It Could Happen Here Weekly 8

Episode Transcript
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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. Well, I'm Robert Evans may

(00:30):
have said that already. I don't know, like I said,
too many motherfucking podcasts, but this is the last school
week episode. Um and and with me actually in the
office right now. Maskless is a protest against the mask
man Garrison David's it's fine, it's fine, Garrison. I understand

(00:52):
that that you don't believe in health mandates. We have
to respect each other's differences. I have magic to protect myself.
That's right, That's that's fine. You use chaos magic to
protect yourself from COVID? What do you got for me?
We're doing we're doing the first it could happen here
daily book episode excellent, um sexy and so I Irotic.

(01:14):
We were looking for for spooky content for Spooky Week
and around Halloween, and I wanted to find a book
written by an unhinged like Christian writer about what they
think Halloween is. And I found I found one with
very very little browsing. It took It was very quick.
It took me like five minutes. It used to be
you were too wrong. Well, no, because you did grow

(01:35):
up in the cold, but you were tooting to remember
this being a super mainstream I mean, I wasn't like
we had no Halloween when I was a kid. We
couldn't got treating. We had like we had, like we
had like a we had like a harvest party. The
church put off, but like we had we had, I couldn't.
I didn't. The first time I went tricker treating was
when I was like twelve and I moved to Portland. No,
I was like thirteen, was the first time I went
trick or treating? Yeah, it's um. I mean it used

(01:58):
to be like it used to be something that got
more mainstream play. The like anti Halloween thing, um kind
of tied in with a satanic panic. I remember the
early nineties. That's what this book is going to be about.
Angry about it, but man, it just is like it's
it's it almost feels like homey and comforting. Thinking back
to that as this book has been oddly comforting because

(02:18):
it just reminds me people with childhood. Was like, that's
just all the same stuff. Yeah, I want you, I
want you to read the title and the author of
this amazing book. Okay, so this is wow. The cover
is honestly just looks like a normal jack. It looks
like a regular a bat into a Jack Lanard, but
it's got like spooky white smoke coming out of it.

(02:41):
The title is Helloween Satan's New Year by Dr Billy Dimily.
It's not a real name. Is not a real name,
Billy Billy like it's I swear to God listeners, b
I L L y E. That is not a name.
And the last it is certainly not Billy, that's Billy.

(03:02):
But the last nay, it was just as bad. Dimily.
Yeah d y M A L L y dim ally
ally don't know nonsense. So we have Whenever you find
a Christian book written by someone with doctor and from
their first name, you know it. You know it's gonna
be good. You gotta figure out what kind of doctor.
Guess what? Guess what kind of doctor. So, first of all,
for the maybe so, Billy dim Ley, the author earned

(03:26):
earned a theological doctorate of ministry in the mid eighties
at the Honolulu extension of the of the Western Conservative
Baptist Theological Seminary headquartered in Portland, Oregon. So that's fine.
The Honolulu one headquarters. The branch was in Hollelululu, but
the headquarters was apparently Importland, Oregon in the eighties, And
that makes sense much if it's still here. But you know,

(03:49):
sister cities Portland and Honolulu. She wrote at least fifteen
original manuscripts her word manuscript UM, on a wide range
of biblical doctrines. And so he is a lady, I believe,
So I mean, has she her pronounces I gotta, I gotta,
can't continue. I'm gonna look this up. So yeah, but Billy,
So then the book that we're looking at is is

(04:11):
one one of her fifteen manuscripts UM self published by
Infinity Publishing. Um. Yeah, this was in the publish in
two thousand six. That gives that's a lady. And if
that's her actual picture on the front, she just kind
of looks like a looks like a white lady like
a white lady. So yeah. So one of my favorite
parts of the book so far is right when you

(04:31):
opened up to the title page, it says, you know, Halloween,
satans know you're a the titled the book, and then
as a as a brief description of what the book is,
it says, a systematic compilation and narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures.
Oh whoa, No, that is not her on the cover
because she is not a white lady, is she not?
So that's her? Oh? She she's like a black conservative

(04:52):
bath Yeah, just like she looks like kind of like
a judge. She does look a lot like a strong judge,
does Judge Jennery? Yeah? Okay, well I do. I do
love the systematic compilation narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures, not
actual Bibles. Not actual Bible scriptures. Wow, Garrison, Uh, you

(05:13):
want to guess what she has as her as her
place of employment on Facebook? Well, let me thank I
don't know. I'm gonna read it verbatim. Works at in
and this is all caps now the service of God. Alright,
she works at in the service of She who doesn't
work at in the service of God? Am I right

(05:36):
fucking incredible. Based on this book, I'm guessing she got real,
real into Q and on. But that's just based on
what I read. I think she may have died. Oh
really well, her last post is in February. I wonder
what happened around in February. Maybe she's just not super
into Facebook but just posting quite a lot. No, she's not.

(06:00):
She's actually not super He's a decent chance COVID got her. Yeah,
maybe she just doesn't use a lot of social media.
That's fine. Con So, yeah, I do like that. She
describes the book as paraphrase Bible scriptures, not actual par paraphrase,
and and Bible paraphrase Bible scriptures on the doctrines of
good and evil, including an expose on the practice of witchcraft, magic, occultism, divination,

(06:21):
and Satan worship. So that that is how she describes
the book. Now, the book is like almost the book
is two pages long, and it is mostly the same
sentence rewritten in like twelve ways. Um, it's all saying
about how good Jesus is and how evil Satan is
and how people using magic our servants of Satan. Basically,
it's just that for for two hundred pages, and she

(06:44):
includes like a lot of a lot of like again
paraphrase Bible scriptures about you know, basically like really classic
evangelical kind of conservative Baptist Christianity type stuff. Um, so
that's how most of the book is. There's there's not
much Halloween content in this Halloween book that doesn't sup rise.
That's often the case with these weird like yeah, it's
just it's they've got some bizarre theological grife that's only

(07:06):
potentially related to the culture ward stuff on, like like
they have like stuff on like Zionism and the Holy Spirit. Yeah,
I bet she's got great takes on sacred books, Baptism. Like,
it's a whole bunch of the whole bunch of just
like regular kind of conservative Christian stuff. Except there is
one chapter that is pure gold. It's called the Witch
of Endor and it is this is this is the

(07:30):
explos day on witchcraft and Halloween. I'm very excited. It's
it is. It is the best part of the book.
And I'm hand it's it's like at least like thirty pages.
I'm not gonna we can't read the whole thing because honestly, again,
it is mostly the same kind of sentences. But I
have highlighted a few a few key passages from the
witches of endor Um to to distill out to us.

(07:50):
So first the first thing, That first thing for when
when a billy billy billy so, and in the section
called what is a witch? Uh is a question says
which is a sorcerer? Which is a Satanist? Which is
worship ancient false gods and practice magic. Magic is the
divinely forbidden black heart of bringing about the results beyond

(08:12):
the human power by use of evil spirits and including
the devil and his demons. Magic always brings Satan's diabolical
power into play. So it's it's it's really good, um.
She She goes on. She goes on to to describe
the practice of witchcraft using like a cult, formulations, incantations,
magical mutterings, peeping and chirping. Now it says, it says chirping, parenthesis,

(08:36):
criminal hypnosis, parenthesis. Oh okay, that's chirping. That's what I'm glad,
she clar up. That's what makes a good writer is
when you you you anticipate the questions chirping, criminal hypnosis. Yeah,
that great writer would have further explained, is that hypnosis
that is itself criminal? It is that is hypnosis on

(08:58):
a criminal as it nosis that makes you criminal, not
it does not give you any indication real mystery. Yeah,
so uh she she she basically rounds up all all
different types of of kind of magic and hildism into this,
into this banner of witchcraft. Um. She said that there's
there's no distinction to be made between witchcraft and sorcery,
despite the erroneous claims that sorcery is diabolical and witchcraft

(09:22):
is creative art. Both are diabolical and devilish. Yeah, I mean,
I guess I I do agree with her that I
don't feel like there's a meaningful distinction between craft and
sorcery um, and that they're both things from from from
your books that you read as a kid. But so
the first thing she gets into in witchcraft, I think
is this. It is a weird intro, but I guess

(09:44):
it makes sense from like her perspective is demon possession.
So this is the first the first like technique that
she gets into. Demon demon possession is a result of
which is of witchcraft. Incantation in diabolical whichcraft the which
voluntarily invites the devil and his and his demon spirits,
who are sometimes referred to as the goddess or god
or the host of a particular names of a particular

(10:07):
deity for each society, However, there's a difference between demon
possession through deliberate invocation than demon possession by demonic internal
attack up on helpless and often unsuspecting suspects. Possession is
often a common aftermath of certain illness, of certain forms
of certain illnesses, such as strokes. So she says that
the most that one of the easiest ways to figure

(10:30):
out if you're possessed if you have a stroke, also
if you have if you have epilepsy or coma. This
is really you know, my my, my, my grandpa was
pretty hard into demonology. There at the end, I's man.
And one of the fun things about this book though,

(10:50):
is that she really tries to hammer down in all
of like the biblical examples of witchcraft, which there is
like a few. Ye, it's the Bible. There's lots of
wacky magic. She really tries to convince like her Christian readers,
that witchcraft is a current problem to be worried with
um because she is, she's kind of upset that people
view it as like a fake thing. She's like, no,

(11:11):
it's real. It's in the Bible. You have to be
scared of it. Um, the God's word authenticates the reality.
Witchcraft therefore is not mere superstition. So a lot of
a lot of this is her trying to her trying
to scare people into believing that witchcraft is actually is
a is an ongoing problem. Yeah. She says that the
familiar spirits of witches spoken of in the Bible are

(11:32):
referred to in folk history as dwarfs, fairies, trolls. I
don't know where this one is. What what's was this
was this? I don't Well, they're usually like a cr
one or less little monster, a little bit of reptilian
things often found in dungeons. If you've got a low
level party you want to bring them up against. I mean,
Cobalds are one of the things that you could have

(11:52):
them go up against. Personally. I have not encountered them
weird games. Yeah, they're they're little little little little lizard
tye type goblin things. Yeah. So those guys, dwarves, fairies, trolls,
and other small spirits of Northern folklore. They can be
friendly mischievous or malignant. In folklore, they were purported as
nature spirits. This is the other thing she really hammers
down on is that if you like nature, that means

(12:15):
that you're actually a Satanist. That that does remind me
of my explore Nature, Hail Satan shirt, which is my
favorite shirt. Yeah, that is mean that that you do.
That is a very good shirt. It's pretty good. So
she she traces back the origin of magic to the
fall of man at the beginning of human history, as
as said in the book, is that where we got magic.

(12:37):
That's what she says. Um, she says so bracically. The
way she explains it is that you know magic and
this is something actual kind of a group. It's like
magic is the idea of like that you are kind
of on your way to become God in some way. Um,
this is this, Wait, you believe that, all right, we
don't need to get in terms of like in terms

(12:58):
of like in terms of like chaos. Magic it's like
you're trying to like increase your own ability to have
power over you, like your own life and that of
the idea. So what she says is that basically in
the fall of in Genesis, when Eve tried to eat
the try to eat the fruit fruit of the knowledge
of the of good and evil. This was her attach like,
this was her attemption to like gain god like power.

(13:19):
God can see good and evil. At the time, man
could only see good. So when Eve ate the fruit,
she was trying to become like God. She was taking
agency over her existence and her fact eating the fruit
to gave her the magic power to see good and evil, right,
which is what which we have now. So this is how,
this is how she tricks back the origin of magic.
She's a biblical she's obviously because you know she's a

(13:39):
conservative Baptist. She has a biblical literalist. She reads The
Garden of Bean as a literal historical tale, not as
like a piece of poetry or art meant to like
symbolize things and culture, like it was obviously written as
Um okay, I mean, there's a lot of a lot
of misogyny in this book. Um sorry, Dr Billy Sorry,

(14:02):
there is a lot. She rails against feminism later on,
and there's a lot of hatred because like Eve was
the one that ate the fruit, so the woman's fault,
like the woman is like the tempter of man. It's
always their fault. That's that's very well tread evangelical ground.
Although it is extra fun when it's a woman who
is hating on ye. And it's easier because this whole
chapter is about witches and which is a typically feminine um.

(14:25):
But she she does say that there's like wizards and warlocks,
but she just kind of ropes them all together. They
searched a second ago and I couldn't find any evidence
that she wrote books about Harry Potter. M This was
written to us in six so from what I've read,
I have not seen Harry Potter mentioned in this. So
far fascinating, is boy? That piste off a lot of
people who are otherwise very similar to Yeah, it sure did. Yeah,

(14:49):
So yeah, let's see she is. She she is very
concerned that that satanism and witchcraft is basically a re
re in vention of paganism um. And she finds this
to be incredibly disturbing and tied into a whole bunch
of like all like the woo woo spiritual stuff of
the nineties. Is also very concerned about She says millions
are now involved in some manner of ancient magical practice

(15:11):
and rights ranging from walking on hot coals with no
ill effect, to booking knives through flesh without creating wounds,
to reading from blind eye sockets or from sighted eyes
which have been masks, to magically filling the cade teeth
with gold, which I don't know is that is that
just dentistry? What is she referring to? Yeah, seem like
I have parents who have like gold filings. A lot
of people that doesn't, Um, that's witchcraft. I don't think

(15:35):
that is witchcraft. Well in a way that it it
makes money disappear. Also, it's I would I would compare
most dentistry to more like armed robbery. But sure, I
haven't had great dentist experiences. Yeah, I mean I'm not
a big dentist. Dentists or bastards would be my contention.

(15:55):
So yeah, she she She says that basically, the sign
of the of the new uptick magic around this is
a round to us, and six this is random. Panic
was the sign of the end times. Magic is the
colossal revolt against God, whose satanic purpose is to instill
in fallen man the desire to be a god. Try
to say, cool, that sounds rash, Yeah, I mean that
is that's also the Mormon faith more or less. I'm

(16:18):
sure she has opinions about more. We're gonna at her
opinions on the Irish Lader so good, oh good, oh fantastic. Yeah,
she has a lot of that. She's real, real punchy
towards the Papists. So she does break down the difference
that she she sees between black magic, white magic, and
what she calls a neutral magic. Um. She says that

(16:39):
the term black magic refers to the direct league with
Satan himself, often involving an actual blood pact of allegiance,
so that she she thinks that the black magic is
when you directly involve Satan, okay, and white magic is
merely black magic in a in a in a mask.
It may it may deceptively employ the names of Jesus, Christ,

(17:00):
the Father, and the Holy Spirit magically, along with other
Bible phrases and the Christian terminology, but this facade is
covering its demonic character, so she thinks that even though
they may use so this is interesting. Like she she
complains here that white magic uses the names of God
and Jesus and in its magic, but later on in
in the book she complains that no magic uses God's name.

(17:22):
So that's the fun thing that we'll talk about, um.
And then and then for neutral magic UM, she says,
the devil shrouds himself with nature. He is referred to
he is. Oh boy, he's that. That's that's her take
on Wicca. Huh, he is. He has revered as Mother
Nature and worship in the door by which is under
this deluding guy's neutral magic. Satan just stresses up as

(17:48):
leaves and that's how Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, Wicca
only gets one mention in this actually, Yeah, but she's
clearly like that's what she's talking about. I mean, she
talks about a lot of like she she uses these
terms very loose. She's got a lot of gradients. Yeah,
a lot of gradients. Yeah. Uh. She has a small
section on magical ceremonies and symbolism and kind of actually

(18:09):
lays out kind of how magic works in terms of
like using like like like this, like symbolic objects and
incantation and like calling upon powers, which is a more
like traditional magic. UM. I find it more fun to
call on fake characters because it's very silly, which is
more of a more of a chaos magic thing, UM,
because the more silly again, I think the more fun
it is. Then she does have a nice section on initiation,

(18:33):
rites and rituals, which gets into the really good Satanic
panic stuff. So she she she describes the you know,
a covid of of which is coming together to have
sex with the devil um usually maybe in like symbolically
with like a male leader of a cult or something.
But then she says, when the initiation has been completed,
the devil worship takes part in a parody of the sacrament,

(18:56):
many times bringing in the bodies of children who the
who whom they have murdered. Good. Yeah, that's the good ship.
That's the good ship. In America alone, there are over
one million missing children at any time. Many of these
children who are never found or seen again are victims
of satanically controlled perverts who do the grossest forms of evil.
Of many more are the victims of witchcraft and incantations

(19:19):
and other rights. Oh that's great. These children who are
being stolen at an astonishingly at an astonishing rate each day,
may be stolen from unbelievers homes or they maybe children
can see by the witches themselves at regularly held sexual orgies.
Witches are that that's an old one, that witches are
having orgy babies and like not reporting them to Yeah,

(19:42):
the children are often offered up a sacrifice to the devil,
and some ceremonies that which has may boil the children's bodies,
mix them with lobes and substances, or then they consume
the children's bodies in the blood ritual parody of the
Lord's supper. So that's fun. And I do like that
this idea never went anywhere and is not and as
not an important part of the USS politics now No, no, no,

(20:03):
of course not nope. Um, yeah, you love to hear it.
That's pretty good. That is that is that is fun.
She she does have a small section on a pagan music. Magic, religion,
and sorcery are some of the means used by the
devil for the purpose of luring men away from the
Christian truth. The heavy metal, punk, hip hop and other

(20:25):
such abuse of confining the Western European world. Okay, yeah, no, no, yeah,
I remember it actually gets quite more racist and not
it's counterpart of the hypnotic traits inducing inducing drum rhythms

(20:46):
employed throughout the whole world by the African nations through
the millions, which the insidious and evil MSR the devil
and setting them to sexual lust in Satan worship. It
is incredible that in two thousand six she's doing the
people music is the Devil and she is also like
black which is very safe. That's incredible. Yeah, it's uh yeah,

(21:06):
unfortunate would be a word for it. Yeah, well I
is it? Is it time for an AD break? I'm
not looking at the close. Yeah, it's probably about time
for an ad break. Speaking of oh oh boy, yeah,
speaking of millions of missing children. Maybe some of them
are in these ads. We're back putting more children in

(21:30):
the cauldron. Oh we're recording. Sorry, anyway, back to back
to reading this magnificent two hundred page book by dr
I've read the first hundred pages because after that it's
just the same words rewritten again and again in different
in different combinations. Like it's just it's just the same stuff. Um.

