It Could Happen Here Weekly 170

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Speaker 15 I was amazing on that show.

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Speaker 8 Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 8 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.

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Speaker 23 Welcome to ICAP and Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again.

Speaker 25 I'm your host, Mia Wong.

Speaker 26 As the new regime settles in, we face a struggle on a thousand fronts.

Speaker 27 It's bewildering.

Speaker 28 It's terrifying.

Speaker 30 It's an offensive design to overwhelm us with the sheer totality of the horror.

Speaker 23 But its diversity is also our greatest advantage, because every struggle on every front brings us closer to victory.

Speaker 4 And that allows us, and it allows you, to pick a field and hold it. One of the most important fronts in the years to come is labor.
Much of what is to come will be decided on the shop floor.

Speaker 6 And today, we're talking about that.

Speaker 30 And with me to talk about that is fellow worker Dino, an IWW peace union organizer in Berkeley, and fellow worker Cole, who's an IWW Peace Union organizer in Portland.

Speaker 30 And both of you two, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 37 Hello.

Speaker 38 Thank you for having me on.

Speaker 21 Yeah, me too. I'm excited to talk to you both.

Speaker 39 So this is a Pete's coffee union.

Speaker 40 We have talked to several other unions, but this was kind of personal to me because this is one of the sort of coffee things that my dad kind of grew up on.

Speaker 32 And I'm now here to deliver wrath against them for their many crimes.

Speaker 25 Yeah, let's start off with, can you talk a bit about how these unions came together and what the sort of like beginning process of this organizing looked like?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so the first store that organized actually was in Davis, California. They organized, I think, in 2022.

Speaker 3 They launched their public campaign at the end in winter and then they voted for their election back in January of 2023.

Speaker 3 That's around the same time period where a lot of media was writing about their unionization process.

Speaker 3 And a couple of the Bay Area stores heard about it and started to meet together. And that's kind of where we started.

Speaker 3 We weren't IWW at the start, but we eventually started meeting with unions and chose the IWW.

Speaker 24 Hell yeah. So

Speaker 4 it was an independent thing that became an IWW.

Speaker 3 Yeah. When we joined the IWW, we were basically fully organized to the extent that we were going to be.

Speaker 3 We already had our committees set up. We had our meetings regularly.
We had Robert's rules and everything already implemented.

Speaker 6 That's so cool.

Speaker 41 Do you want to talk a little bit about what the sort of process of doing that initial organizing before you went to the unions looked like and how everything sort of came together?

Speaker 3 Yeah, when we started organizing, it was very secretive and it was a little bit scary at the time because there was a lot of already kind of union busting from management.

Speaker 3 There was a lot of managers kind of like trying to overhear if people were talking about the union or already instigating themselves and asking like, what do you think about unions?

Speaker 3 And it was a little bit scary to try to just like go up to coworkers and be like, hey, like, are you interested in, you know, hanging out after work and, you know, talking shit about our like manager or something like that.

Speaker 3 And over time, we eventually started doing like one-on-one conversations with our coworkers and meeting together.

Speaker 3 Once we had our three stores that really were solidified, we had at least one person in each store that was like willing to like drive the campaign forward for months and maybe even years as some of us have been around for that long now.

Speaker 3 We felt ready to kind of like start setting things into stone. So we had like meetings every single week week and we had bi-weekly meetings at some point.

Speaker 3 We had committee meetings and people started to kind of select themselves into like social media or we had outreach, we had intake.

Speaker 3 So other stores were also reaching out to us because there was like just secret kind of like people knew what was happening. People didn't want to say it out loud.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So it was just a lot of like hanging out, having socials and things like that that kind of like created the foundation for like personal relationships for organizing.

Speaker 3 And at the time, it was mostly just us complaining for a really long time until we were like, What if we did something about this?

Speaker 36 Yeah, one thing, one thing I'm curious about is like, how, how large, roughly, are these shops?

Speaker 38 There tends to be about 12 to 16 workers at each shop. So, I think the biggest union shop that we have has 16 workers in it.
The shop that I work at is fairly small. We only have 12 workers right now.

Speaker 38 So, fairly small.

Speaker 38 And I will say, just to give some context for the organizing process for my shop as well, Pete's did not make it difficult to organize in terms of like the policies that they were pushing.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 38 Everyone was pissed off about how we were being treated. And so just sort of pushing people.
in one-on-one conversations to look for solutions rather than just bitching about it, which is great.

Speaker 38 That's where it all starts, right? Peace is pushing poor policies. They're cutting hours.
That's one of the biggest thing.

Speaker 38 They're slicing our hours week after week, even as the volume of sales goes up. And so just being like, hey, do you want more hours? Like, do you feel like it's fair for us to be staffed this way?

Speaker 38 Let's try to do something about it.

Speaker 36 Yeah, and the staffing issues, this is one of the things I'm talking to, I mean, just people across sectors.

Speaker 30 It's really one of the, it's one of the things that's the most obvious if you're working one of these jobs and also somehow it's not something that ever gets talked about in the mainstream at all.

Speaker 45 Like it's, it's never a part of the discourse that,

Speaker 50 you know, you don't have a set number of hours that you're going to work.

Speaker 45 You don't know when you're going to work them.

Speaker 30 And also, you know, there's no guarantee that you're going to get to work enough hours to actually survive.

Speaker 52 And then also

Speaker 4 the entire condition of labor, like every sector is just chronic, it's just chronic underscheduling and chronic understaffing of everything and it you know and that that ranges from like coffee shops to like hospitals to schools to like everyone has decided that the way that you manage things is by by chronically overworking everyone and trying to pay people as little as possible by not giving them hours can you talk a little bit more about about the kind of the the actual effects of the understaffing and how that sort of drove people into the campaign yeah i i would be more than happy to i mean one of the

Speaker 38 sort of primary catalysts for organizing for our shop was the introduction of Uber Eats.

Speaker 38 So when I first started working at this shop, it was around two years ago. They had just recently introduced DoorDash.
So previously, you know, obviously it started, it was just a cafe.

Speaker 38 People would come in and get their coffee. Later on, they ended up introducing mobile orders through Pete's own ordering system.

Speaker 38 And then when the pandemic hit initially and everything locked down, they started doing DoorDash to try to continue having a revenue stream.

Speaker 38 Now, after more things started opening up, they opened the shop up again. Obviously, they continued to have DoorDash because it brings in a lot of revenue for them.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 And then without really any forewarning and certainly without any increase in staffing for us, they introduced Uber Eats, which is a similar amount of volume increase, a similar amount of orders increase as DoorDash.

Speaker 38 Like we're probably getting

Speaker 38 at peak, like 30, 40 drinks per hour in addition to what we're getting in store from DoorDash and Uber Eats.

Speaker 55 That's a drink every like sub two minutes.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 38 Jesus. And we are expected to crank these out at less than three minutes in order.
And that's per order.

Speaker 38 So an order might have like five drinks if it's door to hash or uber eats where in particular people will order a lot of things at a time yeah because it seems like using these sort of apps and stuff uh people will order much more egregious things much larger orders than they do when they're in store and so everyone's really annoyed about this just like okay all of a sudden we have all this extra work to do they're not increasing our hours at all yeah you're not getting paid more either well no certainly not and we don't get tips from that either oh Jesus.

Speaker 56 Wait, you don't get tips from it?

Speaker 38 No, no. I mean, like...

Speaker 50 Wait, oh, the tips all go to the drivers.

Speaker 51 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 38 Which I won't, like, that's not a bad thing.

Speaker 37 No, it's good.

Speaker 6 Good drivers.

Speaker 45 Good for the drivers, but you should get paid too. Yeah.

Speaker 38 But it's like Uber who's taking the vast majority of the money from that. And Pete's.
And so us and the drivers are both getting screwed over by this.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 38 But we both have to do all this extraneous work. So.
People were super fucking irritated about that, myself included, for sure.

Speaker 38 And that really got people going with, like, okay, what are we going to do about this? How can we try to push them to staff us better?

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And it seems like the incentive structures for these delivery services add up really badly in terms of the way that it incentives people to order.

Speaker 23 Because you have these minimums on the amount of stuff you have to order to get below this, you know, all this threshold stuff of like, if you do this, you get free delivery, you spend this much, you get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 46 And so that, yeah, it seems like the sort of perfect maelstrom for

Speaker 31 producing even more work.

Speaker 38 Yeah. And I will say this is that they

Speaker 38 like to push out promotions to people of like buy one, get one free, that sort of thing for like our Pete's location constantly. And they, they never tell us about it.

Speaker 38 So, you know, one day we'll just be getting like five large mochas and like six different orders. And we're like, why are we getting five large mochas in all of these orders?

Speaker 38 And someone pulls up the DoorDash app and they're like, oh, it's because there's like a half off if you get more than four mochas or, you know, something like that.

Speaker 38 And it's just like, we never hear about this until it's actually happening.

Speaker 38 And that's the case both for DoorDash newborns, but also for just like internal Pete's promotions.

Speaker 38 Like we tend not to hear about any of these things until we are on the shop floor working and people are asking us about it. Customers are asking us about it.

Speaker 34 Yeah, it seems like the

Speaker 32 way that the integration of these apps into these business models is working is it's just every single thing they do just compounds the amount of work you have to do and compounds how awful the experience is.

Speaker 55 And speaking about how awful the experience is, unfortunately, we are a podcast sponsored by ads.

Speaker 4 So go experience them or don't.

Speaker 52 I don't know.

Speaker 23 If you have Apple, there's a thing you can get called Cooler's Having Media where you don't have ads.

Speaker 23 The Android one,

Speaker 55 I don't even know what I'm legally allowed to say about that shit, but oh my God, it is the biggest legal cluster fuck I've ever seen in my entire life.

Speaker 12 I'm going to leave it at there, but we're trying.

Speaker 25 We're doing our best.

Speaker 22 We are

Speaker 6 so back.

Speaker 30 Yeah, so let's go into their other of their myriad crimes.

Speaker 3 Oh man, where do I even start? So Pete's the second they found out that we were organizing, launched like their their worst union busting campaign they could have ever imagined, wasting so much money.

Speaker 6 Oh, God.

Speaker 3 Right after we went public, the first big thing that they messed up on was they took me off the schedule indefinitely. And we had to like file a whole unfair labor practice about it.

Speaker 3 An unfair labor practice is a charge with the National Labor Relations Board. And we claimed that they were being retaliatory.

Speaker 3 And at the time, it was very clear that management thought I was a key organizer. I I was very public and vocal about being a union member.

Speaker 3 At the time, everyone was, but for some reason, they singled me out. That was one part of how they messed up, but they eventually put me back on the schedule, apologized, gave me back pay.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 And we withdrew the, we withdrew the ULP because we were like, all right, I guess it fixed itself.

Speaker 30 Yeah, that's the thing that happens, by the way.

Speaker 55 Like if you're submitting an unfair labor practice and the company resolves it, you don't actually have to, and this is actually one of the things about ULPs sometimes is that like, neither you nor your employer wants to go sit in front of the National Labor Relations Board and like do a whole thing.

Speaker 39 So, like, sometimes you can get them to resolve it just by like, just by the threat of it.

Speaker 30 And then you don't actually have to go sit in front of the National Labor Relations Board because they've done the thing they were supposed to do.

Speaker 30 So, note for all you people out there who are considering filing one of these.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I know, just stack them up.

Speaker 3 And sometimes that's enough to put pressure, especially for smaller businesses or people who just like, especially corporations that don't necessarily have experience with union investing quite yet.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So at the time that worked and within a week, I had my job back and everything.

Speaker 3 And that was right after we had filed, which meant that if for some reason I wasn't put back on the schedule, I would have been gone leading up until the election, which would have been really bad in terms of, you know, having those one-on-ones with coworkers and making sure everyone was connected.

Speaker 55 I also just want to mention here, like it is illegal to fire someone for union organizing.

Speaker 32 Like it's not the most easily enforced thing, but they legally cannot do that.

Speaker 30 So just

Speaker 30 note for all the people who are listening to union episodes for the first time, they can't do that.

Speaker 32 And if they do it, you can launch campaigns and you can sort of force them to do it. But yeah, this is the Mia Labron note of the episode.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, and I think especially something that's very IWW of how we reacted to that situation was that My coworkers were also just like being really like annoying to the manager being like, what happened to Dino?

Speaker 14 Like, why aren't they at at work?

Speaker 3 Like, what's going on?

Speaker 3 And I think that internal pressure also made it really uncomfortable for management to realize how much they had fucked up and how much my coworkers were willing to have my back.

Speaker 3 There was definitely more talk of like actual direct action in other ways that eventually, like, we actually didn't do because I got my hours back. So, that was really good.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then, yeah, so that was still within the first few weeks of when we filed our paperwork to have an election with the nlrb to be a certified shop according to the government not that that's always important yeah yeah that's something that we wanted especially as the trump regime unfolds yeah

Speaker 3 yeah i know it it's really it's a really tough position especially because i mean we're we're iww members and i know that there's definitely an internal debate of whether or not you know contractual agreements versus direct action yeah but there's always the option to just do both accommodation diversify our tactics but yeah so that happened they also hired a union buster of course they did now according to lm reports from the government that they have to file they spent over a hundred thousand dollars in like a span of like two weeks to hire this union buster

Speaker 3 and what was it wasn't an lm report by the way it is like a a report that you file with the i think forgetting which department it is, but is it the OLM?

Speaker 38 The Office of Labor and Management?

Speaker 3 Thank you. Yeah.
So they are required to file that by, I think, March 30th of the following year for like fiscal reasons. So we finally got those documents this previous year.

Speaker 3 So they did spend a lot of money.

Speaker 3 And this guy who was just basically messing with us for like two weeks and he was, you know, trying to be super helpful, answer any questions about the union and like tell people that the union was, you know, like racist, not for them, or that the union was exclusionary, or that unions cost a lot of money.

Speaker 3 And thankfully, that didn't work. We won all of our elections, but leading up to that, it definitely kind of morale dropped a lot.

Speaker 3 People felt a little bit,

Speaker 3 they were questioning whether or not it was the right decision we made to unionize in the first place, because it seemed like this was just the start of Pete's just messing with us because they can.

Speaker 3 And it didn't seem like there was much that we could have done in that situation other than try to maybe have fun with the union buster and mess with him.

Speaker 3 But even then, that still wasn't like enough to counteract the fact that like people were just being messed with at work and they couldn't literally leave.

Speaker 3 Like there was someone like on the floor asking them questions about their

Speaker 3 activity with the union. And even though now we know it's like illegal and we could have filed unfair labor practices on that at the time, we just didn't do it.
And now we're learning about it.

Speaker 3 But that's something I definitely wish we knew and stood up for a little bit more.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Could you tell a little bit about what the specific thing was so that if people are like experiencing it themselves, they can know what they can do?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So management shouldn't be asking for your

Speaker 3 like affiliation with within like a union. They're not allowed to ask or make assumptions about it.
So like if I'm a manager, I'm not allowed to like go up to like me and be like, hey, Dino, like.

Speaker 3 since you're in the union, like what is the union doing about X, Y, and Z? Like that's not an appropriate question.

Speaker 3 And there's definitely times where, like, my own manager asked me questions like that. And I definitely had to, like, hey, like, this is actually like not appropriate for you to do.

Speaker 3 Like, I don't feel comfortable with this. But that's not always the case.
And some workers definitely were like disclosing private and confidential information about the union to management.

Speaker 3 And it was really hard to make sure that every worker felt comfortable.

Speaker 3 And they definitely picked out workers based on, you know, like social person, like personalities and things like that, which is really disheartening to see.

Speaker 36 yeah it's really scummy and i think morale is a terrain a struggle and that's one of the things here too where it's like a lot of these efforts are just attempts to make everyone in a workplace miserable and intent attempt to make people sort of too depressed and too despondent to sort of organize and a lot of that yeah again is like it's stuff you can organize against it's stuff that like they're not allowed to do and whether or not they're going to be able to do it is is a function of

Speaker 54 labor regulation and labor law is not something that's enforced by the government.

