It Could Happen Here Weekly 170

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

so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat

less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing

new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome to A Kadapad here, a podcast of If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to victory. 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.
And today, we're talking about that. And with me to talk about that is fellow worker Dino, an IWW pizza union organizer in Berkeley, and fellow worker Cole, who's an IWW pizza union organizer in Portland.
And both of you two, welcome to the show. Thank you.
I'm excited to be here. Hello.
Thank you for having me on. Yeah, me too.
I'm excited to talk to you both. So this is a Pete's Coffee union.
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, and I'm now here to deliver wrath against them for their many crimes. So yeah, let's start off with, can we talk a bit about how these unions came together and what the sort of like beginning process of this organizing looked like? Yeah, so the first store that organized actually was in Davis, California.
They organized, I think, in 2022. They launched their public campaign at the end in winter, and then they voted for their election back in January 2023.
that's around the same time period where a lot of media was writing about their unionization process. And a couple of the Bay Area stores heard about it and started to meet together.
And that's kind of where we started. We weren't IWW at the start, but we eventually started meeting with unions and chose IWW.
Oh yeah, so it was an independent thing that became an IWW. Yeah, when we joined the IWW, we were basically fully organized to the extent that we were going to be.
We already had our committee set up, we had our meetings regularly, we had Robert's rules and everything already implemented. That's so cool.
Do you want to talk a little bit about what the process of doing that initial organizing before you went to the unions look like? How everything sort of came together? 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.
There was a lot of managers kind of like trying to overhear. People were talking about the union or already instigating themselves and asking like, what do you think about unions? 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 manager or something like that.
And over time, we eventually started doing like one-on-one conversations with our co-workers and meeting together. 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, we felt ready to kind of like start setting things into stone. So we had like meetings every single week and we had biweekly meetings at some point.
We had committee meetings and people started to kind of select themselves into like social media or we had outreach, we had intake. 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.
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. And at the time it was mostly just us complaining for a really long time until we were like, what if you did something about this? Yeah.
One thing I'm curious about is how large, roughly, are these shops?

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.
So fairly small. 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 the policies that they were pushing.
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.
That's where it all starts, right? Pizza's pushing poor policies. They're cutting hours.
That's one of the biggest thing. 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? Let's try to do something about it. Yeah.
And the staffing issues, this is one of the things we're talking to, I mean, just people across sectors. 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 like it's it's never a part of the discourse that you know you don't have a set number of hours that you're going to work you don't know when you're going to work them and also you, there's no guarantee that you're going to get to work enough hours to actually survive.
And then also the entire condition of labor, like every sector is just chronic. It's just chronic under scheduling and chronic understaffing of everything.
And, you know, that ranges from like coffee shops, like hospitals, to schools, to like, everyone has decided that the way that you manage things is 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 the kind of the actual effects of the understaffing and how that sort of drove people into the campaign? Yeah, I would be more than happy to.
I mean, one of the sort of primary catalysts for organizing for our shop was the introduction of Uber Eats. So when I first started working in the 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, people would come in and get their coffee. Later on, they ended up introducing mobile orders through Pete's own ordering system.
And then when the pandemic hit initially and everything locked down, they started doing DoorDash to try to continue having a revenue stream. 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. 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.
We're probably getting at peak 30, 40 drinks per hour in addition to what we're getting in store from DoorDash and Uber Eats. That's a drink every sub two minutes.
Yeah. Jesus.
And we are expected to crank these out at less than three minutes in order. And that's per order.
So an order might have like five drinks if it's DoorDash 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, 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. Oh, certainly not.
And we don't get tips from that either. Oh, Jesus.
Wait, you don't get tips fromesus you don't get tips from me no no i mean like wait oh the tips all go to the drivers jesus christ i won't like that's not a bad thing necessarily good for the drivers but you should get paid too yeah but it's like uber who's taking the vast majority of the money from that and peace and so us and the drivers are both getting screwed over by this yeah but. But we both have to do all this extraneous work.
So people were super fucking irritated about that, myself included, for sure. 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? Yeah.
And it seems like the incentive structures for these delivery services

add up really badly

in terms of the way that incentives people

to order because you have these minimums

on the amount of

stuff you have to order to get below.

There's all this threshold stuff

of like, if you do this,

you get free delivery, you spend this much, you get blah, blah, blah.

