engineer, and he's just done the
He's it's a popular engineering book. It's one of my
favorite genres. They're like popular science books, except instead of
telling you about how science works, they tell you about
how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why

(01:42:40):
all the estimates of how much renewables we need are
hugely overestimated, and it's basically that like keeping uh fossil
fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right,
so something like of that estimate is just it's the
energy that we need to make the energy, and it's

(01:43:00):
not present in electrical models. Here's how we can manufacture it.
Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how
if we can figure out the financing, Americans can uh
spend less money every year than they do now to
get more stuff that they love every year. That we
can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. Um,

(01:43:22):
And you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says
every all the time, but he is very careful about
his technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There
might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a
technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction
in which, over the next fifteen years, using clever finance

(01:43:44):
and and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the
climate emergency. And yeah, as always, kind of the main
barriers to doing the best version of the thing is
the political realities on the ground. You know, you have to,
but I think that's the that's the value of at
least trying to make it clear that there are options.

(01:44:06):
I wanted to shift for a moment um. I was
thinking recently about I think probably the earliest back book
of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved.
I think I'm gonna you know, if you're one of
the folks like me who was on the Internet back
when you know, file sharing sites, when that was a
huge topic of discussion, when the r i A Was

(01:44:27):
going after people, when like copyright was kind of a
a much more prevalent part of kind of the online discourse. Um.
It deals a lot in that and these kind of
I think there's elements of it that kind of prefigured
what Disney has done buying up every imaginable fictional property
in the world. And that's kind of the the elements

(01:44:49):
of dystopia that book deals with is is, you know,
the attempts of these this these giant multinational entertainment corporations
to shut down the free tape trading of ideas, remixing
and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking about
the difference between the focus of that and the focus
of books like Attack Surface, where you're really delving more
into you know, I the fictional versions of real life

(01:45:11):
companies like Tiger Swan that do it, uh what the
surveillance on protesters and all around the world, and that
are kind of using tactics that were pioneered by other contractors,
and like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I guess kind
of the things that I find interesting about that as
as I can remember when I was first on the Internet,
the big social kind of crusades online with the people

(01:45:35):
that that I paid attention to at least was all
around copyright. It was about not just you know, the
attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work,
but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and
like into these these ever kind of larger uh agglomerations,
and and that's kind of hit. It seems to have

(01:45:58):
hit like a terminal point with the you know, movies
like ready Player one and kind of a lot of
the stuff we're seeing in Marble where everything is showing
up everywhere, Space Jam two. UM. I guess the part
of it that feels less dystopian the days attempts to
crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went
kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually

(01:46:18):
in your thoughts on that, UM, because I can remember,
you know, when the r I A would be threatening
people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff
on kaza we seem to be I don't know. Is
it just that it gets less like I'm interested in
your in your thoughts on that. Is it just that
it's less publicized when they crack down on people, or
has kind of the nature of their response to that
really changed. Well, I think that what's happened with the

(01:46:41):
kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been
the introduction of um brittleness and fragility into our speech
platforms like Twitter, uh and and Facebook and YouTube, where
it's very easy to get material removed by by making
copyright claims UM. And you know, we see out with
the sleazier side of the reputation management industry where they

(01:47:03):
use bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You know,
there was a group of leftists who are really celebrating
the idea that if you if Nazis were marching in
your town, you could stop them from uploading their videos
by playing copyrighted music in the background, and I was like,
you have no idea, what a terrible fucking idea that is.

(01:47:24):
And you know, within a couple of years, cops and
Beverly Hills were doing it. Whenever people tried to film
the police there, they would just turn on some Taylor
Swift to try and stop uploading. UM. You know, the
thing about the copyright wars is that the real action
turned out to be in UM wage theft through monopolization. So,

(01:47:45):
you know, the neutering and destruction of label independent music
distribution platforms like Khazah or Groster or Napster, and the
Supreme Court decision, the Groster decision that supported that meant
that the only UM way that you could launch a
service like that was in cooperation with the big labels,

(01:48:06):
and the you know, most successful one is Spotify. Spotify
is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels
use that ownership stake to negotiate a kind of formalized
wage theft where they allowed for a lower perse stream
rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part

(01:48:27):
of that money goes to their musicians. And that meant
that the firm Spotify, retain more profits which it returned
to it in the form of higher dividends, and dividends
go just straight to their shareholders. They don't that there's
no claim that musicians can make on this. And because
they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective

(01:48:47):
of whether you were assigned to one of the big
three labels, ended up getting the same per stream rate
as as Universal's artists. So they were able to structure
the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side,
UH copyright laws, notably Section twelve of one of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law past that

(01:49:09):
makes it a felony to remove DRM to bypass a
technical protection measure UM that has become the go to
system for blocking, repair, interoperability UH and to prevent third
parties from um UH from from creating services or add
ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security,

(01:49:33):
um AD blocking and privacy and so on. They just say, well,
you know, we we put a one molecule thick layer
of DRM around say YouTube, and when you make a
YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, UM, you you
just create a um A UH you bypass our technical
protection measure and so you're committing a felony, and you

(01:49:54):
can go to prison for five years and and pay
a five dollar fine. And so you have this like
relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into like automotive tractors. Medtronic
uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. UM. So
you know, this, this UM assault on the ability to

(01:50:15):
reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in our
lives and that increasingly holds our lives in its in
its hands right its choices determine whether we live or
die has been really consequential. And I know we don't
really think of it as a copyright problem. We think
of it as right to repair. We think of a
security auditing our accessibility. But the rule that is being

(01:50:37):
used to block into operability is a copyright law. It's
what printer companies used to stop you from buying third
party inc um. It's what Apple uses to stop you
from installing a third party app store. And you know,
the absence of a third party app store is why
when Apple removed all the working VPNs in China, Chinese
users couldn't just switch to another app store that had

(01:50:59):
working vp ends in it. And so you know that
this um endgame of the copyright wars is I think
a lot more dystopian than uh merely suing college kids. Uh,
it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are
that are hard to fathom. Yeah, it's a fascinating example

(01:51:20):
of kind of dystopic creep because, at least kind of
from my more more ignorant position, when I was nineteen,
I was like worried that all of these these people
remixing music and movies that I liked, like we're going
to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled
um And the the kind of thing that I didn't
I don't think a lot of people saw coming until
it hit. I certainly didn't, was what you were just

(01:51:42):
talking about the fact that kind of the logic of
how these these entertainment companies were looking at like an
album or you know, a movie and and cutting up
pieces of that they've they've applied to like a tractor,
you know, and now you can't like repair your John
Deer or modify your John Deer so it works better.
And then you know, you get situations like we just
kind of averted with the John Deere strike where there

(01:52:04):
was a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able
to get a large chunk of a harvest because there
wouldn't be parts and you can't put your own in.
And that's to think that that the thought process that
led us there started with like trying to protect Metallica.
In some ways, it's kind of funny. And this is
why the anti monopoly critique is great because it shows
you that there's cause for solidarity between John Deere tractor

(01:52:26):
owners and John Deere tractor UH makers the workers who
work there, because the same force that has allowed John
Deere to cram down its workforce for forty years is
the is the force that allows it to um uh
take away the agency and economic liberties of farmers who

(01:52:46):
own John Deer tractors. And it's it's the it's the
political power that comes with monopoly. And so you know,
if John Deer were a smaller, weaker firm, it would
be less able to resist both the claims of its
work force and the claims of its um uh customers.
Mhm yeah, I mean that makes that makes sense, and

(01:53:07):
it is like I like that idea of of because
it's not just kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers,
UM and and the people who work in the factories.
It's also there's kind of solidarity between a wide like
anyone concerned with UM copyright. It's a much broader base
of solidarity than just people who are worried about you know,

(01:53:29):
what's happening uh to fiction or like what Disney is
doing to like copyrights around Mickey Mouse or whatever. Like
it's it. You can you can draw in concerns from
right to repair to a bunch of other things, which
potentially means there's there's a greater body of people available
for action if you can make them see kind of
um converging interests there, which is I think is an

(01:53:50):
interesting idea. Well, I think you're getting something really important
and this is UM. This comes from James Boyle who's
a copyright scholar at Duke University and was really involved
and found in creative commons and in those early copyright
fights and and Jamie makes an analogy to the coining
of the term ecology. He says that before the term
ecology came along, you know, someone us cared about owls

(01:54:12):
and someone us cared about the ozone layer, but it
wasn't really clear that we were on the same side.
You know, it's not clear. If you're Martian looking through
a telescope, you might be hard pressed to explain why.
You know, the destiny of charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and
the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere were the same issue,
right in the term ecology. Let all these people who

(01:54:32):
cared about different things find a single point to rally around.
It turned a thousand issues into one movement. And I
think that in the in the course of resisting corporate power,
which is to say, resisting monopoly, we have the potential
to weld together people from very diverse fields. You know,
farmers and people who make tractors. Sure, but you know
if you grew up watching professional wrestling and now you're

(01:54:56):
a ghas that the wrestlers that you loved are begging
on go fund me for pennies to die with dignity,
you know, once someone explains to the reason that that's
happening is that thirty wrestling leagues became one wrestling league
that was able to practice worker's classification, turn those performers
into contractors, take away their health insurance, and leave them
to die. Then Suddenly you're on the same side of

(01:55:17):
the people who were worried about big Tech and big
tractor and the people worried about the fact that there's
only one manufacturer of cheerleading uniform uniforms and two manufacturers
of athletic shoes, and two manufacturers of spirits and two
manufacturers of beer. One manufacturer of eyewear that also owns
all the eye wear stores and the eyewear ensure. You

(01:55:37):
know that Duff Beer thing from the early Simpsons where
there's like Duff Beer raspberry thing, Dulci, Gabana, Oliver, People's Boushan, Loam, Versaci.
Every eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company
coach all of them. And they also own Sunglass Hut
and uh Target Optical and Years Optical, and lens Crafters

(01:56:02):
and Specsavers and every other eyewear story you've ever heard of.
And they bought all the labs that make the lenses,
so more than half the lenses in the world come
from them. A division called and they bought Imed, which
is the company that bought all the insurance companies that
ensure I wear, and so they're also the company that's
ensuring your glasses, your your eyes. One company and I

(01:56:24):
Wear costs a thousand percent more than it did a
decade ago. They stole our fucking eyes. Right, So people
who care about that have common cause with people who
care about wrestlers and people who care about beer and
big tech and the fact that there's four shipping companies
and they have no competitive pressure and so they just
keep building bigger ships that gets stuck in the fucking

(01:56:44):
Suez canal Right, we're all on the same side. Yeah,
And I I like the idea that I like. I
like hoping that that kind of inherent solidarity, if you
can point it out to people, is potentially an antidote to,
or at least a partial antidote to the level of
the layer of politicization that's fallen down over everything um

(01:57:06):
that stops people from actually considering matters but instead considering
Like I don't know, is this owning the libs? Right?
Like if you if they if if you can get
them to see that, like, yeah, their favorite wrestler is
like dying because he couldn't afford insulin, and that that
that's tied to the issue of like the reason his
dad can't get tractor parts this year or whatever, um
and that that's tied to other issues that are maybe

(01:57:28):
championed by people he would reflexively dismiss. But like, yeah,
I I I find that really inspiring. It's still a
significant there's a significant challenge for people who are trying
to make those connections, for folks who are who are
trying to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah,
that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell

(01:57:49):
you that the reason to do cultural world culture culture
war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture,
and there's probably an element of truth to that. But
I also think the reason that he full fine culture
war bullshits so attractive is because they got nothing else. Yeah,
I think we we talked about that a lot within
the context of conservative for politics. I grew up very conservative,

(01:58:11):
and I do remember how the tenor of things I
was hearing through the Bush ears changed from advocation of
policies to just all culture war, all the time, all
all striking the dims all the time. And it was
the kind of um it and that's not the only
place that's happen you see it on the left to
absolutely like it's it's endemic. Now it's it's a poison

(01:58:33):
in kind of the discourse. But I think that there's
a lot that needs to be I think there's a
lot to be discovered still for like how to break
people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we
talk about these issues, like you were bringing up with
sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect
to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff

(01:58:53):
like three D printing presents for that. We have an
organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing
glasses frame since stuff and is helping people with that
sort of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the
Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. I think it's called UM. Yeah,
some of the folks doing like trying to do working
on pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost

(01:59:17):
uh kind of home scratch brewed versions of like different
aids medications, and the Holy Grail is doing that with
um insulin effectively UM and I think it is. And
I do think one of the things that's exciting about
that is because the way in which the way in
which collaboration on three D printing works in the way
in which actually spreading, like the ability to do stuff works.