Speaker 25 It's something that's enforced by you and it's enforced by the people around you.

Speaker 26 And so, you know, like the law can sometimes help and sometimes doesn't.

Speaker 30 It's useful to cite the management.

Speaker 44 It's useful because it makes them think that there's like the full power of the state behind you or whatever.

Speaker 23 But like in turn, in terms of how you deal with this stuff, it is something that is enforced by you and by how organized you are and by how organized your shop floor is and by how organized your community is.

Speaker 62 And that's something I think important for people to understand when you're...

Speaker 45 forming your own unions, which you should also go do because you can just do it.

Speaker 64 I said it before and I'll say it again.

Speaker 45 Like people who organize unions are just regular people, like you personally dear listener. So you can do this too.

Speaker 38 What do they say? It's like a union is just two workers talking to each other.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 38 And yeah, just to expand on that point a little bit, like the NLRB is quite understaffed and it will be more understaffed almost certainly as the Trump administration, you know, gets deeper into gutting the entirety of the government.

Speaker 38 It already takes months to years to get unfair labor practice filings resolved for the NLRB to do most things.

Speaker 38 So that is a core tenet of the IWW is actually

Speaker 38 taking action on the shop floor.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 38 Like that is

Speaker 38 the key aspect to unionism as a whole. And I think one of the great parts about the IWW is that it actually acknowledges that that the power comes from the workers.
It doesn't come from laws.

Speaker 38 The laws only came because workers were pushing for things on the shop floor in the first place. So it's like, let's get back to the root of that.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and like the NLRP, we've talked about this on the show before, but the National Labor Relations Act, I think it established the National Labor Relations Board, like that, that that was part of effectively like a truce that was enforced.

Speaker 40 by by the government because as a way to have like labor unions stop being armed and stop stop getting into shootouts with bosses.

Speaker 4 So yeah, it is as this framework comes apart, it is important to remember like why we had this in the first place, which was union militias would occasionally start like small-scale civil wars in the U.S.

Speaker 30 with bosses over stuff and people would shoot cannons at each other.

Speaker 41 We're sort of distant from that period.

Speaker 62 But there's also another thing about direct action, which is that.

Speaker 32 Yeah, it's hard to organize, but also,

Speaker 40 like, quite frankly, with the way that the NLRB is functioning right now, like the time to organize that A makes the union better, and B is going to be faster than the NLRB right now.

Speaker 59 So,

Speaker 29 yeah,

Speaker 21 this is your practical.

Speaker 41 We have your ideological pitch.

Speaker 29 We have your practical pitch for direct action, which is that it's quick. Unfortunately, the other thing that's quick is the approach of this ad break.

Speaker 52 Here's ads.

Speaker 6 We are back.

Speaker 26 So, let's talk about sort of what's happening right now with the union, how things are going, and what management has been doing.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 38 So, right now, I mean, we're dealing with a lot of the same issues as we have been dealing with. The staffing issue is only continuing to be worse, right?

Speaker 38 One of the things that we were trying to get initially is schedules further out. Right now, we get them two weeks out, more consistent scheduling, more scheduling, obviously, better wages,

Speaker 38 better benefits, you know, all of these sort of things. And those are only continuing to get worse.
And so, we are continuing to try to think about tactics, strategies to counter that, right?

Speaker 38 To give us more power. So, we're both doing direct actions and trying to push for a contract right now.

Speaker 38 Now, one of the big difficulties is that Pete has basically hired this law firm to do the contract negotiations on their behalf.

Speaker 38 And the law firm is basically stonewalling us. Like, they are responding to the emails, but basically by just kicking the can down the road

Speaker 38 and trying to not actually come to the bargaining table.

Speaker 38 And so it's this very frustrating thing of like,

Speaker 38 how do we actually get them to come to the bargaining table? And that's definitely still something that we're wrestling with and that we're working on.

Speaker 38 Yeah, I don't know if you have any more to add to that, Dina.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, I think another thing that's kind of on everyone's mind is that a group of us got written up for another direct action that we did back in October. And then we got written up like.

Speaker 3 the week of Thanksgiving and holidays and finals for most of us that were students. So that kind of just dropped morale and activity.

Speaker 3 And because of the holidays, people were either kind of not paying attention or just organizing activity tends to just drop during no holidays. Yeah.
People are just a little bit.

Speaker 3 Yeah, people check out, people go home. And especially for like us and like food service retail, like a lot of people are kind of just like around for school.
So my location, we're like.

Speaker 3 a few blocks away from UC Berkeley. So most of the students like go home and they're not going to like log into Zoom for a 30-minute union meeting and like hear what's like, you know, the most recent

Speaker 3 check-ins that we need to do. So that is a little bit frustrating that Pete's definitely wrote us up right at the perfect time that where activity kind of drops.

Speaker 3 So they're adapting, they're learning a little bit more. And it's kind of, it's really frustrating.
But yeah, no, a group of us, including me, got written up for something.

Speaker 3 And it was just a blanket discipline.

Speaker 3 And it started restricting all of our abilities to like cover shifts to swap shifts to pick up hours to call out and they restrict everything so badly and then are also like final warnings and there's no like period

Speaker 3 in which all these made-up rules that they're making yeah kind of end i'm just like waiting to hear when my manager decides to like stop punishing me which is like obviously very personal yeah And that's like really worrisome because we tried to file a grievance with Pete's according to what they told us.

Speaker 3 All our district managers were like, Yeah, file a grievance with HR. We'll discuss it there.
And then we did that.

Speaker 3 We filed a grievance, we all signed on, and then management turned around and was like, Actually, you haven't bargained for a grievance procedure. So we actually don't care about this.

Speaker 3 And unless it's legally mandated, we won't listen to you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So now we're getting stuck between like, we want to bargain, we want to go to the table, we want to meet with Pete's, but they are creating these made-up rules on how they want to bargain bargain and meet with us.

Speaker 3 And they're unwilling to cooperate with us. There's like five public shops and they're like not willing to meet with us at the same time.
That actually like makes no sense.

Speaker 3 We have like the same bargaining team members for all our shops. We're in the one big union.

Speaker 3 Like it doesn't make any sense that they're trying to, I mean, it makes perfect sense for management to try to divide us, but it's what the workers want to be in one contract to, you know, be able to do like one grievance and like, you know, go against management together.

Speaker 3 But yeah, it's like a really annoying thing. And it's really frustrating to not really know exactly what our next move is.

Speaker 23 I mean, this is something that I think both union organizers and management knows, which is that the first place that unions fail is trying to get the vote, trying to get to, or just trying to get enough people organized around this sort of campaign.

Speaker 4 So the second place that they fail is before the first contract.

Speaker 21 We're trying to negotiate the first contract.

Speaker 4 And so every company just like tries to draw the shit out as long as humanly possible.

Speaker 23 Like it took us,

Speaker 55 God, I think, what, two years in bargaining?

Speaker 23 And that's like not even that, like, for a first contract, I mean, that's like bad, but it's not even as bad as it can get.

Speaker 47 And there's the other aspect of it too, that you've been talking about, which is that

Speaker 4 the way that companies break unions is just terror, right?

Speaker 55 It's just, it's just a terror campaign.

Speaker 35 It is, it is, it is a campaign to inflict sort of fear and suffering on people.

Speaker 6 And the fact that this is the way that the system works, that, you know, there are a bunch of people in power who are through the way that they're attempting to keep their power is just through fear and through like inflicting pain on people is

Speaker 4 just ghastly.

Speaker 26 And if you want to sort of take a step back and go, like, why is everything like this?

Speaker 6 It's like, well,

Speaker 30 that's because that's what this entire system is built on, has always been built on.

Speaker 38 Yeah. And I think in terms of countering that, one thing that I definitely want to call for from all of my fellow baristas out there is to organize your own shops, right? Like that is the key thing.

Speaker 38 The more people that we have pushing for

Speaker 38 better rights for workers in the workplace, whether that's through a contract or not, the more effective it's going to be. And it's when we feel alone and isolated that their terror is most effective.

Speaker 38 It's when we're together that it is the least effective, that they are the most scared by our tactics.

Speaker 38 So just keep pushing for it. I mean, I think that's one of the things that the Starbucks campaign has showed us.
You know,

Speaker 38 they still don't have their first contract, sure, but they're so much closer now,

Speaker 38 like over,

Speaker 38 what is it, like almost three years down the road, with over 500 shops organized than they were when those first shops organized in Buffalo.

Speaker 38 And that's due to that persistence and due to having more weight on our side. So please organize.
Do it. That's just my little call for that.

Speaker 45 Yeah,

Speaker 21 it's a snowball rolling down the hills.

Speaker 58 Like the more, the more shops are organized, the more that will convince other shops to organize.

Speaker 26 And the larger that snowball is, the harder it is to stop its momentum.

Speaker 40 But what do you think the next steps are going to be for this campaign?

Speaker 26 If you can actually talk about it in terms of like putting pressure on the company, in terms of drawing other people in, in terms of like what's going on in the shops.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think one of the main things that we think that we've been really quiet about is how much union messing they've been doing and just talking to the public about that.

Speaker 3 I think part of why we're here today also is it's going to help with that. A lot of people, especially when people were calling for boycotts on Starbucks, were like, okay, we'll go to Pete's then.

Speaker 3 They're like the good company.

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 3 And I think Pete's gets away with a lot because they have that kind of protection of like, oh, they were a small company from Berkeley, and they're, you know, still in the Bay Area. They're so small.

Speaker 3 Now they have like so many shops across the world. They're like an international conglomerate.
They're part of like a large holding company. They got bought out like over 10 years ago.

Speaker 3 And the quality has been declining. They treat their workers like shit.
We don't get any raises anymore unless it's like minimum wage increases are mandated by law.

Speaker 3 So a company that maybe was right and was maybe a little bit better is now like just going downhill.

Speaker 3 And I think people still like pride themselves in being like a picnic and being a customer and being part of this like weird subculture of coffee that is no longer kind of, there's just like, it's just not.

Speaker 3 what it was back when it was created like in the 60s in Berkeley. It's not, it's not the same and it can't go back to that anymore.

Speaker 3 Just now with the way that they're union busting, not with the way that they're just cutting the quality of everything and over like, yeah, everything, the exploitation of us and in other ways that they do, it's just not sustainable.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And you can see that it's not the same company by just like, oh yeah, hey, they've, you know, I mean, and this, this is, this is not a defense of like small businesses, which also do just absolutely terrible shit to workers.

Speaker 22 Like, if you ever worked for one, like, good lord.

Speaker 21 But, you know, like, as these companies get larger and larger, and as as the sort of

Speaker 32 the endless march of capital goes on, you know, you like,

Speaker 54 you see the current like nightmare of, oh, hey, here's like an additional 50% of your workload.

Speaker 30 And also you don't get tips on it.

Speaker 26 And, you know, unless this stuff is rolled back and unless people understand what's happening, unless there's more organizing, like that's just the latest terrible thing that's going to happen.

Speaker 54 Five years down the line, they're going to have invented a new app that like does something the magnitude of the horror of which we haven't even like comprehended yet.

Speaker 23 Like, I don't know,

Speaker 32 we're probably two years out from like the Chinese style thing where you could order a

Speaker 32 coffee on a train and someone has to go run out to the train platform to the next station to hand it to you on the train.

Speaker 6 Like,

Speaker 23 there are depths of even this algorithmic hell that we haven't hit yet.

Speaker 25 And the only way for us not to continue to plunge the depths of suffering with a line the size of the universe is by organizing more and by getting people to understand that, all of these sort of progressive brands are

Speaker 4 a thin veneer for exploitation and suffering.

Speaker 38 Absolutely.

Speaker 38 And honestly, one of the legitimate worries that we have about next steps in the evolution of what Pete's coffee shops are going to look like is the register folks being replaced with kiosks, you know, like self-service kiosks.

Speaker 38 I mean, that's something that we've seen, you know, in a number of places from grocery stores to like McDonald's now and Dunkin' Donuts.

Speaker 38 They're even rolling out some like beta testing kiosk shops for Pete's in the Bay Area.

Speaker 38 And Pete's has introduced this new service deployment system within the shops, which basically pins the person on the register to the register where they're not allowed to do anything else.

Speaker 38 They're not even allowed to turn around and get coffee

Speaker 38 for the people.

Speaker 38 And, you know, the more that we do this and the more that we get yelled at by our managers for literally trying to help a customer and get them something because we're, you know, deployed to the register,

Speaker 38 the clearer it becomes that they're just trying to basically make that position obsolete so that they can shift it into a kiosk. Yeah, it's just more corporate cost cutting.

Speaker 38 Because, you know, if they're not bringing in any more revenue, they got to make that profit line go up somehow.

Speaker 38 right and so yeah one of the big things that we're doing right now to try to push back against that is doing this sort of PR campaign to try to just bring more people into the organizing effort on the worker side of things and then on the customer side of things just making people more aware of what's actually going on here and that you know we're not actually better than Starbucks.

Speaker 38 You know, we're not the better option. We're part of a massive conglomerate that is practicing the same horrible anti-labor business practices as the rest of them.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I think that's a good place to end.

Speaker 58 If people want to support y'all, where should they go?

Speaker 4 We'll also have links to stuff and what other things can they do to help.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So you can go to our social media at Pete's Labor Union. We also have our website.
We have an intake form.

Speaker 3 So if any barista is interested in reaching out, learning more about organizing, what that entails, and if you want to organize your own shop, we have members, part of our organizing committees that are willing to meet with you, sustain

Speaker 3 contact through

Speaker 3 however long you need for your campaign, and you'll be part of our organizing. We have shops across the country organizing with us.
It's very exciting.

Speaker 3 I'm sure there might be a shop near you already organizing. And we can get y'all connected as well.

Speaker 8 Hell yeah.

Speaker 26 And Jesus Christ, I had a terrible based coffee people of the world unite pun thing, but it's it slipped from my mind.

Speaker 33 All right.

Speaker 64 All of you will be spared my terrible coffee-related puns as long as you go organize your workplace.

Speaker 66 So go do that.

Speaker 23 Go join the struggle. Go make it stronger.

Speaker 25 And I don't know, like there's going to be a number of you for whom this is like not your terrain, right?

Speaker 35 And if this isn't your terrain, find it.

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Speaker 18 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 75 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 18 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.

Speaker 76 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 7 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 78 The men and women who were hurt had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

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Speaker 1 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 18 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here

Speaker 9 because it could.

Speaker 9 My name is Andrew Sage and I'm also Andrewism on YouTube and at time of recording the year is still technically new. So I wanted to start it off with some refreshers on anarchism.

Speaker 9 In the first episode, we'll look at the meanings of anarchism, authority, and anarchy. And the next time, we'll look at free association, mutuality, mutual aid, and throw a solidarity.

Speaker 9 And don't worry, next month, I'll be getting back into the Latin American anarchism series, as I still haven't done Uruguay and Mexico yet. Oh, by the way, I'm not talking to myself.

Speaker 9 I'm here with the one and only...

Speaker 12 Bia Wong. Oh,

Speaker 12 I keep forgetting that you do an actual throw instead of actually saying the name.

Speaker 9 So not to worry.

Speaker 34 I've only been doing this for several hundred episodes now.

Speaker 43 You'd think, you'd think, but no.

Speaker 9 You got it. You got it.

Speaker 44 Hello, I'm excited to do this.

Speaker 39 Also excited for the Mexico episodes because Mexican anarchism is a trip.

Speaker 32 Uruguayan anarchism is also a whole lot of people digging tunnels out of prisons, but

Speaker 44 we'll get to that later.

Speaker 9 We will. We will.
So I suppose to start off with, I want to find out, and I ask this question with tongue in cheek, of course, how familiar would you say you are with anarchism?