(21:51):
So the next section is this is this is again
I'm skipping over a lot of stuff, but this is
like the rough this is the most fun sections of
her stuff on magic and which is um. Now we
have her section called Halloween Satan's New Year. Um. She
she starts by explanning, which is, celebrate eight major festivals
or sabbats each year. Halloween is the primary annual festival

(22:12):
commemorating Satan's new year. Yeah. She then goes on to
explain that the Sabbat is a parody of the holy
Sabbath of God. Now, this is actually really interesting kind
of historical tidbits. So, yes, the words Sabbat in terms
of which is does come from does come from like
the Sabbath, This actually probably comes from, uh, the persecution

(22:34):
of which is being heavily tied to anti Semitism in
the Middle Ages. The first witch hunting book was called
The Hammer of the Witches Um and it is Yeah,
and it is large port large portions of which are
plagiarized from a previous book called Hammer of the Jews.
Entire sections are copying paste. But they just change the

(22:55):
word Jews to which And you really had to put
the effort into plagiarism back because your hand hand. No,
you're doing the whole thing yourself. This is also where
like a lot of like the pointy hat, which stuff
a lot of like the big nose with like like
like a really big nose, green oily skin like all
the stuff kind of comes from anti Semitic tropes because

(23:17):
the persecution of Jews and the Semitism was heavily tied
to the persecusion of which is often one of the
same things. So when they would so then when they
would do Sabbath, uh, they would they would say, like
they're doing like a sabot. They're going to They're going
to basically do like blood libel with children and with
the devil, which is which is which is what a
lot of witches are about, like finding children and stuff,
because it actually is tied to all the stuff. Now,

(23:38):
I'm not saying we have to cancel witchcraft, which if
is totally fine, you can do all this stuff. It
is really cool. But the a lot of the origins
of which hunting is tied to these antis anti Semitic tropes. UM.
So anyway, she she goes to describe different like pagan
like festivals throughout the years, um with like like le
and all this kind of stuff, Midsummer blah blah blah
blah blah. And the last one the eighth one. It's

(24:01):
October three one or Halloween, because she calls the the
unholy Satanic New Year. UM. She says that the rights
and ceremonies and which Halloween was originally observed had their
origin among the Druids. In the course of time, there
were added to them some of the rights, particular to
the Roman festival of Panama, which is which presided over

(24:21):
the harvests. November first among the Druids was the beginning
of the year and the festival of the Sun God.
They lighted fires in honor of their false god. They
believe that October thirty one, to the end of the
old year, the Lord of Death, which she puts in
apprentices the devil. Oh good, I'm really, I'm really again
very appreciative of how of how clear her writing is.
So the Lord of Death gather gathered together all the

(24:42):
souls of the dead who had been allowed to enter
the body of another human being. The belief is that
the root this belief is the root of the false
belief and reincarnation. Now I did not fact fact check
any of this, so I have no idea how how
accurate these these claims are for what she views as
the origin of Halloween. But I think they're pretty funny. Um,
I know, like there is Halloween like Halloween kind of
traditions are are there is like stuff around this time

(25:04):
throughout a lot of like old pagan stuff. Like the
modern notion of Halloween is pretty pretty modern, like the
whole like tricker treating thing and all. Like the way
we modernly think of Halloween is pretty it's pretty new,
because I mean there was of course, like All Hallow's
Day or like All Saints Day and the Eva which
other people would do Shenanigans, which is what we currently
have as Halloween. That's the day before All Saints Day.

(25:26):
All Saints Day is November one. Um, Like, you know,
the modern notion of Halloween is not it's not super old.
So I'm not quite sure how tied these old harvest
festivals really are to our modern Halloween. That's something I
could look into later, But I just picked up this
book and I'm reading right from it because that's easier.
So yeah, so she views Halloween now as like a

(25:47):
as a pagan the pagan holiday. Um, this pagan festival,
Halloween is it broadly celebrated throughout the Christian nations as
a major holiday. In America, Halloween has become a kind
of saturnalia for children, a night in which the rules
are suspended and children venture out to demand streets and
certain reprisals against the dingy. Yeah, okay, I mean that

(26:08):
is a cooler way of looking at Halloween. If it
were literally the saturnality a children would actually take the
role of the parents and make decisions for the family
and demand Yeah, I mean parents would have to go
to school, kids would have to go to work. That
would actually be an incredible that would be that would
so many people would die in plane crash, but it
would be especially if you enforced it, Like you don't

(26:30):
have a choice. You're you are piloting the plane today,
a bunch of other kids are getting on it to
go on work. The kids on air traffic ConTroll they
don't know what they're doing either. Forcing all of the
soldiers out of the various countries we put them in and
and having like the children of Special Forces guys conduct
raids in the Midia, It is pretty easy for a
kids to use an AK so it is a rs

(26:51):
even easier. Yeah, it would be funny. Yeah, a lot
of people are not going to have very successful heart
surgeries that, but it will be very funny in like
a cosmic sense. Increasingly and alarmingly, this celebration is assuming
dreadful expressions of evil and harmful acts are perpetuated against
the children themselves. In serious proportions. The treats are increasingly
found to contain drugs, poisons, razor blades, needles, ground grass,

(27:16):
and many other harms. Oh I I didn't. I didn't
even think of that, because that's like needles and grass. Yeah,
oh no, grass, So yeah, she she, she does seem really,
really really thrilled with this idea that the people are
giving out free drugs, which, man, what a dream I wish. Um. Halloween,

(27:38):
like Christmas, is also highly commercialized and it's part of
a major money making event for the merchants. Okay, breaking
in at the present time second only to Christmas in
that vein. Halloween is the Satanic New Year, and as
a celebration of the devil and is he's using the
world today to gain greater acceptance of the perversity as

(27:58):
he continues to prol mate his doctrine of demons. So
that that is fun um. Then she has a very
small section on old world Halloween traditions, which I'm not
going to read tons of because again, I don't know
how verified these things are. But I am going to
read like and she she goes on to talk about
like how like the laws against witchcraft and like the
six hundreds and stuff. Um she was, she was, but

(28:22):
I do I will read just the first sentence of
the Old World Halloween Traditions section Irish Traditions Devilition. Yeah,
here that Irish We're coming for you. Bring it on,
devil origin, various methods of finding the future and Halloween
we're accepted as tradition. So that that's really all I'm
gonna say, because I just love the line Irish traditions

(28:42):
devilition in Richards. Yeah, I mean that's I think every
Irish person I know would agree with that. That's really
all you gotta say. Yeah, oh man, it is it is. Wow,
what a what a book. It just keeps going on.
So she talks about like the basically like the people's
different Honestly, this there's not even tons about Halloween and
more about different people's belief in witchcraft. So like she

(29:03):
goes through like all the laws against witchcraft in Britain,
she goes against, like she goes she she talks around
the witch trials in America, um, saying that there were
witches but she doesn't talk about all the like, come on,
you coward. Yeah. Uh, it's it's pretty she she has.

(29:24):
It's a little bit of I okay, I'm actually gonna
read some of the stuff on on on America. Belief
in witchcraft was common to the early settlers in America,
but which is, were charged with making wex and images
of their victims and causing their illnesses by sticking pins
in the image or making by sticking pins in the image,
or making them waste away by melting the images before
the fire. This belief is held by the peoples of Africa,

(29:46):
as well as other pagan people in a and widely
varieting in widely varying civilizations and localities. The early settlers
do not initiate this belief in America, but found it
already to be belief in the American Indians who populated
this country. So that that's her little section on that,
which is I don't know, hashtag problematic, Yeah, I would,

(30:06):
I would call that slightly problemat I would call it
slightly problems. You know what's not problematic? Garrison the products
and services that are gonna hopefully sell candy kids. We
we guarantee that less than a third of them are
responsible for the disappearance of a million children, million children.
That's the behind the bastards guaranteed less than a third

(30:27):
of our sponsors who are undocumented too, well, yeah, but
which is making them so much more. It's likely much more.
But anyway, here's the ads, here's the ads. Ah, we're back,
we are all right. Bring it home, Garrison, bring it home.
So yeah, she she does mention that the devil likes
to withhold the fact of existence of witchcraft, like the

(30:50):
devil likes to height. So most people kind of live
in the dark. Um, she says. Although the imps which
frolic on Halloween and now are small children raping on
doors and gleefully seeving treats, wrapping on doors, wrapping on doors,
not raping on doors. That's a very different, very different holiday. Well,
who knows, that might be Canadian things. That's Canadian Halloween.

(31:13):
The night which was formally accepted as the time when
witches met and demons in the form of ghosts and
ghoules who are likely to wander about, has come to
be regarded that's a time of merrymaking and frolic. The
majority of people are so engaged and are unaware if
they satanic consultation of the magic oracles and the Covin's
and groves on this night. I say, cons that's not

(31:35):
how you say it, Well, that's how I say it.
You just you just got COVID on the brain. COVID
is what you call a coven that meets during COVID
because they're not properly socially distancing. All right, right, there
we go. But basically she thinks that basically these all
of the witches and magic doors are meeting, all these
ghouls and Halloween and people are unaware of this, very

(32:00):
extremely concerned that children might like walk in on a
ceremony and it didn't get murdered. Very funny when you
realize like how isolated these people are from the real
world because they've never just like stepped outside during Halloween,
not really like especially I mean Halloween and two that's
in six I was eighteen then, So maybe I'm wrong,
but I think there was. It wasn't huge then, like
it's gotten kind of smaller every year. The biggest fear

(32:21):
back then was like traffic accidents. Yeah, that's always the biggest.
That's like the number one thing. Every year. Thinking back
on it, my parents shouldn't have let me be a
ninja as often as they, But I made it through. Yeah,
it's like we're saying so many the same words. Again,
that's the most of the book is. But Halloween Satan's
New Year. Halloween has a long and dark history of

(32:42):
devilish traditions, which has survived both Christianity and the science
for two thousand years. Is to be considered the chief
festival for the worship of the devil which begins his
new year. Halloweena witchcraft for the means by which the
devil seems to reintroduce the worship of old false gods
by a synthesis of polytheism and feminism. Yeah, that's what halloweenas.
Polyphism and feminism, two sides of the same devil coin.

(33:07):
I love to worship multiple gods and respect women. Just really,
that is my That's my way to spend a night
with my ghoul friends. Incredible, there's also a real here's
a real here's a real. Good quote. Um, there is
no question of the existence of modern witchcraft. It has
been admitted. It has been admitted of by thousands upon
thousands worldwide, and growing rapidly in the Western countries, particularly America.

(33:30):
The word of God makes it undeniably clear that witchcraft
is real. It has existed at least six thousand years,
and it still exists today. Oh good, yeah, that's good.
Six thousand years going good. Good for happy six thousands.
Just like that, she add so that it's a little
been around for all these six happy six thousands, six
six thousand years witchcraft on. I'm guessing because it's the
new year, this is also the birthday of witchcraft. I

(33:53):
mean also just the birthday of the world. Because if
the world as we know was, if the world as
we know it was when Eve ate the fruit and
was Adam and Eve went into the greater world, if
that's like the birth of Dawn, which has been here
since the very beginning, well since the beginning of like
the fallen world, because you have to assume that they
had a hundred years or so beforehand. It's real unclear

(34:14):
this it depends on what It depends on what denomination
you're in and what kind of theological viewpoint you have
on whether there were people outside the garden there as
people who believe that some people just don't um that
is up for debate among different congregations. Yeah, so and
and and the other thing that she's really concerned with
is that witchcraft is making more people have sex, because

(34:36):
she she thinks that most of witchcraft is practicing sexual
orgies on quote every continent of the world. Um. And
that's what that's what, that's that's what black masses to her,
So she is she's very concerned. I mean, there's are
and sometimes in black masses sexual elements to them, I hope.
So that is that it does sound much better, but
she she thinks that that's another one of the main

(34:57):
catalysts of her being fearful of of paganism and witchcraft
is that is making more people have sex. Um. And
again she reiterates that this is just a new form
of paganism, saying that Satan's current day revival of paganism
it's a sure sign of Christ's second coming and it's
it's pretty good. Oh. This this is the section where
she where she complains that magic doesn't use the Bible,

(35:19):
even though previously she said that white magic does. Because
some magic some which is drawn other false religions such
as the Kabbala, uh Sufism, or various Eastern religions, but
never the Holy Bible, the Word of God, or is
employed in their beliefs or practices, except in a paradoxical
counterfeit imaginative magic, rites and rituals performed in the in
the Covin's in the initiation of the converts and their

(35:43):
celebrations of Halloween and other Satanic sabots. So that's that's
that's that's what she thinks I mean. But honestly, I'm
pretty sure it's like the Shabbas, it's the Sabbath, it's
I've I've heard Covin and Saba in the stuff, right,
So alright, alright, let's have let's have a debate everyone,

(36:05):
everyone at no, don't don't do that. Um. She also
claims that this is this is this is very exciting.
Several universities in America offer a bachelor's degree in magic.
I was unaware. Oh I would love a bat unaware
of because this will read now, well, this will make
me consider going to college. Now a bachelor's degree? Is
that a a b A or is that a BS? Like?

(36:28):
Is that like? Is it a Bachelor of Arts or
of science? And really that's a that's a key question.
About how the school match magic is both in our science.
So yeah, well that's why I'm wondering. And she doesn't say,
she doesn't say what university she claims does this. I mean,
I've always wanted to open a witchcraft store, so I
made to get a b a in or a bs

(36:49):
in witchcraft along with my m f A. What's the
business thing? What they don't I don't want to fill
it in with the acronym from the is a misdegree.
Whatever you get, I don't know we I've dropped out
of college. Garrison hasn't gone. Yeah, I went to I
went to film school. That doesn't count though it doesn't
it absolutely does not. Um. Yeah. And then in this

(37:13):
last section she really ties modern witchcraft to the rise
of feminism UM, specifically starting in the sixties. She says
the pre eminence of the goddess and witchcraft hasn't made
an attractive to some feminists. In nineteen sixty eight, which
the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, funded as a
great acronym, AMAZING was founded as a political protist group

(37:35):
who who purport who purportedly justified their name as mere
jest ah it is what a what a good name,
which women international. Quite an exciting um, quite an exciting
back when we could have fun and activism. That does
sound amazing. Many of the members of this feminist movement
are unaware of the cultural movement within the political and

(37:57):
many are are more, and many more are entirely unaware
of the spiritualist movement within the cultural moment. So a
whole bunch of weird stuff around. How whiches are using
political feminism to inject cultural feminism, to inject cultural witchcraft
into the mainstream. This is all what the goal of
feminism is. Um so yeah, and she has this whole

(38:19):
whole pair of feminist feminist witches. Feminist witchcraft is at
present the most rapidly growing segment in the Witchcraft revival.
And it is from the spiritual core at the heart
of the feminist movement that the political and philosophical women's
rights tenants as a whole emerge. To name what to
name one such tenant the rights to abortion, or more
correctly phrased, the might the rights to murder children not

(38:41):
yet born. This this coincides with the which is present
ritual practice of murdering children already born. So she thinks
that abortion is just a way for which is to
to speed up the ritual process. Yeah, that that is
what that is her that that's her main bomb at
the That sounds that sounds accurate. Um, she doesn't just

(39:04):
have a great section describing the different tools which is used.
Um and and uh. An athlete. A phallic penis symbol
of the liberated, unbridled, auto lawful sex represents the power
of self will. It's pretty pretty good. Sexual symbols are
common in witchcraft and which is, are unrepressed by God's

(39:26):
mortal law in their sexuality. Their use of sex symbols
is rooted in paganism. So again, she's very scary that
people are having sex and enjoying it, specifically women. She's
very scared that women are having sex and enjoying it.
Sounds right. I hate it when the people pushing this
line are themselves women, But it does. I mean, that's
a huge part of the evangelical propaganda movement. Yeah, see

(39:51):
a bunch of ship, Margaret Atwood wrote. You know, now
she gets to describe some some of the coolest parts here.
A typical which is Sabbath celebration will have a sky
i clad parenthesis, nude pentis, which is gathered in an
isolated place a grove of trees, if possible, around an
altar which holds an icon or statuary of a false
goddess and or God's, and candles for fire, a child's

(40:13):
for water or wine, a container of salt and a
container for earth rather than the bread, and a sword
or a wand which sounds amazing to just have a
whole bunch of naked which is in the forest around
a ritual altar fire. This sounds like the best best
time ever. It does sound like a good Saturday night.
This does sound like a good who knows we can?

(40:36):
We can, we can get wild? So yeah. She She
goes in to describe what she thinks magical rituals are
and different things that she could do again. She is
very concerned. Ritual sex is engaged in to intensify the
magical power raised in the cone of power combined wheels
of the coffin Witches is symbolized with a code shaped
hats see the typical pictures of which is in literature.

(40:59):
Are you fucking at me? Because nobody wearing one of
those hats has ever gotten fucked? I feel confident say
I wear that hat. All right, let's let's move forward, Garrison.
That's not fair, allegedly, let's move forward. The Cone of Power.
Mm hmm, Yeah, the Cone of Power is is incredible

(41:21):
after raising, and it is phallic, so it must be
for fucking After the raising and release of the Cone
of Power, a ritual covid communication with cakes and wine
which the priestess or priest has consecrated by dipping into
the chalice and touching the cakes with other unholy tools,
are passed on from a kiss from the priestess to
the priest. Um. Basically, this just sounds like a fun time. Um. Yeah,

(41:43):
but I do love the Cone of Power, which I've
not read in any other magic book. No, I have
not ever heard of. I've read a decent amount, and
I've never heard of the Cone of Power. Yeah. That
feels like pure her. That feels like somebody who's deeply
sexually frustrated seeing so happy it's kind of shape like
a dick, and being like, that's got to be poor lady.