(01:59:39):
I think it synergizes nicely with the ability of people
to kind of reach other folks through writing or other
forms of content, because they can both spread through the
same You can have a video or a story, and
you can have like kind of embedded guides on how
to do that. Um I I I don't know that
I've I've runned into a lot of your writings on
kind of the potent chell of three D printing in

(02:00:01):
this space, But I'm interested, like to what do you do?
Are you looking at that as kind of an area
of hope or do you see that still is kind
of to two niche and labor focus to really actually
take off in the way that it would need to
to crack some of these nuts. This is where I
do my my Woody Allen, you know nothing of my
work stick because I had this novel Maker Makers in

(02:00:23):
two thousand and eight. It's it's why uh Bree Pettis
went out and founded Maker bought uh and it's you know,
credited with like kickstarting the homebrew three D printed revolution
blah blah blah blah blah and um and it was
a very bullish novel about three D printing. I UM,

(02:00:43):
you know, the reality hasn't lived up to the hype yet.
It may just be that we're in the long trough
of despair, as the Gardner hype cycle model has it. Uh.
But you know, I think the problem with UM three
D printing was that the patents have been concentrated into
the hands of two arch firms that had bought all
their competitors, including Maker Bought and UM. When those patents

(02:01:06):
finally expired. The big one was the laser centering of
of powder. Patent expired, there just wasn't a big bang.
And I think it's because the supply chain for it
still had a lot of proprietary elements, and so producing
the powder and producing the components that allowed for that
powder printing remained a very high bar, and so we

(02:01:29):
just didn't see the kind of new industry emerged that
we would have hoped for. And you know, it's like
seven years since those patents expired. Five years since those
patent expired. Now we're seeing a few more of those
powder printers. You get a lot more like UVY cured
epoxy printers because those came off patent earlier, and they
have a less complicated supply chain. Um, but still, I

(02:01:50):
mean mostly when we talked about printers, we're talking about filament,
and just filaments just not a great technology. It's been
pushed in ways that you wouldn't even leave and people
have figured out how to do absolutely incredible things with it.
But it's not It's not something that you would make
aerospace components for, you know, it's it's it's something that

(02:02:12):
you make um novelty dungeons and dragons, dice out of
which is an important industry to disrupt. Don't get me wrong,
but I'm with you, with you. I can remember paying
thirty bucks for a set of dice as a kid
and thinking, somebody's gotta fix this scam. I can put
you something for Christmas, Robert, thank you, Garrison. And you
know now I I own a I bought a comic

(02:02:34):
on a couple of years ago. I bought a tiny
little D twenty made out of meteoric or I have
a sky metal D twenty. Oh now that's yeah, that's
that's classy. Um. I'm curious. We've got a little bit
of time left and I wanted to ask in your
your novel attack surface. I know it was released right October,
if I'm not mistaken. UM. And obviously a lot of

(02:02:56):
that deals with again these kind of like corporations that
have been contractors for the D O D doing like
fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan bringing that
technology to crack down on like US, uh, sort of
dissident left wing political movements. It comes out the year
that we have a nationwide kind of uprising, UM that

(02:03:17):
a lot of fucked up surveillance ship that had been
kind of demoed state side around it like standing Rock
and whatnot, gets gets really put into its own How
much of that was written before ship went down? And
I and I'm assuming, like I don't know exactly how
your process works, but I'm wondering, like, I assume you
started the project before everything went the way it did

(02:03:38):
last summer. How much did kind of what happened last
summer affect the way you imagined that technology in those
tactics functioning in that book. Yeah, the the timeline goes
the other direction. I wrote that book before the summer uprising, UM,
long long, long long before that, And I wrote it
about things like UM, the surveillance technology we saw in

(02:04:01):
Belarus and chev and also at Occupy and Standing Rock
and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations and uprisings in Americans. Yeah,
and if you you know also the monotonic expansion of
surveillance leagues right where you know, first we learned about

(02:04:22):
MC catchers, and then we learned about dirt boxes, which
are MC catchers on airplanes, and you know, like we
just all of that stuff leaked like crazy because you know,
these surveillance giants are are not good at what they do, right,
which isn't a reason we should be hopeful. A company
that's bad at what it does is in some ways

(02:04:43):
even worse because one of the ways that they're incompetence
expresses itself is that they often gather a bunch of
data on innocent people and then leak it, right, not maliciously,
just through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the the
this expansion of surveillance has like been on my mind
for a long time, and I've been writing about it,

(02:05:05):
well at least since Little Brother, Right, So two thousand
and six, I wrote that novel, and I've had my
finger in that. Yeah, So I've had my finger in
that for all that time and and working with the
f F, it's impossible to miss sure. Was there a
degree to which, um, I don't know, I guess we're
you surprised by anything that happened last time? Or did
it just kind of comprehensively feel like these are everything

(02:05:27):
slotting into place that I knew was heading in this direction?
Because yeah, I mean, you're right, I did like there
was like everything was kind of presaged um years before.
I'm yeah, I I'm wondering if if there was anything
that kind of surprised you, um, or was it was
it all just sort of what you've been braced for. Yeah,
I don't feel like there were any kind of surveillance surprises.

(02:05:51):
I mean the reverse the use of reverse warrants. I
think we all kind of assumed was going on. There
had been hints of it in Google's warrant canarias beforehand.
But you know those geofense warrants, which again, if you're
like sitting there going oh, geofense warrants are awesome because
they're catching the one six rioters, Like, dude, you are

(02:06:11):
going to be so disappointed, Holy sh it, that's not
where they're going to keep using this yeah. UM, so,
you know, learning more about those reverse warrants I think
was was interesting. UM, but I don't feel like, I
don't well off the top of my head, I can't
say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged,
you know. I I um kickstarted the audiobook for Attack

(02:06:34):
Surface uh, and I offered as like the top tier
you could commission short stories in the Little Brother universe,
and there were three of those and I just finished
the first of them, and it's about um future pipeline
protests and uh. You know, I spent a lot of
time in my research looking at the surveillance that was
done on the pipeline protests, and a lot of it

(02:06:56):
was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible at jobs, right,
like the intercepts, long publication of of uh, you know,
long documents about how those operators worked. They just like
showed up in military haircuts and combat boots. And then
we're like, Hey, I'm from Portland and I'm here because
we're gonna funk up some bad guys. Let's go do it.

(02:07:17):
Let's go do violence and save Indian country. And like
everyone's like you, like, does anyone want to buy drugs?
And and the actual protesters were like you're a provocateur,
like go away, you know, like they could tell. I mean,
I guess you know, there are a lot more effective
in the UK in infiltrating the climate movement. You know,
they impregnated several protesters, so you know, and had long

(02:07:41):
term relationships with them and raised kids with them. So
there is no but here stories yeah here, it was
not that we did just didn't see that incredible efficacy. Yeah,
And I do think that that's I think kind of
the message I took out of it because I I
was I started reporting on like dirt boxes back during
Standing Rock, just having them, like it explained to me

(02:08:03):
by people who were on the ground when I showed
up that like, yeah, there's this your like phones don't
work the same out here, and like we're trying to
figure out what's going on, but like everything is is
and it's not just that we're out in the sticks
or anything. And I think the only surprise, the big
surprise for me last year was how I think how
little the technology accomplished for them and how much it

(02:08:23):
just it just wound up back down to violence. It
was like that was kind of the for all of
the toys they had. The toys that actually made the
most difference was gassing and beating people and violence and
like old fashioned informants that was that was the stuff,
and just having a dude there. Yeah, they were really
relied on. And the fact that you that that you, Corey,
weren't super surprised, but anything last year, I think kind

(02:08:46):
of just more shows kind of the strength of your
work in terms of how you're very good at seeing
the trends that are already happening but taking them to
their next logical place. Um. And it's a really great
way to kind of get a sense of what is something,
what what will something maybe look like in the next
decade or so, because it's it's all based on already

(02:09:07):
existing stuff, just in different kind of original ways. So
that's why I think it's it's so useful to look
at your books as as an activist, specifically around like
surveillance and stuff, because it's it's just really it's it's
really good for kind of keeping keeping an eye on
keep my head, yeah, and and keeping an eye on
what's keeping an eye on you, um, and all that

(02:09:29):
kind of stuff. This was a really lovely conversation was
a lovely last thing to do in my home office
in because I leave tomorrow and won't be back until
the next year, and then I'm actually gonna be offline
for a month after a joint replacement. So it was
it was really lovely to meet you all on to
chat with you. Thanks so much for chatting with us today.
Glory my pleasure. You know what, I think it's time

(02:10:04):
to do a podcast. All right, I did it, Sophie.
This is it could happen here a podcast that's begun.
We talk about how things are falling apart, and occasionally,
when we're feeling good, how to maybe how to maybe
put them back together a little bit. But today we're
more talking about the growing consensus that things in the

(02:10:30):
US culture wars are heating up to an unacceptable level
and and maybe people are going to start doing some
non culture type wars here in the near future, like
a civil type war here in the near future. Those
of you who know me, which why would you be
listening to this podcast if you If you don't know,
like the earlier seasons of this exact show, uh know

(02:10:53):
that I talk a lot about the potential of a
mass civil conflict in the United States. I've been kind
of trying to warn about it for a while, and
today we're gonna do an episode about some of the
more mainstream sources that have started to kind of accept
this as a possibility, um and get concerned about it. Garrison,
You've presented us with three articles, one from NBC News,

(02:11:16):
one from The Independent, and one from the Brookings Institute,
all kind of fiddling around this idea that certain unnamed
journalists have spent years discussing. So, yeah, we're gonna we're
gonna get into it. Garrison. Yeah, so it is the past.
The past few months we have well, I've I've been

(02:11:37):
watching to see how how this idea has been slowly
kind of getting in popularity. Of course, there was like
a spike in this around like January six, but then
stuff kind of settled down, and now we're kind of
seeing it come back up against We had these these
three pieces all published within like a month of each other, um,
all kind of on this topic and specifically, like the