Speaker 6 You know, I have a very silly, like,

Speaker 39 kind of, like, how did I like actually finally become an anarchist?

Speaker 21 Because I've been around anarchists for a long time.

Speaker 45 But, like, the thing that like actually convinced me to be an anarchist is I sat down and I got a bunch of like anarchist history books from a library and started reading them.

Speaker 6 So.

Speaker 9 Like Max Netlau and

Speaker 9 them sorts of people so specifically it was a lot of like corrupts like how to shuzo and pure anarchism and in interwar japan which i've talked about on the show a hundred billion times stuff like that i actually think i read cappelletti's anarchism latin america around that time too it's a very good resource yeah yeah so pretty pretty familiar with with stuff but yeah we'll see we'll see i'm excited to talk about it yeah i mean we'll we'll see is right because let's see i've been an anarchist Well, I was first introduced to anarchism, I would say, somewhere around 2017, 2018, through Christian anarchism, actually.

Speaker 9 That was during

Speaker 9 my deconstruction.

Speaker 9 I stumbled upon Christian anarchism and briefly flirted with it, but didn't really get seriously into the studying of anarchism until like late 2019, early 2020, around the time and late into the 20s when I started my channel.

Speaker 9 Let's say I've been studying anarchism for about five years, seriously. I feel like I'm now getting started.
You know, like I'm now starting to like grasp what it is.

Speaker 9 And the thing is, there's so many interpretations of anarchism, you know, so many different schools of thought.

Speaker 9 I mean, that's not to say that it can't be defined or that any attempts to define anarchism is like exclusionary or un-anarchist.

Speaker 9 You know, I see that that argument floating around that, like, well, no, you can't define anarchism because that's actually authoritarian.

Speaker 9 But, you know, there are such a thing as definitions, but there is room, of course, for a negotiation of meaning.

Speaker 45 Yeah, it's a very, it's a very, well, usually, it's a very syncretic ideology.

Speaker 25 It pulls from a lot of different places and it pulls from lots of different, of its own strands.

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah, exactly. But let's say, if you had to like define anarchism like right now, like what would you say is a non-negotiable, basic fundamental definition for you?

Speaker 39 I mean, the opposition to hierarchy.

Speaker 25 on a basic level, the opposition to the state, to capitalism, to patriarchy, to

Speaker 4 systems of hierarchical power is, I guess, like the baseline definition. And then also in terms of what it's, you know, the replacement for that can be a lot of things.

Speaker 17 But yeah,

Speaker 23 it's the building of a society where we don't have power over one another.

Speaker 4 I think it's like a very baseline kind of thing.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I think that's that's pretty solid. For me, I find it fairly similarly.
I would say that I think the opposition to authority is the most important part.

Speaker 9 You know, I would say the definition I've been sort of workshopping, sculpting over time.

Speaker 9 And as a writer, I really like to play with words a bit and find the best ways to put things.

Speaker 9 So for me, what I've come up with is that anarchism is the political philosophy and practice that opposes all authority along with its justifying dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, a world without rule where self-determination, mutuality, and free association form the basis of our society.

Speaker 9 And so basically, the rest of this episode is going to be me breaking down how I came to this definition, what I'm expounded upon with this definition.

Speaker 9 So for one, just taking a look at the structure of it, we are looking at an oppositional stance and a propositional stance, opposing and proposing.

Speaker 9 You know, we're not just for the negation of all things, although there are schools of anarchism that do lean in that direction.

Speaker 9 We also, of course, we want to be constructive. We're not, as some people seem to presume, you know, obliterating the state and then leaving warlords in their wake, you know?

Speaker 21 Yeah, Bakunin sucks in a lot of ways, but the creative verge is a destructive one, has the order of events correctly, where like the point is to create something.

Speaker 9 Exactly. Exactly.
And as you know, Bakunin is one of the earlier thinkers of anarchism,

Speaker 9 though I've never really been partial to him, you know. Yeah, to me, usually I've been more of a Kropotkin and Malatesta kind of guy.

Speaker 9 But lately, as you know, somewhat problematic as he is as well, I haven't gotten into a bit more Proudhon. I recently got the pictures of Proudhon Reader that Ian McKay put together for AK Press.

Speaker 44 Extremely problematic guy.

Speaker 6 Oh boy.

Speaker 9 yeah but he he certainly wrote a lot

Speaker 9 and so i want to dig through and see what what gemstones of his of his work i can find you know yeah i think that's that's important to sift through he's a he's a mixed and baffling figure who also was a pretty large influence on marx if you like read him even though marx hates him which is very funny marx also didn't always understand Foudon's definition honestly i don't think froudon necessarily always had like a very consistent application of his ideas.

Speaker 9 Hence the misogyny, despite being an anarchist and becoming a politician at one point in his life and all that jazz.

Speaker 39 Yeah, and people may know this who listened to this show, but the term libertarian was invented by anarchists specifically to describe how they were different from Froudon because they weren't sexist.

Speaker 6 Like,

Speaker 6 it's...

Speaker 27 It's a whole thing.

Speaker 9 I actually wasn't aware of that.

Speaker 6 That's interesting.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 27 That's why, and and that's why in most parts of the world, libertarian is like, is a term that means anarchist.

Speaker 23 It's just, it's mostly, largely in the U.S.

Speaker 4 where that's not a thing because the right libertarians like took it.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 9 And well, unfortunately, the U.S.'s cultural hegemony has sort of propagated that American version of the term as the popular one.

Speaker 20 But yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 9 Whether you're talking about anarchists or libertarians or mutualists, you're all getting it from basically that same sort of original pool of late 19th century, early 20th century thinkers.

Speaker 9 And we're sort of using their sort of explorations to build something of a political philosophy.

Speaker 9 But in my definition, I call it a political philosophy, but that can be a contentious way of describing it, you know.

Speaker 9 Anti-politics is a term that's used to describe opposition to or distrust in traditional politics. And traditional politics is usually associated with the art and science of government.

Speaker 9 So there are anarchists who would argue that anarchism is not a political philosophy. It's actually an anti-political philosophy.

Speaker 6 I think these people are very.

Speaker 30 Okay, this is one of the things about being an anarchist, right? This is the thing about being a leftist, and this is something you have to be able to set aside when you have to do things.

Speaker 30 But a lot of being a leftist is being annoyed at other leftists.

Speaker 30 And I could put together an actual detailed theoretical critique of anti-politics, but mostly the people who talk about anti-politics just annoy me.

Speaker 6 It's

Speaker 6 like an affect thing.

Speaker 6 I feel you. I feel you.

Speaker 9 To me, it's like

Speaker 9 it's something I like to pick up, look around at, you know, play with for a little bit, put it back down kind of thing. You know,

Speaker 60 I'm not committed to it.

Speaker 9 But I think it's like, it's good to look at more than one angle of definition and understanding. Yeah.

Speaker 9 I mean, of course, I suppose a critique that could be made of defining anarchism as anti-politics is a sort of a narrowing of the definition of politics to just that sort of art and science of government, when politics can also be defined really broadly as just about the relationships between people and groups, which anarchism is concerned with, primarily so.

Speaker 9 But I do find it an interesting point to wrestle with. And so other than it being a political philosophy or anti-political philosophy, we could also define anarchism as a practice.

Speaker 9 This is something that I believe Graeber did in his life. He saw anarchism in one interview.

Speaker 9 He said, quote, it's possible to act like an anarchist, to behave in ways that will work without bureaucratic structures of coercion to enforce them, without calling yourself an anarchist or anything.

Speaker 9 In fact, most of us act like anarchists, even communists, a lot of the time.

Speaker 9 To be an anarchist for me is to do that self-consciously as a way of gradually bringing a world entirely based on those principles into being, end quote.

Speaker 9 So this is basically the idea that anarchism is not just something you think in your head. It's a method of change.
It's something that you practice.

Speaker 9 It's something that, in fact, some anarchists don't even want to call themselves anarchists because they see anarchism as something that you do rather than something that you are.

Speaker 36 Yeah, that was a graver line.

Speaker 9 I think Ursula Kayla Gwynn kind of had a

Speaker 62 similar relationship towards calling herself an anarchist.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's possible. That sounds very familiar.

Speaker 30 Yeah, I think your line was like she didn't feel like she could because you had to do it.

Speaker 21 But yeah, it's a pretty common

Speaker 26 way of thinking about anarchism that I like a lot.

Speaker 9 Yeah, for sure. Another part of the definition of anarchism that I put forward is the opposition to all authority.

Speaker 9 And that a statement could actually get me some pushback, get me in some trouble with some anarchists, surprisingly. And I'm sorry.
I blame Noam Chomsky. Oh, my God.

Speaker 9 As a historian, as a linguist, okay, whatever, sure. But it was not historically controversial among anarchists to say that you were opposed to all hierarchy and all all authority.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 The definitions of those terms do get confused often because like a lot of words in the English language, they do have multiple meanings.

Speaker 9 You know, you don't want to fall into the equivocation fallacy where you use a word or phrase in one way and then you use it in another way in the same argument.

Speaker 9 So someone might say, for example, anarchism opposing authority is stupid because authority just means having a difference in expertise or a difference in influence.

Speaker 9 or that hierarchy opposition to hierarchy is stupid because you know food chains or you know the hierarchy of needs.

Speaker 9 But as we know, anarchists are focused on very specific things when we use these terms. So arguing against it with other definitions doesn't make sense.
And by hierarchy, is

Speaker 9 anarchists referring to a stratification of society, which gives some individuals, groups, or institutions authority over others.

Speaker 9 And authority refers to the recognized right above others in a social relationship to give commands, to enforce obedience, to control property, to exploit, and so on.

Speaker 9 And I really don't see see the benefit in chomsky's sort of unjust authorities

Speaker 9 or unjust hierarchies approach to define him and i feel so

Speaker 56 yeah because i mean the thing about hierarchies is that every hierarchy argues that it's just like you you you you you would get slave owners like doing these whole speeches about like the inherent morality of slavery like it's not actually a

Speaker 39 it's not actually like an ethical position that leads you to like the opposition to hierarchy because again, every hierarchy is

Speaker 30 self-justifying.

Speaker 9 Exactly, which is why I say opposition to all authorities and their justifying dogmas, because all of them have dogmas, including the example that Chomsky uses, which is typically of the parent pulling their child away from traffic.

Speaker 9 That is not an exercise of authority. And the relationship between a parent and a child is something that can and should be interrogated.

Speaker 9 You know, that is a caretaking relationship, primarily, a relationship of responsibility.

Speaker 51 It does not have to be a relationship of authority in the sense that i can suppose yeah and and and the way that it turns into a relationship of ownership is something that genuinely can and should be opposed but it's also something that like gets a lot harder to oppose when you're sort of stuck up on this like well actually no it's good because this is authority or whatever So I think the way that Chomsky obfuscates this stuff makes it like harder to actually do politics that's useful.

Speaker 9 exactly because it also makes it harder for people to sort of question the the authorities they're more comfortable with or the hierarchies they're more comfortable with so you'll see that where so-called and you say oh no we don't actually oppose all hierarchies you know you know parents thing and it really is you see it in ground in a sense because you make it harder to identify and really question those things because you're you're shutting down that that avenue of questioning

Speaker 9 you know And so when we speak of authority, we're really speaking about that right, the rights that authority like gives to certain people over other people, you know, privileges that are recognized and enforced and a right being a sort of a priority that is above others.

Speaker 9 You know, the right of authority is a guarantee to actions or resources that absolve the individual holding that right of consequences.

Speaker 9 The right of authority compels and subordinates the desires and needs of those below that authority. So, you know, authorities have the right to command, recognized and enforced by their underlings.

Speaker 9 You know, they have the right to enforce the obedience of the underlings. They have the right to control all the properties the earth has been carved into.

Speaker 9 You know, the right absolves them of certain consequences and sort of goes in one direction. It's a unilateral sort of thing.

Speaker 9 So the authority can take your house, you know, the bank, the government, the landlord, they can take your house, but you can't take theirs.

Speaker 9 You know, an authority can assault you, whether it be a soldier, police officer, whatever. You cannot assault them.
An authority can take the fruits of your labor.

Speaker 9 They could take from the wealth of what you produce, but you can't take from them. That's theft, right? An authority cannot be an authority by themselves.
They have to have authority over.

Speaker 9 They have to have a hierarchical social relationship that deprives some of their benefit.

Speaker 9 And anarchists oppose authority because, you know, among other reasons, those subjects of authority become controlled, they become dependent, exploited, prevented from accessing their full potential and even their bare necessities.

Speaker 9 And reading that prevented from accessing their full potential is why a lot of anarchists have spent a lot of time targeting our approach to parenting and our approach to education.

Speaker 9 You know, just this morning, I was reading a bit of Emma Goldman and she was talking about Ferrer's schools.

Speaker 9 The way that she speaks, honestly, she was an excellent writer, an excellent speaker, but the way that she did so and the way she approached and recognized this need to tap into our potential, particularly from young, to prevent it from being limited by the impositions of authorities is just extremely profound.

Speaker 9 It's necessary.

Speaker 9 It's necessary to start at, particularly at that age, but really at any age, to break away from that condition that recognizes and enforces and obeys and accepts authority and the right of authority.

Speaker 9 You know, if everybody, if everybody, including their underlings, decided tomorrow not to recognize and enforce the authority of presidents, of kings, of capitalists, that threat would be gone in an instant.

Speaker 9 It ultimately starts starts with us being able to actually question, to challenge, to resist authority. And that's something that has existed since humans have been humans.

Speaker 9 Throughout history, we see this sort of compulsion to resist authority. And that sort of seed of resistance is what anarchists hope to have flourish.

Speaker 59 Fortunately, we have to go to ads, disaster, fiasco,

Speaker 32 our principles in shambles.

Speaker 52 But here, here's ads

Speaker 9 we are back so like i said before authority gets confused with a lot of different things force and violence is a main one it's one that marxists in particular love that sort of conflation of authority with any use of force

Speaker 9 you know the the slave resisting the slave owner is actually an example of authority

Speaker 55 Incredibly silly.

Speaker 32 People who are otherwise reasonably intelligent will just say this stuff.

Speaker 42 It's like, really?

Speaker 32 What are we doing here?

Speaker 27 Just, come on.

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah. I mean, force and violence are associated with authority, and they can be a mechanism of defending authority, but they're not in and of themselves authority.

Speaker 9 They're not the source of authority. They don't constitute authority.
And you could just as easily use them to resist authority.

Speaker 40 Yeah, I want to go back to the slavery thing specifically about authority because the argument that it's an imposition of authority for slaves to free themselves is an argument that was specifically made by the southern plantation class.

Speaker 50 Like that was that was their argument about federal tyranny was that specific argument.

Speaker 34 So it's probably not a good theoretical basis for understanding what authority is.

Speaker 43 If

Speaker 34 you are making the same argument as the southern plantation class, it's gonna just

Speaker 36 leave the wood out there.

Speaker 9 Exactly. Exactly.
And really we have to understand violence, force those are things that are used by authorities. But if I punch somebody in the face, that doesn't make me an authority over them.

Speaker 9 You know, if I defend myself from being a punch, that doesn't make me an authority over the person trying to punch me.

Speaker 9 The source of authority is really about that right, that position, that recognized right above others, that position, that social relationship above others. That's what grants authority.

Speaker 9 It's recognition. The general of an army is not an authority because he's holding the gun to the heads of all the other soldiers and making them do things.

Speaker 9 The general is here, is there recognized authority because of his position and the privileges and rights and powers that that position gives him.