And so that, yeah, it seems

like the sort of perfect maelstrom for producing even more work yeah and i will say this is that they 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, 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 and all of these orders? 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.
It's just like, we never hear about this until it's actually happening. And that's the case both for DoorDash and Uber Eats, but also for just like internal Pete's promotions.
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.
Yeah, it seems like the 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. And speaking about how awful the experience is, unfortunately, we are a podcast sponsored by ads, so go experience them or don't i don't know there's a if you have apple

there's a there's a thing you can get called coolers on media where you don't have ads uh

the android one i don't even know what i'm legally allowed to say about that shit but oh my god it is

the biggest legal clusterfuck i've ever seen in my entire life i'm gonna leave it up there but

we're trying we're doing our best we are so back yeah so let's go into their other of their myriad crimes oh man where do i even start so pete's the second they found out that we were organizing launched like their worst union busting campaign they could have ever imagined, wasting so much money. Oh, God.
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.
An unfair labor practice is a charge with the National Labor Relations Board. And we claimed that they were being retaliatory.
And at the time, it was very clear that management thought I was a key organizer. I was very public and vocal about being a union member 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.
And we withdrew the ULP because we were like, all right, I guess it fixed itself. Yeah, that's the thing that happens, by the way.
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 UOPs 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 so like sometimes you can get them to resolve it just by like just by the threat of it 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 so note for all you people people out there who are considering filing one of these.
Yeah, no, just stack them up. 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.
Yeah. So at the time that worked in within a week, I had my job back and everything.
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 having those one-on-ones with coworkers and making sure everyone was connected. I also just want to mention here, it is illegal to fire someone for union organizing.
It's not the most easily enforced thing, but they legally cannot do that. So just note for all the people who are listening to union episodes for the first time, they can't do that.
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 Labor note of the episode.
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 being really annoying to the manager. Hell yeah.
Being like, what happened to Dino? Hell yeah. Why aren't they at work? What's going on? 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 were willing to have my back 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 my hours back so that was really good yeah yeah 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 CHOP, according to the government.
Not that that's always important, but that's something that we wanted. Especially as the fucking Trump regime unfolds.
Yeah. Yeah, no.
It's a really tough position, especially because, I mean, we're IWW members, and I know that there's definitely an internal debate of whether or not contractual agreements versus direct action.

But there's always the option to do both, a combination, diversify our tactics. But yeah, so that happened.
They also hired a union investor. Of course they did.
Now, according to LM reports from the government that they have to file, they spent over $100,000 in a span of two weeks to hire this union investor. What's an LM report, by the way? It's a report that you file with the, I think, forgetting which department it is.
Is it the OLM? The Office of Labor and Management? Thank you. Yeah.
So they are required to file that by, I think, March 30th of the following year for fiscal reasons. So we finally got those documents this previous year.
So they did spend a lot of money. And this guy who is just basically messing with us for like two weeks and he was 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.
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.
People felt a little bit, 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.
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. But even then, that still wasn't enough to turn out the fact that people were just being messed with at work and they couldn't literally leave.
There was someone on the floor asking them questions about their activity with the union. And even though now we know it's 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. But that's something I definitely wish we knew and stood up for a little bit more.
Yeah, could you tell a little bit about what the specific thing was so that if people are experiencing it themselves, they can know what they can do? Yeah, so management shouldn't be asking for your affiliation within a union. They're not allowed to ask or make assumptions about it.
So if I'm a manager, I'm not allowed to go up to me and be like, hey Dino, since you're in a union, what is the union doing about X, Y, and Z? That's not an appropriate question. And there 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. 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.
And it was really hard to make sure that every worker felt comfortable and they definitely picked out workers yeah based on you know like social person like personalities and things like that which is really disheartening to see yeah it's really scummy and i think morale is a terrain of 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 attempt to make people sort of too depressed and too despondent to sort of organize and a lot of that yeah again it's like it's stuff you can organize against and stuff that like they're not allowed to do and whether or not they're going to be able to do it is it is a function of labor regulation and labor law is not something that's enforced by the government it's something that's enforced by you you and it's enforced by the people around you. And so, you know, like the law can sometimes help and sometimes doesn't.
It's useful to cite the management. It's useful because it makes them think that there's like the full power of the state behind you or whatever.
But like in terms of how you deal with this stuff, it is something that is enforced by you, by how organized you are and by how organized your shop floor is and by how organized your community is. And that's something that's, I think, important for people to understand when you're forming your own unions, which you should also go do, because you can just do it.
I said it before, and I'll say it again. Like, the people who organize unions are just regular people.
Like, you, person, dear listener. So you can do this, too.
What do they say? It's like a union is just two workers talking to each other.