(02:11:58):
pieces themselves are definitely going coming at this from a
more like liberal perspective, But the thing that made them
interesting is that they did have a decent number of
like of of polls and uh and and surveys in
them based on like what who who, what types of
people think are like are thinking about this and think
it's more more of a possibility. One survey published on

(02:12:22):
November one, they've said eighteen percent of Americans believe that
quote unquote patriots might have to resort to violence to
quote save the country. Um so. And then that included
a thirty percent of Republicans, um so, but eighteen percent
of all of of of of Americans in general Republicans. Yeah,

(02:12:43):
So using that very specifically turn of phrase is definitely
uh notable. And then another pole from arlier in the
year found that forty six percent of people thought the
country was somewhat or very likely to have another type
of civil war. And that's the plurality of the people
pulled in that because only like said unlikely, So the

(02:13:06):
majority of people are not the majority of people pulled,
but like the most common leaned on, yes it is,
I think maybe we're going to have us a war, yeah,
which is not great. The one that uh NBC published
included in their article had but like thirty three percent
of people saying no, it's it's probably not gonna happen
kind of on the maybe and and and and forty seven,

(02:13:28):
leaning on yeah, this maybe this is this is probably
gonna happen at some point soon. Yep. I mean a
lot of a lot, a lot of what these articles
are talking about is just like kind of the increased
increased threats against like elected officials and then increased almost
like militancy or performative militancy of elected officials types of

(02:13:49):
like like you know, like a performatively bringing your gun
into Congress and that type of thing. And it lays
out like a list of a list of like of
of of threats or stuff enacted against governors, congressmen, all
that kind of stuff in in the past, in the
past like a year year mainly. Yeah. One of the
things I really disagree about the Brookings because Brookings is

(02:14:11):
the one who kind of is analyzing that that big
poll and talking about it. Has a list of reasons
why we might have a civil war and a list
of reasons why it's unlikely. And one of the reasons
why it's unlikely is quote, most of the organizations talking
about civil war or private not public entities, um. And
note that when Southern states seceded in eighteen sixty they
had police forces, military organizations, and state sponsored militias. The

(02:14:36):
rights of that now, Yeah, Like there's a ton of
signal posting from guys like Jim Jordan's uh Hawthorne, um,
Gates Bobert um, a ton of signal posting of GOSAR,
from elected Republican leaders, from governors, from state level elected officials, um.

(02:14:59):
And like regular street cops. Yeah, and like regular street
cops that are like civil war adjacent, um, if not
directly advocating for internet scene violence. So I think that
that I don't think Brookings, I don't think they're analysis
is spot on with this. And I think there's just
one other thing that's interesting about that, which is I

(02:15:22):
think it was one of those are these our sps
arguing that it was like, well, the Pentagon's not particularly
civil like, well, the Pentagon doesn't want civil war, They're
not gonna step into it. But but I think it
is also important to note that, like, like if you
remember what happened last summer, there's a lot of FEDS
who are just like, you know, like when like yeah,
so so you know, the the army kind of doesn't

(02:15:44):
want Trump to like send the army against protesters. But
like you know, like bor Tak for example, like was
just like absolutely hyped up to just like absolutely just
go disappear a bunch of peopowl and they were very
excited about that part. Yeah, Yeah, they love they love
this stuff, and it's like, yeah, the notion that it's

(02:16:07):
less likely because it doesn't have like formal police backing
is really silly because if you spend any time monitoring
these type of militia groups, you know that a good
portion of them are also members of some type of
law enforcement or have like family connections to There have
been a bunch of cases of weapons being stolen stolen
from forts um, particularly in like the West coast right now, Like, yeah,

(02:16:29):
there's a ton of connections to the and a ton
of like members in common. It's like at the Capital
riot there were like thirty something active duty police officers involved. UM.
To say that there's not direct connections with law enforcement
is nonsense. And it's true that like our military leadership
remains pretty much a political and very like committed to

(02:16:51):
being a political in the sense that like in the
within the like US partisan context, right, like they don't
come in to prop up the Democrats of the Republicans,
And I don't think that's immediately likely. But police forces
in the United States are extremely politicized and have more
than enough power to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign nationwide.

(02:17:13):
And as long as the US military didn't step in,
and why would they, like the cops are willing and
able to do the civil warring for the government. Why
do you think they have all those tanks? You? So? Yeah,
like there is there is a lot of backing um,
at least performatively among certain types of like writing politicians
and of course police. But I think a lot of
what the politicians are trying to do is more like

(02:17:36):
encourage regular folks or people in like civilian militias to
just start doing violence against other elected leaders. That seems
to be like like like Bobart and that, and those
types aren't. They're not like telling police to go do this.
They're speaking to like regular people. UM. And I think
one one one decent point the actually the nbcp's actually

(02:17:59):
puts out, it's it's all of this kind of like
divisive um and and more violent of rhetoric and behavior
displayed by and towards some of our like officials. Does
not necessarily mean another like civil war in terms of
like a military conduct contest between states. Um, it just
does not mean that it's inevitable or even probable or
even like probable. A more likely scenario is a turbulent

(02:18:21):
era of civil disturbances, armed confrontations, standoffs, threats, assassination attempts,
and other acts of political violence. In other words, one
that's a lot like the last two years of American history,
which I feel like, yeah, in terms of in terms
of the likelihood of there being like a more formally
declared kind of conflict versus just versus just like increasingly

(02:18:43):
increasingly normalizing extreme violence against uh you know, quote unquote
fellow countrymen. I think is is ah, yeah, like that
there's we are going to be more likely to be
just moving in that direction slowly, and at the point
when there is frequent enough exchange of the fire, that's
when we say, yeah, we're basically in a civil war.

(02:19:05):
We're just not calling it that, um, which is you know,
that's the points that you, Robert have made a lot
in the in the past. Yeah, I mean, and there's
I I'm I think a lot of this is just
a failure of kind of imagination and ability to accept
from a group like Brookings, who I know has paid
some attention to the Syrian Civil War, that like civil

(02:19:27):
conflicts in the United States or in the in the
twenty one century often don't like there's no clear regional split.
Like you look at a lot of what was happening
in Syria. You had cities divided up by neighborhoods between
like who who was in charge? Um, you know that
that's very much what we see here. And you do
see like clear regional split between urban and rural divides.

(02:19:50):
And it's not like they say, within specific states, but
like I would say, it's very specific and limited states
that don't have huge urban rural divides. Um, Like, that's
that is the norm everywhere in this country that I've been.
Maybe it's different in fucking Vermont or New Hampshire, but
I don't trust those places. Um yeah, And I guess

(02:20:13):
I think they're overly optimistic based on kind of a
fundamental misunderstanding of how these sorts of conflicts occur. Um
that said, I don't know, Like it's it's one of
those things I think the number one the number one
thing you should be looking at in terms of whether
or not a civil war is likely is the number

(02:20:35):
of people who respond in polls with things like, yes,
I think we need to use violence to restore the
nation or whatever. UM that it's not just enough, like
I I it's not just enough to think that a
civil war is likely, because a lot of that's just
based on people who don't want one, but are paying
attention to the same media as everybody else and are

(02:20:56):
watching the same stuff we're watching, and they're like, well,
this seems sketchy. I think think the main indicator is
the number of people who respond, yeah, I think it
would be awesome to use violence as a like in
order to make America more like what I wanted to be. UM.
And again that doesn't mean we'll we'll creep over the point.

(02:21:16):
There's a number of interesting things that have happened UM
on kind of the we're headed towards the civil war side.
The number one thing that I've seen recently is the
use of paramilitary organizations UM to kind of choke uh
local civil institutions UM like school boards. I I see
that as very concerning and as kind of prelude to

(02:21:38):
the sort of armed mobilizations that you would see unlocalized
areas in any kind of civil conflict. It's it's the
precursors to death squads. So that's the that's the thing
that I see on the ground that worries me most. Um.
In terms of the thing that I'm I'm less certain
about honestly, Like one of the things they note in

(02:21:59):
here in Brookings article that like the sheer number of
guns in the United States is a reason why we
might have a civil war, And I agree with that entirely.
When you have four million weapons in private hands, it
increases the odds that they'll be used in some sort
of scale. UM. We've also seen historic numbers of non
white people of of of like folks who are from

(02:22:21):
marginalized communities, UM, not just buying up weapons that unprecedented rates,
but organizing with them. And I'm not really sure how
to think of that. There's certainly a way it could
certainly be a very negative development, but it could also be.
I think a big part of what I've seen from
the right lately is the sense of impunity, UM. And

(02:22:43):
I think the feeling of being matched uh in arms
is an end to impunity potentially. UM. Then the big
question is, like, well, what about the police, and like, well,
if the police side with the riot against you know,
there's there's still a number of questions there and we
don't have any clean answers. But um, I don't know that.
I I think that on the whole, I'm more worried

(02:23:06):
than I was two years ago when I wrote it
could happen here. Um, but it's not clean. And I
think in some to some extent, I'm I'm a little
more worried about something like the years of lead in
Italy than I am about Syria right now, if that
makes sense, I will say one thing about the years
of lead, which because a lot of people talk about

(02:23:28):
the years of less, so that the years a letter
this kind of like a roughly ten year period in
Italy of I don't know, mass terrorismating political violence with
effigant body counts in a way that stood out from
the years around it. Yeah, And I mean, you know,
the years of lead haus And there's a litt also,
there's there's a bunch of intelligence and she's involved. There's

(02:23:49):
a lot of foreign kind of false false bombings, like
hundred hundreds of people are being killed in bombings, and
I think there there's one absolutely crucial difference between now
in the years of let I mean, well, okay, so
partially it's that unlike Italy, we don't have seventeen thousand
intelligence agency is operating in the US and like trying
to kidnap and kill the foreign prime minister. But the

(02:24:11):
the other thing that's very important is that unlike unlike
the Italian left, and you know, really unlike the whole
global left of the seventies and eighties, there is no
American like left wing like left wing I guess you
could call like, there's there's no left wing terrorist tradition,
right like the like the left doesn't do suicide bombings,

(02:24:32):
the left doesn't kidnap people like like the modern American
left doesn't do that, and that a big part of
what was happening from the years of lad was that,
you know, sometimes the left was doing this. A lot
of times it was the state pretending to be the
left carrying out bombings. And that isn't really something that
is happening right now because there's just like the like,

(02:24:53):
the the left is not in a place where everyone
is going, we need to do armed durban guerrilla movements
and yeah, so and then that that makes it harder
to sort of pin things like pin actual urban guerrilla
movement stuff on the left because there's just none of that.
But I don't think and I agree years of Left

(02:25:13):
is kind of like a broad Strokes comparison, because what
I see is more likely is what we're what we're
already witnessing on the ground with these right wing militant
groups increases, and they moved to the point of kidnapping
and executing and potentially in concert with law enforcement, like
doing stuff like in states that have issued harsh laws,

(02:25:33):
you know, banning certain books you have in a town,
local law enforcement and militias like go after and grab
individual leftists and either kill or imprison them, and conflicts
over that, and you have the left increasingly organized an
arm um as a defense against that, and then a
number of armed conflicts, you know, as a result of that,

(02:25:53):
which maybe then proceed to bombings and stuff that that's terrorism,
or proceed to just more kind of skirmishes that the
FEDS have a minimal response to, and local or state
law enforcement kind of tacitly allows um like that. That's
that's kind of obviously that's not a direct comparison to
what happened in Italy, but of course we're a different country.