(42:08):
And then she she has a small section on Satanism,
particularly like the iron Rand version of Satanism, So I'm
not even gonna get into that. I find that boring
and it doesn't matter, and and and and she even
says that these Satanists don't believe in an actual devil,
just a little the evil. So I'm not even gonna
bother with this section because it's just talking about the dumb,

(42:29):
iron rand version of Satanism. And I don't care about that. Um,
if you like it, I mean whatever. It has an
anarchistic stuff kind of but it's also very randy and
and it has it has a lot of like, not
great stuff either. I don't I it's fine and all
it all is more effort than I want to put
into thinking about the universe. And then I think, I
think this this could be. I think this is our last,
our last paragraph favorite. This section is called titled the

(42:52):
End of the Witches, Witches, our children of the Devil,
The end of the witches, sorry, the end of the witches.
Already before their idolterous altars, that they're depraved spots where
they eat and drink and play their gross music and
sing and dance, naked and shameless and corrupt and defile

(43:16):
themselves and desecrate God's holy Sabbath, shall surely be accomplished
by God, who will put them, who'll put them to
death and cut off their souls forever among his children.
So that's that's the end of the Witches. Everybody, We're
gonna be dancing naked, shamelessly, like having like an undeniably

(43:36):
good time, being able to dance naked and shame listening
to gross music and singing, what a time. Sounds like
the ideal weekend. And then and then God will put
us to death. And it does sound a little bit
like our last weekend. But it was very cold, so
people were wearing Yeah, that is that is that is
most of that is most of the good parts of

(43:57):
the book. Again, it gets two pages. Yeah, it's a
nice easy read. Grab it, you know this weekend. It's
only ten bucks on Amazon. What a deal, what a steal? Yeah,
And it is fun that she she does, Um, there
is one there is one section where she like outlines
what all she thinks like magic is like all like
all of like the different groups. Um, she puts them

(44:18):
into a really nice little package. But I don't think
I can find that because again there's two hundred pages
and I did not mark off that section. But I
think I think we decently got the gist of the
main main parts of this book. Um, again, most of
it is just her talking about Jesus and and and
and the Christian soul. Um. But the one which which
is of indoor section is pretty good and honestly worth

(44:40):
the read. So that is my first book report of her.
It could happen here. All of you Satan's New Year
beloved children, enjoyed this this this book and are are
properly warned about the dangers of witchcraft which is coming
to make your children have a pretty red time. You're
gonna dance in the woods listening to gross music. So
I hope everyone on this Halloween danced in the woods

(45:02):
listening to gross music. I hope those of you who
climactically could did so naked. Um. I hope none of
you got hit by cars while dressed as Ninja's and
I I also hope that most of you weren't out
trick or treating, because I think the average age of
our listeners is sometime in the mid twenties. That would
be a little bit of a little awkward, a little
bit weird, but hey, whatever, it's your life, your thing.
Do you think, hello, everyone, Garrison here just going to

(45:26):
be adding in one quick correction for our Halloween Satan's
New Year episode. So towards the end we made some
assumptions about the the Code of Power which were apparently incorrect.
So the Code of Power does actually seem to be
a thing inside ritual magic um, but particularly Wika. So
I'm not super familiar with Wika. This is not this

(45:48):
is not my system of choice, so I was unaware
that this is actually a thing, but apparently apparently it is.
It is. It is a method for centering or directing
or like raising energy. Um, well it is. It is
less tied to the which is had those so that
part is is more um made up. I cannot find
much tying the Cone of Power directly to like the

(46:08):
cone shape, which is hats. This is mainly an invention
of of of Doctor Billy from at least from from
what I can tell. But apologies for assuming that the
Cone of Power was completely made up and when in
fact it is a part of Worker. So sorry, sorry
to the Wickens and the more proper witches for that,
for that, for that gross assumption on mine and Robert's part. Anyway,

(46:32):
this wraps up our spooky week of content. I hope
you had a good Halloween. This episode should be releasing
on Halloween itself, so I I hope you are having
or had a good time, and hopefully you were able
to celebrate Halloween Satan style just like it was designed to.
So goodbye everybody, see you on the other side and

(46:54):
hopefully we can do Spooky Week again next year. Goodbye.
Oh welcome to it could happen here a podcast about

(47:17):
well mostly it's about how things are bad, but it
is also sometimes about what you can do about it.
And today we have two people who are in fact
doing things about it. So with me we have a
Bra and Shanine, who are part of the Common Humanity Collective,
which is a mutual a group out of California, um
clogen and Club Bra. How how are how are you

(47:38):
doing today? Doing well? Thank you? Doing pretty good? Thank you.
So yeah, we wanted to have you too on to
talk about basically your mutual aid work and then also
the sort of political aspect of that because I know
about something YouTube and wanting to talk about that. I've
read the media coverage of it in it does not

(47:58):
ever make it into the interview. So yeah, I guess
I guess to start. So you two started doing mutual
aid stuff with with this group, specifically around the beginning
of the pandemic. As I understand you know what, can
you walk us through how it started and what you
guys are up to? Absolutely, and I think it's interesting
to trace out the different stages of this work because

(48:20):
it's very much BEND, a kind of evolution. So let
me go back to the very very early days, and
this is really the first day of lockdown UM in
the Bay Area where we live. I'm a PhD student
at UC Berkeley and UM. As COVID was spreading from
the East coast to the west, we knew that things
would quickly get shut down in California UM. And there

(48:43):
was someone in my lab, a good friend named Yvonne,
and she and I just quickly realized that this pandemic
was going to hit UM. Given the sort of crumbling
public health infrastructure, the poorest among us, the elderly dispossessed UM,
these people would be vulnerable and as PPE just completely

(49:07):
disappeared from store shelves. These people UM, especially those living
in cramped housing conditions, those with essential work UH, those
in nursing homes just would not have access to UM
the tools they needed to protect themselves from this disease. UM.
And in the very early days, when we thought that

(49:27):
the stuff was transmitted via surfaces, UM, all of the
attention was focused on hand washing hand sanitizer. The problem
was you couldn't even find hand sanitizer anywhere. So here
we were in our labs and UM, you know, our
few moths weren't being used and everyone was getting sent home.
UM and UH, we realized that we could pull ethanol

(49:51):
from the scientific re agent supply chains and stir up
some hand sanitizer ourselves in lab and distribute it UM
just to homeless shelters, to people who needed it in
the city, etcetera. UM. So this began as a very
sort of low key, quiet under the cover UM effort.

(50:12):
And UM, you know, we didn't have a name. We
didn't even know what mutual Aid was. I think we
were just following our basic instincts UM. And fast forward
a week or two, and suddenly a whole lot of
people got involved. UM. We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure
which started sort of self assembling. UM. Lots of people

(50:35):
came to find ways of getting the sanitizer to everyone
who needed it in the meantime, we realized that as
the demand was enormous, we need to come up with
ways of procuring the supplies UM and mixing it at
scales that we didn't have to turn anyone down. So
we called upon lots of different labs on campus and
asked them if they could do this, if they could

(50:55):
shift some of their discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals UM.
And you know again, within a few weeks after that,
we were mixing hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer and
delivering it to absolutely everyone who needed it. My phone
was just getting UH called NonStop from the moment I

(51:17):
woke up to when I went to sleep, I was
forgetting to eat. I was barely sleeping. UM. Just responding
to these cries for help from all over the Bay area. UM.
And in that time we met so many people UM
and we figured out how to do this work efficiently
and effectively. But also UM, as the attention shifted from

(51:39):
surface transmission to aerosol transmission UM, everyone started realizing that,
in fact, masks were probably the primary way in which
we protect ourselves from the coronavirus UM. And that's when
a good friend of ours Chris, who was a PhD
student that he's now a post a brilliant, brilliant creative guy,
came up with ways of that actually making sub micron

(52:02):
masks out of just UH supply chains that weren't getting
tapped UM. So initially these were shop towels, and then
he started looking at NANI fiber material UM and he
found ways of for around sixty cents making a mass
that was basically the quality of an N ninety five
mass that could be made in just a few minutes
at home UM. And so we suddenly just integrated that

(52:25):
whole effort into our own and started just recruiting volunteers,
sharing all of our resources, and UM this large assembly
network of these little pods situated all across the Bay Area,
each of them with a team lead with a little army,
a battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers were just

(52:47):
making thousands of these mass every week, which we were
then distributing through the the distribution infrastructure that we had
UH sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic.
And so we found ourselves and this was still very
much in a time when you couldn't even find cloth
masks or surgical masks and shops, we found ourselves astonishingly

(53:08):
being the primary source of this essential ppe for tens
and tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area.
And as we were covered in the early days by
the Chronicle in the l A Times, loads of people
started joining the volunteer network, we started getting donations and uh,
that was the earlier stage of what we did, and

(53:30):
I'll pass it on to Jinine to talk about what
we did next. Yeah, So, kind of as UM Common
Humanity Collective was working on this project up Bar, myself
and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a
Democratic Socialists of America or East by d S A
side of what was happening UM. And through this project
our intent was to UM have a little bit more

(53:54):
political education and think really critically about how we could
make this true mutual aid, which A Row and I
have learned is really really difficult to do, especially under capitalism. UM.
And so because we started this project around December, so
kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to
make it accessible for people who were really COVID cautious UM,

(54:15):
and so we would assemble kits of masks in a
park with a couple of folks outside, and then we
would drive these kits to people's homes and get on
zoom UM and we would have a breakout room for
people to learn how to make masks. UM. People oftentimes
people who had only come to the build a couple
of times started teaching new folks how to build these masks.

(54:35):
And in the other room we were doing readings. UM.
We were reading you know, Panna Cook and Jane mciwy
b side by side talking about you know, trade unions
and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing. UM
a bar. Do you want to talk about Rosa Luxemburg
a little bit? Yeah, I mean it was an amazing thing.
We were trying to sort of expand our own political consciousness,

(55:00):
and we did things like host to three part series
just discussing, examining, analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxembourg UM.
And we had huge participation. And this was at a
time where in our d SA chapter UM and many
of the different committees people were panicking because no one
was showing up UM, and yet we found an enormous

(55:24):
number of people joining our effort in these discussions were
so energetic and so enthusiastic. Um. And you know, this
was a lonely time. It was a difficult time, and
people seemed to find something and what we were doing.
What do you think about that, Jennie, Yeah, and I
think you know, not only were people coming and participating, right,
we had high school students. We had people who had

(55:45):
dedicated the pandemic to reading political theory, right, and so
you have this huge breath of knowledge. We have more
liberal people joining. We have like anarchists and communists right, like,
all in this space that are actually talking together. And
what was so empowering to me was everyone felt like
they could speak. We had people that were really introverted,
um then in the beginning didn't talk at all, slowly

(56:06):
start to open up. We had high schoolers asking really
incredible questions, right like is revolution even possible right now? Um?
And kind of getting into some of this. And I
think one of the most impactful things was that we
had these calls from seven to nine at night, and
after that we had what we called late night, where
folks would stay on till like twelve at night and
talk to each other. And in this time of like

(56:29):
isolation and depression, I don't think anyone that I know
at least was having a good time in December, January, February, right,
people were coming together on Zoom and actually staying on
Zoom after what we were doing to feel some type
of camaraderie, to feel like they were part of a community. Um.
And we were able to actually create that space. And
I think that that was something that to me was

(56:49):
really incredible. UM. And I think, you know, framing this
also from the George Floyd protests that happened over the
summer and thinking you know, more about abolition, right, thinking
more about community building. I don't think you can truly
or I can't imagine the future without the prison industrial
complex that doesn't involve communities of care, that doesn't involve

(57:09):
giving people both the resources and the like love that
they need to be able to not be pushed into
situations where they have to commit crimes, and also having
accountability amongst each other. Um. Not to mention, right, this
work is really really hard. People burn out, like we
are exhausted to be able to create a space where
everyone cares for each other or we're checking in with
each other where you know, in the beginning of this

(57:32):
virtual mask builds, I think, you know, a bar, myself
and a couple other folks were doing the majority of
the work and by the end we were doing none
of it. We had like been able to reallocate those tasks,
we had been able to develop leaders, and we had
essentially organized ourselves out of a job, which to me
is like the organizer's dream, right, Like that's what you
really want to see happen, UM. And so that's kind

(57:53):
of what was happening on the production side of the
Mask builds. On the distribution side, again, we're thinking, how
can we act really make this true mutual aid UM,
and so we started to partner with Tank Tenant and
Neighborhood Councils, which is one of the main tenant groups
in the Bay Area UM and working with them to
go to food banks right places where people are generally
low income, where they might not be able to have

(58:15):
the resources to get masks, and we're distributing masks asking
them are you having trouble with your rent or your landlord? Right?
The goal in this is to give people the tools
to organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent
to them, especially with an impending fiction moratorium. Right, and
so UM, we learned a lot through this. We went
to a lot of different food banks we found, um,

(58:38):
you know, some of them were places where people primarily
spoke Cantonese and Mandarin, and so we you know, used
our networks again that we had created through this project,
these relationships of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin
and we're willing to come out, um and talk with folks. Um.
We found people that spoke Spanish that we're willing to
come out and talk with folks. And we started to
develop relationships at these food banks where we are able

(59:00):
to distribute masks to people, talk to them, understand what
issues they were having, UM, and invite them to come
to meetings where they could actually get their resources to
try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing.
Abrought you have more to add on the MASS project, Yeah,
I think it's worth saying that. UM, we're all very busy.
I'm a PhD student. While we were doing this work, UM,

(59:23):
you know, in d s A, I was teaching a
class and I was doing research, and Janine is a
extremely busy union organizer. UM, And normally, you know, we'd
come home after work and be absolutely exhausted, UM, and
this was very tiring, but we felt somehow energized, We
felt driven to do this, and we found that lots

(59:44):
of the other people who participated were also busy with
their jobs and yet would make time to do this
and UM in terms of our actual practice, in terms
of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution
aspect of our mutual aid, there was a constant interplay
between what we were reading and what we were practicing.

(01:00:05):
So as we began working with this radical tenant organizing
group tank that Jinin mentioned, whose aim is to give
tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions
in order to use tools such as rent strikes to
rebalance power between themselves and their landlords and real estate companies, etcetera. UM.

(01:00:26):
During that time, during our mask builds, we would then
go and read articles in newspaper clippings from you know,
early twentieth century, when there were examples of twenty year
old factory girls in Lower Manhattan organizing groups of apartment
buildings to go on rent strike, you know, ten thousand
families in one case, to go on rent strike. These incredible,

(01:00:49):
deeply inspiring stories, UM where people uh suddenly became UH
subjects of history and not merely objects. And I think
part of what's stained our own work in this group
was some UH similar feeling and UM At the same time,
when we were trying to imagine future beyond capitalism, we

(01:01:13):
were looking at moments when that future seemed within reach,
and so we were studying, for example, Paris in ninety,
which is a moment within many people's living memory, all
although not our own, UM and studying how it was
that these protests began with the student movement and then
spilled out into these massive strikes and all the sort

(01:01:35):
of self activity that emerged from that. And there was
such a wide, wide breath of people who came to
these builds. There were people as young as high schoolers,
were also much older, people in their seventies and eighties.
And when we were having this discussion, someone who lived
through the sixties and witnessed these things very up close
came to talk about Paris in n and shared the

(01:01:57):
wealth of his own experience. And again, all of this
was driving what we were actually doing with our hands,
what we were doing on the streets, what we were
doing at these food bank lines, UM and so it
was very critical that everything we were reading was somehow
feeding into our practice. Yeah, and I think, you know,

(01:02:18):
we had over a hundred people participate in these masks builds.
And I think one of the things that I really
took away from this is again, people were craving that community,
They were craving relationships, and people came back because they
felt that in this group, UM. And that translated also
as we transitioned, right, we had built a culture of
friendship and of caring for each other that people wanted

(01:02:41):
to continue working on this. They wanted to continue to
be a part of this project. As we transitioned UM
to building air purifiers, right as the um you know,
vaccines became more prevalent, masks were still being worn, but
to a lesser degree. UM, and we started turning to
fire season UM. As these disasters right continue to strike,

(01:03:01):
especially with climate change only getting worse and worse, one
of the things that I think is really powerful about
mutual aid, and is really powerful about communities is that
these disasters have been happening and continue to happen at
a greater and greater frequency. And I think what I've
learned from looking at you know, the heat waves that
recently took many lives across the Pacific Northwest. The UM

(01:03:23):
really really freezing temperatures that happened in Texas about a
year ago, and especially COVID is that you know, the government,
local or federal is not stepping in to help people.
Billionaires are not really stepping in to help people. It's
really only communities and networks of relationships that are keeping
people alive. And the only way you know that we're
going to get through this is through having those relationships,

(01:03:46):
through understanding where people need support. And we started to
do this with the distribution of masks, right is build
relationships with community members in you know, fruit Vale in Oakland,
which is not a large, not a place that many
people from d SA or from TANK are living currently, right,
and starting to build relationships with people that do need

(01:04:07):
these resources in times of crisis UM, so that we
know where we can plug in and also build relationships
amongst our fellow organizers so that we can support each
other through these disasters. UM. And so as we transitioned
to the air purifiers, we started, you know, thinking about
everything we have learned from the Mass project and kind
of making that even bigger and better, and how can

(01:04:29):
we you know, continue to take what we've learned and
change it and turn it into something really really incredible.
And UM we you know Chris who Abar mentioned before,
who came up with the masks, came up with a
really incredible way to make air purifiers that like ridiculously efficient.
UM is really really useful, especially for wildfire smoke, but

(01:04:54):
also for just people with asthma. There's a lot of
environmental pollution in the Bay area, right these things can
be used UM year round. And we began to build
these air purifiers out of you know, box fans and
help a filters UM with a shroud with weather stripping
right to make the air like only go through the
fan to make it extremely efficient. And UM started to

(01:05:16):
think about how can we make this like community aspect
even bigger at least this is what I was thinking of,
because I started to realize, right, I think the only
thing that we can rely on is each other right now,
especially UM. And so we started bringing in a bunch
of different groups to come to these builds. So we
have you know, East Bay d s A. We started
working really closely with Sunrise and developed a level of

(01:05:37):
trust and reciprocity in that relationship that has you know,
continued to be really beneficial to us UM and really helpful.
We met amazing people that came out. You know, they've
helped fundraise for US as our funding has gotten really
really low because these air purifiers are not cheap those
they are much cheaper than commercially available, but we're you know,
giving them to folks for free because we want this

(01:05:59):
to be mutual aid UM and so working with Sunrise,
we're working with Asians for Black Lives UM, Berkeley Mutual
Aid MASK Oakland UM who both came out to our
builds but also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno
and to places that had you know a qu i
s of five hundred right when fire season was so bad,

(01:06:22):
when the smoke there was just like unlivable. UM. We
were able to work with them to distribute these air
purifiers where people really needed them most. UM we were
able to you know, continue to work with tank UM.
Some folks from the i w W came out. We
were able to distribute these air purifiers to the Sagorata
Land Trust, which is UM a land trust that is

(01:06:45):
run by Indigenous women UM and is working on essentially
giving um indigenous land back to Indigenous people. We were
able to distribute with Critical Resistance and amazing abolitionist groups
started by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela dave Us in Oakland.
We were able to distribute UM to s r oh UM,
a group that is working with UM low income Chinese

(01:07:08):
immigrants in San Francisco who are generally living in single
family homes right with really bad air quality UM and
work with like all of these different groups, you know,
Berkeley Mutual Aid. We're pulling in people from just countless
networks to come and build air purifiers together. UM. And
we had you know, an ex black panther talking to

(01:07:30):
someone from Sunrise from San Francisco, right Like these just
wild connections, UM that are happening at these builds of
people who are deeply political and people who are barely
understanding um you know what socialism means, but are wanting
to come out and do something for their community. UM.
And through these relationships and networks again, like we're able

(01:07:52):
to hang out after the builds, people are able to
enjoy themselves. Everyone said they were having a really fun
time even though we were like literally doing work this
satur Day. People were still like, this is so fun.
We had you know, people baking bread and like fruit
tarts and cheesecakes and bringing it. We had so we
had music. It was like a very fun atmosphere and environment.

(01:08:14):
And despite the fact that you know, it was physical
labor and it was taxing and a lot of times
it was on hot days. Um, people stayed for you know,
four hours to help do this and to do this
work because they cared, because they wanted to see, um,
you know, what they could be able to do. And
they also I think started to build relationships. Um. I know,

(01:08:34):
you know, countless people talked to a Bra and I
and had no idea. You know, we've known each other
for less than a year now, um, and they thought
we'd known each other our whole lives. And I think
that that really speaks, right. I think that speaks so
much to the relationships that we've been able to build
through this. And you know, I think a Bra and
I have met countless people and have developed like an
incredible community through this work. Um. That definitely helps me

(01:08:58):
keep going. I would definitely be able to continue to
do this work if I couldn't, you know, call Librara,
but nine pm and we talked for three hours, and
we complain, but we also talked through like what are
we doing and how can it be better? And how
can we you know, get through this roadblock UM And
I saw that in countless places UM as we moved
to our own distribution, So we're partnering with these organizations,

(01:09:20):
but we're also doing our own distribution UM, which I
think is like a huge experiment. And how to actually
do mutual aid which UM is something that you know,
when we talked to the organizers in our circles, we
weren't finding answers too, and so we kind of realized
like we just have to kind of try and figure
this out. But we would go out and do these
distributions and afterwards, you know, have lunch with people and
talk to each other like what could we do better?