Yeah. 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.
It already takes months to years to get unfair labor practice filings resolved for the NLRB to do most things. So that is a core tenant of the IWW is actually taking action on the shop floor.
Like that is 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 the power comes from the workers.
It doesn't come from laws. The laws only came because workers were pushing for things on the shop floor in the first place.
So it's like, get back to the root of that yeah like the nlrb we've talked about this on the show before but the national labor relations act i think it established national labor relations board like that that was part of effectively like a truce that was enforced by by the government because as a way to have like labor unions stop being armed and stop getting into shootouts with bosses so yeah it is as as as this framework comes apart it is important to remember like why we had this in the first place which was uh union militias would occasionally start like small-scale civil wars in the u.s with bosses over stuff people would shoot cannons at each other. We're sort of distant from that period.

But there's also another thing about direct action, which is that, yeah, it's hard to organize, but also, quite frankly, with the way that the NLRB is functioning right now,

the time to organize that, A, makes the union better, and B, is going to be faster than

the NLRB right now.

So, yeah, this is your practical.

We have your ideological pitch

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 here's here's ads we are back 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 yeah 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 only continuing to be worse, right? 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, 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, to give us more power.
So we're both doing direct actions and trying to push for a contract right now. Now, one of the big difficulties is that Pete has basically hired this law firm to do the contract negotiations on their behalf.
And the law firm is basically stonewalling us. They are responding to the emails, but basically by just kicking the can down the road.
Yep, yep, yep. And trying to not actually come to the bargaining table.
And so it's this very frustrating thing of like, 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. Yeah, I don't know if you have any more to add to that, do you know? 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 the week of Thanksgiving and holidays and finals for most of us that were students. So that kind just dropped morale and activity 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 checks out 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 a few blocks away from UC Berkeley so most of the students like go home and they're not gonna like log into zoom for a 30-minute union meeting and like hear what's like you know the most recent like check-ins that we need to do so that is a little bit frustrating that he definitely wrote us up right at the perfect time that where activity kind of drops yeah so they're 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 and it was just a blanket discipline 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 in which all these made-up rules that they're making 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.
All our district managers were like, yeah, file a grievance with HR. We'll discuss it there.
And then we did that. 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. And unless it's

legally mandated, we won't listen

to you. So now we're getting

stuck between like, we want to bargain.

We want to go to the table. We want to

meet with peds. But they are

creating these made-up rules

on how they want to bargain and meet with us 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 makes no sense we have like the same bargaining team members for all our shops we're in the one big union like it doesn't make any sense that they're trying to i mean it, it makes perfect sense for management to try to divide us. But it's what the workers want to be in one contract, to be able to do one grievance and go against management together.
But yeah, it's a really annoying thing. And it's really frustrating to not really know exactly what our next move is.
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 trying to get enough people organized around this sort of campaign. So the second place that they fail is before the first contract, or trying to negotiate the first contract.
And so every company just, like, tries to draw the shit out as long as humanly possible. Like, it took us, God, I think, what, two years in bargaining? And that's not even that, for a first contract, that's bad, but it's not even as bad as it can get.
And there's the other aspect of it too that you've been talking about, which is that the way that companies break unions is just terror, right? It's just a terror campaign a it is a campaign to inflict sort of fear and suffering on people 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 just ghastly and if you want to sort of take a step back and go, like, why is everything like this? It's like, well, that's because that's what this entire system is built on. It has always been built on.
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. The more people that we have pushing for 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. It's when we're together that it is the least effective, that they are the most scared by our tactics.
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, they still

don't have their first contract, sure, but they're

so much closer now

like over

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.