(02:26:15):
But that's kind of that's kind of the kind of
brush fire conflict I could see cropping up in the
very near future in this country. You know what else
will start a series of armed gun fights between left
and right in American towns. The products and services they're

(02:26:42):
they're working on it every day, the products and services
that support this podcast urged violence on the streets of
the United States. That's behind the bastards. Guarantee, Sophie, We're
not doing behind the bastards? What what show are we?
Who are we? Any? Here's ads? All right? Oh my gosh,

(02:27:05):
Uh we're back. Yeah, what a great ad. I really
nailed that transition. Um, just absolutely. So. The next thing
that I want to talk about, um, something that I
think has some some backing behind it and something that
I think is kind of more silly, is that one

(02:27:25):
of one of the reasons that this uh NBC piece
by what's his name, uh, Brian Brian Michael Jenkins is
uh he says, one of one of the reasons that
we're kind of getting more okay with you know, uh,
killing or hurting our neighbors essentially is um quote, Americans

(02:27:50):
do fewer things together. Church attendance is declining. Membership and
civic organizations and lodges have been decreasing for decades. PTA
membership has dropped by nearly half from what it was
in sixties, Bowling leagues have almost disappeared, and a shared
national experience of military service disintegrated with the abolition of
conscription in nineteen seventy three. Meanwhile, self proclaimed citizen militia's

(02:28:14):
driven mainly by far right conspiracy theories, have surged since
two US and eight, especially in the past five years.
So he is wrong, but he's yes, militias have leagues,
militias have risen. But is that due to bowling leagues. Yeah,
I don't think it's due to a drop in bowling leagues.

(02:28:35):
I think it's due to the fact that all these
guys are terminally online now and we're watching Fox News
for twenty years before that. That is the thing is that, like,
I don't think this guy, Brian Michael Dickens understands how
the Internet intersects with extremism because he's he's doing this
from a very like like he's he's acting like we're

(02:28:55):
still in the seventies and he like, like, that's not
how the war old works, and I like, people spend
their time. No, people aren't doing bowling leagues, but yeah, woman,
young men are spending and and you know, middle edgement
are spending time online, whether that be discord in a
terrorist group chat, or that be a Facebook group that's
for a militia, and that's where that socialization is happening.

(02:29:18):
And because the Internet rewards extremism and the hottest take,
it's moving in that direction even with people who would
ordinarily just have historically the past joined bowling leagues. I guess,
but it very it's it's correlation doesn't equal causation. Ship
it's wow, less people are in bowling leagues and going
to church and militias have grown wildly, wildly, Um, this

(02:29:41):
one must cause the other. And it's like, well, no,
they're both both of those things. May have some causes
in common, there may be similar factors that are driving
both of those things, but they are not caused like
they don't necessary. One doesn't necessarily cause the other. Um.
And if you like, again, the smart person version of
this would be to say, hey, people are doing less

(02:30:03):
things together out in the world. People are reporting because
you can find statistic backup for this. People seem to
be lonelier than ever. UM, people are more depressed than ever.
Suicide rates have risen, and while this is happening, militias
and extremist groups have grown. Perhaps there's something about these organizations,
UM that makes them particularly attractive when folks are vulnerable
due to these things. And like, let's look at you know,

(02:30:25):
the failure of our political system to confront these issues
further feeds into the desire amongst some chunk of the
populace for some sort of nihilistic cleansing violence. And again,
pieces of all the pieces of this article could be
could be reassembled into something with um some insight, but
I I don't think Brian Michael Jenkins has much. I

(02:30:46):
think it's also an interesting thing to note here about
because so the lessing he talks about this, oh, is
the thing that formed the commons or national identity was
shared universal Military service. And it's like, okay, the the
reason shared universal military service went away was that everyone
kept murdering literally just blowing their officers up in Vietnam

(02:31:07):
like that. And you know, if if you want to
talk about like incredibly high levels of political polarization and
like mass violence between Americans. I mean, the army basically
fighting a civil war against itself in Vietnam is you know,
in an enormously important part of this. And then simultaneously
the sort of right wing vets returning home and you know,

(02:31:27):
going Louis Beam and stuff like that that you know,
he's relying on this kind of mythos of this. So
there was a time when you know, it's it's basic,
it's basically made it make America great again. But sort
of like, yeah, that this type of rhetoric is actually
very similar to like the return return to tradition stuff,
being like the solution to our extremism that need to

(02:31:50):
be going to church church again, being a part of
civil organizations, joining bowling leagues and conscript conscripted military service.
That's like that is that that is just the same
that that is very similar to like the make America
grade again, returned to tradition sect because those are those
are also their goals, except that they're just willing to
use violence to achieve those goals, whereas this guy just

(02:32:12):
wants people to start doing that again. I guess, um,
I don't know, Yeah, like in terms of like military
service not leading to extremism, I mean, like Oklahoma City bombing.
I don't, I don't, I don't really there is other
stuff going on there. But like in terms of terms
of that being like an example, it is, it is
very silly because a lot of a lot of a
lot of the guys even inside you know, are are

(02:32:34):
current like three per centers and stuff. A lot of
them have former military service, so that I mean, but like, yeah,
citizen militias in terms of gaining popularity, but specifically due
to um kind of overall distrust of the federal government
and the type of socialization that being online too much

(02:32:57):
results in, has yes, grown, grown, grown the militia movement
a lot um and and I just don't see how
Bowling is going to solve that issue in terms of
in terms of how do we mean to trust the
federal government? Solve that issue? Garrison. But but you've never
watched The Big Lebowski, so you wouldn't you wouldn't understand.

(02:33:19):
I have not watched The Big Lebowski. So I'm kind
of I'm kind of I'm kind of done with the
kind of done with the NBC piece there. I know,
there was there was something Brian Michael Jenkins. The other
thing on on the Brookings thing that I have a
decent issue with is that they're one of the reasons

(02:33:41):
they give for and and this is actually something that
Brian Michael Jenkins also brings up with the NBC piece,
is that one of the reasons why they believe the
civil war is not as inevitable is because there is
no clear regional split like a North South divide, and
they for some reason think this means that there is
less likely to be civil conflict. Um. They they recognized

(02:34:01):
there is an urban rule divide in most states, but
because there is no large, kind of obvious North South divide,
they think this is going to make a civil war
less likely. Well, the map would really be a pain
in the ass, so it probably won't happen, right, Like
that's that's the thing they're thinking, is like, Oh, if
I was gonna if I've have to map this out,
it's gonna be too complicated. When I read that, I

(02:34:22):
had flashbacks to my first trip to a war zone
in Ukraine, where we were like taking Google maps up
to a certain point and then we had to use
like hand drawn notes because he was like, well, the
different like the different chunks of this air next like
twenty acres that are owned by the separatists as opposed
to the government are like you can't use Google, It'll
send you into enemy territories because it's not a clean

(02:34:45):
break because you had literally suburbs of cities fighting each
other and you still do. Yeah, this is a this
is you know, I think personally, this this is this
is a sort of peak American brain thing because you know,
there's there's been like five ever civil wars that are
broken like this, and the problem is that there's American
Civil War and then we also fought in both Vietnam
and North Korea. But like, yeah, yeah, we were really

(02:35:09):
civil war. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that's there was fighting
between two halfs of the country that it was a
proxy for two others several other kind of ye and
that's yeah. And that's and that's the thing that like,
it's the combination of the American Civil War was very
unique civil war, and then the other major things that
we think of as like quote unquote civil wars were

(02:35:31):
you know, we're basically cold war stuff. And I mean,
you know, like that there there are a couple other
like yeah, I mean there have been other examples of
like secessionist stuff like that. Like I mean, in in
any civil war, like there's a lot of other countries
that get involved. In the US Civil War, there was
a significant amount of that sort of thing. And even
even even even in the US Civil War, like there

(02:35:52):
are just like towns in the middle of like Confederate
Territory they're like, no, funk this, we're not going over.
But everyone but people have this just like incredibly i
optic view of what a civil war is. And it's
like every other civil war that's been fought in the
last like fifty years has been just seven thousand factions
like neighborhood fighting each other. I don't know, it's just

(02:36:14):
incredibly frustrating watch these people not understand this. It's very
America brained, and it's very sad because I'm going to
read a quote that's gonna make us want to purge
our ears. There are urban rule differences within specific states,
with progressives dominating the cities while conservatives reside in rural communities,
but that is a far different geographic divide than when

(02:36:36):
one region could wage war on another. The lack of
a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to
confront other areas organized supply chains and mobilize the population.
There can be local skirmiches between different forces, but not
a situation where one state or region attacks another, which
is complete nonsense And that's not how like it's like

(02:36:58):
they don't understand that really fighting exists, and they don't
understand how the whole, the whole, the whole part about
organizing supply chains and mobilized population, like that is just
another way to fight a war is by exploiting that
specific thing like the fact that cities are so isolated
um and lack and and and lack of home much

(02:37:20):
resources and the fact that rural areas are isolated in
a different way and lack of separate resources. That is
not something that makes a civil war less likely. That
just makes it more complicated and makes it fighting over
Amazon fulfillment centers and the like. Yeah, like it's it's
the it is It is ridiculous, um saying that, Yeah,

(02:37:41):
saying that the that that it's it's far different from
a geographic divide that one reacher could wage one another
is like that, No that you're you're just saying something
that is just completely wrong and like you have not
studied any type of like urban conflict whatsoever. Yeah, And
and I think it's important thing to say, which is
that regions mostly it's not that region's wage warning. Yeah,

(02:38:06):
it's not. People don't do the fighting. Yeah, Like regions
aren't the things that are fighting. It's the people in areas,
and people can move around and people can block off
access to areas, and like it's it's this, it's a
weird it's a it's super a weird way to think
about things. And it's the fact that if if this
is something that like the Brooking Institution um is, if

(02:38:28):
this is what they think on this topic, that's pretty
sad indicator for what a lot of people how they
how like a lot of mainstream levels are going to
view the possibility of any type of civil conflict. And
I don't know, maybe they feel very secure in their cities, um,
which which is a weird thing. I've I've not felt
that in years. Yeah. And I think the other thing
that's very weird about this is that because so a

(02:38:50):
lot of people writing about this are x are um
like are like kind of terrorism people, right, and the
kind of terrorism kind of resurgence people. It's weird because
they used to understand it, like you know, like a
lot of like you know, because like in in you know,
in the twentieth century and even sort of early century,
like the the sort of the sort of standard like
grilla insurgency doctrine was, you know, it's some some some

(02:39:14):
some variation on the like maoists fish in the sea,
like surround the cities where we're like ural areas, etcetera,
etcet etcetera, and like and you you even see versions
of this, you know, in things that are quite civil
wars but are kind of like what happened like the
water and gas wars and Oblivi and there the three
thousand's where like you know, what what what, Yeah, you

(02:39:37):
have kind of an urban reyal divide with they have
allies in the cities, but the sort of you know,
like the you have a bunch of rural indigenous groups
that literally just you know, they blockade every road in
the country and then start off the cities out right.
I mean, this is this is this is this is
just a thing that happened in like five six It's
just like yeah, that is like, yeah, that is that