Speaker 9 If tomorrow all the soldiers decided to tune on their general, as has happened historically, that is 100% possible. That is an instance of force or of violence being used to resist authority

Speaker 9 rather than being used to

Speaker 9 be authority. Another thing that gets confused with authority is influence or

Speaker 9 or respect

Speaker 9 so influence is really something i mean i might find somebody's abilities or qualities or achievements admirable right so i respect that about that that doesn't mean they have an authority over me i might be inspired by someone in a way that affects my character or development or behavior but again that doesn't that influence doesn't automatically translate into authority.

Speaker 9 You'll find that a lot of the anarchist thinkers of the late 19th, early 20th century, they were very influential. They were not authorities, but they had a profound impact on the people around them.

Speaker 9 And they were a profound inspiration to us even to today.

Speaker 30 Yeah, there's a paper I always think about where I found it like a kind of liberal, well, like a maybe center-lefty academic writing about Malatessa, who we've talked about a lot on this show.

Speaker 25 He's an Italian anarchist, did a whole bunch of stuff.

Speaker 9 So when the Italian revolutions are happening in 1918, 1919, like Malatessa comes back to Italy because he'd been all over the world doing a whole bunch of other stuff.

Speaker 39 And he gets called like Italy's Lenin.

Speaker 9 For those who have listened to some of my anarchist history episodes, you'll know that he kind of shows up sometimes. You know, like he shows up in Egypt, literally everywhere.

Speaker 9 He shows up all over the place.

Speaker 44 Yeah, all over Latin America.

Speaker 30 He's in the U.S.

Speaker 45 And, you know, and so he gets called like the Lenin of Italy.

Speaker 39 And this paper was about like, was he act, did he actually act like Lenin?

Speaker 9 And the conclusion that they came to you was like, well, no, he didn't try to he didn't come back to italy to attempt to seize control of the country like he simply did not because he was an anarchist because that's what it means to sort of you know have influence but not like rule exactly exactly and that really gets into sort of the interesting conversation around anarchism and leadership and the different ways that you can sort of interpret the concept of leadership but i'll save that for another discussion there are two other things that authority gets confused with that i want to address the first is coordination And what's interesting about coordination is that it's very much tied to authority a lot in the present day.

Speaker 9 You know, a lot of the rules we have in the current system, coordination and authority, get tied up together.

Speaker 9 So you have a manager of an enterprise and that manager coordinates all of the workers in that enterprise, but the manager also has authority over those workers, you know, to fire, to

Speaker 9 discipline, to do all these sorts of things. Or a general in an army might have a coordination role of ensuring that there's communication between various militias or

Speaker 9 various regiments and that the soldiers within that regiment know exactly what

Speaker 9 their goal is, what their task is, and how they can go about accomplishing it.

Speaker 9 That is in many ways a coordinating role, but it's also tied up with the authority of the general, as in the right above the soldiers, to command them, to enforce obedience, to punish, and that sort of thing.

Speaker 9 So we get tied up between a coordination and authority a lot, but coordination does not have to be tied to authority.

Speaker 9 In its simplest form, coordination can just be the communication of information between parties to ensure they work together smoothly and effectively.

Speaker 9 That can and already does take place between equals.

Speaker 9 So, okay, here's a good example. You know, you're trying to move a couch into a house or an apartment.

Speaker 9 And for those of you who have had to squeeze a couch in through a doorway, you kind of know what I'm talking about already, because you have to kind of come at it at a certain angle.

Speaker 9 You know, the size of a doorway and the dimensions of a couch require a very particular approach so you might have somebody who stands to the side and they tell a person okay all right turn it slightly this way because when you're lifting a heavy couch you kind of just want to put it down

Speaker 6 you know

Speaker 9 you can't really think okay what angle should i take it at so you might have somebody in a position to say all right back up okay come forward okay turn it slightly turn to the left that kind of thing that's a coordinator role but that person doesn't have authority over anybody there it's just communicating information to ensure that the shared task that the people involved have can be executed effectively.

Speaker 9 So that's a long way of saying that we can't have coordination and organization in anarchy. It doesn't have to be or doesn't have to involve authority.

Speaker 9 Finally, one of the pet favorites of confusion is the confusion between authority and expertise.

Speaker 9 Authority and expertise are the example of the equivocation I was talking about earlier, because authority is a synonym for expertise by certain definitions.

Speaker 9 But the kind of authority the anarchists oppose has nothing to do with expertise, which is what Bakunin was talking about with his authority, the bookmaker argument.

Speaker 9 Now, if I could go back in time, I would just go and tell Bakunin, listen, a lot of people are not going to read this in full and understand the full context.

Speaker 9 So maybe don't use the word authority here. Maybe be more specific and use the word expertise or something so people don't get confused.

Speaker 9 Because when you read it in context, it becomes very clear but there are people who take the title of that article or they take one quote or one passage is taken out of context from the whole or they take like for example there's a version of that article that is cut off from the entire thing on on marxist.org i think So there's like an incomplete version of that text available in one page and then the full version is available in the anarchist library.

Speaker 41 Incredible.

Speaker 9 So you have people who basically use that article to argue that actually, you know, the Kunin wasn't against authority, but in context, it makes sense when he's talking about authority there.

Speaker 9 He's specifically talking about expertise. And yet he still says that in the end, he's not going to be commanded by that expert.

Speaker 9 He's just going to take their perspective into account because he understands the incompleteness of his own perspective.

Speaker 9 That is a very different relationship from the sort of commander and subordination that we see in an authoritarian relationship.

Speaker 9 And while expertise often gets conflated with authority in positions in the current system, that often is damaging to authority itself.

Speaker 9 If you think about the relationship people have, for example, with, and this is a sort of a contentious one, but if you look at the relationship people have with like their own like personal doctor, their family doctor, which is the relationship that they might have with a public health professional.

Speaker 9 When people go to their personal doctor, it's very easy for them to sort of, you know, accept that sort of expertise. They have a relationship with them.
They understand them.

Speaker 9 They trust them, whatever the case may be. Of course, there are places where because healthcare is inaccessible, people don't have that relationship with the doctor.
But,

Speaker 9 you know, I'm speaking internationally here.

Speaker 59 Yeah.

Speaker 65 Also, I need to put the trans note here, which is that like, it is very hard if you're trans to find a doctor that you personally trust because

Speaker 6 oh boy.

Speaker 9 That is true. That's a, that is a time.
That is true. That's, that's the influence of, you know, ciseter patriarchy and its, it's impact.

Speaker 59 Yeah.

Speaker 32 And so it's also, it's also an example of why you can't just sort of blindly accept the authority.

Speaker 9 Like you can't accept the authority of people who have expertise because it's like sometimes they don't exactly exactly like a lot of times in fact the credentials don't actually mean that this person knows anything about trans healthcare like fiasco exactly it often just means that the person has been given the stamp of approval by an institution that has been granted authority yeah but the institution being granted authority doesn't necessarily or should not have a monopoly on expertise and often does does not in practice have the full understanding the people who are produced by that institution do not necessarily have that full grasp and everything to see that

Speaker 9 they can be treated as an unquestioned authority or expert. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And it's something that you have to have a kind of balance between

Speaker 33 what

Speaker 54 kind of like neoliberal technocracy.

Speaker 25 where you get like, we put the experts in charge and the quote-unquote experts running the economy like did 2008.

Speaker 9 They all come out to like right-wing think tanks. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 And it's like, and on the other hand, the kind of like reflexive contrarianism and desire to build a new expert that gets you like

Speaker 55 RFK Jr.

Speaker 45 as the future like secretary of health and human services.

Speaker 29 So, you know, you have to sort of like

Speaker 32 you have to sort of like balance between sometimes these people fuck up and also vaccines are good.

Speaker 51 This is not a problem that requires us to like fly through the pin of a needle.

Speaker 39 We do have to have a little bit of, I don't know, it's not that difficult of a problem to deal with, but the way that authority is construed has created a sort of backlash to it that has been used to sort of delegitimate genuine, useful expertise and create sort of like false expertise.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 And that's exactly the point I was going to make to the institution of authority and the fact that authorities so frequently you know, mess up and so frequently like abuse the trust of people creates a sense of mistrust, a rightful and valid mistrust in authorities that can often be misdirected or exploited towards ends that are not necessarily equivalent.

Speaker 9 So because these people in public health positions are tied up with a government that people already don't trust, any legitimate expertise that they may have gets soured essentially by that position of authority, poisoned by their association with a government that has clearly proven itself to not have the best interests of people in mind.

Speaker 9 All right, so just to get back to the definition again, anarchism is a political philosophy and practice that opposes all authority along with its justifying dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, a world without rule where self-determination, free association, and mutuality form the basis of our society.

Speaker 9 So, I mean, I've spoken a bit about that. Those justified dogmas came at Chomsky a little bit.
And we spoke about how that's sort of incoherent because every ideology opposes unjust hierarchies.

Speaker 9 So, I think it's important that anarchism calls out, you know, all the justifications. I'm sure you could think of some of the main justifications that tend to be used.

Speaker 9 One of the oldest justifications is, of course, the divine rights of kings.

Speaker 59 Yeah, that one's mostly been broken.

Speaker 56 Hopefully, we don't have to deal with that shit anymore.

Speaker 44 But I, you know, I don't know.

Speaker 45 I have, I have eternal cynicism.

Speaker 9 I don't know. Maybe the, maybe the American people yearn for the Trump dynasty.

Speaker 52 Yeah, we're going to

Speaker 44 create their god king.

Speaker 9 Yeah, his imperial presidency. But yeah, I mean, in more liberal circles, the justification for authority is usually the social contract theory that individuals implicitly consent to authority.

Speaker 9 But I don't know about you, Mia. Nobody asked for my consent.
And also, I don't have any way of relinquishing my consent.

Speaker 9 So is it really consensual?

Speaker 56 No.

Speaker 53 Like, I saw some fucking assholes in Philadelphia like 200 years ago were like, we're going to set up a thing and also slavery is good.

Speaker 27 That's like, really?

Speaker 6 What are we doing here?

Speaker 65 In what meaningful way did I agree to this?

Speaker 9 Yeah, exactly. And it's not like I can step out of it.
I mean, you hold a monopoly on literally every inch of territory on earth. Some state lays some claim to some part of the world.

Speaker 9 There's no escape. So it's not a contract you can opt out of, you know.

Speaker 9 You know, another justification that authorities tend to use is this idea of meritocracy and economic Darwinism.

Speaker 9 That the best of the best, they rise to the top, that there aren't really any systemic inequalities or structural barriers, that this is a survival to the fittest and the fittest win, and the losers are losers, and they fail because they're losers.

Speaker 9 That's a very cynical sort of take that I don't think many people openly espouse outside of like right-wing circles, but it's definitely one of the justifications for authority that gets used.

Speaker 9 Another one is also in conservative circles, the idea of natural hierarchy. The idea is that hierarchies are part of the natural order.

Speaker 9 You know, people will use evolutionary biology or religious texts or pseudoscientific claims to justify the inequality between genders or races or classes.

Speaker 9 Colonial and imperialist powers, for example, would justify their dominance by claiming cultural superiority.

Speaker 9 They would use ideas like the white man's burden and civilizing missions to enforce their authority over other peoples and their lands.

Speaker 9 And that justification, while questioned and challenged today, still

Speaker 9 is at the basis, at the root of almost every institution in our modern world.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 29 And something I think is going to become increasingly visible in the U.S.

Speaker 4 over the next few years,

Speaker 29 coming out of a period where it was like slightly more obfuscated.

Speaker 44 But, you know, all of the people who are about to be coming into power,

Speaker 39 if you spend like even the tiniest amount of time, you will see them start talking about like fucking racial IQ shit and like all of this

Speaker 9 really pretty explicit ideology that they have that like of this sort of like racial superiority that they think they have that's like a you know that is like the motivating ideological factor and also the thing that used to sort of justify their power yeah it's it's it's unfortunately becoming more and more uh open and common to see that sort of discourse on mainstream platforms like Twitter.

Speaker 9 The necessity of order and efficiency tends to also be used as a justification for authority. You know, the idea that authority is needed to maintain order,

Speaker 9 to keep things in place, to

Speaker 9 make decisions.

Speaker 9 And this is really ignoring the capacity that people have already proven historically and presently to organize cooperatively, to organize without authority, to take on horizontal and decentralized approaches, because it's something that is treating complexity as synonymous with hierarchy, that you have to organize this way.

Speaker 9 It ignores all the inefficiencies of bureaucratic systems. It ignores all the harm caused by authoritarian systems.
It just says that

Speaker 9 we need this thing, these things to function, but we don't.

Speaker 25 One of the weirder artifacts of the 2010s was David Graeber had an argument with Peter Thiel, where they did a debate.

Speaker 34 And one of Graeber's arguments is like, well, what do you mean?

Speaker 12 like our technical technological systems mean that we have to organize society in a way like are it like is is the argument that you're making that technological possibility makes us less free it's like no

Speaker 9 what are you talking about and you know this is all people like who make these arguments don't necessarily have an understanding of our systems the internet is not organized by one central body the internet is already fairly decentralized it's become more centralized upon certain platforms but as an infrastructure, the internet is really a network of nodes that are all over the world and all over space.

Speaker 9 Or we could take, for example, the international postal system. All the mail that gets distributed around the world internationally is not one central global body that's in charge of that.

Speaker 9 It's multiple organizations that coordinate their activities to ensure that you get your mail. Or we look at even basic supply chains of goods and resources.

Speaker 9 It's not all handled by one central industrial body. It's not all handled by the government government or by one corporation.
It's a set of relationships between groups, between companies, between

Speaker 9 mining companies and resource extraction companies and shipping companies and processing plants and factories and distribution.

Speaker 9 All these networks are already not undertaken entirely by one central body. They may be organized internally hierarchically, but that can very easily change.

Speaker 9 Finally, final justification I want to get into is this idea that authority is the lesser evil. That authority might be imperfect, but it's preferable to boost alternatives, like total anarchy.

Speaker 9 And of course, when people say anarchy here, they mean it in the pejorative sense. They don't mean like actual anarchy in the sense of the political philosophy.

Speaker 9 They mean it in the sense of instead of having one central authority, you have one to compete in authoritarian powers. A bunch of warlords fighting for power.

Speaker 9 That is not anarchy in the sense that anarchists pursue.

Speaker 6 That is, you know, petty authority fighting for dominance, which is, if you think about it really how historically states came into being yeah well it's like what do you think we have now like what what do you think the like 190 something states are doing like i i i don't know like i feel like a lot of these arguments are just describing the current state of affairs and going well it could be like that it's like oh what if uh how how how would like communes deal with war It's like, wouldn't the communists start going to war with each other?

Speaker 12 It's like, well, okay, like, what, look at the world right now and ask yourself the question, how are states dealing with the problem of war?

Speaker 48 And the answer is they're dealing with the problem of war by going to war with each other.

Speaker 44 Like,

Speaker 66 what are we doing here?

Speaker 9 Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 9 So the more positive side of the definition of anarchy is one that I haven't quite gotten into yet, and I haven't broken down the ideas of mutuality and free association.

Speaker 9 But I'll save all that for the next episode. If you can't wait until then, my videos on how anarchy works and what anarchy needs should whet your appetite.
But until then, I've been Andrew Sage.

Speaker 9 You can find me on YouTube at Andrewism and Patreon at St. True.
This is It Could Happen Here, the show where we chronicle collapse as it happens and explore how we might build a better future.

Speaker 9 And in my case, occasionally take a look at the past as well. And that's it.
All power to all the people.

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Speaker 70 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 69 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 71 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 73 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer.

Speaker 74 The investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 72 Available now.

Speaker 71 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 18 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 75 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 18 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.

Speaker 76 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 7 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 78 The men and woman who were hurt had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 79 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 80 The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life.

Speaker 1 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage on those lights.

Speaker 18 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 81 Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.

Speaker 82 On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.

Speaker 83 32 lost nuclear weapons.

Speaker 83 Wait, stop?

Speaker 11 What? Yes.

Speaker 84 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Speaker 82 Who still wore knee pads.