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. Yeah, it's a snowball rolling down the hill.
It's like the more shops are organized, the more that will convince other shops to organize and the larger that snowball is, the harder it is to stop its momentum. But what do you think the next steps are going to be for this campaign? If you can actually talk about it in terms of putting pressure on the company, in terms of drawing other people in, in terms of what's going on in the shops.
Yeah, I think one of the main things that we think that we've been really quiet about is how much union investing they've been doing and just talking to the public about that. 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. They're like the good company.
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.
Now they have like so many shops like across the world. They're like an international conglomerate.
They're part of like a large holding company and they got bought out like over 10 years ago 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. So a company that maybe was right and was maybe a little bit better is now like just going downhill.
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 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 just not with the way that they're union busting out 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.
Yeah. 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 is this is not a defense of like small businesses, which also do just absolutely terrible shit to workers.
Like if you ever worked for one, like, good Lord. but 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 like if you ever worked for one like good lord but you know like as as these companies get larger and larger and as as this sort of the the endless march of capital goes on you know you like you you see the current like nightmare of oh hey here's like an additional 50 of your workload and also you don't get tips on it 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 they're they're like 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 like i, like, I don't know, we're probably two years out from, like, the Chinese-style thing where you could order a 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.
Like, there are depths of even this algorithmic hell that we haven't hit yet. 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, you know, all of these sort of progressive brands are a thin veneer for exploitation and suffering. Absolutely.
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. 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.
They're even rolling out some like beta testing kiosk shops for Pete's in the Bay Area. and pizza's 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 they're

not even allowed to turn around and get coffee for the people. 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, 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 because, you know, if they're not bringing in any more revenue, they got to make that profit line go up somehow.

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 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.
Yeah. 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. Yeah, I think that's a good place to end.
If people want to support you all, where should they go? We'll also have links to stuff and what other things can they do to help? Yeah, so you can go to our social media at Pete's Labor Union. We also have our website.
We have an intake form. 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 contact through 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.
I'm sure there might be a shop near you already organizing and we can get y'all connected as well. Oh yeah.
And Jesus Christ, I had a terrible based coffee people of the world unite pun thing, but it's, it's slipped from my mind. All right.
All of you will be spared by terrible coffee related puns as long as you go organize your workplace. So go do that.
Go join the struggle, struggle go make it stronger and i don't know like there's going to be a number of you for whom this

is like not your terrain right and if this isn't your terrain find it find find the struggle that

you were going to do and wait and wage it there and take your field and hold it Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok.

You come across a video of a teenage girl

and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her.

And I was like, what?

Like, it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking.
It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan.
I'm a journalist in Los Angeles. And I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed.
I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media, so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time.
It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down their friend's killer.
This is their story. This is My Friend Daisy.
Listen to my friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband cheated on me with two women.
He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay? Hey Sam, that has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime podcast history.
Well John, that's because it's Dumpin' Week And this user writes, my partner told me when we first got together that he has cancer. He's currently living with his mom while he is in recovery so that it takes the pressure off me caring for both him and her baby until he's well enough to move into our new home with us.
Is it good so far? Well, last week we had attempted break-in. I asked my husband who was supposed to be at his mom's to come over and change locks, but he wouldn mom about it, who told me he doesn't have cancer.
She also informed me he was in rehab, not the hospital. He suffered from addiction and was trying to recover for me and our baby.
Did she leave him? Well, to find out how the story ends, listen and follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha all along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour.
It's musical mayhem and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man.
You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too.
We often... There's some cross-pollination happening in here.
Not like... No! Have we? No.
No. Not yet.
Never say never. I cannot wait for all you girls, gays, and theys to join me on this extremely special pink confection of a podcast.

There is so much darkness in this world, and what I think we could all use more of is a little joy.

Listen to The Dillon Hour on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Love ya!

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Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, because it could. 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.

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 the role of solidarity.

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.

I'm here with the one and only

Mia Wong. Oh, I keep

forgetting that you do an actual throw

instead of actually saying the name.

Not to worry.

Only been doing this for several hundred episodes now. You'd think, you'd think, but no.
Nah, you got it, you got it. Hello, I'm excited to do this.
Also excited for the Mexico episodes because Mexican anarchism is a trip. Uruguayan anarchism is also a whole lot of people digging tunnels out of prisons, but we'll get to that later.
We will, we will. So I will so as well to start off with i want to find out and i ask this question with tongue in cheek of course how familiar but you say you are with anarchy you know i have a very silly like kind of like how did i like actually finally become an anarchist because i've been around anarchists for a long time 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 so like max net law and them them sorts of people are so specifically it was a lot of like corrupts like hadashuzo and pure anarchism and in in toward japan which i've talked about on the show a hundred billion times stuff like that i actually think i read capoletti's anarchism latin america around that time too it's a very good resource yeah yeah so a 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 see is We'll see.
I'm excited to talk about it.