(02:39:58):
that is going to happen sooner than later, whether that
be caused by accident, by some type of climate natural disaster,
or on purpose by a militia like that, it's just
a matter of time until we have to deal with
this massive problem. Yeah. Um. And it's like I've been
reading recently about um Uruguay and what happened with them,
and like the seventies when their dictatorship took over and

(02:40:20):
they had a left wing group that was like very
much engaged in kind of a lot of acts of
poetic terrorism, like you know, robbing banks to steal paperwork
that they would then hand over to like somebody to
reveal malfeasance within a company, or like stealing trucks of
food going to like some big wealthy Christmas party and
redistributing it in poor neighborhoods. Pretty rad stuff. And one

(02:40:42):
of the ways in which the new incoming dictatorial regime
cracked down to them as they deputized like ten thousand
jud's and gave them guns and sent them in with
the army. Um. And I was like, yeah, I could
absolutely see ship could that happen? Yeah, Like if there
was some sort of uprising in a in a liberal city.
There's areas around them filled with chuds there and there

(02:41:07):
is precedent. There is precedent for police doing that. Um,
they have done it within your r I shot Garrison
like on small scales. So I think we'll have one
more break and come back and talk about a talk
about a hedge fund. Oh funk I love hedge funds.
Let me get Let me get my hedge funds. Shared

(02:41:27):
out the shirt that I wear when talking about hedge funds.
All right, I have my hedge found shirt on UM.
As you can all see, it's a picture of Ringo
star filating himself. I don't know why that's my hedge
fund shirt. I don't I don't know either, but I
love the beach boys. Um anyway, so thank you perfect

(02:41:49):
nailed it. Uh we should we talk about this hedge
fund guy? Yes? I do want to talk with the
hedge fund guy because this is when something with this
much money he is talking about this one just for fun, right,
he's doing this just for ships for funds. Yeah, he's
doing it for ships and giggles. And he wrote a
book kind of on this topic and he proposed one

(02:42:12):
one solution he came up with one thing that will
prevent us from entering a civil war. Um, which shows
how smart these hedge fund people are. Um. But first, uh,
I Chris would love to I would love for you
to explain who who this Who this dude is? Okay,
So Rage Dahlio is a hedge fund manager and he

(02:42:35):
is So he runs Bridge Bridgewater Associates one allegedly the
world's largest hedge fund firm. Yeah, and it depends how
you to find anything, but yeah, alleged it's a very
large fund. And this guy, this guy is weird by
like venture capital standards. So the Bridge Waters whole thing
is that everyone in the company is constantly surveiled at

(02:42:56):
all times, and anyone else in the company could look
at when anyone else is doing. It's supposed to be
like it's like total transparency, and what it actually means again,
is it like you can you can look at, like
fucking what any of your colleagues, like also working at
this place, is doing, just sucking at their day job.
You can see all their records, you can see everything
they're looking at. And the other thing that he's known
for is that he doesn't trust anyone else to like

(02:43:18):
run the hedge fund after he retires. Your dies. So
he's trying to build like like a cybernetic version of
his brain to keep running the hedge funds. The like
other hedge fund weirdos think this guy is fucking wild
And yeah, he's he's a time and he runs one
of the world's funds. It's great, it's we it's it's
amazing and good we give these people this much money

(02:43:38):
to control. So I will say, when it comes to
his actual analysis of like whether or not it's likely,
I don't particularly disagree with anything. Yes, I it's it's
broadly reasonable. Yeah, his looking Yeah for what, he's just
doing this because because he thinks it's fun. He has
enough money he's gonna survive whatever. Um. But yeah, he's

(02:44:01):
also I mean, part of why this is fairly credible
is he's I mean, if you're if you're good at this,
it means that you have one actual talent, which is
is judging risk. Um. And I think he's probably pretty
good at judging risk. Yeah, So he he he said
that he believes there's like a high likely could that
a civil war or something resembling it will break out
within the decade. Um is the number he gives. He's

(02:44:23):
the number he gives and then he, um, yeah, wait,
let's see. Yeah he said there's also he have a
quality says it's a we're we're in a we're in
a high risk position right now. Um, and yeah. He
he talks about the different kind of reasons why he
believes so in this book, most of which are like
pretty reasonable, um in terms of like uh in in

(02:44:46):
terms of like looking at a population and how much
how like you know, the various like polarization between politics
and culture and all this kind of stuff. Um. But
the solution that he gives to this is that, um,
we should make a formal judgment for quote unquote close

(02:45:07):
elections and have the losers respect the outcomes, and then
once that happens, the order is going to be like
restored and respected, and then we will avert a civil war.
So he he thinks that a civil will will probably
be like enacted by some type of election dispute, which
that is actually very reasonable in terms of what happened

(02:45:28):
in our last election. If there's like a big if
there's big elections, that can absolutely spark some type of conflict.
But the idea that we can avert a civil war
by just having an organization to judge close elections is like,
but that's not gonna solve Like, that's not gonna if
you do that, that's not going to solve the close
election problem. That doesn't even if you do it, that

(02:45:51):
won't be a solution. You know, I will say, like, yeah,
credit where minor credit is due. Raydalio is in fact
right that the difference between two thousands, which is when
the last time someone actually literally stolen election happened where yeah,

(02:46:11):
but Bush Bush openly reads the election. It's incredibly obvious,
like there there's like six ways he does this. Everyone
knows what's happening. And the reaction is everyone just kind
of shrugs because they're like, oh, this dream courts legitimate
compared to both, which, yeah, that that's you know, that's
that's that's there. There there's been an actual break there.

(02:46:32):
It's just that I don't know, maybe I think it's
it's almost just like a lip brained thing where it's
like you think that if you have an institution that
sets down rules this, this will make everything okay because
everyone will obey it. And that's just not where we
are anymore. Yeah, I mean there was just a poll
that came out recently that should like Americans trust in
the military has fallen to its lowest level ever registered,

(02:46:54):
and like that was kind of the one thing left
that most people felt positively about. Not to say that
that's even a good thing, but just like the there
is such a complete fucking lack of faith in institutions
across the spectrum in the United States. But it's like,
how unless you're hiring I don't know, um fucking no.

(02:47:15):
I would say Tom Hanks, but Tom Hanks has even
gotten politicized, even viruses. So yeah, there's no one they
could pick to get do this job that people would
feel good about if they Yeah, I mean, I'm sure
if they brought Mr Rogers back from the dead, half
the country would call him a cuck. So I don't
I don't know what what, I don't know who Daio
thinks is going to like get everybody on board. So

(02:47:40):
maybe maybe, uh maybe, um, Danny DeVito, Danny DeVito might
be able to do it. Well. I think if if
we put all of our hope in Danny DeVito, that
is a better solution than what any of these articles
the Supreme Court. It beats it beats every other quote
solution these articles. I mean Odin Kirk brought Twitter together

(02:48:05):
that one week. Maybe yeah, yeah, you know with with
the practice to your court. If you just picked twelve
random people off the street, and we're like, that's that's
the thing, it's like, I am, I am all for
It's the term isn't the term isn't a democracy? Um,
it's it's I forget the term yes of of almost

(02:48:27):
I forget exactly. But it's when a government is not
composed of elected leaders, composed of a random selected a
random selection of people, and they made decisions and then
their decisions over then we then we get a new selection.
I'm all for that model of government over almost any other.
It sounds way better than what we have. Yeah. Yeah,
So that that is. That is the three pieces I

(02:48:48):
want to talk about. The independent piece on the Hedge
Fund of Brooking Institution, on the Civil War, and then uh,
Brian went no, not not Brian, yes of Brian Michael
jenkins Um, senior advisor to the President of rand Brime
I j who who who wrote? Who? Who wrote the
thing for NBC. So yeah, that is just the terms

(02:49:10):
of in terms of you know, people in institutions talking
about the topic more generally and sometimes decent ways, oftentimes
not decent ways. That is, that is the stuff from
like the just the past between the past week, two months,
of people with big salaries talking about the Civil War, yeah,

(02:49:30):
or in terms of the in terms of the hedge
fun guy, not a salary, just billions of dollars, Yeah,
just billions of dollars and thinking it's neat. Um, I
don't know, you know, every time one of these comes out,
I get tagged by a bunch of people, um, saying
like Robbert is the thing you were talking about? Other
people are talking about it, and um, I don't know,

(02:49:53):
I don't like that this is the thing other people
are talking about that I've been talking about as opposed
to mass Zeppelin, transit or something more fun. Yeah, these
people could dedicate the resource into something more manageable for them.
And because they don't have a good grasp, especially the
Brian Michaeljakins guy has and has no grasp on how
extremism works. Um, And it would be better if they

(02:50:16):
dedicate the resources to something else. But this is the
world we live in. It would be better if perhaps
Brian Michael Jenkins dedicated his his efforts and his platform
at NBC to looking into Mr Dario and whatever the
funk he's been up to. Um that might that might
do more? Man, he just did plan them on. He
would absolutely Brian Michael Jakins would get PanAm on so

(02:50:38):
fucking quick. The panamanias motherfucker in journalism, just just like
not even not even downtime before that car gets bombed
as he's talking on air. The Okay, Brian Michael Jenkins
is seventy nine years old, so oh it won't it

(02:51:01):
wouldn't be hard. I just that that that's like a
ten minute job. I'm just I'm just thinking like Brian
Michael Jenkins, he's a quote unquote an American expert on
terrorism and transportation security with four neckends of analysis. This
is why he doesn't understand modern extremism. It's because, yeah,
he's still thinking in the seventies mode. That's why sure,
I'm sure of his thoughts on terrorism are just him

(02:51:25):
rehashing opinions about like Hezbollah in the eighties. Yeah, all
of all of his stuff is superdated. So that's that.
That's why I I said that previously, is that he
still views terrorism as like as it was in the
seventies and yeah, this is this is why. Um so
that's great, that's that's him. Um anyway, that wraps up
our show. Um, yeah, watch out for the one. The

(02:51:48):
one Brian Michael Jenkins prediction I do think will happen
is that there's a decent chance we might be back
in an assassination territory because it is but it has
been a long time since that has happened. It's it's
it has been a hot minute and definitely decrease in
bowling leagues. It keeps happening in the UK. Yeah, I
love was meaning specifically in in America and well, yeah,

(02:52:09):
that's what I'm saying. We're We're not that far away
from them in terms of like things happening, so that
I'm kind of surprised it hasn't had. I think it's
probably just because maybe American legislators are all much more
concerned about assassination because guns, so people like our elected
leaders take more precautions than British ones. Did I don't know.