(01:09:42):
What are we doing wrong? Is this mutual aid? Like
these are questions we're having right after we've been standing
in the sun talking to people for three hours. Like
the dedication of the people involved in this, like of
our said, most of us are working forty fifty sixty
hour weeks and yet we're dedicating constant time during the
week and at least one day every weekend to either
distribution or a build. UM is incredible. I feel like

(01:10:05):
incredibly honored to be able to work with the people
that we've been working with UM. But in our distribution,
we started thinking about, you know, how can we invite
some of these people to come to our builds. Maybe
that's the reciprocity. I think true mutual aid is really
about believing that the people that were distributing to can
also give back to us, rather than seeing them as

(01:10:27):
like helpless UM. And so we continue to do some
of our distributions with tank UM and actually we were
able to do some of these distributions in a way
that helped new buildings who were just starting to form
tenant councils. UM. You know, use the air purifiers as
a way to open up conversation with some of these
people and say, hey, you're building is being organized. Remember

(01:10:47):
how the fire season was last year, right, Like, this
is something that you can use, and let's talk more
about other tools that we can use coming together to
really fight for changes that we can't necessarily make on
our own. UM. So that was happening, and then we
also decided to look at data around where in Oakland
or asthma rates really high, where in Oakland is air

(01:11:08):
pollution really bad, and where in Oakland is it primarily
lower income folks? Right? We want to be giving these
air purifiers to people who can't generally afford a hundred
to two hundred dollar air purifier. UM. And so East
Oakland was one of those places. And again through this
network that we had built through the Mask build, we
had a connection in East Oakland someone that had UM

(01:11:28):
that is part of East Bay ds A right, that
had done a lot of community organizing, and someone that
was actually able to, you know, send out an email
to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air purifiers.
And so we had people posting up at her house. UM.
So you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that
was not our own, which in some ways UM you know,
there's a lot of complications to that, UM, but we

(01:11:49):
were also able to do it at someone's house that
we knew UM. And our goal in this was to
get people to come to our builds to make air
purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends,
so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods, right,
so that they can then start to own that distribution
and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it. Um.

(01:12:10):
And so we also kind of door knocked around the
neighborhood talking to people about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke,
about coming out to a build, you know, about why
this is really important, um, why we need people to
engage in this project. Um. And we distributed almost a
hundred air purifiers that day, I think folks in that community.

(01:12:34):
And after that that week UM, so we distributed on
Sunday and then um a week later on Saturday, we
would have a build. So within that week, right, we're
calling everyone that we distributed to saying, hey, how is
your air porifier working? Can you come out to a build.
It's really really valuable that you come out to a
build so that you can make sure that your community
has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season. UM.

(01:12:56):
And through these calls, right, I talked to someone who
lived in East Oakland for an hour, UM, and this
person just started opening up and was so touched that
we had done this and basically said, you know, no
one has ever cared for my community like this. No
one has ever even thought about us, right, And you see,
like there are nonprofits right California was giving out air
purifiers to certain people, like there's a semblance of the structure.

(01:13:19):
And yet we were actually interfacing with these people who
seemed to have no idea that any of this was
happening right there, saying, you know, no one else has
been able to do this, UM, and we're starting to
form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make
people feel cared for and follow up UM. And despite
all of this work, right, no one shows up to
our bill that week UM, And I think Obra and

(01:13:39):
I both felt pretty defeated, right, Like is mutually possible?
What are we're doing wrong? Clearly? Like class and racial
barriers are really hard to overcome in this UM. And
you know, we're talking to our ex black panther friend
that has continued to be a huge part of this project,
and he was like, you're you know, you have to
keep trying. You're doing the right things. And so we

(01:14:01):
went to West Oakland again where we had a connection
from our Mass project that helped us set up in
front of this corner next to UM, a vegan cafe
that serves trans poc for free UM and has really
wonderful food. We're able to talk with them give them
air purifier as they allowed us to. UM kind of

(01:14:23):
set up shop in front of their store. And there's
also like a liquor store on this corner. It's like
a very busy corner in West Oakland. UM and kind
of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers,
talking to people about the build, talking to people about
UM you know why this is important. And we're also
door knocking in the neighborhood, talking to folks UM at
their homes, UM asking people, you know, who needs an

(01:14:45):
air purifier? Right, Like, these communities generally know each other
really well, and we're able to talk to people who
are like, oh my gosh, you know, like my aunt
lives over there and her kid has asthma, and like
you should go talk with her. UM. And so we
start to develop these connections and kind of map out
the neighborhood and UM you know, again we're following up.
We're talking to these people on the phone, we're asking
them to come out to the build. And we went

(01:15:09):
out to this neighborhood again. So the second time we
went out. Um. I started to recognize people, right, and
I started to be able to talk with people, and um,
through I was kind of like door knocking, um, while
people were posted up by the liquor store and this
beacon cafe and uh, there was like a church service
going on and I recognized one of the people there,
and he recognized me, and we were able to talk

(01:15:29):
and he was really grateful for the work that we
were doing. And he started calling his friends over and
be like, hey, you know, do you all need an
air purifier? Remember how a bad fire season was last year,
And also like we should all go to this build
next time. Um, you know we should actually be showing
up and helping out um. And words spread so quickly,
like these communities are so deeply connected, um, at least

(01:15:51):
from what I like witnessed. And um that week again, right,
we called everyone. We said, like, you know, we really
think it's valuable for you all to come out to
a build. We want to give you like ownership and
autonomy over this in a world where I think so
often you feel so little autonomy, um, and so little
power when everything feels like it's crumbling. Right to have
some semblance of ownership and autonomy. To be able to

(01:16:13):
um do something that is immediately like visible and real
UM feels really powerful, right when sometimes you know, uh,
talking to elected officials is moving too slowly because disasters
are happening so quickly. There is a need to balance
immediate need and system change, right, and I think you
have to constantly hold both. Um. But you know, we're

(01:16:34):
talking to these folks, were asking them to come to
the build and UM, we actually had a couple of
people come out to our build from our distribution, people
that had a really amazing time, People that you know
said that they enjoyed being there um and took air
purifiers back and gave them out to their friends and family. UM.
And we're able to say, you know, I made this right,

(01:16:55):
like this is something valuable, but also I understand how
it works. And I talked to one of these people.
Our next build is actually on his birthday, and he
was like, I really want to come out on my birthday.
I really want to come out and help people and
do this thing that has been enjoyable um and is
also like helping people. And that to me was someone right,

(01:17:17):
like that someone wants to come on their birthday to
like build air purifiers on a Saturday, when most of
these people are you know, working forty two however many
hours a week that they're willing to continue to even
work on a Saturday, I think is a huge feat UM,
and it's something that's definitely felt really really powerful in
this Yeah. I think something that Janine brings out is

(01:17:40):
really important, which is that UM, at every stage we've
been sort of interrogating and examining the work we're doing
and asking whether we are truly drawing out the full
political potential of our work. So in the earlier days
when we were just stirring up that sanitizer and getting
out these masks, you know, we did a lot, and

(01:18:04):
you know, this network of volunteers comprised well over two
hundred people, and it was sort of consuming all of
our time. But eventually we realized that to a large degree,
we were basically just acting as a stopgap measure for
government austerity, for the big gaps left behind by this

(01:18:25):
extremely problematic nonprofit industrial complex, and the work we were
doing then we realized, was sort of susceptible to co
optation UM, and it didn't necessarily represent too much of
a threat to capitalist hegemony and um. At that point,

(01:18:45):
you know, we shifted into d s A and we
started bringing in a very sort of explicit political education
component and started associating with an organization like Tank, which
is already been doing um, really incredible radical organizing in
the Bay Area, but eventually ran up against the limits
of that as well. And you know, d Essay is

(01:19:07):
an organization where a lot of us initially learned our politics,
but you know, and its current sort of stage, it's
characterized by a strong degree in our chapter of sort
of democratic centralism, and most of the effort is being
put toward electoral work and reform work, and everything that
we were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme

(01:19:28):
limits of that form of organizing and how these forms
of organizing in fact represented sometimes the more reactionary elements
of the left in earlier moments in history, and we
wanted to go beyond that. And so we realized that
we were spending a lot of time having to just
sort of defend the work that we were doing. So
eventually we just decided to uh sort of reassert our autonomy.

(01:19:50):
And as we shifted into the air Purifier chapter of
our work, that's what we were doing, and um our
inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading about these
earlier moments in history, something which UM had an extraordinary
effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish

(01:20:11):
Revolution in six and suddenly I was reading about this
moment in history that's been more or less erased from
most of our textbooks are presented UM in a very
kind of dishonest form UM. And what these workers and
peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was

(01:20:32):
create on an enormous scale UM the perhaps the most
egalitarian society that I've ever read about, which truly represented
UM a sort of liberatory, radical, early form of anti
authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much

(01:20:56):
uglier forms of so called so acitialism that we've seen
appear in the twentieth century. And what I noticed was
that this society in Spain in n six was absolutely
replete with mutual aid, and these kind of anarchist tendencies
had UM sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of

(01:21:19):
the workers and peasants in Spain, you know, sixty years
before the revolution, after UM Bakunin in the first International
sent out an emissary to start spreading these ideas, and
they took whole like wildfire and spread across the country.
I think, I think one of one of the most
incredible things about that story is the the guy they

(01:21:40):
gets sent from Italy, like from as as the representative now,
because yeah, he doesn't speak Spanish, right, he only speaks Italian,
and he he he should stove at this place, right,
and he's he's he's such a sort of brilliant order
and and the sort of like the power of the
ideas that he has is so strong that you know
it it breaks through the language here, and it's it's

(01:22:00):
this sort of I think it's just this incredible moments
that you know, I think, I think comes into a
lot of a lot of WHI the two were running
into with, you know, I mean, we still live in
a place that's you know, incredibly defined by language bears,
and just the the ability to break through that becomes
it gives you this just incredible potential of power and organization. Yeah, Chase,
you don't know how much it means to me to

(01:22:22):
hear someone who's as familiar with this as most of
the time when I talked about it, just total blank faces,
even among my friends and comrades on the left. And unfortunately,
but yeah, I mean reading about Finelli, who didn't speak
a word of Spanish and he just went and with
his wild gesticulations and his passionate rhetoric was able to

(01:22:44):
basically inspire people with the radical politics that he came
there to represent. And it somehow then took on a
life of its own. Is kind of an extraordinary thing.
And what I would do to take a time machine
back and just see what this guy, you know, stuck
on rains and basically lived as a tramp as he
went from village to village, spreading the word what what

(01:23:05):
this looked like? What was he doing? Um? And yet
these ideas took hold in a only deep way. And UM,
these notions of solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation, free association existed
by the time of the Spanish Revolution in nineteen thirty six.

(01:23:25):
So these sort of dual power counter institutions were more
or less in place. And these are the things which,
um were the basis the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian
social revolution that then unfolded, which was unfortunately destroyed by force. UM.
But this was the sort of society that I imagined

(01:23:46):
I might actually want to live. Um and and uh
and and what you see is that there is a
deep element to UM, a sort of shared consciousness that
existed at that time. And it was quite an effort
for people to bring that consciousness from sort of the
countryside where it took hold more nash naturally into sort

(01:24:08):
of the industrial um centers, the metropolitan areas where people
working in factories were um, you know, found it a
lot more difficult to sort of exercise these UM values
because these things are effectively bled out of them as
a work on the factory floor. And UM. That brought

(01:24:29):
a whole different meaning to the work that we were
doing now. And we wondered, what can we do to
uh inculcate, to nurture this kind of consciousness among the
people with whom we're interacting as we do our mutual aid,
as we do our distributions, as we hold these builds
that you know, even though we had trouble getting initially
a few of the people from our distributions to show up,

(01:24:50):
there were still you know, sixty seventy people showing up
every other weekend. And now we finally started having the
people that were distributing extraordinarily surprising and exciting and yeah,
this has been It could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow
for part two of this interview, where we'll go more
in death in the political side Common Humanity Collectives work. Meanwhile,

(01:25:12):
you can find us on Twitter That Happened Here pod
and also on Instagram in the same place, and you
can find the rest of her worker cools and media
in the same places. Welcome it could Happen Here podcast

(01:25:36):
about things falling apart and about how we can put
them back together in a way better than they originally were.
And today we're going to continue our interview with Janina
Abrar from the Common Humanity Collective. We've been talking about
their work. We've been talking about the origin of the
mutual aid products. We've been talking specifically about the political
aspect of their work and how they're reading this sort

(01:25:58):
of anarchists. The history of anarchists Ruckle in Spain and
particularly bbitual agere in the Spanish Civil War helped impact
and shape the politics and work that they've been doing.
One thing I wanted, I wanted to sort of circle
back all the way too from the beginning was the
stuff you got you were doing at the very beginning
of the pandemic. Because I think that this is I've
talked about this before on here, but you know, the

(01:26:20):
difference between a country like the US where what seven
hundreds and undifty people are dead and places where that
didn't happen was the degree your community mobilization. And I
talked about this with the Chinese example, is that like, yeah,
I mean like that the reason that China that the
pandemic sort of got contained there, it wasn't because the
state stepped in and was like, we're going to do this.
It was because hundreds of thousands of ordinary people just

(01:26:43):
took to the streets and we're like, okay, we're doing
a lockdown now. And you know, and it takes a
different form in China because you know, there's there's a
lot of different sort of things going on there, but
that kind of mass community mobilization in the beginning of
it's just like it. It didn't happen that much in
the US. And I think, like, you know, the the
world where we don't all die in the pandemic, right

(01:27:03):
is the one where the things that you all were
doing happen. I mean, one the way the things. I
remember my sister is a bios grad student, and she
was telling me about how, you know, so so the
you know, one of one of the things, one of
the bottlenecks beginning of a pandemic, and it's still kind
of a bottleneck, was it was about being able to
being able to do COVID tests. And you know, bio
grad students can do PCR tests like it's easy. This

(01:27:26):
is you know, this is one of the first things
they teach you. And that capacity just was never used.
It just it was just sort of left and like
sat there and rotted, and it sat there and rotted
because you know, the actual pandemic response was run by
a state that just didn't care. Any bureaucracy that even
when it did care, was sort of you know, I
didn't have this capacity to mobilize. You know, it's it's

(01:27:48):
its entire existence is about making sure that sort of
the capacity for a tonics mobibilization never happens. And I
think that that was one of the most interesting and
powerful parts of what y'all were doing, was that you
just did it and it just it kept spreading. Yeah, No,
I think it's a that's a really good and important
point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before

(01:28:09):
we started doing any of the stuff with PPE, I
was actually you know, as word as as as the
um uh, the fear of the pandemic started spreading, and
we finally had a picture of what the US would
soon look like. I remember going to a union meeting
among my Spellow grad student workers and talking some people

(01:28:32):
afterwards and saying like, hey, um, I don't think that
we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that
we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff,
Like why don't we just is there any way that
we can just take pc art machines and set up
these little guerrilla operators and start testing people for free?
And unfortunately, one of the things I noticed was that people,

(01:28:52):
you know, we're just very confused by this idea. They
had much more faith in the state's ability to um
assemble these infrastructures, and I just realized that was not
the way in which I was going to be able
to help out. And so it's it's unfortunate, but a
lot of people have even though they have these instincts

(01:29:13):
for sort of mutual aid and for this kind of
autonomous organized. This stuff lies just below the surface. Often
they don't feel actually capable of it. And I think
more than anything, what we've done with this project is
we've created a context and atmosphere in which things which
people typically feel like they cannot do they suddenly realize
they can do again. It's just to come back to

(01:29:34):
that idea that most of us, you know, we live
our lives, We sell our labor for wages. A few
people who own the means of production, you know, accumulate
profits and use them to manipulate the state for their
own purposes. Um. And this has an effect on us.
I mean, this has an effect on dulling our consciousness

(01:29:56):
um And it's an extraordinary transfer asian in our social relations,
in our sense of our own individuality when we do
realize in these moments that we can be um subjects.
And so unfortunately my initial to try to stimulate some
of this activity around testing didn't work out. Um But

(01:30:18):
uh yeah, it just presents this recurring problem, which is
that people are not used to doing this kind of work.
And Janine and I have found many many times that
you know, people are willing to come and use their
hands and build something for a few hours. But then
what we try to do is get them involved. We say,
come to the meetings. You have decision making power. You

(01:30:39):
can determine the trajectory of this work. And that's always
a very very difficult thing to be doing now, given
the way that sort of people have been conditioned, um
right now. And I think that's something which is concerning
because these uh traits of subservience and sort of submission

(01:31:00):
and I think are incompatible. If there were a moment
of revolutionary rupture, I'm not sure that that would necessarily
lead to any better sort of society. So I think
this stuff is deeply, deeply important to get people involved
in this kind of work. I just want to go
back to one of the things you said, Like you
mentioned the community aspect and like those relationships, and I

(01:31:21):
think that I know I've said this so many times,
both in my organizing space and even on this podcast today,
but I truly have felt like building community is one
of the most powerful ways to organize. And I think
so many people in leftist spaces right now see organizing
as like a place where you just do work, um,
And I actually think that that's a really terrible way

(01:31:41):
to organize. I don't think that you're gonna have people
come back, right, Like I don't think that UM, anyone
is going to feel empowered. And you know, kind of
through talking to a bra I've started reading this book
on the Free Women of Spain and like thinking more
about this also right and thinking about how they're talking
about community building and how they're talking about like community

(01:32:01):
is believing in each other and like helping each other
realize their full potential UM and as a way to
actually find equity and equality through like horizontalist structures, through
allowing people to reach their full potential UM And I think,
you know, these are some of the politics that have
informed what we're doing, that have informed how we're trying
to allow people to grow. And so many people have

(01:32:24):
come to us and said, you know, these mass builds
or these air purifier builds are like the highlight of
my week or the highlight of my month, UM or
I'm thinking about the like the way that you're structuring
UM your distributions and thinking about how I can implement
that into the work that we're doing UM And I
think that those things are so powerful when you're able
to create these spaces again where people care for each other,

(01:32:47):
and like you're saying, that goes a long way towards
being able to mobilize um when there are disasters, to
being able to mobilize around protests, to being able to
mobilize around these ruptures because you have solid air that's
built through relationships and that is allowing you to build power.
One of the things that that YouTube sort of getting
it is that you know, there's it's hard in a

(01:33:11):
lot of ways because yeah, I mean, the US has
and you baked into just to every single part of
your life is there's going to be someone who is
above you, who can order you and tell you what
to do. And that's you know, that's that's that's that's
the defining characteristic of life in the United States. And
the second defining characteristic is if you don't do what
they tell you, a person with the gun shows up
and either beats you or haulds you away and slaves you.