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 82 It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

Speaker 6 I'm like, oh, wow.

Speaker 81 Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

Speaker 83 What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Speaker 85 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

Speaker 83 I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Speaker 49 Nick Kroll.

Speaker 9 I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So

Speaker 9 let's see how it goes.

Speaker 81 Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 G'day, good day. This is Andrew Sage bringing yet another episode of It Could Happen Here.
As my granny used to say when she answered the phone, what's happening?

Speaker 9 And the answer in this case is anarchy. Last episode, I gave a definition of anarchism.

Speaker 9 The anarchism is the political philosophy and practice that opposes all authority along with its justifying dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, a world without rule where self-determination, mutuality, and free association form the basis of our society.

Speaker 9 And then we took that definition and we broke it down a bit further. You can go back to the episode if you want to hear how, but I left my explanation a bit incomplete.

Speaker 9 I didn't get into the positive side of the definition.

Speaker 45 So today I am joined once again by Miao Wong, also who does this podcast and who is excited to talk about building building the new world in the shell of the old.

Speaker 9 Let's go. Swanchism proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, a world without rule where self-determination, mutuality, and free association form the basis of our society.

Speaker 9 The unending pursuit element is another important part of the definition. You know, it's ongoing.
It's a strive. It's not some perfect utopia that we reach and stagnate with it.

Speaker 9 In fact, it's not even assuming that people will become perfect anarchists.

Speaker 9 It's about currently and constantly pushing to be better, to create systems that produce better outcomes and greater anarchy, to continuous redevelopment of the values necessary to maintain anarchy, to never get complacent and to understand this is a species-level project.

Speaker 9 The idea of anarchy being a world without rule is actually something that gets some pushback from some anarchists as well.

Speaker 9 There's this sort of rules, not rulers version of anarchism that has a lot of sway in some circles. Ah, the anarcho-constitutional The anarcho-constitutionalists.

Speaker 9 You know, it was popularized by the sort of direct democracy, libertarian Marxist crow that kind of got their popularity in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 9 But it's not something that I consider an accurate representation of what anarchism strives for.

Speaker 9 You know, now that we have access to more historical anarchist literature than ever, if you dive into any of it, and you get to the root of what anarchy is, it becomes very clear that anarchists were not into this whole direct democracy thing.

Speaker 9 They weren't really into any form of democracy as in the rule by majority or the rule by some abstraction called the people. Anarchism is really about, it's not just no ruler, it's also no rule.

Speaker 9 I've been brought into this understanding by the efforts of the translator and sort of scholar of anarchist history, Sean Wilbur, who, in my opinion, is putting forward some of the best historical analysis of anarchism today.

Speaker 9 He's actually who inspired a lot of my definition of authority in anarchism. And so I'll have his work linked in the show notes, of course.

Speaker 9 But in this getting into this sort of no rules definition of anarchy, a lot of people might ask, you know,

Speaker 9 wouldn't we still need rules?

Speaker 9 But of course, enforceable rules are just really a follow-up laws that are backed by authorities, which anarchism opposes. And unenforceable rules are not really rules at all.

Speaker 9 They're closer to norms of behavior. And if living in a society tells you anything, you should know that norms should be as open to questioning as the most rigid of rules.

Speaker 9 In fact, norms can be even more dangerous if we let them slide as just the way that things are and the way we do things around here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like patriarchy, for example, something that is, I mean, like, obviously, yes, which is enforced by the state and by like explicit violence, but it is also

Speaker 20 really,

Speaker 25 really enforced by norms.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 4 In a way that like,

Speaker 9 you know requires you to like reckon with norms as a concept theoretically yeah there's a concept of authority that is inherent in patriarchy and that is also the set of norms that that that exist to aid and to reinforce you know that authority we tend to speak a lot of you know the people the community and stuff in anarchist circles but i think it's important to to make sure it's clear that there's nothing special about quote unquote the people or quote unquote the community you know what the people or the community thinks is right and wrong should not be all litmus tests on what is right and wrong.

Speaker 9 There's no virtue in being a majority. And there's also no virtue in being a minority.

Speaker 9 Because we can see with instances where there are minorities such as the elite, the rich, who obviously have us over all the time.

Speaker 9 And then there are instances of majorities that just exist to reinforce a lot of the rules and norms and authorities that are keeping all of us down.

Speaker 9 So all it must test is not majorities, what a majority votes for, what the the majority wants, or what minorities desire.

Speaker 9 It's really the absence of authority, the absence of this sort of power over others at all.

Speaker 9 And it's also inevitably the absence of permission and prohibition, the ability to permit things, the ability to prohibit things.

Speaker 9 When nothing is allowed and nothing is disallowed, yes, people can do what they want. but everybody else can also do what they want.

Speaker 9 And so that creates the incentive to be thoughtful and responsible in what you do. And to be thoughtful and responsible in how what you do affects other people.

Speaker 9 You do things and your things are open to like any number of consequences. And so if you want to avoid negative consequences, you got to get informed.

Speaker 9 You have to learn about how your actions might affect others through communication with individuals and groups. And you have to find compromises and solutions to points of conflict.

Speaker 9 You're not an island. You're part of a web of mutually interdependent relationships.
And that's something that exists in every kind of society, that mutual interdependence.

Speaker 9 The problem with hierarchy is that in a hierarchical society, to access that web of mutual interdependence, you have to obey authority.

Speaker 9 You have to take part in the authoritarian systems to have access to human community.

Speaker 9 So in an anarchic society, you don't have us obeying authority, but our behavior is still regulated, quote unquote, in a sense that we are dependent on other people and we want to have as much as possible a harmonious relationship with those other people perhaps controversially i could say that it's actually the absence of rules and rulers that makes anarchism work because for one harm can never be fully captured by rules and and rules cannot capture all the possible circumstances where harm could occur but also for two The existence of rule often provides protections for authorities.

Speaker 9 This is something we talked about in our definition of authority in the last episode.

Speaker 9 This idea that authorities, there's a right that grants certain privileges and protections, you know, the idea that the police officer can beat you up, but you cannot raise a hand in defense of yourself.

Speaker 9 You know, the bank can evict you from your home, but you can't be throwing all its offs into the bank.

Speaker 9 You know, that sort of thing is a very unequal relationship that is enforced and defended by rules, by the rights granted by those rules.

Speaker 9 And so rather than approaching society with a one-size-fits-all approach to rules that are enforced by some type of authority, we can instead create solutions that are tailored to specific problems.

Speaker 9 And yes, we might approach concepts like best practice and solving problems and conflicts, but that'll be different from rules.

Speaker 9 You know, that's something that's not enforced, something that is constantly in negotiation, something that is constantly taken into practice and developed and shifted and is far more flexible.

Speaker 9 And I know that it can be difficult to break away from the idea that we need rules and that the rulers are essential, but it's necessary that we can conceptualize anarchy from that angle with that implication.

Speaker 9 And it's difficult because of how we've been socialized, how we tend to view human nature. And I take time to develop these ideas, to dwell on them further.

Speaker 9 I'm still grasping some of these things and trying to understand them.

Speaker 9 But,

Speaker 9 you know, between this episode and the next, and all the books and all the work that is being put out there to sort of develop anarchism, to bring it to more people.

Speaker 9 And of course, through practice, we can get a clearer sense of how anarchist organization can work in all of its harmonious complexity.

Speaker 9 And I say organization and complexity specifically because it is often assumed that the presence of anarchy is the absence of organization or the absence of complexity, because those terms are often associated with or synonymized with hierarchy and authority.

Speaker 9 But you can't have organization and complexity without them.

Speaker 9 So, on the next part of the definition, we get into the idea of anarchy being a world where self-determination, mutuality, and free association form the basis of our society.

Speaker 9 Self-determination is probably the easiest to explain of the three terms that are used to define such a society because it's just the idea that individuals can define and pursue their own paths.

Speaker 9 It's the belief that people, individually and collectively, have the capacity to live and organize themselves in ways that reflect their own needs, desires, and values.

Speaker 9 It rejects the notion that others, whether they be states, corporations, religious institutions, or other elites, should have the power to dictate the lives of individuals who impose structures of exploitation and control.

Speaker 9 Self-determination is the basis of autonomy, which is necessarily followed by free association. But first and foremost, I want to get into the idea of mutuality.

Speaker 9 Mutuality is feeling an action or relationship that is based on shared benefit between individuals and groups in a society.

Speaker 9 It is reciprocity, it is communication, it is a sharing of sentiments and an exchange of positive actions. And it's not unique to anarchy.

Speaker 9 Mutual interdependence, which is a component of mutuality, is also not unique to anarchy.

Speaker 9 It can be found in pretty much every society, because we rely on mutuality to survive and progress through our day-to-day life.

Speaker 9 Whether we're working together to clean the house for Christmas, or troubleshooting a problem in the workplace, or taking part in a club or sport, or sharing resources following a natural disaster, mutuality happens constantly, informally, and often without recognition.

Speaker 9 This is something that Kraber talks about. In Debt the First 5,000 Years, he says that this is the glue that holds society together.

Speaker 9 Not contracts or power, but solidarity, empathy, and the natural human inclination to care for others. Our world is so divided and yet we still find ways to care.
And are there obstacles to that care?

Speaker 9 Of course. You know, there are various prejudices, propagandized mindsets, socio-economic systems, and material conditions that limit our practice of mutuality.

Speaker 9 But these are problems that anarchy seeks to rectify.

Speaker 9 Obviously, issues like colonialism and white supremacy have fractured societies along racial lines and created distrust and competition where mutuality could flourish.

Speaker 9 The propaganda perpetuated by states and corporations also limits our capacity to imagine mutuality and create this sense of scarcity in this competitive mindset that creates an unnecessary dichotomy between the success of the individual and the success of the collective.

Speaker 9 Because of the very nature of these hierarchical systems, forcing us into exploitative relationships, things like mutual aid end up being replaced by transactional exchanges.

Speaker 9 Care and community become commodities. Basic human needs become profit-driven markets.
And the state takes on a lot of the role that was formerly filled by mutuality.

Speaker 9 Just the idea of disaster response, for example, is dominated by bureaucratic agencies that monopolize and direct the resources that could be be used and more effectively used by people addressing their own needs locally.

Speaker 9 And of course, with the implementation of the property regime, with privatization and fencing off the commons that once supported communal life, it creates that sort of scarcity that limits our interpersonal practice of neutrality.

Speaker 9 And when people are poor, when they're struggling to meet their own needs, they often lack the resources or energy to extend help to others.

Speaker 9 Food insecure families may not have the capacity to engage in community support networks. Or, you know, if you look at how cities are often designed, they're structured to isolate people.

Speaker 9 They make it harder for people to form bonds of trust.

Speaker 9 You know, the existence of all these non-places like highways, the absence of third places, and the prevalence of suburban sprawl all make it more difficult for us to form bonds of trust and solidarity.

Speaker 9 And then, of course, you have the intervention of the state into people's efforts to engage in mutual aid.

Speaker 9 You know, the state punishes and criminalizes mutual aid efforts for migrants or for homeless people.

Speaker 9 You'll often see the police or border authorities preventing people from helping those people, charging them with criminal penalties just for trying to help their fellow human.

Speaker 9 And all these are things that limits the free and full flourishing of mutuality.

Speaker 9 But we shouldn't look to the limits of mutuality in our current system as an indication of how it might be limited in another system.

Speaker 9 In fact, we can look at these limits and see what ways mutuality could flourish even further when they no longer exist.

Speaker 9 So by taking the time to dismantle prejudices, to challenge propaganda, to build alternatives and to create abundance, we can start to recognize the potential of our mutuality.

Speaker 9 And so really getting from point A to point B, it becomes a matter of expanding our solidarity, which will expand our capacity for mutuality to drive our social organizations.

Speaker 9 Solidarity is about establishing and recognizing the bond between all people, understanding that I stand to gain from you doing well and vice versa.

Speaker 9 Remember that our system incentivizes selfishness that acts to the detriment of others.

Speaker 9 So anarchy doesn't need perfect people. It just needs systems that have better incentives.
So anarchic systems would incentivize generosity and selflessness, of course.

Speaker 9 But the real trick is really in creating systems that utilize selfishness to the benefit of others.

Speaker 9 Making it so that even the most self-interested and self-absorved people are a net positive or at least a net zero on the impacts of the rest of society, because they will find themselves acting in ways that are generous and that are selfless in order to get the gains that they desire for themselves.

Speaker 9 You can call it a kind of a selfish selflessness.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and it's funny because like, that's the sort of justification that capitalism uses that like, oh, if everyone purely acts into self-interest, then everything will like get better for everyone, you know, but it's effectively just like a coat of paint that's been put on a system that people use their self-interest to make things better for exactly them yeah and so clearly the system of capitalism has these systemic incentives and structures that allow for selfishness to not only expand and propagate and be reinforced but also ensures that that impulse that inclination has an extraordinary impact on the lives of of millions of people an individual selfish person alone cannot do that much to impact others, but put them in a position of power, and all of a sudden their decisions can impact the lives of thousands, millions, even billions.

Speaker 9 So the practice of anarchy is a way of creating a society where no one stands above another and where our lives are built on cooperation instead of domination.

Speaker 9 reshaping how we practice mutuality by building new habits of cooperation that work without rulers.

Speaker 9 And that's what social revolution is all about, is an ongoing and intentional transformation of our society, of our economy, and culture, and philosophy, and technology, and relationships, and politics.

Speaker 9 It's the ongoing negation of all forms of authority and prejudice, and the ongoing affirmation of freely associated equals.

Speaker 9 It is, in many ways, a reconstitution of our natural initiative, our capacity for mutuality, and our responsibility for ourselves and each other.

Speaker 9 And that starts here and now, not at some distant point in the future. It won't be easy, but it's necessary to unshackle our mutuality, to create a society where it can flourish.

Speaker 9 And this is where we get into things like mutual aid. It's confused with charity very often, but it's a manifestation of our mutuality.

Speaker 9 It's a voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange of services and resources in a society. And so it's not about tit-for-tat payback or measuring each person's contributions.

Speaker 9 It's about taking responsibility for one another as members of a society. and building social relations that sharpen our ability to collaborate and share.

Speaker 9 To paraphrase Peter Kropotkin, practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually, and morally.

Speaker 9 With mutual aid, like I said earlier, it derives its basis from our interdependence, which is another component of mutuality.

Speaker 9 Mutual interdependence is the very basic idea that we rely on each other for various aspects of our lives in every kind of society.

Speaker 9 And in anarchy, our mutual interdependence is unrestricted by authority and instead guided by complementarity. So we are all approached and appreciated as unique equals, cooperating on that basis.

Speaker 9 Mutual responsibility is another manifestation of mutuality.

Speaker 9 It's the idea that in the absence of legal order, in the absence of authority, when society is no longer guided by laws that are binding and enforceable by some authority, we must be guided instead by responsibility.

Speaker 9 That actions are not pre-authorized or pre-judged by external rules, but that each action is undertaken freely and subject to any number of responses, positive and negative.

Speaker 9 If you're curious about this idea of legal order and permission, prohibition, and mutual responsibility, I recommend Sean Wilbur's A New Glossary on the Libertarian Labyrinth, as it offers the exploration of that concept and a lot more to synthetic anarchism.

Speaker 9 So anarchy demands a high degree of self-awareness, care, and reciprocity from individuals and communities.

Speaker 9 Not through coercion or enforcement, but through voluntary, continuous, and conscious negotiation, incentivized by the nature of the system itself, with its basis in cooperation and the desire to prevent unnecessary conflict.

Speaker 9 In hierarchical systems, cumulative justice often escalates conflict. Imprisonment, for example, tends to breed resentment and resistance and further criminalization.

Speaker 9 In anarchy, the absence of pre-authorized retaliation encourages us to find dialogue and to create restorative practices.