(02:52:30):
Maybe I don't know either. Well, speaking of assassinations, you
can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. That happened here
probably Coles on media. If we Go Missing it was
great Dalo. If We Go Missing it was Ray Daldio.
But could ye everybody welcome to could happen here? Talk podcast? YEP,

(02:53:03):
I could say it a podcast. That's what we're doing,
and it's about it's about how things are kind of
kind of kind of falling apart sometimes, or at least
it feels like it, and I don't know, maybe we
can do some things to help make it better, like
what happened recently in terms of forests. So, hey, a
good news episode. Whoa rare rare rare episode drop for us? Uh,

(02:53:27):
we got some good news. So I'm gonna be talking
with Sam, who was on a previous episode discussing a
forest defense, about an update on on all of the
things that we were talking about a few weeks ago. Um,
So yeah, I think we can. We can pretty much
get into it and then then we'll talk about some
other stuff around kind of forests in general. So Hello, Sam,

(02:53:49):
Thank thank you for joining me again to talk about trees,
one of one of our favorite topics. Hello, my pleasure always.
So I think it was like a day or two
after we dropped the episode or something, or I think
I think it was. Actually it was maybe maybe even
like right like right before Um, we got some extra
extra news about all about the post about the postfire

(02:54:13):
logging um near the bright Bush Watershed. Um, yeah what
happened there? Yeah, yeah, it was pretty wild. Actually it
was really serendipitous timing too. UM. We as I think
we mentioned in the last podcast, we were awaiting the
first hearing for the court case. Essentially, you know, we

(02:54:34):
believed that the plan to log in that area for
myriad reasons was not only unethical but also illegal. Um.
And so it was going to court, and we were
awaiting a hearing that happened on December three, Friday. And
typically the judge does not rule from the bench in
these sorts of hearings, and so we did not expect
the decision on that day. UM. But sure enough, the

(02:54:56):
judge felt h strongly enough about this case and sure
enough about her decision that she did roll from the
bench and rolled in our favor. And so yeah, victories. UM.
Now we have um a preliminary injunction in place, meaning
that no logging can happen there um at least until
this uh timber sale has its real day in court.

(02:55:17):
Or until the four Service just drops this Shenanigan entirely,
which hopefully they will do, but we'll see. Yeah, so
they they blocked, they blocked the posts far logging and
the the the basically started start starting to clear cut
these areas without without actual like public and put without
actually going through the process as flawed as the process.

(02:55:39):
Maybe they were just skipping it entirely. So that that
was that was that was blocked by this by by
this legal case. Um, what was I guess? Yeah, well
what was what was the uh? What what was what?
What was the reaction like in in in the room
and in the various signal chats when this happened. Yeah,

(02:56:00):
in the ether spheres, um, the reaction was super awesome.
I mean, so many people love this place and that
was kind of the whole point of what we were
trying to do when we did the direct action out
there a number of weeks ago. It was just demonstrate
how many people love this place and how the Forest
Service wasn't going to get away with what they're planning

(02:56:20):
to do. Um, because people, as we promised, would be
back if they tried to log it and move forward
without logging, which as you pointed out, and as we
said last time, was super sketchy, not only because it
was a terrible plan that they're planning to do um
in this beloved for us, but also because it was
behind locked gates that in the public wasn't allowed into
and so um, it was just this you know, travesty

(02:56:42):
that was about to happen. And when we found out um,
and when we heard the judges incredibly strong ruling, UM,
we you know, were absolutely overjoyed. Um. The news spread,
you know, like wildfire, excuse the pun it how to
do it? Um, and just you know, all this the
threads were popping, People were putting it on Twitter, people

(02:57:03):
were reposting the sexy photos of the blockade with the
giant slash pile and the fire truck and the band
on top of the fire truck. And I just wish
that we all could have hung out again and had
another dance party because it was the best that doesn't
incredibly incredibly rad UM was was like your this is
this is this is something I don't I don't don't

(02:57:23):
actually know, but I was like it was like the
documentation that was taking place by by going to these
places and showing hey, this is where they're cutting. Was
that brought up in the court case in terms of like, hey,
this is we actually went and saw what's actually happening.
So it was was that type of evidence used and
did it in your mind like um um uh kind

(02:57:43):
of be a small part of like the result of
the ruling. Yeah, it definitely was. And that is such
an important point and I really hope that everyone who's
listening can just like put that in their minds for later.
How important it is for people to be UM field
surveying or sometimes we call it ground truth thing um
these places and actually collecting documentation photographic evidence. UM. A

(02:58:06):
lot of folks do kind of like what we call
community surveying and collect um some site specific um kind
of like uh, community science sort of stuff. But all
of that was used in court and it was super awesome. UM.
I actually was one of the standing declarence, so I
got to submit a lot of evidence from my many
years of traveling that place. UM, and that all of

(02:58:27):
that was referenced in court. So so so important. UM.
Even you know, when the forest services essentially trying to
kick everyone out and keep everyone out of these places,
it's really important to go um and see them anyways. Obviously,
you know, everyone needs to consider how they do that
and their own security and safety. Um. And it's becoming difficult. Um.

(02:58:47):
But certainly putting eyes on threatened places is one of
the best tools we have to save them. Yeah. I
just think that's really important to really focus on that
as like a thing because like, yeah, stuff that people
did actually had an impact on this not happening right now. Um.
And yeah, but by going out there and documenting and

(02:59:10):
then talking about it, um, it has like an actual
like causal relation, which is very hard to It's it's
it's hard to get direct causal stuff to happen in
like the general umbrella of activism. Um. And it's I
think it's it's just really exciting that that that this happened. Yeah,

(02:59:31):
that's so true. It does feel in the general umbrellaive
activism really hard to point to things that we do
that are actually making an effect, and this is totally
one of them. I mean, when if and when this
case does have its day in court, um, you know,
outside of the preliminary injunction itself. UM, I am sure
that so much of that evidence from all the folks

(02:59:53):
who've been traveling there um and documenting it will be used.
We documented, you know, so many green living trees and
places before service that were dead, um, you know, so
many like unused roads in places the Forest Service said
they needed to log alongside these roads because they're so
trafficed and they're posing a safety hazard. And so it's
basically like, you know, the best way to expose their

(03:00:15):
gas lighting and lies is to just go document what's there. Yeah,
because a big part of their ability to do this
is utilizing deception in terms of like and and and
utilizing like non information, Like they're just not talking about
the stuff that's actually happening, or they're doing like white
lies to make it sound better. So they're just they're
they're lying about the type of like um uh, the

(03:00:38):
type of sales that they're doing with these with these treets,
and like how they're classifying the trees that they're logging
to like get it past all of the loopholes. But
they're not actually like that, that's not actually reality. They're
just changing the terms to make it fit what they want.
So like, as as soon as you start looking into
this stuff, it gets all it gets very sketchy, because
it is they're just about a lot of this stuff.

(03:01:01):
Like if you're like listening and be like, oh, you know,
be these people just love trees, Like, yes, we do
love trees, but like the actual thing that's going on
is like they're lying about the types of damage that's
being done. They're lying about what areas this is happening
in all to just rack up more timber sales like
that that that is that that that is what's actually happening. Um.
And that's so so important to say, like loudly and clearly,

(03:01:23):
because the Forest Service and other management agencies are experts
in making the public feel dumb and wrong and misinformed.
And right now, even we sound a little wing nutty
being like yeah, you know, but like let us be clear,
a federal judge agrees with us. Yeah you know, like

(03:01:44):
we're not the ones who are wrong here, and I
think you're totally right. You know, they're using a mixture
of blatant lies, um, but also euphemisms like we no
one's they don't they don't use the word clear cut anymore.
They're using all of these euphemisms, you know, regeneration, hard,
a lot of and a lot of this stuff that
they're deciding to do is like not open to the public.

(03:02:06):
You need to do like fullial requests to to to
actually learn what they're doing because they don't talk about
it like that. It is all. It is all extremely sketchy.
And yeah, like the fact that like a federal a
federal judge agreed with like green activists is not a
sentence you here often so like it's like, yeah, this
is actually a thing, and it's it's important to remember,

(03:02:27):
like you are not immune to propaganda, like all a
lot of this stuff is uh is has people who
want a lot of money are vested in making people
believe things about about about about like force management all
this kind of stuff. Um, yeah, I know it may
it may sound crazy when we're talking about you know,
the secret Illuminati of the Force Service. But like no,

(03:02:48):
like it acts like it's it is a it is
a governmental organization. All governmental organizations are kind of sketchy,
especially when their sole purpose is to one of their
purposes is to make money or assistant like sales of
something like yeah, it's it's gonna have some sketchy stuff.
Um absolutely, And also you know in the realm of
just like the propaganda machine, Um, we you know just

(03:03:09):
the other day, UM, a hilarious response piece UM came
out from the timber industry, an organization called Federal Forest
Resource Coalition, which is just a coalition of loggers. UM
put out this hilarious little mini video responding directly to
the line that we've been using in forest events, which
is worth more standing. Our forests are worth more standing.

(03:03:29):
And they put out a hilarious response that is essentially
you know, pushing this timber slu this logging propaganda, saying well, actually,
our forests aren't worth anything standing after they've been burned,
and they're contributing to the climate crisis, and they're destructive,
you know, and all these things, and so totally I mean,
even people who see it with their eyes can be
convinced by these voices that they're wrong because they're so good,

(03:03:54):
so good at making us feel just like we're the
wrong ones, but we're not. We got this, yeah, in
terms of like this the secretive kind of decision making
and stuff behind the scenes, In terms of like the
types of like terms they are using too to you know,
do like restoration, thinning, um and all this stuff around
around trying to like basically just just take as many

(03:04:16):
trees from the Bright British Watershed as they can, and
the judge said that she was quote disappointed in the agency,
uh for for all of their silly behind the scenes
trench coat meat in the dark alley way to pass
off information type of thing, um, which is yeah, like

(03:04:37):
so what what what is what is some of the
other kind of um stuff that the four Service and
the related organizations were trying to We're trying to hide
like what like what what? What? What? What? What was
the stuff that like came out um via this legal
process that was like, yeah, what was it? What was it?
What was a few of the actual things that they
were that they were trying to do that eventually like

(03:04:59):
came to light mm hmm. The major thing is that
they were trying to get away with changing the logging
contracts without doing any additional environmental analysis or public engagement process.
And so there were before fires, there were there was
a plan to do what they what we had fought

(03:05:20):
them so hard to get them to agree to do,
which was not log a bunch of these this older
stands protect tree. They had a diameter limit on trees
that they were going to log. So we basically like
slapped their hands off of all of these trees and
finally were like, okay, we won't sue you if you
move forward with the plan as stated, and it had

(03:05:40):
very strong sideboards, and you know, even local folks were like, okay,
go do this. And then the fires came through and
so what they were trying to do was just change
the plans. They turned it all into clear cuts in
the forest that we slapped their hands off of. And
they were trying to argue that they didn't need to
do any an additional analysis and they didn't need to
engage the public, and even in court, you know, that's

(03:06:01):
what they were arguing. Um. They were they were doing
some stupid magic math and you know, somersaults, um to
try and explain how they had already done an analysis
that accounted somehow for the fires that no one could
have ever predicted. A. Yeah. So the judge was like
just you know, she was just roundly like, y'all couldn't

(03:06:23):
have predicted I like to give her, you know, Southern accident.
Y'all couldn't have predicted, Judge Akinstone the South. No, Uh,
you couldn't have predicted. Uh, you know that the fires
were going to burn through and so there's no way
you could have done analysis for fire that you didn't
know what was going to happen here us silly little beasts.
But she did talk to them, you know, as if
they were just naughty little children, which I loved to hear.