(01:33:34):
And you know that that that has these enormous sort
of psychological consequences that you know, create creates this culture
where people you know, I mean, and that this goes
along with there's there's this whole skilling process that that's
been a sort of part of the broad arch of
capitalism that you all trying to reverse. But even even yeah,
you know, it's like about even the people who have
the skills just don't sort of they don't believe in

(01:34:00):
our own autonomy in a way, and that that that
becomes this incredibly powerful, you know, tool of of keeping
people in line. But when that breaks and when when
people start to see it, it can take time. But yeah,
you know that the the kinds of power in the
depth of the sort of organization that you build isn't
from that is incredible. And I think this is only
everything is about the Spanish example that people tend to forget,

(01:34:21):
which is that you know, okay, so that the c
NT which is the sort of giant c n T.
F Ayes, the giants sort of anacaust the union that's
that's running a lot of this stuff. You know, they're
almost completely destroyed at the dream, like over the course
of the spanis civil war, and they're you know, distruber
the Stalus, disruber the Fascist at the end. By the
end of the war, you know that the Fascist control
Spain for about forty years. But even that, you know,

(01:34:45):
I mean, they kill hundreds of thousands of people. They like,
there's massacres is you know, it turns into literally a
fascist police state. But the moment that, the moment the
fascist a tatorship collapses, the CNT reappears. And they even
even in you know, in seventies Spain, in a place
that is in a lot of ways industrialized, they still

(01:35:06):
almost overthrow the government one more time. And you know,
I mean they're they're still around the sort of much
reduced form to this day. But I mean, once, once
you build that kind of power, right, even you know,
even forty years of fascist dictatorship was not enough to
completely destroy it. It was you know, it was it
was still there, sort of waiting underground, and then the
moment there was a rupture reappears. This is a really

(01:35:28):
important thing that you're bringing up, Chris, because I think
it has um a lot to do with how we
just measure and talk about success on the left. Um,
what you're describing, which you know, Spain is typically by
many people on the left described as kind of a
failed experiment. Oh it was nice, but it ultimately failed.
So let's look at Russia, you know, Um, but uh,

(01:35:52):
some people have argued and I think very correctly that
you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once
something like this happens, it's there that energies are there,
they are not forgotten, they're not lost. And there's you know,
a very vigorous sort of left wing radical anarchist movement
that's resonant um uh and very sort of consistent with

(01:36:15):
with the earlier movement during the thirties. And UM, I
think that's that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about.
We tend to measure these projects in these very sort
of linear sort of status terms, and we discovered, especially
when we were doing work in d say, that a
lot of people were trying to frame our own project
in that way. You know, what are the demands that

(01:36:37):
you're making, what are the what pressure are you exerting
on the state? Um? And so there's these criteria that
people use to evaluate kind of the efficacy or success
of projects like these, And the Spanish example tells you,
UM that the way that these things work is in
fact much more complicated and much more interesting UM. And
that by assembling these structures, these organizations, even if at

(01:37:00):
sometime or another they don't necessarily exist anymore, all of
those people who participated in them are transformed, and the
people that they interact with might then also be transformed.
And so something like the c n T, which is,
you know, an extraordinary organization, the f AI is what
you know, really gave it the kind of anarchosymbical list

(01:37:21):
content that defined the quality of that revolution. Um, that
never got lost, that never went away, even when it
seems to have disappeared. UM. And so I think we
have to learn to think about success in failure um,
you know, as we very simplistically use these terms very
very um differently, and this is something which informs our

(01:37:41):
own work when we're asking was this successful? Was this
not successful? Um? I think that's a much more difficult
and complicated question than we often make it out to be. Yeah,
and I think there's something very specific about you know,
I think we can go into sort of d s
A factional politics for a little bit, but like I
think like in some ways you see this shallowness of
a lot of the approaches that was happening in the

(01:38:02):
d s A where you know, like if if you
if you look at a lot of how the sort
of medicare for all stuff went or a lot of
how the sort of Bernie campaigning stuff went. Right, it
was okay, you know, you have these you have these
organizations that are like a mile wide and inch deep,
and it's like, okay, they're they're capable of mobilizing people
to vote one time, but you know, then they lose

(01:38:23):
the election, and then what right, so that they don't
they don't don't they don't have you know, there's they're
supposed to be this whole thing of like Bernie being
an organizer in chief and this whole sort of plan
to use the sort of lists de developers and organize anything.
And it's never happened. And you know, it didn't happen
in a lot of ways because it was just sort
of they treated the whole process of building power as
essentially a bureacratic exercise. Right, it's how many people are

(01:38:43):
on this list, how many people are showing up to
state like you know, and like how how many how
many how many doors have we knocked on? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's it's just you know, and that's the that's the
other thing you're talking about with the fact that organizing
spaces have to be more than just another just another
place you go to work, right is if you know,
if if all you're doing is just replicating these sort
of beercrarect things, you're you're going to watch them fail

(01:39:05):
exactly the same way the burocracies do. Except you know,
you're you're you're not the American State, you're not a
Democratic party. You don't have an infinite amount of money
or the ability to sort of you know, you don't
you don't have the ability to call an arm to
enforce what you need to do, right, You don't. You
don't have you do you don't have the fallback of
bad methods of organizing, which is violence. And when that happens,

(01:39:26):
you know, and and suddenly and you can't confront your
own failures because you're stuck in this, things just start
to sort of implode, and you start to lose people,
and you start to sort of, you know, you see
this sort of stagnation and decline that I think, you know,
talking about, Yeah, without getting exactly too much into what's
going on in East Bay, like that's that that, that's

(01:39:47):
been everything I've seen out of it. Yeah, And I
think to go kind of off of what a bro
was talking about to kind of put this into terms
of the work that we've been doing right, you know,
through the Mask builds UM. As they were winding down,
weren't quite sure what our next project was, and you know,
we talked a lot about like how do we keep
this energy going, like we don't want to just lose this.

(01:40:09):
And I also felt, you know, a certain amount of
social obligation to you know, keep this community together that
had formed during the pandemic. And so we started a
book group kind of in the interim reading How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, and you know, had around
thirty people show up to that UM And I think,

(01:40:30):
as you know, you're talking about the importance of once
you know, these relationships are formed, once these ideologies start
to percolate, that they don't just go away, right. These
people that we you know, brought into D s A
and a lot of ways these by D s A
came to join this book group and later came to
join the Air Purifier project. Despite the fact that it

(01:40:51):
was more outside of D s A. A lot of
these people because of you know, what we had built
and what we had created, continued to be such a
huge part take on incredible leadership Roles um and you know,
facilitate this project in a way that it would not
at all look like what it does without you know,
these people dedicating so much of their time and energy

(01:41:12):
to this project kind of throughout the process. Yeah, and Chris,
I'm going back to what you're saying earlier. I think,
um M, I've seen a very interesting, um a kind
of reflection come out of some of these organizations, and
you see these different splits and sort of uh wings developing.

(01:41:36):
But yeah, I mean, I Janine is a very sort
of organic, radical and revolutionary who I've learned an enormous
amount from. But I think my own trajectory was much
more characteristic of what you described earlier, which is that
you know, I put all my eggs in this basket.
I thought, Okay, Bernie Sanders, like, that's that is, that
is the that is the beginning of how we undergo

(01:41:58):
a sort of democratic social transformation. And then, you know,
in a few snaps of the finger, even though I
had spent just like hundreds of hours just knocking doors
and promising all these things to people who might you know,
vote for him at their door, and and all this
stuff that and and and just sort of regurgitating all

(01:42:18):
these slogans and and talking, you know, rapturously about these
welfare programs. UM. I saw all that dissolved in a moment,
and I realized that I didn't leave anything behind. And
there was, you know, in D s A and our chapter,
you saw that there was a large group of people

(01:42:39):
who just wanted to keep that flame burning and just
say we'll do better next time, you know, we'll do
more work at the local level to elect representatives. But
then there was another group of people, it was much
more disillusioned UM and really started wondering is this what
we should be doing, or at least is this all
that we should be doing? UM. And you see the
same thing coming out of a group like Sunrise, which

(01:43:02):
whose primary sort of mandate is to just put pressure
onto Congress UM to urge the necessity of a green
new Deal or whatever. And nevertheless, out of Sunrise, we've
met people who, after the George Floyd protests, after the
dissolution of the Bernie campaign, have been led down the
same radical path as as some of us UM found

(01:43:23):
ourselves traveling UM in in East by D s A.
And they're the ones who have now come to help
our project, and you know, using whatever autonomy they have
at the sort of UM hub level in Sunrise, because
even though it's an organization with sort of paid staff
and something of this bureaucracy right now in this moment,

(01:43:45):
the individual little local hubs actually have a surprising amount
of autonomy, and I really hope they're going to fight
for protect that autonomy. So they've been able to use
that autonomy to actually put a lot of effort towards
raise money thousands of dollars our work at c HC
and come to our organizer meetings, become a part of
the effort, and urge upon their own UM friends and

(01:44:09):
co organizers and people they know in Sunrise to shift
the direction of their work of their branches towards doing
more work like this. So there are these kind of
interesting different uh splinterings that you see happening, which give
me some hope that we're not just going to keep
running the same tape over and over again. So one

(01:44:30):
of the other interviews we did on this show was
with a bunch of people who were working with the
basically this giant effort in Atlanta to stop this like
just atrocious sort of destruct this destruction of a bunch
of forests to create this like weird teaching cops, how

(01:44:50):
did you counter terrorism? Enormous academy thing that's being funded
by a bunch of the adalytic corporations in Atlanta, And
they were describing you know, they didn't talk about sort
of the exacting process of solution, but you know, you
saw they were like, you know, one of the people
with the hair was from Sunrise, and they were also
talking about how they pulled together. That's just like enormous
coalition of a bunch of community groups that was you know,

(01:45:12):
and like the their their initial goal was just they're
trying to pressure the city council into stopping the into
you know, not approving and that doesn't work. But you know,
you know some of some of the other groups that
were that were involved in this, you're talking about like okay,
well you know that they're they're planning is like if
this fails, we're gonna go stop it ourselves. And I
think that pivot right is one of the most crucial

(01:45:34):
things that is happening right now, because you know, okay,
if if you if you you know, if if you,
if you you you pull out your like Polly, your
policy like policy space diagrams, right, like it's it's the
United States. The policy that's enacted is the one that
is the policy decided aby the sixtieth senator. And it's like, okay,
so you know, even even if if even if you're
gonna try to do an electoral thing, right, you need six,

(01:45:56):
you need sixty votes in the Senate, there is one
arguably socialist senator and we've never elected another one, so
you know, and you're just looking at this right and
it's like okay, like you know, we we elect like
to maybe three socialists in in the House every year,
and if you know, if you continue at the same rate,

(01:46:18):
they'll be like what like like two hundred years before
we have a majority there. And it's like yeah, you know,
and at a certain points like yeah, I mean, we're
like we're not gonna be around because we'll be dead,
but like most of most most of the stuff on
earth will also not be around because it would have
been obliteral black climate change there, and you know, and
at some point you have to get to we're gonna
have to do it ourselves because no one, no one

(01:46:39):
else is going to do it for us. And I
think the work you two have been doing is just incredible,
is just an incredible example of how that can actually
happen and what what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah.
I think that it is so important, and I think
that that's one of the reasons that to me, it
was also so important to get all of these groups
at these air purifier pips because I think oftentimes organizing

(01:47:01):
is so siloed and it really frustrates me, and people
seem very like loyal at least I've found this in
East by d s A to like their particular organization,
any other organization they don't even really want to talk
about or they don't even know still exist. UM. And
to me, like, if we can give people the tools
to organize, I don't care who their organizing, UM, but

(01:47:23):
if we can also like have these groups communicate with
each other, right, Like different groups are doing exactly the
same thing. Right. We have the Ecosocialist group UM in
d s A, Right, you have Sunrise, you have the
I w W, and then you have the Labor Committee
of d s A. And it's like sometimes there is
cross communication, right, But to me, it never feels like
it's quite enough. It never feels like we're really all

(01:47:46):
working on this or we're really all in it together,
and I think we really should be, because, like you're saying,
like there's kind of a ticking clock. We only have
a certain amount of time to actually make the changes
that we want to see, and when we're not willing
to actually work with each other and communicate with each other,
things are not going to happen as quickly. UM. And
so being able to have, like, you know, a table

(01:48:07):
of people assembling purifiers from d S a Sunrise tank
right and they're all talking about the organizing work that
they're doing and sharing stories and strategies, so that we're
not all constantly reinventing the wheel. That actually working together
on this I think is so so valuable. And this
is something that we've seen. You know, one of our
friends who's helping lead one of the tank locals has

(01:48:31):
come to a number of our events and was telling
us how he's actually tried to bring things that he's
seen that we're doing into his own local and we've
heard this in other contexts as well. So things spread
and that's I think a really important thing that um,
you know, especially because of Janine's Um, you know, just
just uh attempts to try to get all these groups

(01:48:55):
together into one place to communicate, to build relationships. Um,
we're now seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere.
And we're also learning a lot from all these different
people in groups who come to our builds and then
become organizers in the effort. And you know, to mention
someone like you know, Gerald Jennine referred to earlier, who

(01:49:16):
is this uh wonderful UM Cantanker is uh ex black panther,
you know, who has such an enormous history of experience.
For him to give us that historical perspective for everything
that we're doing, um has been an enormous boost of confidence,
and it's allowed us to focus and you know, just

(01:49:38):
to reiterate what she said earlier, we were really depressed
when we went out and we were talking to people
in West Oakland and East Oakland and everyone was telling
us we're gonna come, Yeah, we'll show up, we'll be there.
And then, you know, while many other people showed up
from Sunrise, D, S, A, C, HD elsewhere, none of
those people showed up. And we said, Gerald, they're not coming,
what's going on? And he said, you know, keep going,

(01:50:00):
keep trying, keep doing it, do not give up. Do
not judge from that one experience. This is really hard work.
And these people have had the door shot on them
over and over and over again, and they're tired, and
it's the weekend. But you keep doing it and they
will come. And then the next time they came, we
may not have gone there again had it not been

(01:50:22):
for Gerald bringing in this enormous um breath of experience
to share with us. You know, at the end of
our previous bill, there's this there's this quote that I
remember from Frey who was it was one of the
one of the people who've been heavily involved in the
Egyptian Revolution. She Dousan eleven had this quote and she's
talking about, you know, I should be doing this for decades, right,
And she's like, yeah, because you have a protest and

(01:50:44):
if if a hundred people show up, you're happy, and
if a hundred people show up, you're depressed. And then
one day, eight hundred thousand people show up and you
kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah, I
mean that that is something that you know, Yeah, like
organizing is not easy. There you're you're gonna spend a
lot of time like not winning. You're gonna spent a
lot of time feeling like you're barely treading water. There's

(01:51:06):
gonna be a lot of time where you know, nothing
works and everything seems to be falling apart. But you know,
if you keep pushing, people show up and you know,
and suddenly the regime is like taking like you know,
trying trying to catch planes out of the country. And yeah,
and you know, and you get to that that CLR.
James line about how the ruling classes not defeeding until

(01:51:29):
it's ruling until it's running for its lives. But you
know they do run for their lives. This is the
thing that happens. Yeah, and you know, if if we
do this together, we can get there totally. And I think,
you know, what a bar saying is so true. And
we also, you know, in doing these distributions, talk to
people and I literally would say, like what, we'll get

(01:51:49):
people to show up, right, there's kind of like honesty
in these conversations of like, you know, this is what
we're trying to do, Like there's a reciprocal relationship here again,
like help us understand Also, like what we need to
do in order to make sure that the reciprocal relationship
is actually realized and actually happening. UM And I think

(01:52:10):
that that was kind of an exciting moment of like
having people have some autonomy and like say and like,
you know, they know this community better than we do, right,
they know like how people are going to show up
and how maybe they won't. But Chris, Uh, just to
bring it back to what you were saying, I think
describing the kind of nonlinear trajectory of uh popular movements

(01:52:33):
in history is something that we try to keep always
in our minds. Um, things may begin small, things may
seem small, even when you study the examples in Spain
of sort of the groups of people who formed sort
of the early f AI who were just sort of
discussing these ideas around the fire before they tried to
sort of infiltrate the CNT, and then this became the

(01:52:53):
sort of predominant UM mood and sort of ideology that
that that that characterized the CNT, which then you know,
spread out and sort of characterized the Spanish Revolution at
large and massive numbers millions of people, you know. Um
And and just seeing what happened with the George Floyd
protests and studying the examples of you know, Paris in

(01:53:15):
where it at first just seems like small groups of
students and then you know, just a few days and
weeks later, you know there's thousands and thousands and thousands
and thousands of workers, um, you know, who are out
literally just pulling out cobblestones from the street, you know,
up against the police. And and the way that these

(01:53:35):
things happen is very unpredictable. And I think that's also
a very important thing to keep in mind as we're
trying to evaluate, you know, what we're doing in a
given moment. Yeah, I think, I think I think that's
that's that's a very good note to end on. It's
you know, every the struggle we have embarked in is
an incredibly difficult one, and we're not going to know

(01:53:58):
how it ends for a long long time. But that
doesn't yeah, you know, that doesn't necessarily means it ends badly.
And the kind of resiliency we can build is incredibly
deep and incredibly powerful. Okay, plugs time, Where do you
too want people to go? What do you want people
to know? And yeah, we can we can link stuff
if you want to send it to us in the

(01:54:20):
in the in the chat chat, we can we can,
we can link stuff. We can we can we can
link stuff. In the description of this episode, this is
why we have editors. Yeah, UM, I think definitely like
our social media UM so Twitter and Instagram is see Humanity,

(01:54:41):
see UM for folks to be able to donate UM,
to visit our website, to be able to plug in.
If they are in the Bay area and want to
get involved, they can find ways to do that through
those social media channels. You know, they can message us
UM and then our fundraiser a bar. I don't know
if we should just send the link or what the
best way to do at it. If you go to
a Common Humanity collective dot org, there's a donate button

(01:55:04):
which leads to the fundraisers. You can find it also,
so if you if you go there, you can see
how they You can see instructions are how to make
the fans and they are so cool, like they're awesome,
it's it's sweet, it's so go do go do that
too because it's sick. And there's also instructions for how
you can make them as well. And we hope people
do this elsewhere please reach out to us. We want

(01:55:25):
to not be the only ones doing and so this
is why we've tried to just put everything online that
others can replicate this model. And this is why we're
coming on a show like this and going into so
much detail into our history just that uh, you know,
we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. I think,
you know, a bar and I have learned so much

(01:55:45):
from this project, UM, and a lot of it really
did feel like reinventing the wheel, which is unfortunate because
I know that you know, mutually it has been done elsewhere.
But with the organizers that we were talking to, a
lot of the things that we were doing, we were
having to kind of start from scratch. And at least
my goal is like we're both very accessible people, like
if there are questions, you know, to be able to
reach out so that we can you know, explain our

(01:56:08):
experience to other folks, UM and talk through you know.
Our relationship with Sunrise started because they heard about the
mutual aid work that we were doing and they said,
we want to do that also, and we're like great,
and you know a bra are co organizer Joe and
I and this woman from Sunrise met in a park
and eat dinner and just talked about mutulateing, you know,
the pitfalls that had happened and what went well and

(01:56:28):
how we could do it in the future. And then
like this beautiful collaboration began like a bar was talking
about so um, I think, you know, we're really happy
to talk about where things have gone awry and what
we've learned from this project and thankfully at this point
to like what successes we've had. So yeah, go go everyone,
go go go go find them, go out of your communities,

(01:56:50):
go do this theirselves, and yeah, go go go get
us another Spanish revolution. We need another one. Yeah, thank you,
thank thank you to much for joining us. I s
agread Chris. This has been such an huge pleasure for
talking to you. We've we've been covered by a lot
of places, but never quite like just thank you so

(01:57:12):
much for doing this, and thank you. Such an honor
to be here and so much fun to talk with
you both. Thank you so much for having us and yeah,
so this this has been it could happen here pod.
You can find us at Happened Here Pod, on Twitter, Instagram,
and at cool Zone. For just the rest of the
stuff that we do. Alright, bye, everyone, whats critical my

(01:57:50):
race theories? UM? Well, all right, that's not a great introduction,
but it's not a great time in America. I'm Robert Evans.
This is it could happen here with me tonight as
often but not always is is Garrison Davis UH and
our good friend Christopher Wong. Uh. We're here to talk about,

(01:58:13):
um a bunch of stuff. Largely, we're talking about the
increasing and escalating attacks on school boards and attempts to
take over and dominate school boards by far right activists.
And a lot of this is centered around critical race theory,
a lot of it centered around vaccine mandates. It all
kind of blends together like a good gumbo UM or

(01:58:35):
like fascist syncretism UM. One of the things that I
would say, that's that's kind of most relevant right now
as we're recording this. I don't think the race has
been officially called, but it's become an increasingly obvious that
UH Terry mccauliffe has lost his re election bid and
the uh new governor of Virginia will be a Republican who,

(01:58:58):
among other things, as like homist and based a huge
amount of his campaign on banning critical race theory and
specifically like banning books and ship from being taught in
Virginia schools. Um and this is all the result of
a pretty far reaching, um and and complex and honestly
pretty pretty scary campaign. And we're gonna talk about that tonight, Garrison.