Speaker 9 If a conflict arises over a resource, people have an interest in reaching a resolution that benefits both, rather than escalating things into prolonged disputes.

Speaker 9 So such a society will necessarily require responsibility.

Speaker 9 Both responsibility for the environment and responsibility for other people.

Speaker 9 You know, if you are costing the ecosystem its resources, you can't just offload that cost onto everybody else, as is common in capitalist systems.

Speaker 9 You have to be in dialogue with other people to ensure that your actions are balanced by replenishing the resource, by mitigating harm, or by securing some kind of collective agreement.

Speaker 9 And if somebody is creating a disruptive situation, if they're blasting loud music at night, we cannot rely on an external authority to mediate, but we have to mediate in some way.

Speaker 9 We have to find ways to ensure that they bear the costs of disturbing others, whether that involves apologizing or making amends or adjusting their behavior, or if they don't want to take on other people facing other consequences as necessary.

Speaker 9 So social revolution really aims to prepare us for that responsibility. It's, as Wilbur describes, a basic principle for encountering, recognizing, and engaging with others.

Speaker 9 It's our beefed up and extremely demanding version of the golden rule.

Speaker 9 The organic emergence of this responsibility and the incentives of this system could create a sort of a mutual understanding which is another aspect of mutuality as people will necessarily form norms of behavior that will guide the interactions between them they'll facilitate consultation and negotiation they'll restrain the escalation of conflict they'll maintain the viability of shared commons and libraries of things

Speaker 9 And similarly, our desire to prevent the escalation of conflict, to prevent threat to our being and to prevent threats to our social harmony or society's integrity, will thus develop a sense of mutual defense.

Speaker 9 It's in all of our interests to to minimize the potential harm of our actions, to proactively seek out solutions to potential and actual conflict, to ensure that we won't get flack and pushback and negative consequences to the things that we do and threats to the sustainability of our society and our lives.

Speaker 9 I see yet another manifestation of mutuality. We come to the idea of mutual interests, which are what make free association as the basis of anarchic social organization possible.

Speaker 9 Free association is the founding principle of anarchic social organization, and it refers to the ability of each person to move around, to associate and disassociate with others as they so choose, without being subject to authority.

Speaker 9 Free association is free from the impositions of wage labor, from the boundaries of citizenship and from all other hierarchical relationships.

Speaker 9 This is different from the sort of liberal idea of freedom of association, where under capitalism, that freedom of association is the freedom that comes with signing contracts and controlling private property.

Speaker 9 So being free from authority, we still have to do what we have to do because we're still mutually interdependent.

Speaker 9 But that free association empowers people to connect with others and to form groups based around shared interests or desired actions to pursue those interests or actions.

Speaker 9 So our interests might be as broad as wanting to eat, or as niche as wanting to maintain the traditional Japanese art of wood joinery, or they might span the globe, or they might be unique to a particular interest, such as those who are interested in maintaining the cleanliness of a local rifle.

Speaker 9 So groups don't just exist for the sake of existing. They don't exist to perpetuate their own existence.

Speaker 9 They exist with a particular goal in mind, whether that is maintaining roads, producing and distributing food, or building housing.

Speaker 9 And then such groups may exist for a long time or they may dissolve frequently. They may split or they may emerge.
They may overlap or come into conflict.

Speaker 9 And the spaces where they interact could be called spaces of encounter, taking place in factories or in gardens, specifically tiered online platforms or some sort of community center.

Speaker 9 So free association may occur on the level of networks of individuals or federations of groups.

Speaker 9 But I need to explain the commune and the federation, because those are things that can be interpreted in a few different ways.

Speaker 9 You know, federations, people might think of government, communes, people might think of, well, local government or counties or something of that nature.

Speaker 44 Yeah,

Speaker 9 that too.

Speaker 9 So anarchy is about finding ways to cooperate in ways that are not bound by the traditional boundaries of authority, and that includes the traditional boundaries of shared territory.

Speaker 9 The anarchist commune has been confused very often with things like intentional communities or administrative divisions.

Speaker 9 But But if we're going by Kropotkin's description in Words of a Rebel, chapters 10 to 11, he makes it clear that commune describes any group formed on the basis of free association.

Speaker 9 In fact, he juxtaposes the free commune with traditional conceptions of the commune. He says for us, quote, commune no longer means a territorial agglomeration.
It is rather a generic name.

Speaker 9 a synonym for the grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The social commune will soon cease to be a clearly defined entity.

Speaker 9 Each group in the commune will necessarily be drawn towards similar groups and other communes.

Speaker 9 They will come together and the links that federate them will be as solid as those that attach them to their fellow citizens.

Speaker 9 And in this way, there will emerge a commune of interests whose members are scattered in a thousand towns and villages.

Speaker 9 Each individual will find the full satisfaction of his needs only by grouping with other individuals who have the same tastes but inhabit a hundred other communes. End quote.

Speaker 9 So Kropotkin's commune is essentially a fluid collective of individuals and groups, wherever they find themselves coming together of their own volition and according to their shared interests, projects, and activities without being bound to territorial designations.

Speaker 9 So expect to see like a bunch of like mini governments all over anarchy, a bunch of mini community governments all over anarchy.

Speaker 9 Because an abstract group in the community may not even necessarily share many real interests in common.

Speaker 9 And so trying to put them all into one body, one polity that is responsible for identifying and enacting their will, it tends to be dominated by the group's most dominant voices.

Speaker 9 It tends to subordinate individuals to the will of a nebulous collective, a nebulous majority.

Speaker 9 As the alternative to this sort of polity form, as Wilbur describes it, is the federative principle, understood in its most radical anarchic senses.

Speaker 9 So not in the sense of networking conventional static polities like a confederation of city-states, but instead bringing together the information and perspectives necessary to facilitate the dynamic process of free association.

Speaker 9 We could look to antinomies of democracy, another bit of writing by Wilbur, which further explains how the federative organization is the process by which we identify specific social selves as an interests or needs and establish their involvement in large-scale collectivities that are formed on the basis of those convergent interests.

Speaker 9 So, these collectivities might exist on a sort of a consultative basis, as they seek out and disseminate information or advice that relates to interests of the recognition where relevant of expertise.

Speaker 9 So there might be such associations based on armed defense or co-housing construction or agroforestry.

Speaker 9 There might be consultative associations with a journalistic focus or with a rewilding focus or an accessibility focus.

Speaker 9 They may exist on any scale, depending on the specificity of the information needed, from as local as an apartment building to to as far-reaching as a continent or even the entire globe.

Speaker 9 Consultative associations could create blueprints, they could document their valuable labor and expertise, they can source resources and they can share feedback, all so that interested and affected individuals and groups can easily access everything they need to make informed decisions.

Speaker 9 So in Anarchy, we'll see a variety of individuals grouping together and interacting in ways that are perhaps illegible from a top-down view of society, but in ways that work to accomplish accomplish their goals, resolve their conflicts, and maintain social harmony.

Speaker 9 It can be difficult to imagine this possibility due to how thoroughly our disempowerment and domestication has been.

Speaker 9 You know, we live under a global order that seems to deny any alternatives and extols its understanding of human nature as the only valid interpretation.

Speaker 9 The propaganda of our education, our mass media, and our inherited understanding as subjects in a hierarchical society has limited our consciousness of our situation, and thus our drives and powers to transform our situation.

Speaker 9 There are those of us who can overcome this through theoretical and historical study, but there are others who can only overcome this condition through demonstration.

Speaker 9 Some are not convinced by intellectual anarchist arguments. They have to be transformed through experiences.

Speaker 9 So to borrow the terminology of innovation adoption, it is up to us early adopters, those who are into the revolution before it becomes cool, to convince the majority of the possibility of freedom by example.

Speaker 9 And furthermore, as William Gillis wrote in The Distinct Radicalism of Anarchism, quote, to reach a moment where we sit back entirely satisfied would be to abandon anarchism.

Speaker 9 To the radical, there is no litmus for due diligence, no final finish line, no moment where we pat ourselves on the back. The vigilance of the radical is never satiated.

Speaker 60 End quote.

Speaker 9 And that's it for me today. We'll get more into revolution, powers, drives, and consciousness, and more in future episodes.
In the meantime, you can check out my channel, Andrewism, on YouTube.

Speaker 9 I talk about things like this all the time. I've been Andrew Sage.

Speaker 9 This is it could happen here.

Speaker 9 All power to all the people.

Speaker 6 Peace.

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Speaker 11 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 69 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 71 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 73 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer.

Speaker 74 The investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 72 Available now.

Speaker 5 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 18 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 75 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 18 In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?

Speaker 76 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 7 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 78 The men and woman who were hurt had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 79 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 80 The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.

Speaker 1 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage on those medicine timber.

Speaker 18 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 83 32 lost nuclear weapons.

Speaker 83 Wait, stop?

Speaker 11 What? Yes.

Speaker 84 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Speaker 82 Who still wore knee pads.

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 82 It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

Speaker 6 I'm like, oh, wow.

Speaker 81 Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

Speaker 83 What was that like for you to soft-launch into the show?

Speaker 85 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

Speaker 83 I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Speaker 49 Nick Kroll.

Speaker 9 I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So

Speaker 9 let's see how it goes.

Speaker 81 Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 6 Oh,

Speaker 84 welcome to Executive Dysfunction, a podcast.

Speaker 15 ED?

Speaker 6 It's electoral dysfunction.

Speaker 86 Electile dysfunction.

Speaker 2 Executive disorder. Jesus.
Our weekly newscast

Speaker 2 covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

Speaker 17 Not about dick stuff.

Speaker 20 Sponsored by Hemps.

Speaker 2 Not yet. Hopefully, one day.
I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans, who never knows the title of the podcast that he's on.

Speaker 52 In my defense, I'm on a lot of podcasts.

Speaker 17 I was going to say just because Robert Evans lives in like a constant podcast.

Speaker 2 This episode, we are covering the week of February 12 to February 19.

Speaker 2 Let's start with a brief Eric Adams update, or as I call it in you.

Speaker 17 That's the Turkish for Eric Adams update.

Speaker 2 So in response to the calls to drop the Turkish corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, eight top federal prosecutors have resigned in protest.

Speaker 2 Then we had four deputy mayors leave office. The New York governor is now considering removing Adams from office, which somehow is something that the governor of New York has power to do, by the way.

Speaker 2 And also the city council speaker has called on the mayor to resign.

Speaker 2 There is a judge doing a hearing on Wednesday as we are recording this right now on whether to appoint a special prosecutor to continue prosecuting the charges, despite Trump's effort to have these charges dropped to help Adams make sure that ICE raids can continue in the city in a very, very clear quid pro quo.

Speaker 2 So this is a developing story. We will continue on the Eric Adams front as this changes.

Speaker 28 By the way, people who miss it the first time, like a few months ago, we did record an entire episode about the things that he actually did, which are unbelievably funny. So go listen to that.

Speaker 28 We're not going to talk about them here, but it's very, very funny corruption.

Speaker 17 Yeah, if you didn't get the turkey joke,

Speaker 17 we explain it in detail there.

Speaker 2 I'm sure people are familiar with the turkey situation in general. All right, next, on a related note, on Tuesday, President Trump instructed the DOJ to fire all Biden-appointed U.S.
attorneys.

Speaker 2 Now, usually these types of appointments do resign at the end of like their president's term, but Trump just immediately going out to fire all of them is new, unique, and noteworthy.

Speaker 2 And Trump has done some other noteworthy things to expand executive power. And for more on that, I will turn to Mia Wong.

Speaker 30 Oh, boy.

Speaker 28 So yesterday on Tuesday, the 18th, Trump signed an executive order that

Speaker 37 effectively is just him saying the words, I am the law, over and over again.

Speaker 28 The actual sort of content of the executive order is convoluted, but basically what he's saying is that like the presidency and like him specifically is in control of all government agencies.

Speaker 28 And this is an end to a very, very longstanding practice of, well, okay, an attempt to end the longstanding practice of there being like independent regulatory agencies, which were set up by Congress.

Speaker 28 And what Trump is doing here is claiming that, you know, this is the thing called the unitary executive theory.

Speaker 52 There's a whole history of this Republican Party.

Speaker 28 This is the most most unhinged unitary executive theory thing we've ever seen, where he is just straight up claiming that he should be able to run all these things, that none of these independent regulatory agencies, and this includes stuff like the FCC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, stuff like that, actually all just directly answer to him and not to, you know, Congress or as, you know, function as independent bodies like they were set up to be by acts of Congress.

Speaker 28 It states that everyone's legal opinions that come out of these things like have to agree with legal opinions of the presidency.

Speaker 28 And

Speaker 28 it basically sets up a reporting thing where all of these things have to like report any major policy decisions that they're going to make to Russell Vought, who's like...

Speaker 2 One of the co-authors of Project 2025. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 28 So in some sense, it's a codification of the stuff he's already been trying to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, ever since.

Speaker 2 basically he got inaugurated again they've been trying to push for this complete uh unitary executive power as like running the entire not just running the entire entire like executive branch but all of these agencies that they want to rope under the authority of the executive branch yeah and there's a there's a number of sort of alarming things about this one this is a like even by the standards of like peak war on terror bush administration shit where they're just like grabbing people off the streets like this is a unprecedented sort of seizure of executive power.

Speaker 28 Two, and I think this is also worth noting in the context of a bunch of the shit he's been saying over the past week.

Speaker 28 Like last week, he had the he who says his country does not violate any law, which is like, I think a fake Napoleon quote.

Speaker 8 It's a fake Napoleon quote from a movie made in the 1970s in the Soviet Union.

Speaker 6 I believe the name of the movie was Waterloo.

Speaker 8 It's famous because they had some massive thousands and thousands of actual like soldiers, like set-piece battles.

Speaker 8 But yeah, that's where the quote, I think the quote may have another origin, but that's the famous origin. It probably was never said by Napoleon.

Speaker 2 Well, and earlier today, the official White House account tweeted about abolishing the New York City congestion pricing with basically like a magazine cover style image of Trump wearing a crown with text that reads, Long live the king.

Speaker 39 Yeah, then again,

Speaker 28 that was the official Twitter account of the White House.

Speaker 2 Which has also been doing some like unhinged posting, including like ASMR deportation videos.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like really dark stuff, like like viscerally upsetting.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it is like the opening credit to Bizosta movie, the White House Twitter feed right now.

Speaker 87 Yeah, it's the stuff like you used to not be able to talk about being a king in American politics.

Speaker 56 Yeah. Pretty recently.

Speaker 2 That's kind of the whole point of this country.

Speaker 20 There's a state where the whole motto is six simper tyrannis. Yep.

Speaker 17 And the unit of the United States military.

Speaker 52 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 45 And okay, so I want to come back onto the thing for a second and talk about one of the things that probably will be the crucial legal fight, which is that he's claiming the ability to be the person who interprets the law and

Speaker 2 you know there there's a whole bunch of sort of legal fuzziness about that and about to what extent these things are supposed to be independent but probably isn't the culmination of his attempt to literally like rule the entire country by executive fiat but this is a big step yeah this is this is this is a massive step towards that and i think you know and and we like again this is one of these things where we literally have no idea what the consequences of this will be because like we are we are so far into the great beyond that shit is happening that a year ago if you proposed it everyone would have thought you were completely out of your mind yeah well and this is stuff that that like robert's been talking about for a long time there's been a lot of people talking about the heritage foundation's push for the unitary executive theory stuff that curtis here's been talking about like my article last week on shatterzone kind of underlines where they are going with with this and and yeah like the the consequences are so vast and unknowable because we've we've never had an executive that is kind of this successfully or like this focused in his attempts to seize like total executive control over the entirety of the federal government yeah yeah and i want to end with like one of the other really chilling parts of this which is that if you read the executive order the underlying logic of it is that like the president is like the physical manifestation of the will of the people yeah it's just the fear of principle yeah yeah yeah never been done before like that and also specifically that napoleon quote about like he you say this country should not violate any law like that is literally the legal principle that carl schmitt developed like specifically to put hitler in power as the fuhrer yeah so this is great i mean and musk and trump have been saying stuff akin to that yeah in interviews like being asked like how is doge allowed to do this sort of stuff musk and trump have been saying well The people voted for this.