(03:06:45):
You know, the disappointed in the Forest Service was a
major move. And I think the other one that came
up is just you know, the Forest Service was arguing
that they needed quote need to do this logging um
for restoration, for economic recovery, um, and to prevent future
wildfires from severely burning in the area. All of that too.
BS Like, one thing that the judge said that was

(03:07:08):
super strong, UM was that she sees and obviously on
paraphrasing here um, but she she sees that the community
loves this place. It's obvious that this is like a
beloved place, and she, you know, essentially understands that the
forest is worth more standing. She said that she wanted
she thinks that the forest needs an opportunity to recover

(03:07:29):
from the fires, and so basically just called the BS
on the Forest Service for their hilarious you know, justifications
for logging all the we're gonna save the forest by logging.
It is just not it's not right, it's not accurate.
In the judge agrees. Yeah, I'm very very excited about
about this ruling and what it means for the future

(03:07:49):
and at least at least at least postponing this until
um if if if the if if the lawsuits going
to go through, or if or if they're just going
to drop this, which they also very well, maybe they
might decide to focus on another part that is that
they just don't tell anybody about and start doing it
there and then you know, we'll we'll start we'll start
this again. But for this particular area, UM. That is

(03:08:09):
that is very exciting, and yeah, it is. It is
rare for a federal judge to agree with people on
this topic. UM. And now I want want to talk
about a few other kind of stuff around like forests,
um and how and how these kind of types of
things work. I I didn't get an interesting comment which
I totally agree with in terms of like how propaganda

(03:08:30):
works in this department, um, and how like how like
logging towns operate, or how like towns became logging towns,
how like they're basically able to convince local populations that
logging is is like good because like yeah, like they're
they're gonna they're gonna move into this town. They're gonna
restore the town because they're gonna bring in new money
through like logging industry. Um, and yeah, this is a

(03:08:52):
very like, very like a typical move, whether it be
for like you know, coal mining, whether it be for pipelines.
In terms of like big companies going into all towns
and be like, hey, we can promise you economic growth
if you can like assist in this you know, extract
of process, and they'll be able to convince them with
you know, misleading statistics and you know all that kind
of stuff. In terms of logging industry is getting getting

(03:09:14):
really good at radicalizing rule populations to have them believe
that it's one not it's it's not like economically destructive
to take down trees. They might even say it's like good,
um and all all that kind of stuff has have
Has there been like any outreach in terms of kind
of addressing addressing people in small towns who like maybe

(03:09:38):
used to like you know, rely on unlogging or something
and how does how does that works? I know, like
they'll be like, oh, but you people come from the
city and now you're coming out here into like the
woods where I live, and I think it's good that
they're chopping down these trees. Right there's there's there's there's
like that kind of that that kind of disconnection because again,
no one, no one's immune to propaganda. You can you
just you just just have to find the specific one. Um. See.

(03:10:00):
I'm just curious about, like in terms of in terms
of like forest defense, how often this comes up and
how and how you kind of yeah, I don't know
what's what steps to make to to be like to
tell people, hey, maybe you're believe these things because timber
industries told you them, Like how how how do you
start that conversation with people? Yeah, this is like actually

(03:10:22):
the heart of the forest defense work ahead, what you're
talking about right now, the heart of our work ahead. Um.
And I would also say, you know, there's a there's certainly,
um a dichotomy that the media especially likes to present
between the rural logging communities and you know, Portland or

(03:10:45):
city based environmentalists and the hippie environmentalists to come in
and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And everyone's familiar with
that and there's of course some truth um to that,
but I want to say, like super clearly, there are
so many rural who do not support the logging industry,
and so that's like a false dichotomy that gets presented
to us right off the bat, and a lot of

(03:11:06):
those you know, for in the in um the work
that I've been doing on forest forest defense, essentially, we're
always connecting with folks on the ground in literally the
backyards of these logging proposals, and many of them are
super uninterested in having their backyards clear cut. And so
we you know, the we we pushed directly against that

(03:11:28):
mythology that you know it's just environmentalists coming in from Portland,
because we work directly with people, including for Brighton Bush,
but with every single thing that we work on directly
with people who are literally on the front lines of
that logging. That said, there is absolutely um a huge
pull um. You know Oregon specifically as you know, famous
for logging. Like we talked about last time, there's a

(03:11:48):
logger on top of the capitol. Um you know, are
the mayor of Portland's logging money it's in Oregon's Oregonians
black and for rural Oregonians. UM. There are economic realities
where in some cases some counties benefit from UM logging

(03:12:09):
in their total from the logging industry, their school you know,
schools are tied to logging money UM. And there's you know,
in a lot of ways, a narrative that is not
really accurate anymore, but has like an element of nostalgia
to it, like you know, logging towns and UM. This
old story about how things used to work with small,
small family logging. That's not how it is anymore, but

(03:12:32):
that narrative that like nostalgic narrative, carries on into a
lot of communities. And so what the way that I
like to cut through that UM for people is by
making it really clear that there's a difference between small
you know, family loggers of lore UM and and you
know of you know, people's what people are attached to
and the kinds of what we're seeing today is we're

(03:12:54):
looking at Wall Street logging. We're looking at Wall Street invested,
UM invested huge you know corporate industries who owned who
can who still own like you know, huge percentages of
our drinking water sheds of our UM communities. Some some
of the communities on the Coast are owned primarily by

(03:13:14):
private industrial Wall Street funded UM logging corporations. And that's
you know, those aren't mom and pop. They're not living
in the community. They're living often not even on the
Pacific Northwest. These are rich ass assholes who are destroying
our bioregion. And you know, I think that making it

(03:13:35):
clear that those aren't those folks are not like us.
You know, those are not like rural Oregonians, your those
are not your friends. Those are not you know, your
pals or your neighbors. And just cutting through that narrative
that like, oh, you know logging communities, Um, you know
loggers are your friendly neighbor. Actually, no, loggers are Wall Street, um,

(03:13:56):
you know investment corporations, rich money people who are doing
this destruction. And just kind of like breaking that I guess,
like that um, that attachment that people have to this idea,
that's just not a reality anymore. The reality is that
people who are for logging in rural communities are they

(03:14:19):
have a lot more common with those of us who
are fighting logging than the actual people doing the logging,
if that makes sense. Like there's a lack of understanding
of what the logging industry actually is it's like back
to that nostalgia. Like people who are against logging in
rural communities, um, you know, often genuinely do not realize
that this is Wall Street and like who's doing this logging.

(03:14:41):
They're still thinking it's their you know, neighbor or their
friend and it's you know, these stories. But you know
the reality is that, you know, this is corporate timber
owners who are maximizing their financial gain by buying out
small landowners all over the place, um ensuring that they
aren't taxed by lobbying heavily in the government's so they
don't you know, have any sort of taxation that then

(03:15:03):
goes back to benefit our communities. Don't even get me
started about how many taxes the timber industry skips out
on that could actually benefit our communities and our schools
and our libraries and our fire departments, but aren't. UM
And then they're adopting exploitative labor practices. Basically, you know,
the contracted workers who are in the logging industry right now,
who are doing the logging and hauling UM and reforestation

(03:15:24):
so called reforestation planting of mono crop plantations, they are
experiencing flat wages and declining work quality conditions. Um. Meanwhile,
while the corporate timber forms are expanding their profits um
and you know, getting more wealthy investors. So that is
the reality of the timber industry. These are not you know,
your friendly neighborhood loggers anymore. So a few other points

(03:15:47):
I wanted to bring up, kind of on force itself.
Someone someone said something about how we talked about like
old growth, and and I guess they think that we
said that all forests in this area is old growth.
And that's not something we actually said old growth. This
is a specific term that means a specific thing. And yeah,

(03:16:08):
regardless of it being old growth or not, they still
shouldn't be cut down. I don't know. So I'm not
sure why this point was really raised, because we didn't
I did. I don't think we did, uh say that
every that every tree there is old growth. Um. A
lot of them were planted in the past few hundred years, UM.
But that that doesn't mean like they're like much less important.

(03:16:30):
It's like, just because they're not old growth doesn't mean
we shouldn't be preserving this particular watershed in this particular
environment and not be clear cutting all of it. Yeah,
old growth is like, like the term old growth is
just like become fetishized to me, and this like this
thing that you know. This Also, let's be clear, that's
not an agreement on what old growth actually means across
the board, even between agencies, Like there's an arbitrary date

(03:16:52):
cut off that the federal government uses to define old growth. Um.
But obviously, if you walk into a forest stand, this
a healthy you know, a healthy old growth stand is
complex in terms of age diversity. There's going to be
old growth individual trees, there's going to be a lot
of younger trees, is going to be horizontal and vertical diversification. Like,
old growth is complicated, it's messy. But the whole point

(03:17:14):
is like you're right, like it doesn't actually matter if
it's like quote in the CAD the small narrow category
of what the Forest Service would define as old growth.
If it's a forest that's been around for you know,
a hundred years or even you know, I would argue,
if it's a forest that's over like seventy or eighty
years old, what are we doing cutting that down up?
Especially now you know that's storing so much carbon safely

(03:17:37):
in the ground, and also by that age, it's had
the opportunity, you know, to to become more diverse than
these like monocrop plantations that we're seeing younger forests. So
I would argue any forest that's not a monocrop plantation,
a young monocrop plantation, should absolutely not be clear cut.
It's just an inappropriate activity to do in native forest.
And speaking of a clear cut, there's another Another comment

(03:18:00):
was about how clear cutting can sometimes be good because
it creates new environments for other animals and living things
to exist in. And I find this to be a
really weird comment to make. Um, I don't. I don't
quite understand this, this kind of idea, because yes, of course,

(03:18:22):
if you cut down a forest, you are creating a
new environment, but that's not where that environment should be,
nor is it where it is. It's like if you
if you erect a whole bunch of concrete skyscrapers where
a force used to be. Yeah, you're also making a
new environment. But I would say we probably shouldn't do that,
though I don't. That's not that's not a good thing.
The same thing with like the people obsessed with like

(03:18:43):
putting solar panels in the desert, like the desert is
an actual environment like it has there is reasons for
why deserts need to exist and that have this whole
like a whole like a whole whole environment and a
whole um I forget the word, but like and as
an entire system of living things that exist there. That

(03:19:04):
should Um, we we don't need to terraform everything. I
don't think that's like, I don't we shouldn't. I think
preserving the environment in general, presuming the environments that are
existing and who are creating like ecosystems, is a good thing.
I think generally the less terraforming probably probably the better,
at least right now, when we're being with a massive

(03:19:26):
like looming climate crisis that's caused by US terraforming the earth. Um,
maybe we should not do that as much. Yeah, we
could call by the general role like no more terraforming,
you'll just leave it. Let's just let's just leave us,
let's leave us for a bit just as but for
real though, whoever wrote that comment, I mean, that is

(03:19:46):
a timber industry talking point that it's literally that is
literally and whether they meant it or not, you know,
this is how the timber industry gets us. They're real
good at this. This is there, you know, nice sounding
talking points that we rebut all the time, um, you know,
not just in media but also in court. Um. And
the talking point is clear cuts mimic natural disasters like

(03:20:08):
severe fires by replacing you. And it's that they totally
don't because it does not look at a clear cut.
Go look at a fire. It's a completely different experience
than I could go down that rabbit hole all day
on fire ecology another time maybe, but suffice it's to say,
you know, what they're arguing is that they're creating young

(03:20:29):
forest or quote early several habitat by clear cutting an
old forest. But what they're actually doing is deforestation. They're
replacing an old forest with something that's not a forest,
A young mono crop plantation is a crop. It is
not a forest, and so they are deforesting, and um,
it is ecosystem. It is ecoside, and it is it

(03:20:54):
is egoside. And I think, yeah, the insistence that like
it's it's good because it will allow some species to
exist in this new environment, like yeah, but there's other
environments where they can't exist, and we don't we don't
need to be destroying the ones that are already kind
of important and doing good stuff to make room for
other ones that aren't already there. They argue that the
deer and the butterflies love the clear cuts, and so