(01:59:21):
Do you wanna do you wanna take it from here? Yeah? Yeah,
I'll do a little bit then we can move over
to telegram. But yeah, you like the getty lee of this,
So so this is your drum solo time. Yeah, we
we decided we needed to do an episode on this
sinn and later when a few weeks ago a large
number of of of of anti Vacts and anti mask

(01:59:43):
protesters took over a school board meeting in uh Portland.
And the reason why that is special in it of
itself because this has been happening across the country for
a long time. But that but the fact that they
were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school
board meeting with hundreds of people, like invading this building
then shutting this down with just the essurement of like
power that the people had there was it was It's

(02:00:06):
notable because it's like it's it's a liberal ish city, right,
It's that's generally how people view it as. And you know,
we're used to this happening, you know, more like southern
states and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative. But
when like a Portland school board me to get shut down,
people were like, oh wow, this is like extra important
because this is showing that it's not this isn't isolated

(02:00:29):
to like quote unquote red states, right, this can this
can spread out everywhere now, you know. With Portland it
was it was a mix of like hippie types who
are like anti vax but there was a good deal
of like actual proud boys there as well. Yes, and
it was partly organized through an organization run by the
Bundies UM, and there were some direct ties and they

(02:00:51):
helped to advertise it. So it's there's a lot of UM.
I mean, one of the things that was so unsettling
is that a lot of these people were not Portland's
resident but they were showing up and we're able to
effectively like take over and dominate at Portland's school board meeting.
UM in part because law enforcement is never ever willing
to do anything against There's there's a there's a lot

(02:01:12):
of a lot of points here, so like, yeah, one
of it being is like these like these big mobs
are definitely able to benefit from being you know, white,
mostly middle class like parents and stuff, or maybe not
maybe not not even parents. They're gonna be white middle
class um, which means they can like storm buildings and
shut stuff down without any real consequence because police aren't

(02:01:33):
police and security aren't really going to get involved that much,
and the like the libs are not gonna like really
be pushing back on this in any kind of me
They'll just make fun of these people if they misspell
something on a sign. Yeah. So, like basically the idea
for this episode as we want to talk about why
and how school boards have become kind of the new

(02:01:53):
front lines for pushing far right stuff into the culturals
like guyst because they've really become the new, the new,
the new like space that people on the right are
able to push things that are that are more that
are more extreme, and push things that are gonna you know,
hurt you know, kids mostly m So looking for this,

(02:02:18):
we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing
chats for how basically the right is talking about these
things and how they're trying to organize it. UM. And
one really interesting kind of thing of not which will
come up later in the telegram stuff, is that in
I think it was when was it It was late September, UM,
the National school Boards Associations like that, the National school

(02:02:40):
Board Union UM put in a request for federal assistance
to stop ongoing threats and acts of violence against UH
school boards like meeting members and people president at school
boards because this has been ramping up. You know this
that this was happening the last last school season as well,
but really the past few months, the the prevalence and

(02:03:01):
the number of these types of like mobs based overtaking
these school boards has become so much more common, UM
that the school Board Union put in like sent like
a letter directly to the president saying, hey, we kind
of need help here. UM. So it's it's not just
it's this is this is a problem that's recognized widely

(02:03:22):
even among people like on school boards, because yeah, they're
getting like carasped, they're getting death threats. UM. This is
becoming like unsafe to hold school board meetings. UM. And
whether or not you like our modern school system or not,
the resulting effect to this is that it's gonna be
hurting like kids. Like, like, it's a good whether it
be through like COVID, whether it be through teaching them

(02:03:44):
racist like curriculums, or whether it be to you know,
making trans kids have make their lives a whole lot harder. Right,
all of this kind of stuff is gonna be worse
by this happening. So it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah,
it's worth caring about all. Like, it's clearly an attempt
in order to to to arrest the kind of progressive

(02:04:07):
tilt that that society has gone through. All of this
is a reaction both too. I mean, the religious right
was initially, more than anything, a reaction to desegregation and
the women's liberation movement UM. And what we're seeing now
is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people
have made in the last like twenty years, including the
legalization of gay marriage UM. And so the ultimate goal

(02:04:31):
of all of this is to stop progress towards racial justice,
to roll back gay rights, UM, to enshrine white supremacy
using violence. And that's why that's why all of these
different school board meetings, like the the threat of violence
from these people is a constant factor. Um, there's regular

(02:04:51):
discussion of it. There's like, I mean, that's why the
Proud Boys are showing up is to be a of
like is to be a death squad. Um, you know,
a little precursor death squad. They're not quite willing to
start start pulling triggers yet, but they want people to
know that it's possible. They want to scare people away
from getting involved in local politics unless they adhere to

(02:05:11):
a very specific far right political ideas. It's working because
a lot of these school boards are getting these school
meanings are just getting shut down, like they just can't
have them in person or sometimes not at all because
they'll just they'll like zoom bom. Like it's not like
they're just shutting down so they cannot take place or
at school by members are afraid to go out in
public because these people are are going to hurt them. Um.

(02:05:32):
And this is like a lot of people involved in
this are maybe not themselves like Proud Boys, like they
they're they're they're they're not super like they're individually are
more kind of regular Republicans in these states. But the
reason why it gets so extreme and accelerate so quickly
is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place,
and also because of stuff like Fox News and news

(02:05:54):
Max and Ona and o An like pushing people further
right in the past few years, but like specifically the
method of organized zing on apps like Telegram and Facebook groups.
This this is, this is the thing common on the Internet,
but like it rewards accelerationism, it rewards the most extreme,
takes those the ones to get shared the most. So
even if you know this is just some mom in

(02:06:14):
her forties who's not a proud boy by any means
she's she still poses a threat in this in this
way because she's poo boosting this same rhetoric and as
part of these same organizing channels that are full of
like actual fascists. Uh, there's a decent amount of very
popular posts from very popular channels I pulled that talks

(02:06:36):
about the Jews in the school boards and we'll we'll
get to that kind of stuff shortly. Um, So there, Robert,
do you wanna start on the telegram with the whole
the whole school board telegram channel that is popped up
by no means the most popular to Telegram channel for organizing,
but it is specifically dedicated to school boards. And because

(02:06:58):
of how Telegram works, this channel gets it around a
lot in other much bigger channels. Yeah, and and just
so you know, So the way Telegram works. If you're
a decent person um and you don't live in a
country where Telegram is a legitimately good choice for you,
there some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network,
but for the most part, in the United States it's

(02:07:18):
used by fascists and weirdos um. So if you're fortunate
enough to not use Telegram, the way it works is
you have open groups and closed groups. Open groups are
anyone can view them. Uh, you don't expose yourself by
looking at them, and people largely just kind of post images, memes,
videos and then can comment on them. And a lot

(02:07:39):
of what's posted in any given Telegram channel is shared
from another Telegram channel. So for people like Garrison and
I who research extremism, one of the uses of telegram
is that by looking at what's being shared in one
group from other groups, you can actually start to build
networks and see, oh, there's affinity between these two groups.
Because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives.

(02:08:00):
They're sharing all of this all of this content from
this far right you know Pepe group that's also sharing
a lot of neo Nazi content, and you can see
there's a lot of affinity between the other thing that
happens is that these channels that are getting big and
being you and you're being used for this kind of
like right wing organizing who present themselves as more just
like regular conservative channels. If you I've been in this

(02:08:21):
channel for like years at this point, and this channel
used to be a like proud Boy channel. They just
changed their name. Like It's like that happens all the time,
where a lot of the big organizing channels used to
be like openly violent organizing, like for different mobs to
go beat up people, and now they've rebranded to make
them appeal more to like just regular Trump voters. That

(02:08:44):
is the other thing that happens all the time. And
one of the main channels that we're talking about today
is one of these one of these channels that used
to be a Proud Boy thing and is now just
kind of right wing organizing in general. Yeah, and it's um,
I don't know, I'm just gonna get into it. So actually,
you know what I'm to get into before I start
talking about fascists on telegram trying to destroy the concept

(02:09:06):
of democracy. You know what else is trying to destroy
the concept of democracy. That's right, Chris, products and services,
that's right. Oh my god, we are just having a
great time here. So let's talk about stand for Students,
which is a telegram channel that Garrison pointed out to me,
and I spent more time than I really wanted to. Yeah,

(02:09:28):
that's never, never, never a good idea. So the stuff
in here, this is number one, on the surface, a
much more moderate group. These people are not ranting about
like Jews destroying civilization or the need to like execute
black people or something like that. Um, the stuff in
here runs the gamut from like one of the first

(02:09:48):
things I found was a clip from Jesse Ventura, wrestler,
predator star and former governor once had a conspiracy TV show.
There's a popular clip in anti vaccine Circle is from
it where he's talking with Alex Jones about the Builderberg
group and stuff. So I found that in there, which
is like pretty garden variety, like early two thousands conspiracy nonsense.

(02:10:10):
Definitely like, oh yeah, these are like older people like
I don't think what mostly boomers, but definitely gen X
and stuff like folks who were in like their forties
and fifties. Um, this is the kind of ship that
they would have been like exposed to in their late
twenties and whatnot. Um. One of the posters I found
commenting on that video said, quote aired onto TV in two,

(02:10:32):
that's a nine about a plan for depopulation through a
virus and injections. Too much of a coincidence, and another
responded to this. I was never a huge Alex Jones fan,
but he was right all along. My kids were born
in the early eighties and I refused their vaxes way
back then. Unfortunately, one of them is now a late
thirties CNN jabbed zombie and has infected my grandkids with
this inspiric experimental treatment. I'm done, um, which is silly,

(02:10:58):
but it also keeps you in like the are it's
it's what you see a lot with Q and on right.
It's these folks who are getting brought in onto telegraph. Yeah,
it's great. It's terrible that this person, this lady who
has to be what in her fifties sixties, My parents
age the boomer um is on Telegram, which two years

(02:11:18):
ago even was the only Americans you were would find
were like extremely online nazi weirdos. Um. Yeah, I remember
doing like old training. It's like, yeah, I was like
over over two years ago, and Telegram was nowhere near
this prevallem for like regular organizing. And this is a
result of of the d platforming of folks in the

(02:11:39):
wake of the capital attack. But anyway, we don't need
to get too much into that right now, So I
want to talk a little bit more about some of
the things folks are sharing in this in this channel,
which is again kind of like I'm gonna guess everyone
here is kind of late thirties to maybe sixties, fifties, sixties.
There's one local story that it was actually very popular
among a lot of like lefty folks on Twitter of

(02:12:00):
this like group of dads who showed up to stop
there's like an epidemic of fighting in their school or something,
and they showed up to do like a community policing
or a community self defense sort of thing. It was
celebrated by a lot of folks because it was like, oh, hey,
this is you know, a way that communities can protect
themselves without cops YadA YadA, YadA, which is a nice
thing to see. It was also celebrated um by these people, um,

(02:12:23):
by by people in this channel, and specifically the clip
of the news story covering this I found was from
the Pepe Lives Matter channel, which is, um, you know,
an alt right channel like it. Again, as we were
talking about earlier, the Pepe Lives isn't all like the
way full Nazi pilled stuff, um, but it shares a
lot of stuff from the channels that are straight up Nazis,

(02:12:45):
and so you can you can see already this like
lady in her sixties who's probably was some pretty normal
boomer three years ago, is now two steps away from
Adam often type motherfucker's that's just the way telegram works, um,
and all kind of bonding over again, this is not
a bad story what these local dads did, but it
very much ties into this idea of like we gotta

(02:13:08):
get all these parents together and take action in the
real world, like and that's gonna that's gonna go towards
taking action against the people you don't want showing up
in your school, meaning like black children and like children, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
community self defense is great, but also it really depends
on what community is defending itself from what. UM. So

(02:13:30):
that's uh, we'll probably we'll have to talk about that
more at some point in the future. But Yeah, Another
thing I found on that channel was video this. This
I dug into a bit. So there was this video
that was claimed to be an ad. It was, in
fact an ad that Comcast had refused to air. UM
and the video this, this unaired ad claimed that it

(02:13:51):
was about. It was telling the story of a thirteen
year old girl, Maddie de Garay Um, who was vaccinated.
She was part of a FASER trial and had she claims,
like a disastrously bad reaction. UM an ad about her
situation was rejected by Comcast. UM and this girl like
has done the whole right wing in her I'm I'm
guessing her parents are the driver's done the whole right

(02:14:13):
wing media kind of circuit at this point. UM. The
fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people
in this telegram channel were yelling about. UM. And I
want to actually quote from the an article about why
Comcast rejected it, because it makes clear what's actually happening here.
Comcast is said to have told the ads buyer it
was rejected because it needed substantiation at all. Graphic images

(02:14:33):
needed to be removed. Documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included
the girl's complete medical records, which are said to have
outlined symptoms such as erratic blood pressure and pulse, muscle spasms,
muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing up words, and the
inability to walk and cough. Um. So you've got this
case where number one there's graphic images, um, and number
two there's documentations that this girl has symptoms, but there's

(02:14:56):
not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine,
Like it's just one these The comcast is being careful
to not spread unsubstantiated shit about vaccine reactions and stuff. Um.
But within the telegram channel, the focus is entirely on
like how this is evidence of this conspiracy there suppressing
the information, suppressing information. UM. One response was, why in

(02:15:21):
Heaven's name don't these parents do their research before having
their kids vaccinated? My heart goes out to the precious
child and family. What a lesson to learn for so
many parents. Never too late to educate yourselves people. UM.
Also I want to point it just that the spelling
and the area incredible. There's an upsetting amount of emojis

(02:15:41):
that Yeah, honestly I couldn't never never two with one
oh late to educate your space selves. Uh, it's just
again and now I'm doing the doing the thing. I'm
doing the thing I tried not to. I did try
to give it a straight read through. You can be
challenging with it. It's like a very content it's it's
very funny. Yeah, but but but I think you know this,

(02:16:04):
this is this goes back to the whole point about
how this pradicalization works, right, which is you know you have,
especially with anti vax stuff that has this sort of
larger base from just like regular peer like hard right
Nazi stuff. You get to see people who you know,
otherwise probably would be a vaguely normal person, very very

(02:16:25):
quickly get all this stuff and very quickly just go
off the deep end. They're not like, yeah, it's these
it is it's hard to like say like these are
all extremists because like they themselves aren't extremists. There's surrounded
by so much content that is made by extremists that
it's making them do these things, which is how which
is how extremism works, right. But it's it's challenging because
like when you try to explain this to someone, you're like, no,

(02:16:46):
this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something, right,
And it's hard to explain to them how fast this
thing can move to the point where they're showing up
at a school board with their grand killed children yelling
at like teachers and stuff. Yeah, and it's not that
this lady is a Nazi. It's that this lady can be,
through the process you just outlined, convinced to stand up
next to a Nazi and like, uh, defend his his

(02:17:11):
right to do violence to people. She has been convinced
are president a threat to the lives of her, her grandchildren,
which is people may say like the whole like, oh,
it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing
next to a Nazi or a Nazi, but like I
would argue, no, what's actually the logistics of what is
happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got

(02:17:32):
radicalized into national socialism. Anyway. Another meme I found it
was a screen grab from fucking um Shawshank Redemption with
Morgan Freeman and I don't know whatever. One of the
white dudes in that movie in prison jumpsuits sitting next
to each other, and it's the text on it is
what are you in for? I spoke of at a
school board meeting, which you she see a lot of

(02:17:53):
stuff like this, this idea that they're going to jail,
they're going to get rated by the FBI because they're
like showing up at school boards to pro test vaccine
mandates and mask mandates. Um. And then like in the
middle of all this stuff, mostly talking about like anti vaction,
there's also this post talking about how this post that's

(02:18:13):
a video of a woman at a school board talking
about how a book needed to be banned, and she's reading.
The book she's reading is a queer memoir. Um. And
I'll talk about I'll talk about this more at the end,
but you can definitely mention it here because it gets
up a lot. It's it's a gay it's a gay
coming of age story, right, And as a result, there's
a couple of semi graphic scenes in it. And she

(02:18:35):
like gets up in front of the school board and
reads this and argues that it's basically like pornography. The children.
They think it's child pornography. Yeah, that's what they're marching
mistaken what child pornography is. They're trying to they're trying
to get all the people at the school board either
killed or arrested over this. That is that is their goal.
And I'll talk about this specific instance later because it
keeps coming up with all of these channels, and it's

(02:18:57):
one of the main things that links someone from like
a sodden red channel to a channel like this. This
is like one of the main things they've been using
the past few weeks, like this is the current, this
is like the past, and and this is this though
has been going on for a while. You've seen a
lot of like the libertarian right wing, a lot of
like kill your local pedophile shirts because who's gonna Most
people don't think, like, who's going to defend a pedophile pedophiles? Yeah,

(02:19:20):
the proud boy at the Portland school Board who was
standing and ready to fight, the ready to fight security
guards and stuff, he was wearing a kill your local pedophile. Uh,
it's this is this is the thing. This is the
thing the right wing figured out. And if they figured
this out a long time ago, which is that Okay,
if you want to get a bunch of people who
are vaguely normal to do like absolutely horrible violence, the

(02:19:41):
way you do it is to tell them that they're
threatening kids and it doesn't matter what you went on
works so well yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and you know,
and this once and once you've convinced you know, like this,
this is this is just a very I think a
very important thing about media messaging in general is that
the literally the instant someone says think of the children,