Speaker 2 Like we, we are, we are enabling the will of the people. Even if that like, you know, goes past like our technical authority, it's what the people wanted.

Speaker 2 So we're going to remove all of these bureaucrats that ordinarily would try to stop us because we have the consent of the governed.

Speaker 20 The mandate of heaven.

Speaker 2 Even if that just completely bypasses Congress, even if that denies the courts, which we'll talk about more later, they are willing to go as far as

Speaker 44 they can.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and no one stopped them yet, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, some of the courts are trying, but trying isn't good enough.

Speaker 17 They seem to be an open violation of that, though.

Speaker 51 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Like they were told to keep paying USAID stuff and they just said they won't.

Speaker 2 More on that later.

Speaker 2 Let's touch on immigration with James and then we will have a quick break.

Speaker 17 Yeah, perfect. Okay.
So what I want to talk about is this.

Speaker 17 It was first reported by the New York Times. I've since confirmed it with sources on the ground in Panama.

Speaker 17 The Trump administration is detaining migrants that it can't deport to their home countries in Panama currently. So currently, these are places where the U.S.

Speaker 17 doesn't have good relations with their government, right? There'll be Afghans, there'll be Iranians, people like that. The U.S.

Speaker 17 seems to have found a way to deport Venezuelans using an airline that was sanctioned until the day it apparently landed at a U.S. military base to take Venezuelan people back to Venezuela.

Speaker 17 If you want to hear about people leaving Iran and why they're leaving Iran, you can listen to my episodes I did in the Dalleyan Gap. They came out late October and November of last year.

Speaker 17 But right now, they're being kind of corralled in a hotel in Panama City, from what I've heard. And just this morning, the transport to San Vicente began.

Speaker 17 So the New York Times kind of mischaracterizes the detention center at San Vicente. I'm guessing this is because they haven't been there and I have.

Speaker 17 They called it like a detention center that's being built, quote, close to the jungle. It looks close to the jungle if you're looking on Google Maps, I suppose.

Speaker 17 It's off the Pan American Highway, actually. You literally take a dirt road off the Pan American Highway and you come across this huge prison facility.
It's all big, modern white buildings.

Speaker 17 The old facility that was there burned down and it's been rebuilt largely, I'm guessing, with money from when the Biden administration was funding deportations from Panama in 2024.

Speaker 17 It's a vast detention facility.

Speaker 17 At the time, when I went there, my fixer, Daddy Anela, and I weren't allowed to access the facility, but it was very clearly like too big for what its stated purpose was.

Speaker 17 Its stated purpose was people who had warrants for their arrest and had been found to have warrants for their arrest when they entered Panama and were being deported back to the countries where they had warrants.

Speaker 17 I've spoken to half a dozen to a dozen people who were detained there. And I just got one quotation or later to read and then we can talk about this.

Speaker 17 They treated us very badly, verbally and psychologically. We all had to do our business in the same cell.
They threw food on the floor for us to eat and we were all in handcuffs.

Speaker 6 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 So is this a result of like Rubio's negotiations with Panama? Like, how is this like logistically operating in terms of like the U.S.

Speaker 2 dropping people into a totally different country that like they also just don't have citizenship to.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 17 So the legality of taking someone to a third country is a little unclear, right? Of course the United States has done this, well, Guantanamo Bay is technically American soil, I guess, but they've also

Speaker 17 done it in other places around the world that are not Guantanamo Bay throughout the war on terror. This is not the same as the El Salvador plan.

Speaker 17 The United States Department of Homeland Security, the Secretary for Homeland Security, attended the inauguration of the new Panamanian president.

Speaker 17 The DHS and the Panamanian executive have a very close relationship. Got it.
The U.S. was funding deportations for Panama under Biden.

Speaker 17 They claimed that these were only people who had warrants for their arrest in the countries they were being deported back to.

Speaker 17 When I spoke to those people, like I was there when they literally took the families apart, right? Put the people in a truck, sent them off to San Vicente and deported them.

Speaker 17 And these guys, if they had warrants for their arrest, it seems very odd because when they arrived back in Colombia, they were not detained or arrested.

Speaker 17 And like if you have a warrant for someone and they get handed to you, that's when you're going to detain them, right? And none of them were detained.

Speaker 17 They've just released back to their day-to-day life in Colombia. So, like, there was definitely precedent for this set by the Biden administration, but what's happening now is a degree worse, right?

Speaker 17 Taking people.

Speaker 17 I don't know what the long-term plan for these Afghan and Iranian people is, right? Were they going to live in San Vicente?

Speaker 2 Like, whose custody are they in?

Speaker 17 Yeah, like, is this like a DHS black site? Like, is it a...

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, absolutely.

Speaker 17 Are they on U.S. soil in San Vicente? Certainly, when I was there, it was secured exclusively by Panamanian authorities, not by U.S.
authorities.

Speaker 17 So, like,

Speaker 17 the legal process, I'm guessing, like, I don't know if there is one beyond, like, we can't deport these people back to their countries. We want to number needs to go up, right?

Speaker 17 There's been reporting that Donald Trump is upset that his deportation numbers haven't hit the numbers that Biden did.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 17 And so they're doing things like this, which appears to be move fast and break things, I guess. Like, I don't really know how to describe it.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's the entire motto of the new Trump term in general, and things are being broken.

Speaker 17 Yes, they are, yeah, including lots of human rights conventions.

Speaker 17 As we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon, I just heard from a friend in Panama that 300 people were transferred to San Vicente, and it looks like 179 of them have no sort of clear path to be deported back to their home countries, no accepted place to send them.

Speaker 17 So those are the people who seem to be in legal limbo right now now in Panama and San Vicente for an amount of time that we don't know, in a status that we don't yet know, or isn't clear.

Speaker 17 But yeah, this is pretty bad. Like I say, I've been on the ground.
I don't know many other reporters who have been on the ground in San Vicente.

Speaker 17 We're very well sourced in Panama and among the migrant community. So, we're going to continue reporting on this.
I've already sent some requests for comment out.

Speaker 17 So, I would expect us to have something out on this in the next couple of weeks, hopefully.

Speaker 2 All right, let's go on a quick ad break and come back to talk about RFK Jr.

Speaker 2 Okay, we are back.

Speaker 17 I need to take off my plate carrier. It's crushing me with it.

Speaker 2 As James takes off his plate carrier that he's wearing for some reason.

Speaker 8 It's company policy that we all wear body armor while recording because of an accident that occurred several weeks ago. We don't need to get into it.
Garrison, please continue.

Speaker 17 Did Garrison say something rude or offensive when I had to take my headphones off to take on my play carrier? Yes.

Speaker 2 So last week, so last week, RFK Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
This is one I thought there might be a slightly more pushback on, but oh, oh, how naive I was. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 8 No, they are beaten into a corner.

Speaker 52 I didn't put that much of a fight.

Speaker 2 On February 13th, Trump signed an executive order establishing a commission to make America healthy again.

Speaker 2 In the third paragraph, the order states quote-unquote concern over the quote-unquote staggering increase of autism. And the next paragraph takes aim at ADHD medication.

Speaker 2 Not great. Not ideal.

Speaker 2 And the order continues to be pretty bad. I will do a direct quote here, quote, This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life.

Speaker 2 To fully address the growing health crisis in America, we must redirect our national focus in the public and private sectors towards understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease.

Speaker 2 This includes fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, and effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety.

Speaker 2 Unquote. Fresh thinking.

Speaker 17 Yeah, like one of the types of guys who I've run into when I'm out in the mountains is people who have very reasonably assessed that people in the United States don't have access to the healthiest food, especially if they don't have a lot of money, and that that is impacting their health, right?

Speaker 17 That's a fair enough assessment. Sure.
To go from that to like,

Speaker 17 I just want someone who will do something about it. So I guess this RFK guy is okay.

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 2 Everything in this order has the most like dog whistly language.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 That not only like directly targets life-saving medication, but it can also be used to target like vaccines. And like it's, it's really worrying.

Speaker 17 And there's a measles outbreak right now, right? In Laredo, like in Texas.

Speaker 8 300 people last I checked in Laredo, around Laredo.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's been an increasing number of measles outbreaks the past like five years in this country.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 17 If you're not aware of how devastating measles outbreaks can be, I'd really encourage you to look into the outbreak in Samoa and the absolutely heartbreaking consequences of that.

Speaker 8 Yeah, which RFK Jr. helped to cause by pushing a shitload of anti-vaccine propaganda here.
Something like 80 people died, most of them children.

Speaker 17 Jesus. Yeah, they ran out of child-sized coffins and had to ask for people to send more.

Speaker 8 Well, which leads to a separate problem, but you know, if you go to childcoffins.com and put in the promo code, it could happen here.

Speaker 8 Anyway, 10% off.

Speaker 17 Yeah, RFK gets you 20% off.

Speaker 8 It's a good business to be in.

Speaker 2 Speaking of, section 2 of the order calls to, quote unquote, aggressively combat. critical health challenges, such as, quote, the rising rates of mental health disorders and diabetes.

Speaker 2 So RFK has made a number of statements that are worrying, which is just a blanket statement that I can make, but specifically talking about how to treat diabetes with like, you know, lifestyle changes and like changing your diet habits and like a whole bunch of extremely worrying stuff.

Speaker 2 Section five of the order states that with 100 days, this new commission made up of the heads of 13 various agencies and chaired by RFK Jr.

Speaker 2 is supposed to submit their findings that quote, assess the threat threat that potential overutilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures pose to children, and assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin

Speaker 2 re-uptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight loss drugs, unquote.

Speaker 2 The idea that we're going to be trying to take away people's antipsychotics while also making handguns more available across the country.

Speaker 8 Yes, more children with handguns, less children on antipsychotics.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 this is targeting depression medication, mood stabilizers, meds for ADHD,

Speaker 2 antipsychotics. And then also, you know, lines about certain chemicals absolutely being like an anti-vaccine dog whistle.

Speaker 45 Also, also, we have to mention to the diabetes part of this.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Where

Speaker 57 that is

Speaker 43 an unbelievably alarming thing

Speaker 27 for him to be safe.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 20 It's pretty bad.

Speaker 43 Because, like, the thing about diabetes is you don't have like your body can't, like, literally can't physically fucking process shit. You can't actually solve that with exercise.

Speaker 55 Like,

Speaker 17 yeah. And, like, I'll just say, like, I've worked in diabetes education in the past, right?

Speaker 17 And in various like non-profit capacities, not that kind of doctor, but I have seen the people who have died because they have been subjected to this kind of bullshit.

Speaker 17 Like, I know the people who have lost children and loved ones because because of this.

Speaker 17 And it is heartbreaking to think that somebody, normally it's somebody trying to make money, would lie to someone about their health. Right.

Speaker 17 And the people who are most vulnerable to this are the people who are also already struggling to access healthcare and access medications. And it is disgusting to see the government pushing this.

Speaker 2 On Tuesday, R.F. Kej Jr.

Speaker 2 made his first official statement since being confirmed, promising that, quote, nothing is going to be off limits, unquote, in his quest to make America healthy again, telling health and human services staffers, quote, some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized, unquote.

Speaker 2 And then, according to Politico, RFK Jr. suggests that he would direct HHS to investigate antidepressant drugs, ultra-processed food, electromagnetic radiation, and the herbicide glycophate.

Speaker 2 So that seems to be some of their first targets.

Speaker 39 4G, 5G cell tower shit.

Speaker 33 Great, great.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah, no, no.

Speaker 8 I am excited for people to both not have food and also not have Adderall.

Speaker 87 That's really going to make quite an interesting mob.

Speaker 2 Our economy is going to crash.

Speaker 88 If they remove Adderall, this whole country is going to kill.

Speaker 8 If we are going to see stockbrokers leaping out of windows at rates unheard of.

Speaker 6 That stuff works.

Speaker 30 Either that or we are simply going to move to an economy that is entirely based on the consumption of cocaine and meth.

Speaker 44 Like,

Speaker 15 one of these things is going to happen.

Speaker 87 That's true. Adderall is going to be worth more by weight than gold.

Speaker 20 People, Vyvans will be the new legal currency.

Speaker 2 I'm going to start storing them like peppercorns to get.

Speaker 61 I bought a house with two months of vivans.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Jesus.

Speaker 2 Lastly, before we go on break, Borders are Tom Homan has been on a crusade against AOC and others for holding know-your-rights trainings, specifically informing constituents, including legal citizens who are being harassed by ICE, that you do not need to open the door if ICE knocks on your door.

Speaker 2 You can ask them to leave. You can stay silent.
You don't need to share personal information.

Speaker 2 You have the right to speak with an attorney, and you do not need to sign anything or hand over any documents. So there's been, you know, like webinars and trainings informing people of their rights.

Speaker 2 And this has really upset Border Czar Tom Homan, who last week went on Fox News to accuse AOC of impedement, which is not a real word.

Speaker 2 And he announced that he has directed or has asked the DOJ and the Deputy Attorney General to investigate AOC for interfering with ICE actions by simply educating people about their rights.

Speaker 2 I have a clip here I'm going to play in the podcast with Homan on Sean Hannity.

Speaker 78 When does it cross a line into aiding and abetting law breaking?

Speaker 78 Would it have to have direct involvement by her in helping people to evade ICE?

Speaker 90 That's exactly the question I posed to the Deputy Attorney General. I asked him to look into it.

Speaker 90 I says, you know, I know through my career, someone steps in front of you in between you and the person you're arresting or repeating. Yeah, that's a violation.

Speaker 90 But at what point do you cross the line on saying you're educating people versus you're teaching them how to evade ICE arrest?

Speaker 90 So I've asked that question to the Department of Justice for clear guidance so I can share that with the officers of ICE.

Speaker 90 So we're looking for that clear direction so we can start taking action on people that want to evade, who want to help educate these people to evade ICE.

Speaker 90 So hopefully any day now we get that guidance sent out to the field.

Speaker 2 Let's turn this over to discussion. James, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this.
Yeah,

Speaker 17 this is kind of foundational to the Constitution, right? It's the access to an attorney, the right to an attorney.

Speaker 17 And it's again something that like even under Biden, that the DHS have been taking a swing at.

Speaker 17 Specifically, we've done an episode last year about transferring detained people in ICE custody away from their attorneys, right?

Speaker 17 In this most cases, it was people from California, specifically San Diego County, because San Diego County had a program that funded some attorney access, and moving them to Texas.

Speaker 17 So, like, you're either going to bleed that program dry, flying attorneys to Texas, or have them do it over a phone call.

Speaker 17 But a lot of these people who are detained because they come from dictatorial countries don't feel like phone calls are secure.

Speaker 17 And so, they're not really going to feel comfortable talking to their attorney on a phone call. We've done a whole episode about that.
You can go back and listen to it.

Speaker 2 And like, this is very basic Fourth Amendment stuff. And this applies to you whether or not you are a citizen.
This applies to you if you are in this country. Yeah, you have these rights.

Speaker 2 And it is within ISIS and Tom Homan's interests to make people not realize that they actually do have rights regardless of their immigration status.

Speaker 17 Yeah, absolutely. Like they're not going to tell you necessarily what rights you have.

Speaker 20 No.

Speaker 2 They're not going to tell you they don't have the right to enter your house police want to enter your home and if you open the door they will but you do not need to open the door and like this is like very basic stuff of informing people really getting on tom homan's nerve he's been on news like five times the past week to to specifically complain about aoz he really wants her to get arrested for this thing that's not a crime Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 17 that's kind of what they're going for throughout, right?