(03:21:15):
just call that out as bullshit. Next time you'll hear that. It's,
you know, spread the word that is some timber industry bs.
They're tricksy, but don't let them get you. And the
last thing I wanted to mention is why blocking off
access to these areas is bad? Um, because I got
someone someone said something like, um, you know, because fires

(03:21:35):
are human caused, closing off public lands is it can
be good because then fires someone gets hurt in those areas,
And this really just misunderstands why fires get started. And
also it's just a bad thing to do anyway, because
like fire, if you look at like the map of
where wildfires start, um, almost all of them are on
the path of highways. Um. Specifically in California that when

(03:21:59):
when the fires were really there was there was this
firefighter who who made a great video about like why
the fire line was all next to the highway, And
there was like conspiracy theories of like including the antifa's
driving down highways and setting the forest on fire, which
was which was an actual popular talking point because we
live in the hell world. Um, but like you know,
he's explained like the reason why, Like they are like

(03:22:21):
human caused, but they're not, like a lot of them
aren't intentionally caused. It's because that's where power lines run,
and this is where a lot of sparks can ignite
stuff on the edges of of of highways that will
then take out part of the forest. Now, every once
in a while there's a gender reveal party that goes
horribly wrong and does and and does ignite it. That
is true, and I think the solution to that is

(03:22:41):
not closing down the forest. It's not having gender reveal
parties that we stopped selling uh on Amazon. I'm all
thor Tanna right as an idea, But how about let's
stop selling blue and pink Tanna right packets to people
who don't know how to use explosives genuinely don't know
about because yeah, like they're not they're not actually using

(03:23:02):
tanna right for what it's meant for, and they're not
using it to do like like training, Um, they're using
it to say that they're having a baby, and this
has caused a lot of wildfire death. So how how
about we just stopped selling uh the gender reveal party bombs.
I think that'd be a better solution than closing down
massive swaths of public land. And how about our power

(03:23:25):
line companies get their ship together and stop. Do actually
have a plan for planned power shut offs? And actually,
you know, we know now actually Pacific Corps is in
court right now because they started the Santiam fires. Their
power lines started the Santa Inspires and the Archie Creek
fires and probably more. And so yeah, how about the

(03:23:46):
power line companies get their ships together? But I feel
like the other huge thing here is that, you know,
the suggestion that we should close off these forests to
the public, to me is just like more uh you know,
it's you know, blatantly it's racist, um, and it's you know,
I think it's wrong because these lands, these belong to

(03:24:07):
Indigenous people. We should be giving these lands back to
indigenous people. And think, you know, when we're talking about
like rural communities too, in adjust transition, like rural community
members should actually have more say in what happens in
their backyard. Forests should be able to be more engaged
UM in you know, the forests that literally provide them
with their drinking water, UM, and you know all of

(03:24:27):
the things that they need, um to survive. So we
should not be you know, locking off these lands and
keeping humans out. Humans have a place in these lands.
I've always had a place in a role in these lands,
and um, if we take leadership from the right folks,
then we could totally live in a much more reasonable
way than the gender revealed party path. Yeah, and like
I don't know if you know this, but like being

(03:24:48):
in the forest is great. It's like it is great
to be surrounded by giant trees. It makes you feel awesome.
The last thing I want to talk about is um
you you mentioned before, like getting people who live in
these rural areas who used to rely on logging, getting
them are involved and doing a just transition, because this
is a topic that comes out that comes up on

(03:25:10):
climate change like everywhere in terms of like you know,
like countries that are still developing not being able to
have access to the same amount of fossil fuels that
countries like the States you know had when they when
when they were developing, and like how is that fair? Right?
This this is like, this is a very common thing
of in terms of countries that are better off. UM,
need will you know, have kind of kind of like

(03:25:31):
a duty to assist assist countries that are trying to
develop and trying to get better standards of living. Um,
because we profited off the fossil fuels and now they
won't have the same opportunity if we're trying to you know,
get to a carbon neutral world. UM. So in terms
of like a just just transition, this is something like
you know, a COP twenty six there was supposed to
be funding for adaptation efforts in in the developing countries.

(03:25:55):
Now that failed because of course it did. It's COP
twenty six. But in terms of like, in terms of
like this idea of a just transition, how do you
see this like locally in the rural environment within the
States and for for like these types of areas, because like, yeah,
because it's similar to like coal mining the towns, similar
to you know, logging towns. How how does how do

(03:26:15):
you see this working? Yeah? This is something I think
about so much. UM. And we actually put out a
platform called a Green New Deal for our Forests in
the Pacific Northwest that talks like all about what a
just transition could look like for communities. But I mean,
this is a dream, and I think it's like a
really inspiring uh inspiring path forward because what it means
is that, you know, we're not saying to end logging,

(03:26:36):
and we're not saying that rural communities basically need to
like stop existing and getting funding from logging. What we're
saying is that rural community members, what we that nostalgic
dream that are that people are playing to, we actually
want to have something in that regard. We would like
people to you know, engage with and interact with their
local forests. Now that shouldn't look like clear cutting them,

(03:26:57):
because um, that's irresponsible and that doesn't unefit local communities
or you know, the benefit of future. But that could
look like restoring these young mono crop plantations into complex,
healthy forests. It could be looked like bringing fire back
onto the landscape with prescribed fire and cultural burning, taking
lessons from indigenous folks who are doing network um. It

(03:27:17):
could look like education and recreation and so many things
of like you know, hands on engagement with backyard forests
that surround us um and you know that that could
look like basically firing the freddies and uh taking this
land and giving it to local communities with um, you
know the with with conservation goals but also goals to

(03:27:40):
economically support by all of those ways you know, jobs
but also jobs and recreation, UM economically support local communities.
So basically giving the land back to the local communities
who rely on them and giving them power and control
UM to care for them in ways that makes sense
because right now, while streets caring for our four us
and really it should be us. And I think one

(03:28:03):
other thing on this topic, for like how how well
propagando works when I was UM at the stop line
three purchase camps last summer in terms of like how
do corporations get towns to start supporting these ideas and
how do they like foster this hatred of environmentalism um,
despite you know, these areas often being the worst impact

(03:28:23):
one of the worst impacted ones by these like effort efforts.
Right uh, you know you're they're chopping down forests near
where this town is. Pipeline is going next to the town.
If it leaks, it's going to cause all this problem
to like their water spline stuff. But like how they do.
It's like the day of the direct action to block
off the pipeline, Enbridge was sponsoring like a town fair

(03:28:45):
in like the little downtown area, and it's like this
super surreal moment of being like, oh, this is like
I've read this happened in like comics before, Like this
this is like this is like one of Lex Luthor's
favorite things to do. Hell like like go into this
like small town. Who's gonna start like this evil you know,
evil like uh like lab At and he'll like fund

(03:29:08):
like this small town event thing and like I've like
seen this before in so many superhero comics, Like I've
seen this trope and that I'm just like living it.
You're just like watching it happen. You're like driving past
the town to go block up pipeline and then you
see like Enbridge with like a little stage and like
a little like fair and like everyone in the towns
like dancing and they're giving out like free drinks and

(03:29:30):
like oh no, like this is yeah, Like you're you're
like living the things like you know, a lot of it.
It's about like this idea of like rein like reinvigorating
like like you know, like the like the spirit of
the town and injecting injecting new life into it. So
like you know, this this is like a new one
for like they're they're putting a pipeline down, but like,
you know, it's the same thing for like you know,

(03:29:50):
old like old cold towns, old logging towns, and these
corporations will come in, you know, make the town more
active again, start putting on events, make it feel like
more of a place. And then that that gets so
the company gets associated with positive changes. Right, so then
people who live in towns like, oh yeah, and we're
just doing all these good things for my town. That
must mean they actually, you know, are gonna care about

(03:30:13):
us here and then help and help us out. Meanwhile,
these people from all around the country are driving through
and trying to block the pipeline, and the police are
driving everywhere. Now it's all this chaos, right, these stupid environmentalists,
they don't understand how this is gonna you know, it's
it's we're creating so many jobs here, which actually didn't.
Enbridge outsourced most of the jobs out of state, but
they lied about the type of job creation. You know,

(03:30:33):
all all all all this type of stuff, and this
is a very very common thing totally, and like timber
unity is like delivering would to people when the when
when the snow storm happened and everyone was cold and
didn't have power, and they were you know, going door
to door with mutual aid support. Um. But that is
why you know, a remember how everyone should remember how

(03:30:54):
how tricks e and how dishonest these folks are. But
also be why um, those of us who want to
see a different way need to be doing mutual aid too,
Like we actually need to be out there in our
communities and making friends and building trust and not just
showing up to function up when it's time to function up.
And I think that kind of like circles back to
the point we talked about earlier, which is like building

(03:31:15):
relationships with people on the front lines. Um, looks like
so much more than just like the defense of a
bad thing in their backyards. It looks like, you know,
mutual aid because the industry is doing it, um and
they're they're good at it, and we need to be better. Um.
I think that wraps it up for us today. I
just what one thing I want to mention is like,
what what is going to happen going forward? Now? After this,

(03:31:37):
after this legal victory, what's kind of just just just
just just just so people know, like what is like
the next steps that are going to be taken on
the legal process that will kind of determine what what
happens UM with like you know, direct actions and going
to see the forest in like in the future. Yeah, UM, Well,
basically we're waiting UM for a date for this court
case UM, and so that will hopefully be scheduled if

(03:32:00):
it if it ends up having to go through, which
it might not. UM. Obviously it is going to be
an effort made on behalf of lawyers UM to try
and get the Force service to just stop, to just
drop this to Nanigan UM and walk away UM while
they're you know where they're at. Because we we do
think we have a really strong case UM that will
win in court if it goes to court. So that's

(03:32:20):
kind of like the legal avenue UM. Same story as
what I said with the last time we talked. You know,
if if logging is going to move forward in that area,
whether that be because UM it happens in the future
or because somehow this legal case is lost, direct action
will happen. People will be out there in the way
of logging. There's no way people are going to let

(03:32:41):
that go down in the Brighton Bush community. UM. So
right now we're kind of in a waiting game. We're
watching and waiting. UM, but you know, I hope the
four Service knows now that they can't just get get
away with stuff like this. People are watching, UM, people
are going to file public records request. We're documenting this
and UM hopefully you know, we won't be seeing more
of this, but because we live in the real world,
the real sad world, we will be seeing more of this,

(03:33:03):
and so, UM, you know, we'll be out there again
when the next forest is on the chopping block, which
is probably going to be you know, today, tomorrow. Yeah,
it's kind of always the thing. UM. Well, thank thank
you so much for coming on to talk about this
and the uh rare rare good news episode of Hey
something good happened. Thank you. Thanks. In any of these sources,

(03:33:27):
people can kind of follow along on the fight that
the people can find online. Yeah, make sure to follow
Cascadia Forest Offenders and Portland Rising Tide um who will
be definitely tracking and posting. You can also follow Cascadia Wildlands,
who um was the lead nonprofit on the lawsuit and
they've been posting about it too. Great. All right, thanks

(03:33:48):
everybody for listening. Uh go see a tree, touch tree. Yeah. Hey,
we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could

(03:34:10):
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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