(02:20:02):
you need to stop and you need to disregard everything
they're about to say after that with a stick. Yeah,
Like of the time that person is like about to
try to convince you that like you need to like
we need to murder the gauge or something like that.
Like That's that. That's the thing that follows from I
feel confident saying no one has ever advocated thinking of

(02:20:26):
the children and meant anything, but I want to kill
this specific group of people. Um just like I that's
not even really hyperbole. It's it's a a trite and
true organizing tactic for these people. And it's part of
the reason why, like the famous white nationalist catchphrase is
focused around we need to secure a future for white children, right, Like,

(02:20:47):
that's what they're always talking about with all of this
ship and it's it's about being able to demonize a
group in a way that they can't be defended. It's
about ending any sort of debate or conversation, and it's
about justifying thoughtless violence because it's you're protecting children. Um,
you know who else protects children? Robert definitely not the

(02:21:07):
advertisers of this show, um, because we are sponsored by
raytheon brand. School bus seeking missiles the only missiles that
only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank,
at a at a technical at a at a terrorist
training camp. They go right for school buses no matter
where you aim them. So in that way, they are
a fire and forget kind of weapon as long as

(02:21:28):
you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school
bus with a with a missile. Okay, here's here's some
check it out. All right, Well we're back still talking
about this. Uh yeah, so last segment for this episode.
As we as we as I was talking about that,
there's a post that In the post is a video
of a woman from a different school board meeting reading

(02:21:49):
out a graphics, graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir,
and ranting about how it's it's child pornography. Comments include
fucking monsters running these schools, satanic and disgusting an elementary school. Unreal.
Why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing pornography
to minors? It's not even reading, they could, It's just

(02:22:12):
available from some other library. It's like, because you can
request a lot of books at libraries in all caps.
Where's the sheriffs, where are the city, county, state and
federal task forces? And uh yeah, it's I'll talk about
this more in the next episode. Tied to just the
overarching anti anti queer, anti trans, anti gay school board

(02:22:35):
side of things, and of course other things I found.
There's like video of them celebrating Capital rioters, celebrating Josh
Holly for defending Capital rioters. Um. I went into some
other channels that were adjacent that I saw shared, you know,
in this channel. One of them was Oscar's midnight writer
Patriot Post channel, which actually has thousands and thousands of followers.
Average post would get two to three thousand views. Um,

(02:22:57):
here's one. I'm considered a domestic terrorist if I tell
a school board that I don't want my eight year
old daughter watching sex videos in her third grade classroom. Um,
And that post was right above this post. The Constitution
actually says you can legally overthrow your government if they
are tyrannical. And that post was right above this post,
which was a screen which was a screen grab from
a Twitter account for a guy who calls himself Murray

(02:23:21):
Rothbard's seventeen seventy six The FBI didn't rate Epstein Island
or protect hundreds of young female gymnasts from being sexually
assaulted for years, but they'll raid your PTA meetings when
you question the curriculum and on scientific mask mandates and
their indoctrination camps, I mean public schools. And of course
this from Twitter user named Emerald Robinson. And again this
is all shared in that channel. It's like a screen

(02:23:42):
grab from Twitter. When the FBI starts arresting parents at
school board meetings, just remember the GOP senators who made
it happen by confirming Merritt Gardland as Attorney General. And
then it's a list of Republican u Emerald Emerald Robinson
is the White House correspondent for news Max. Oh right,
Oh my god. Yeah, you're right. Uh huh great great.
So I don't know, that's probably all I should get into. Well, no,

(02:24:07):
there's a wen one more things. So Oscar's Midnight Writer,
which was shared in in that uh that school board
channel took me to the Western Chauvinist school Board channel,
which took me to a post which with a video
UM with a link to a video. The text with
the video was woman at school board meeting calls out
Jewish power by name um and it's a woman ranting

(02:24:29):
about how the Jews are behind all of the critical
race theory in schools. Um. So again not hard to
get to this kind of ship. Another post was it
was in the Western Chauvinist Telegram. It was sharing a
post from the Murder the Media Telegram, who were part
of the Capital riot. UM. That post from Murder the
Media was National school Board Association apology letter for calling

(02:24:50):
you domestic terrorist. It was we'll talk about this later,
but the comment in the Western Chauvinist was like, we
don't apologize for being like for being domestic terror rists.
Like we're yeah, we we think it's rad that they
called us domestic terrorists. Because in this channel by the
Way has over fifty subscribers UM and used to be
a Proud Boy channel, which is now just a general

(02:25:11):
kind of farther right wing organizing channel that it's probably
it's one of the most shared Telegram channels in this
whole network. UM and they are really good at creating
propaganda that appeals to Trump voters while slipping in a
lot of accelerationist talking points UM to slowly lead people
on that redcrumb trail to make them be okay with

(02:25:32):
mass violence. There was a comment in there, forwarded from
another from the telegram account of a guy named Eric Striker,
UM and this was a post Striker made commenting on
a video of a father being dragged out of a
quote woke school board meeting. UM for uh complaining of
complaining about this kind of ship UM. The post from

(02:25:55):
Eric Striker I think is worth reading, and I'm going
to read it now. For now, all we can do
is impotently watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting.
We must build our political organization to the point where
we can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations,
sent him free legal support and make people realize that
the time of fucking with whites is over. We need
our own media, civil society groups and activists. We need

(02:26:18):
money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything
in the conservative movement. It never will be. We need
to build it from scratch. We are well underway National
Justice Party. We must quietly and patiently build. Eventually we
will have the capacity to come on the scene when
they least expect it and will be and we will
be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where we
should end for today. Yep, that's a good part on

(02:26:44):
good sad intro into the current problem of schoolbar meetings.
We'll get into a lot more like accelerating rhetoric in
the next bit and then talk about kind where the
stuff originated from and the other other side of things beyond,
just like the CRT and UH and and mask stuff,
because it branches out into a lot of other kind
of adjacent cultural war bullshit issues. Um. Anyway, Yeah, we'll

(02:27:05):
do that tomorrow. Um. You can follow the show on
Twitter and Instagram, it happen here, pod and cool zone
Media if you want to be on those apps, which
I don't know why you would. Yeah, don't be on
those apps. Get you know, I just found out they'll
deliver skinned gators to your door. Get into cooking gators.
That's what I plan to do. Getting off Twitter and
I'm Gator is the new social network. So ga gator?

(02:27:43):
What second? My part of this episode on right wing
attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order
to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups.
And also it rode democratic institutions from the ground. Uh

(02:28:04):
statue title, Yeah, yeah, that'll that'll click. Well. Ah, I'm
so glad we don't have to worry about clicking and titles.
And that took up a lot of my mind back
in the day, Garrison, back when, back when the internet
was different. Now we don't have to worry about that anymore.
But we do have to worry about our mobs of
fascists attacking school board meetings. It happens every week, keeps

(02:28:27):
happening more often. Boards are calling for assistance. That they
seem pretty, they seem pretty, not thrilled. Yeah, they seem
not psyched about. So where we're where? When we left off,
I was talking about some things I found on the
gram telegram. Uh, Garrison. What's next. I'll go into my

(02:28:48):
preliminary research on Telegram and particularly response. Basically, I looked
through every single Telegram post and all of the main
fascist channels I lurk on that mentioned school boards from
like the past two weeks. Um, so like yeah, this
is like current current stuff on ongoing. UM. I got
to a lot of the channels I was already familiar with,
like you know, the Western Chavenist channel, which is uh

(02:29:11):
subs um, the Standard Students channel, which was a when
I was less familiar with, specifically dedicated to this school
board issue. Um. One of one of the posts we
have on there is UH says your enemy isn't some
far off ship whole country. Your enemy is just down
the street at your local school board meeting, teaching your

(02:29:31):
kids to hate their ancestors, you and themselves. So like again,
that is a very much white supremacist dog whistle just
right there, um talking about producing Hollywood movies writing they're
basically it's basically just a whistle. Um. So yeah. They
then they, you know, the same post talks about you know,
masks and shutting down businesses and the vaccines and stuff,

(02:29:53):
and saying the fight is here and the fight is
now so just in terms of like, yeah, they're really
wanting to hype people up for doing this thing at
school boards. They're trying to really hammer down the school
board points. So like I found this, I found this post.
This is this is a post from the Standford Students channel.
Um and I saw this one re shared in a
lot of different channels. One of the other first ones

(02:30:13):
that I saw pop off was from Ron Watkins channel
like Code monkey Z. He is one of the one
of the architects or one of the you know people
who really pushed Q and on stuff into He's the
guy who ran like the physical infrastructure of Chan chan
in eight Coon for years. Yeah. He and he's trying
to pivot into being like having his just his face

(02:30:35):
be like a kind of alternative right wing figure right now. Uh,
he's gonna be running for office in Arizona, I believe. Anyway,
he has a very popular telegram channel, um and he
made he made this post that had over a thousand,
over a thousand comments on it, which is a lot
for telegram. A thousand comments on telegram post, especially telegram
post of of code mackeyzs size. I ever see how

(02:30:59):
how many subs doesn't so Ron just as context, Ron
Watkins has four hundred and thirty two thousand subscribers on
his on his telegram channel. So yeah, anyway, Uh, CRT
is being rebranded as s e L a social emotional learning.
If you are attending school board meetings as you should be,

(02:31:21):
do what you can to make sure you stop both
s e L and CRT and keep them and make
sure that they are banned in your school districts. So again,
just direct calls to action for getting people to show
up to these school boards. And also, social emotional learning
is not CRT, and of course SCRT is not even
taught in schools. I think everyone who listens to this

(02:31:41):
podcast knows that sr T, actually critical ray theory isn't
taught in schools. This isn't an actual thing. It's it
is like a legal theory. We'll get into more of
how this got like pushed towards the end. I think
Chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's again these none of these things are actually real.
It's a complex legal theory. What they're really mad about
is their people are teaching that racism is like an

(02:32:03):
issue that's built into a lot of American institutions, and
it's an ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past.
That's what they're actually mad about, and they just call
that crt. Some some of the comments from the Ron
Watkins post, stuff like these snowflakes are so annoying. I'm
about to start cutting power to any school in my
community that teaches this. Um so yeah, more Again, that's

(02:32:23):
just a direct, direct threat of doing terrorism. Should like,
I mean, less of a threat and more of a promise. Yeah,
does that? No? Sure it doesn't. Alright, Well I don't
understand things the same way you zoomers do. Please continue. Yeah,
a lot of a lot of posts being a shipped
around from channel to channel, including this full Nazi channels

(02:32:45):
were like trying to trying to of course, like lots
of Nazis are actually you know, I thought it was
pretty funny that the that the school board union put
in a call to assistance to the federal government to
deal with this issue. They of course they thought that
was funny. But they're going to use this to like
spread networks to be like, hey, the government wants to
stop you. They're calling you a terrorist. You like regular
folk are being called terrorist because you're showing up the

(02:33:06):
school boards, right, that's the kind of message that they're
going to shoot out. So they a lot of Nazi
channels crafted a lot of posts like that that got
shared around a lot. Yeah, in trying to basically all
time critical race theory and if you approached against critical
race theory, they're calling you a domestic terrorist. That that
type of thing. And this got this got shared in
the school boards channel, and a whole bunch of whole

(02:33:28):
bunch of other stuff being being talking about how if
you if you stand up, you're gonna be a domestic terrorist.
You have to be brave and do this. A few
days after the school board Uh, not a few days,
I guess this. This was this was in like in
October um, the school Association retracted some of the some
of the words that they used in their letter because
of this backlash that was created. And this was also

(02:33:51):
shared in shared in uh lots of fascist channels. The
main one who is shared in that I saw was
the Honk Pills channel UM, which is just another type
of Peppe meme Um, one of the other one of
the other big big kind of groups active in this.
In this whole sphere. And this this has been a
group going on for a while and we haven't talked

(02:34:12):
about on the pod, but we probably should do something eventually.
Is this group called White Rose, So this is a
White Rose is a COVID conspiracy group that has been
very uh successful in creating on the ground organizers who
are regular people. They do a lot of like sticker
bombs and lots of neighborhoods. If you have if you
ever seen anti like COVID or COVID conspiracy stickers in

(02:34:33):
your neighborhood, it was probably a White Rose sticker. UM.
These are all over the States and basically every time.
As a quick heads up, the original White Rose was
a student protest organization that existed in Nazi Germany UM
and protested illegally and its organizers were executed by the Nazis.
And I think it was the mid forty I mean

(02:34:53):
it would be like like forty three, maybe maybe forty four. UM.
Sophie Shoal was the person most associated with them. So
they they're they're they've taken the names of these these heroes,
UM in order to it's just disgusting, it's very gross.
There's there's a decent amount of decent amount of researchers
in this field. Thinks that there's like actual bad people

(02:35:16):
behind White Rose of course, with like like bad people
because they're spending COVID stuff, but like like wait, like
like more like bad actors use basically astroturfing this thing,
but at White rosterserves its own piece later. But because
they have such a big following on telegram, they are
of course using using this to using the school board
thing to gain more support, and they have about fifty

(02:35:37):
subscribers to their specific telegram channel. They showed a post
a few weeks ago saying thank you to all the
brave parents going out to their school boards and standing
up for the children. Um. And they try that, you know,
get people to do sticker bombs and stuff, but the
fact that there's like specifically calling out people in school
boards is like an extra step of like beyond just

(02:35:57):
putting stickers up in your neighborhood. Um. Another another another
White Right Rose post. They shared a shared a video
UM that was captioned as concerned parent absolutely destroys school
board with facts. The school boards are the battlefield of
our time. This is how it's done. And just the

(02:36:18):
increasing rhetoric around like battlefields. This is where like the
fight is at all that kind of stuff. Um. There
was another another, Uh, the White White Chauvinist Channel shared
a video from Fox News UM and they they the
Western Chauvinist Channel, which is again it's one of the
most shared ones in this whole network. They captioned this
saying parents and Virginia are trying to fight back against

(02:36:40):
the school board that is anti white. Um. Every every
school district in America needs to have an anti mandate
pro right parents running for the school board. So that's
just the It's this type of stuff all over and
this this this post was got it has like an
eleven eleven thousand, eleven thousand views. Um. So these things

(02:37:03):
are spreading to a lot of a lot of these
specific networks. And I mean, I I have so many
of this kind of stuff. I'm not going to go
through every single one in detail. There's ones that are
way more like openly anti Semitic, uh, you know saying,
you know the Jews that run you know, ex school board,
um are trying to force vaccinations on every student over twelve. Um.
Other another Uh, there's this fake this is this this

(02:37:24):
fake Clint Eastwood channel on Telegram. That's pretty popular. Someone
who's pretending to be Clint Eastwood that spreads far right stuff. Um.
He had a post that was shared a lot that
started by saying, start taking over school boards, start taking
over city council, start taking over city boards. Um, start
to start being poll watchers, start being poll workers, start
taking over sheriff's departments. It's not enough just to vote.

(02:37:47):
So this, this is the other thing that we're going
to see a lot more of, is rhetoric around voting.
Isn't enough. You need to start doing more things. Um,
there is one of it. Yeah, here, here's here's one.
This is gonna this is referencing some of the trans stuff.
I'll discussing a bit, but I just want to tie
it in now. A post from the Western Chauvinist Channel
saying there is no political solution, which is a direct Nazi,

(02:38:10):
a direct Nazi lie. I mean that, That's what I
did an article early this year on Riley Williams, the
Nazi who stole Pelosi's laptop during the Capitol riot, and
then like the video that we were able to identify
her as a sig hiling Nazi and That's how she
opened her quote. There is no political solution. It's a
very common catchphrase among like the the fast right. Yeah,

(02:38:34):
So there's been a lot of stuff around harassing like
specific school board members, harassing specific teachers. There was this
teacher in I think in California that was trying to
like introduced like like anti fascist type rhetoric and talking
about how fascism is a modern thing. They got absolutely
bashed um and like docs um, and they got it
I think fired because there was like hundreds of of

(02:38:54):
parents organizing on on apps like telegram to harass this
one teacher at school board's that you know, they took
over massive goool board meetings and just talked about this
one teacher endlessly um. And it was even It's interesting
because like all the parents were like, yeah, Mike, my
I got worried because my student actually really like liked
the teacher and said that they were doing like giving
really interesting points about like systemic issues. And the parents

(02:39:16):
were like and they like brought their kids to the
school board meetings. There's the kids are standing in the
back as their parents are ranting about this and talking
about how the kids actually like I thought they were
learning things about systemic issues and then that got people mad.
So you know what else gets people mad? Uh? This
is advertisements. Yeah, and we're bad. We're gonna we're gonna

(02:39:44):
touch on the uh, the specifics, like all the stuff
we've been talking about. Most of the modern most most
of the current organizing is a lot of it's around
like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Um, Like all of
this stuff called like you know, the the school board channel.
All of this kind of stuff is usually around vaccine,
vaccines and masks stuff. Uh. Of course there's critical Royce

(02:40:06):
theory was the way more popular thing a few months ago.
Right now is the vaccine thing. The other kind of
like ever present thing is being upset that trans kids
exist and being very fearful that that there are trans
kids around your kids. Uh. This is a thing that's been,
you know, a thing for years that people have been
fighting against, and since the school board thing is becoming

(02:40:29):
more popular, people are are starting to uh bring lastly,
do these kind of flash mobs specifically around trans issues. Um.
One of like the more like astro turf type things
was people getting mad that there were like two specific
books available in certain high school and some middle school libraries.
UM that one of it was like a like one

(02:40:52):
of it was the memoir that Robert mentioned. The other
one was like a graphic novel memorial about someone realizing
their gender queer. So these are books that are not
in curriculums. These are just books that are available at
the library. UM. And basically there was people who just
who found these out and got turned it into like

(02:41:12):
like a meme on telegram essentially, like people like sharing
information about this, then you like look it up, see
if it's in your library. So then we have all
of these like coordinated attacks on school boards by these
models of people all about these same two books. UM.
And the goals to not only just get the books
like banned, but they're also trying to like fire or
arrest the teachers and school remembers for allowing these books

(02:41:33):
to happen. There has been school members who have like
stepped down because of just how much harassment is about
these things. Quote from the Western Chapnist channel, Jesus Christ
straight up pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again,
the Jewish school boar member gets mad and trying to
shut them down. How can you not connect the dots here.
There's no political solution. Voting will not remove these people. Um.
There was the mayor of Houston, uh So, in the

(02:41:57):
mayor of Houston, Ohio heard about this, and he went
to a school board meeting and instructed all of them,
all of the board members to resign um quoting the
quoting the Proud Boy right wing organizing channel Western Chavenista.
This comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the
system called educators, instructed kids to describe a sex scene
that they wouldn't show their mom. Of course this didn't happen.