Speaker 17 But like, I know, for instance, in California, lots of universities have these like know your rights cards accessible that you can have them in your lectures and give them out to your students.

Speaker 17 They can take them regardless of citizenship status, right? Which is generally the way to approach this, right? With an agnostic approach to citizenship. Correct.

Speaker 17 You don't certainly want to be holding a, if you're undocumented, come to this thing at this time and we'll give you a know your rights session.

Speaker 17 Like, like, that does not, that is not a smart way to approach this. But yeah, like.
immigration agnostic, know your rights trainings, they're kind of foundational to like constitutional rights.

Speaker 17 They're pretty much front and center of things you're allowed.

Speaker 2 Do you know what else is front and center?

Speaker 17 Advertisements.

Speaker 2 That's right. It's in there.

Speaker 6 Article 22.

Speaker 17 It's like they can't put the soldiers in your bedroom unless they're sponsored by...

Speaker 8 I mean, look, depending on the soldier.

Speaker 2 All right. We are back.

Speaker 2 Mia, it's time for tariff talk. Yeah, time for tariff talk.

Speaker 86 Tariff talk.

Speaker 8 Dan, I'll insert a little little musical jingle here for tariff talk.

Speaker 2 Dan has not been an editor on this podcast for years, but sure.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 86 Tariff talk, tariff talk, talk about tariffs.

Speaker 2 Tariff talk with Mia Wong.

Speaker 86 There we go.

Speaker 17 I thought Garrison said tariff talk in a Canadian way.

Speaker 14 Very different podcast, much more cursing.

Speaker 20 Why not?

Speaker 88 Mia, Mia, tariff talk.

Speaker 6 Okay, okay.

Speaker 50 I got a through line, which is that Trump is announcing that he's going to maybe sign an executive order to put into effect more tariffs.

Speaker 66 One of those is pharmaceuticals, which would actually, would actually

Speaker 51 like possibly impact tragedy and your healthcare.

Speaker 44 So there's my tie-in. Okay.

Speaker 30 But so the main things is auto imports, like computer chips and pharmaceuticals are supposed to get, we think in April, like a 25% tariff.

Speaker 39 It's again, unclear whether these will go into effect break.

Speaker 45 But I think it's worth noting this because...

Speaker 63 And this is something I haven't seen anyone put together for reasons that are absolutely baffling to me.

Speaker 32 But I think that a big part of the pharmaceutical like tariff threat here is specifically to threaten Denmark into selling Greenland because one of Denmark's largest companies is Novo Nordisk, who would get absolutely colossally fucked by this.

Speaker 12 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 23 And so we sort of have to look at all of these in the context of like what kinds of negotiations are going on. The chips one is pretty obviously like a China-Taiwan one, although

Speaker 21 the cars, the auto import one, I think is

Speaker 53 pretty specifically,

Speaker 12 it's all auto imports.

Speaker 44 I think it's pretty specifically targeted at Mexico because there's a whole bunch of U.S.

Speaker 54 auto, like full car imports from Mexico.

Speaker 30 But yeah, 25% tariffs.

Speaker 39 We'll see exactly what happens with this round of negotiations, but who knows?

Speaker 45 They might go into effect.

Speaker 44 This might also be part of the push for the U.S.

Speaker 23 to seize Greenland.

Speaker 30 This is also less of a Trump thing, but I think it's worth.

Speaker 63 noting the sort of seriousness that both the kind of the people around Trump Trump and also like the media in Canada is taking like a potential U.S.

Speaker 30 attempt to just like seize Canada.

Speaker 33 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 12 Like they might really do that.

Speaker 2 Oddly enough, this push from Trump might actually help catalyze the anti-conservative movement in Canada, which has kind of been trending conservative the past 10 years.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And Trump's actions have really upset the country, even the conservative factions. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You are seeing support for the liberals as swell, which has been like in like rapid decline for the past five years.

Speaker 2 So it's actually causing a pretty big shake-up in Canadian politics right now, which I'm sure I'll do an episode on in the future.

Speaker 8 There's even, I don't know if it'll, it's going, things are going to change enough to have a big influence.

Speaker 8 They probably won't on the next German election, but AFD saw its first drop in support in a while after J.D. Vance endorsed them.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Oh, God.

Speaker 17 Still doesn't have any juice.

Speaker 56 Send him to the UK.

Speaker 66 We could kill reform now.

Speaker 43 Send him to the UK.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 17 God, I would love to see that.

Speaker 2 I wish.

Speaker 2 To get back on the war on woke front, I'd like to talk about attempts to purge DEI gone wrong, specifically in OSHA, who has now trashed workplace safety guidelines by banning and removing like 18 workplace like training and safety publications per popular info.

Speaker 2 Now, some of these documents have been removed for just containing the word like gender. Oh, wow.
Like in one case about how patients might need different treatments based on their gender or age.

Speaker 2 This list of banned documents also includes a document from 2009 that instructs employers on how to quote unquote protect their EMS responders from becoming additional victims while on the front line of medical response.

Speaker 2 Unquote. The alleged reason for removal is because the document contains a sentence about how EMT workers work under quote-unquote diverse conditions

Speaker 2 and that EMT agencies have a quote diversity of state-specific certification, training, and regulatory requirements.

Speaker 8 There was also a special education program dedicated to helping young adult special ed kids transition into the workforce that got cut.

Speaker 8 And the suspicion is because it was a child program that included the word transition.

Speaker 8 Like, we're not going to know for a while the precise reason, but all of this lines up pretty well.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I'm sure it would also be removing programs with the word disability, frankly. Like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, and they're doing that elsewhere too i just yeah and this is affecting a huge number of agencies right like i we we could do i mean we probably will do whole episodes on this um i've been collecting a whole bunch of resources in a document called the war on woke which eventually i will turn into an episode this is manifested in other ways as well uh there's now disclaimers on the target hiv and the cdc website which now reads the cdc's website is being modified to comply with president trump's executive orders and specifically on pages related to sexual health there is a big like a top banner reading, quote, per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11.59 p.m., February 14, 2025.

Speaker 2 Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.

Speaker 2 The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation and to women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities.

Speaker 2 This page does not reflect biological reality, and therefore the administration and this department rejects it.

Speaker 15 Unquote.

Speaker 2 So even though they've been ordered to have these web pages still online, they are basically defacing the web pages with these notes from the Trump team.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 30 That also, by the way, and the extent to which this matters is basically zero because they don't give a shit what the courts say, but like that's also a violation of the court order.

Speaker 44 Pretty much.

Speaker 39 They did not put up the website as it was at the time when it was specified for. They have put new bullshit into it.

Speaker 88 but speaking of violating court orders

Speaker 2 uh the trump administration told a judge in a tuesday court filing that it will not comply with the tro directing usaid and the state department to resume foreign aid funding stating that quote usaid intends to terminate instruments that the administrator determines are inconsistent with the national interests or usaid's mission And it tries to argue that this is like in line with USAID's lawful ability to operate.

Speaker 2 So they are just like blatantly, blatantly defying a judge's order, as we've talked about how they seem to be wanting to and continuing to do for the past four weeks.

Speaker 2 More on that in the weeks to come as this situation escalates through different appeals courts and will eventually probably reach some kind of final showdown with the Supreme Court.

Speaker 2 Now, longtime Social Security official Michelle King has quit the agency amid fights to prevent Doge from accessing sensitive information.

Speaker 2 The Washington Post quoted Martin O'Malley, the Social Security Commissioner under the Biden administration and a former Maryland governor, as saying, quote, at this rate, they will break it, and they will break it fast, and there will be an interruption of benefits, unquote.

Speaker 2 Social Security is just one of the agencies that Doge is either gutting or has already gutted.

Speaker 2 And it's leading to kind of a mass resignation, not only of like, you know, probationary employees and like deferred resignation like letter employees, right?

Speaker 2 Everyone who's receiving that fork in their odd email, but also just like top-ranking like officials who've been doing this their whole whole lives, who are quitting because now it's impossible for them to like do their job with Musk's Doge basically running all of these departments and determining who can be hired,

Speaker 2 who should be fired.

Speaker 2 In late January, David Leibrick, the highest-ranking civil servant at the Treasury Department, was put on leave and then quit his job after trying to stop Doge from accessing data at the Bureau of Fiscal Service.

Speaker 2 The head of the FDA's food division, Jim Jones, resigned last Monday, citing Doge as inhibiting his ability to run the department. And at least four deadly plane crashes have happened this past month.

Speaker 2 Actually, five now, considering one this morning. And then there's also that whole upside-down Delta flight from Minneapolis to Toronto.
And

Speaker 2 this is all happening amidst the Trump admins mass firing of several hundred probationary employees at the FAA, an already understaffed agency.

Speaker 2 And this past Monday, a team from SpaceX arrived at the air traffic control headquarters in Virginia to begin the process of overhauling the control system.

Speaker 20 Great, cool.

Speaker 17 Luckily, SpaceX has had no notable incidents, and so I'm sure that will be fine.

Speaker 8 No, they didn't just hide a rocket going off.

Speaker 88 There's good news.

Speaker 45 There is good news on this front, which is that President Trump is very, very mad that his new Boeing plane is like his personal plane for like, I think it's, I think it's like another Air Force One or something isn't coming fast enough.

Speaker 50 So

Speaker 12 he's now encouraging them to do a rush job on it and let people in and don't have the right security clearances.

Speaker 66 So, so this whole thing

Speaker 88 is critical support to Boeing.

Speaker 66 And critical support to Boeing, you motherfuckers. You have one job that is to produce an airplane at your normal quality and standards.

Speaker 2 Similar to that, on February 13th, an Air Force plane carrying Secretary of State Mark Rubio was forced to turn around en route from Washington to Munich after the aircraft, a converted Boeing 757, experienced a mechanical issue 90 minutes into the flight.

Speaker 2 So they were forced to turn around. So again, critical support to Boeing.
I only wish them the best in securing more and and more government contracts.

Speaker 8 Absolutely. You know, I think we,

Speaker 8 well, actually, we should probably call it as an episode before I make any more jokes about air travel.

Speaker 2 Which is increasingly scary.

Speaker 2 I flew so much last year, and I am less willing to now.

Speaker 8 I do not want to now. That said, it is worth noting.
I think there's two things that are worth noting.

Speaker 8 One is most of what people are pointing out as like scary crashes are crashes that the same number happened at this point last year when it comes to like small aircraft.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Those are much more dangerous than cars, like tiny personal aircraft, which is why I always enjoy at CES when they try to sell

Speaker 2 less regulated flying cars.

Speaker 20 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 8 But I also think from a political standpoint, no, we should actually absolutely, every single plane crash, even if it's a tiny plane crashing and not tied to the greater shit with the FAA, all of them should go on Trump's head.

Speaker 8 It's not about what's true. It's about what you can can use to make political hay.
And this is something that you can hurt Republicans with.

Speaker 8 Every time someone dies in a plane crash, lay it at their feet, right? Like, what do you get from being honest?

Speaker 2 And it has been one of the more deadly months in aviation history.

Speaker 60 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Specifically for like American soil.

Speaker 8 They're definitely going to get people killed, but like the way that you do that is not wait until, okay, this is finally the one that it's fair to attack. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 You make it, you make every time this gets in the news, you make it on their head, you know?

Speaker 17 It's certainly not helping, right? That like the FAA was already understaffed. Like, as you said, people were already dying in plane crashes.
Taking staff away from the FAA is not helping.

Speaker 17 Like, we can't isolate that from every crash that happens.

Speaker 2 And, like,

Speaker 2 it's not just that. It's also like the continued, the continued hiring freeze.
Largely, air traffic control operators have not been affected by the firings.

Speaker 2 Other support staff have, which are still just as crucial.

Speaker 2 But it's also preventing them from hiring more air traffic controllers, which they need to, because because it's so understaffed, which actually does lead to an increase of these like small plane collisions.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this is like a similar pattern across all departments, though.

Speaker 2 The USDA announced on Tuesday that over the weekend, they accidentally fired several agency employees who are working on the bird flu response as a result of the Trump Doge mass firings. And now

Speaker 2 USDA is trying to rehire Tev.

Speaker 63 Have we explained the provisional employee firing thing that they're doing for all of these on here yet?

Speaker 17 You should explain what a probational employee is.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, it's employees that have been hired for less than a year and have different protections than other career employees.

Speaker 2 And part of Doge's campaign to do like massive, massive layoffs across all government sectors is by targeting, first of all, probationary employees because they're easiest to fire and then move on to career employees.

Speaker 2 And this is just like the first batch of mass layoffs because they're the easiest to do. They don't have like union negotiations.
They can't appeal the firing.

Speaker 2 So this is like the first step in a larger series of events that will lead to, you know, a severely reduced government workforce.

Speaker 2 And like the situation with the USDA is very similar to the situation with the nuclear strategy employees who the government is struggling to rehire because they lost contact information with them after firing them.

Speaker 66 They fired the nuke police.

Speaker 8 They fired the guys whose job is to transport and make sure no one steals nuclear weapons.

Speaker 56 I cannot answer.

Speaker 61 The one kind of cop we can all agree we need as long as we keep having those things.

Speaker 56 This is one of these things where it's like, like, I've been saying, not even really as a joke, that millions of people are going to die from this, but like,

Speaker 66 if these people are not stopped.

Speaker 20 Oh, we'll have a broken arrow.

Speaker 63 We are like two months into this.

Speaker 50 This is the second time they have tried to fire the Nuke police, and they actually succeeded this time, right?

Speaker 56 Like, millions of people are going to die.

Speaker 50 and they lost their phone number they can't even call them back like they don't they don't have this they don't have the numbers of the security like these people must be stopped from doing this or we or we are going to see a cataclysm that is going to make the fucking pandemic look like a fucking joke like we're all going to look fondly back on like the year we spent in lockdown and the million who died as like the fucking like smoking remains of seven american cities like

Speaker 8 i i have an episode on this that i'll put out at some point but

Speaker 8 you're getting to a thing that I've been worried about for a while, Mia, which is we are every day getting closer and closer to a nuclear January 6th.

Speaker 8 And what I mean by that is an incident in which a nuclear weapon gets either gets utilized or gets out of the control of its proper handlers in a way that is dumb in the same way January 6th was.

Speaker 8 So I'm not talking about you have like an actual military conflict between Russia and the United States. I'm talking about something really fucking stupid.

Speaker 8 Like I'm talking about something incomprehensibly silly. And yeah, millions of people will at least potentially die.

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 2 what another uplifting episode of it could happen here.

Speaker 6 It could happen here.

Speaker 66 Stop them now. They're weak right now.

Speaker 2 Before they do this, they can only get stronger. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Well, until someone else gets a nuke, then all bets are off.

Speaker 8 Like I said, if you are someone who has been fired from the federal government and are transporting a nuke, I have a large backyard uh and coolzone would would love to become a nuclear power uh also unrelated we have a uh a tip email uh james want to talk about

Speaker 17 for legal reasons this is a joke we do not want any nukes it is coolzone tips at proton.me uh you can contact us there it is ProtonMail is encrypted. That only means that the mail is encrypted.

Speaker 17 If you send from a proton email address to a proton email address, none of that means that you are necessarily 100% secure, but it's the best option that we have for right now.

Speaker 17 If you'd like to reach out to us, please feel free to do so. Coolzone Tips at Proton.me.

Speaker 2 We reported the news.

Speaker 6 We reported the news.

Speaker 8 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 91 It could happen here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 91 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 91 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 41 Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 71 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.
So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 74 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 72 Available now.

Speaker 5 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 91 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years

Speaker 91 until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 13 Merica, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happen

Speaker 11 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 91 Listen to Graves County on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 67 Wishing the holidays could come early?

Speaker 89 If you own or manage your business, they can. With help from iHeartRadio, people are already shopping for their loved ones and hunting for deals wherever they can find them, including right here.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.