(02:42:18):
This is this is they these these things are not
are not These books are not used in any kind
of curriculum anyway. So even even if they were that
that we not even we're not even in that reality. Um. So,
the mayor of this town basically got these instructed these
instructed all of these people to resign. Um. Earlier, I

(02:42:39):
think in mark No. In August of this year, pride
flags were banned at a at a school school district
inside south west Oregon. Um I think around I think
around Newburgh. The Newberg school district banned but banded pride flags.
So all this kind of stuff and and of course

(02:42:59):
that is in a lot of states. But the yeah,
the fact that it's in like Oregon, a blue state
is people got made. Like you know, there's like you know,
NBC articles about it because it's it's Oregon. It's not
it's it's it's not it's it's not a red state.
So it's all big, it's all Portland, it's all Antifa,
right yeah, yeah, so again the stuff is not not
not like contained to one thing. And like yeah, if
you google the stuff around these books, if you google

(02:43:22):
like gender Queer Book, uh school boards, you'll find this
in so many school districts. You'll see just mobs of
people lined up yelling and screaming um and like like
printing out giant, like giant cardboard prints of of this
comic book showing like like with like you know, there's

(02:43:42):
like a dick on it, Like there's like a drawn
a drawn dick, because that's what human bodies look like.
Like you can look at like a lot of like yeah,
like what are you gonna band the statue of David
because he has his dick out too, like like come on.
And also these are the same people who talk about
like oh they're you know, banning books, burning books, you know, right,
there was that. There was that tweet from like James

(02:44:04):
Woods about like these are the books that people want banned.
That means they're the most important ones. But these people love.
These people love like burning books. These people love banning books.
They love cancel culture. That the cultures that I was
that I was in as a kid, they would have
like massive like book and like c D and DVD
burnings for like unlike unholy and sinful media that you
would like bring in and like throw like your sinful

(02:44:25):
music onto this giant fight. Like these people love love
burning books, they love they love banning stuff, they love
cancel culture. Um, but they just laugh about it. Yeah,
So that was that was most of my stuff around
the kind of the ongoing queer and trans stuff. Of course,
they know this ties into like bathroom stuff as well,
with the people showing up to school board meetings to

(02:44:46):
scream about you know, kids going ship in the bathroom
that they want to and feel comfortable in. Um, you know,
and again like it doesn't it's not gonna stop with
trans people either. Right as soon as they banned trans people,
the next thing is going to be oh, gay students. Right,
this is it never it's never stops, it always keeps going. Um,
and it's just an ever present problem that it's gonna

(02:45:06):
require a lot more a lot more dealing with. And
again with all of these flash mobs, like no one,
no one's gonna stop them because they're like the people
in power, they're the people that have all of the privilege.
There's no really effective counter organizing for these school board
meetings right now. Um, the cops aren't gonna do ship.
Security guards aren't gonna do ship. Uh And regular libs

(02:45:27):
and regular regular people aren't gonna do sh it either.
And it's hard to figure out how to actually combat
this because there's a lot of times that the people
in school boards really like, no, we don't want this
to turn into a giant like fist fights, Like, don't
don't come in mass to start fistfighting them. But there
needs to be something to combat, whether that be you know,
running running for school boards, just showing up outside school boards,

(02:45:49):
having just more people there in, having more presence there, uh,
so that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob
of two hundred anti mask people showing up. Right. There
needs to be some type of thing happening because no
one else needs to be countered, And yeah, you know what,
they might need to get the ship kicked out of them.
I'm sorry, but like I don't like, I don't think

(02:46:10):
that would actually help in this instance. Probably, but like
they needs to be fucking something like they they are.
The level of boldness that they have is evidence that
they feel they are confident that there is no counter
to what there is going to be done. And perhaps
if they were being met by a wall of people

(02:46:33):
in the community who were willing, if they tried to
force their way into fucking throw down, you know, to say,
you're not entering this building without a goddamn mask, you're
not shutting down this meeting. Um, I don't know, maybe
that would do something. I don't actually know what would
do something. If it was people just as regular people,
I think that would be. Yeah, it's certainly not going
to help of its antifa. Um, for the love of God,

(02:46:54):
don't show up in fucking black block at a school
board meeting. Um, Like what would work is a bunch
of other middle aged parents showing up and being willing
to confront these people, and like everything that is worth
mentioning is that a lot of the people at these
protests like are not parents at all, Like they're not
they're not they're not eve from the same school district.

(02:47:15):
They're just sort of like this this is just how
this is just how the sort of right wing outrage
machine has worked. This is where they're drawing people. Yeah,
I mean and again, like it's it's a lot of
the people and there there's gonna be big dudes who
want to fight, but a lot of the people like
screaming are are like you know, middle aged women. The
people who are like really like leading the charge on

(02:47:36):
this because they're able to use their privilege because like
no one's gonna stop them, right, So that that's like
when they're leading the charge of two people who are
gonna like scream and harass and chase how black security
guards chase out, chase out the all of this, all
the school remembers no one's they're they're very effective at
using their privilege to gain political ground by just like

(02:47:58):
doing stuff on the ground. It's like, you know, this
is like this is like the January six thing. It's
like the January six thing. This is the new future
of political action is just showing up in mass two
places where no one's gonna stop you because you're like
you're the you know, the good, relatable, you know every
day Yeah, you're anyway, That's that's the stuff I had.

(02:48:18):
Will probably have an ad break and then talk about
maybe some of how this stuff started. Speaking of using
your privilege, you know, what is the greatest privilege? Being
able to purchase the products that Yeah, that's exactly right.
There's no privilege higher than being able to engage with

(02:48:39):
these consumables. Yeah, and we're back, all right, Chris, you
want to close this out. Yeah, So the last thing
I want to talk about that is interesting about this
whole thing is, you know, we we've we've mostly been
focusing on the very furthest right elements of this, but
a lot of the school board stuff is tied to

(02:49:02):
i mean just trade, a Republican party operatives and people
who work in this sort of you know, I mean
there's there's literally a bunch of people who work for
Republican parties will get into it, and there's also this
sort of network of of Republican think tanks, Republicans sort
of dark money dumps. That's a lot of a lot
of AstroTurf groups and that kind of stuff. Yeah, and
and so I want to talk about a few of
these people because I think they're interesting. Um, I think

(02:49:27):
we can start with Nicole Nelly, who's an interesting person.
She's so she she most recently founded Parents Defending Education.
Who are They're They're one of the big groups to
sort of like spreads this this sort of attack on
school board stuff over the country. They have chapters, they
organize people, and they also, you know, they do this
thing where they collect co incident reports from from school

(02:49:47):
districts that they you know, just distribute to all these
people and they put it online. They have all of
these they they they have a lot of stuff they do.
They do a lot of anti mask mandate stuff. So
they have these like template letters, like template like fakely
performed letter things that you can send to schools that
if you don't want to wear a masks that is
that's a staple of this type of organizing. Now. Yeah,
and and the interesting thing about Nickolenelly is that so

(02:50:09):
this is not like her first organ like three years
eighteen back in the Halcyon days of all right, you know,
I'm not quite going to say it was before the
mask fully came off, but it was well, the mask
was like a little bit more on. She she previously
founded a speech first Yeah you might remember, yeah as

(02:50:30):
the Republic when free speech was the big talking point.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and so she ran that
for a while. Now she's you know, organizing with the
holy people who just wants to Yeah, they just move on,
they move on to the new things. It was it
was free speech, it was christ theory. Right now it's
anti mask stuff. Next up is gonna be trans stuff
going real hard. Just today we had the fucking person

(02:50:54):
who BBC platforms the fucking lincum. Yeah, Lily the rapist
Lily Kade manifesto where she details which specific trans women
she wants to personally kill. Yeah, I used to know
Lily um. Oh yeah yeah yeah, uh real dark turned Um.
I don't know. I guess it's not super surprising. She

(02:51:16):
was definitely interviewed her for a documentary and it was
she was a bit off putting. Uh, I didn't realize
this was going on. I mean, yeah, there's there's a
lot of a lot a lot of reports of people
in like the sex book industry of talking about her,
like raping people in bathrooms, which again it's like, yeah,
the people that's always screaming about oh no trans women

(02:51:36):
or in bathrooms. Yeah, the people the person screaming about
this is an actual rapist. Like like when when when
we say rapists here like she she she raped so
many people that, like on Twitter, like I was scrolling
through my feet and I saw multiple people who were like, oh,
I know this person she assaulted me. Yeah, it's really bad.
The people who the turfs are like pushing. Yeah, this
is the BBC was platform. So like, yeah, like trans

(02:51:59):
stuff is as soon as as soon as the anti
mask anti vax stuff like dies down in the next
five months or whatever. Uh I I foresee a massive
pivot towards specifically anti anti trans antiqueer antique stuff because
that's going to be the new thing. Yep. And and
and I think it's it's worth bearing in mind that
this stuff. Yeah, and you know, with with the Coldnelly specifically,

(02:52:21):
so she she worked she like worked at the Cato Institute,
which is like Murray Rothbart and Charles Cokes. Now it's
it's yeah, it's it's it's basically it's basically this is
a slight oversupplication, but it's basically one of the cokes
sort of like money laundering like money operation things. She
also worked at Freedom Works, who oh yeah, yeah this
is great. So um this is this is one of

(02:52:41):
the fun parts of this which is that so freedom
Works is another one of the Coke's sort of dark
money laundering machine things. And Freedom Works are basically the
people who created the Tea Party. Like there are the
people who turned the Tea Party from like a bunch
of weird guy just like like six weirdos into like,
you know, the the basically the the the the entirety

(02:53:03):
of the pre Trump conservative political machine who like built
a Republican party after it was like completely discredited, um
into two thousand's. And this is true of a lot
of the people who are in charge of these big
organs have connections like this. Um, the person you found
in No Left Turn, which is No Left Turn know

(02:53:23):
for an education, They're they're they're they're not one of
these big sort of anti school board things. I mean
they they are the people. They're one of people who
like they have a list of books on their website
that they want banned. Wow. Yeah it's great. And their
founder rights for the Heritage foundations like magazine. So they're there,
there's there's all of this stuff, and I think maybe
the most implematic one is this guy is Mark Ruffo,

(02:53:44):
who Yeah, so so he's he's the guy who just
created the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing.
He like threw together a bunch of like inc just
like these incredibly tenuous connections. Like there's a bunch of
sort of old uh cultural Marxism conspiracy stuff in there. Yeah,

(02:54:04):
it's a lot of like Frankfurt's school type ship. Yeah yeah,
and and but but what I think is interesting about him,
it's less his ideas, which are just pseudo intellectual. Yeah,
he doesn't he's not actually super smart in what he
says that there's a lot of videos of him talking
to actual philosopher is getting schooled about what rice theory is. Like,
he's actually not that intelligent in this in this side

(02:54:25):
of things. But but you know that the thing is
that there's nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a
trick up his sleeve, exactly. And you know, and then
the trick basically is Fox News. And you know, the
reason the reason this whole thing exists is that this
was you know, Mark Ruffo. He's very very explicit about
this that this this, this was his solution to the
George Floyd up rising. Yea, was that, oh, we we

(02:54:46):
need we need to we need to find this thing
to stop the medicum of this uprising. And this is
this is who Tucker Carlson brings on and starts bring
onwenty and this blows up. He immediately gets hired by
the Manhattan Institute, which is a very not that old
but there from the eighties, but a very an old,
extremely powerful conservative think tank that I don't think. I
think it's less known than things like the Heritage Foundation

(02:55:07):
or the kid who wants to Yeah, I would say
so yeah. But he gets they hired him like immediately
because you know, the sort of mainline at the Republican
Party very quickly is like, this is the thing that
we can use as like a hammer, right, and so
the Manhattan Institute publishes this roop o work for them. Now.
I can't I'm not actually sure if you. I don't

(02:55:27):
know if he specifically wrote this or he was just
involved in it. I think it's it's the bye line
is just the Manhattan Institute. But they have this incredibly
detailed tool kit explaining how you know, both both explaining
what the sort of right wing like line on critical
race theory is. And they have like a bunch of explainers,
have like list of terms have you ever seen Yeah, yeah,

(02:55:48):
it's actually yeah, if you've ever seen like list of
terms of people want banned, Like it's all just pulled
from this document, right, so I add stuff. Um, But
but the interesting part of about this is the other
thing is this this is an organizing manual, right, It's
it's it's a thing that tells you how to go
and how to find other people, like other other people.
You know, if if you're like an incensed right wing
like freaking one of these school districts, It's like, okay,
well here's here's how you like talk to other people

(02:56:11):
in your districts. Here's here's a list of options of
like things you can do going public. And then there's
a very interesting thing part of this that that I
think is really disturbing and outlines like really what's going
on here, which is there's this whole like freak out
thing about this thing called minority rule, where like, oh,
the left has this like they have this like militant

(02:56:31):
minority that that will compel the majority to follow them
by because they keep on showing up and they keep
on doing things. And if if this minority like it keeps,
keep keeps, you know, being more in transient than everyone else,
then they will inevitably win. And this the three quarters
of this section is this like weird fear mongering thing
about it. But then the last part of it is

(02:56:53):
a bunch is the thing us saying, oh, we need
to do this ourselves, right, this is how we win.
We win by being more in transient. We win by
showing up more often of course. Yeah, and you know,
and this is this is the other thing is this
is from like last year. I think this is like
the kid this summer. Yeah, okay, that's sorry. This is
this is one. Yeah, this is really the ship. But
it's interesting because it's like this is the sort of

(02:57:14):
you know this, this is this is the Republican Party essentially,
I mean institute, very very mainstre Republican Party. This, yeah,
this is this is how they do aspective in person organizing.
We we talked about this a bit in our episodes
um about the like in the aftermath of the abortion ruling,
in Texas and how and how like the religious righting
organizing has worked in local districts. Yeah, this, this is

(02:57:35):
how they are able to get things done, which is
why there's been so many school by members who either
got fired, who have had to step down, who have
been harassed off the job, and are now there's people,
you know a lot of a lot of like people
I would describe as people holding very extreme views are
now running and taking these spots um because if you
can do if you can do this type of like
again it's not grassroots, but it's it's it is it

(02:57:57):
is like astroturp, so like it appears grassroots. But if
can do this type of like fox grassroots organizing, you
can gain a lot of power over specific areas and
make a lot of people's lives a lot more miserable.
And that's that's that's what the goal is, right, the
goal is to make trans kids lives miserable. The goals
they get people to not wear masks and dive of
COVID like that those are the results of these actions. Well,

(02:58:18):
I think I think there's an interesting interplay here though,
because I think because so freedom works, like like even
even a lot of the specific protests that are happening.
And this is especially true of of the very earlier,
earliest ones. I think like when when like the very
first school board protests that were happening. Yeah, like like
a lot of these summer to follow was when they
started to start up. Yeah, and and those a lot

(02:58:40):
of those were directly organized by by people who work
for Freedom Works. And and this is this is what
a lot of the c RT ones yeah, yeah, yeah,
they see the CRT one very specifically freedom works. And
this is what I think is interesting about this is
that you know, okay, freedom works. It's like, okay, so
what does freedom works out of this? Freedom Works wants
the T party again, right, because you know this, this
is what freedom Works does. Right there. They're they're they're

(02:59:02):
basically the group that comes in when when the Republicans
start losing election cycles. They're like, Okay, well now we
need to get the balance of power back, we need
to bring drawn the Democrats out. So they're they're they're
largely trying to build a sort of electoral base. And
and again like this, this this will look familiar to
people who remember two thousand and ten because it's the
same thing, except And this is the thing that I
I I this is the part where I genuinely they

(02:59:23):
can't tell whether the Freedom Works people, whether the Cokes,
whether that, whether this sort of dark wning network either
I don't. I can't tell whether they understand what they're
doing and like it or they're just incredibly naive. But
you know this is not two thousand ten, right, You
can't when when when you start mobilizing people like mobilizing

(02:59:44):
people on the right wing to go to a place,
they don't just like sit there and hold signs anymore.
They cannot you cannot contain them at this point. You
cannot control the spread like you have once you've you've
opened this can, and there's no way of putting them
back in because as soon as they start organized is
it on appside telegram, they're one step away from skull masks.
And then they're being okay with cheering around people that

(03:00:07):
are going to go beat up that are going to
go beat up people in these meetings. Yeah, And this
is this is this is really the thing that I
think it's not just January six that we live in
the shadow January six, but it's also about you know,
if you look at how how the anti lockdown protest
went in. Right, you have a bunch of people showing
up with guns the capitals and that stuff was extremely effective.
And that in the conformation between that in January six

(03:00:29):
has you know, it's open the floodgates and now that
was that was to January six being possible. Is the
more and more protests around capitals of people showing up
in mass to overwhelm anyone. And because they're all white,
because they're all like middle class conservatives, no one's gonna
stop them. Yeah, and and you know, and this is
the thing, right, you know, the Cokes. I I genuinely

(03:00:52):
don't know what the Cokes want out of this. My
guess is that the thing that they want is a
new based Republican voters. But that's not what they're creating.
The thing that they're creating is a new core fascist
street fighters. And you know it, at some point, it
doesn't it literally doesn't matter whether or not this is
what the coachs are trying to do or like not
trying to do, because they're in the end it's it's

(03:01:12):
just pushing people towards thinking there's no political solution. It's
still only only violence. And overwhelming people in mass is
the only way to get the change that they want.
The change they want is to have trans kids not exists.
And yeah, just more, more and more like fascistic policies. Um,
whether that be you know, banning books that mentioned gay

(03:01:34):
people existing or what it's like to be a gay person,
whether that be teaching people that racism is still an
actual thing that exists, or that be putting a mask
on so you don't kill your grandma or whatever. Yep. Well,
and you know, and I think I think one last thing, right,
you know, we saw what happened last time they were
in power, right, and it was you know, and like

(03:01:57):
you can you can talk about how a lot of
the worst stuff were still happening. Was like, yeah, they
put a bunch of people in concentration camps. Right, and
if they if they take back power again, and there's
a good chance that they're going to because you know,
the Democrats are being they they you know, the Democrats
never want to be in power. The thing they want
to be minority opposition so they can do fundraising, right,

(03:02:21):
and if you know, when when when these people, if
these people take power again, it's going to be even
worse than it was last time. Yeah, the thing looking
at looking at the Virginia election the night of recording
is a great example of that. Yeah uh In terms
of yeah, it turns out when Democrats just do nothing
and just sit around in office, you don't convince young
people to want to vote for them because they're not
actually doing anything. So then they just sit out. Then

(03:02:42):
the Republicans actually do vote in people, then we get
uh we anti CRT person elected to be the governor
of Virginia. And that's the episode. Good times. Well, I
hope everybody's optimistic feeling nice. Well, um, we'll be back
with something else. Research your school boards, who's in it,

(03:03:03):
and just protests around it and maybe show up with
some of your I don't know buddies with your lattes
and stand in front of the building and be like, no,
we don't want you, we don't want you to shut
stuff down because no one else is going to stop them.
It has to be just like regular people. You can't cops,
it's not going to be any elected democrat and honestly,
like you can't rely on teens and black block to

(03:03:25):
do this. That is this isn't this isn't what they
need to be doing. It should be like yeah, it'd
be like millennials and Gen X need to be like, Hey, no,
we're not gonna We're not gonna have you doing this. Well,
that's the that's the episode. Hey, we'll be back Monday,

(03:03:52):
with more episodes every week from now until the heat
death of the Universe. It Could Happen Here is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
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