Yeah.

I mean, we'll see is right

because let's say I've been an anarchist.

When I was introduced to anarchism,

I would say somewhere around 2017, 2018,

through Christian anarchism, actually.

That was during my deconstruction.

I stumbled upon Christian anarchism

and briefly flated with it,

but didn't really get seriously into the studying of anarchism until like late 2019 early 2020 around the time and late in 2020 is when i started my channel 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 and the thing is there's so many interpretations of anarchismism, so many different schools of thought. I mean, that's not to say that it can't be defined or that any attempts to define anarchism is exclusionary or un-anarchist.
And I see that argument floating around. Well, no, you can't define anarchism because that's actually authoritarian.
But, you know, there are such a thing as definitions.

But there is room, of course, for a negotiation of meaning.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But let's say, if you had to define anarchism, like right now, what would you say is a non-negotiable, basic,

Thank you. But let's say if you had to define anarchism right now, what would you say is a non-negotiable, basic, fundamental definition for you? I mean, the opposition to hierarchy on a basic level, the opposition to the state, to capitalism, to patriarchy, to 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. But, yeah, it's the building of a society where we don't have power over one another.
I think it's like a very baseline kind of thing. Yeah, I think 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 you know i would say the definition i've been sort of workshopping uh sculpting over time um and as a writer i really like to play with words a bit and find the best ways to put things 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.
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. 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.
We're not just for the negation of all things, although there are schools of anarchism that do lean in that direction. 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? Yeah, Bakunin sucks in a lot of ways,

but the creative urge is a destructive one,

has the order of events correctly,

where, like, the point is to create something.

Exactly. Exactly.

And as you know, Bakunin is one of the

earlier thinkers of anarchism,

though I've never really been partial to him,

you know?

Yeah.

Usually I've been more of a Kropotkin and Malatesta kind of guy.

But lately,

as, you know,

so problematic as he is as well,

I haven't gotten into a bit more Prud'an.

I recently got the pictures of Prud'an Reader

that Ian McKay put together for AK Press.

Extremely problematic guy.

Oh boy.

Yeah, but he

certainly wrote a lot.

And so I want to dig through and see

what gemstones of his

work I can find, you know?

I think that's important

to sift through.

He's a mixed and baffling figure who also

was a pretty large influence on Marx

if you read him, even though Marx

Let's do this. 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 fredon's definition honestly i don't think fredon necessarily always had like a very consistent application of his ideas hence the misogyny despite being an anarchist and becoming a politician at one point in his life and all that jazz.
Yeah, and people may know this who listen to this show, but the term libertarian was invented by anarchists specifically to describe how they were different from Fredan because they weren't sexist. Like, it's a whole thing.
I actually wasn't aware of that. That's interesting.
Yeah. That's why in most parts of the world, libertarian is a term that means anarchist.
It's mostly largely in the US where that's not a thing because the right libertarians took it. Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, the US's cultural hegemony has sort of propagated that american version of the term as the popular one but yeah yeah 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 40th century thinkers. And we're sort of using their sort of explorations to build something of a political philosophy.
But in my definition, I call it a political philosophy, but that can be a contentious way of describing it, you know. Antipolitics is a term that's used to describe opposition to or distrust in traditional politics.
Traditional politics is usually associated with the art and science of government. So there are anarchists who would argue that anarchism is not a political philosophy, it's actually an anti-political philosophy.
I think these people are very... Okay, this is one of the things about being an anarchist, right? This is the thing about being a leftist, and it's something you have to be able to set aside when you have to do things but a lot of being a leftist is being annoyed at other leftists 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 it's like an affect thing I feel you to me it's like it's what I like to pick pick up look around at you know play with for a little bit put it back down kind of thing you know i'm not committed to it but i think it's like it's good to look at more than one angle of definition and understanding yeah i mean of course i suppose a critique that could be made of 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.
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.
This is something that I believe Graeber did in his life. He saw anarchism in one interview, 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.
In fact, most of us act like anarchists, even communists, a lot of the time. 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. 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 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.
Yeah that was with Graeber line. I think Ursula K.
Le Guin kind of had a similar relationship towards calling herself an anarchist Yeah that's possible that sounds really familiar yeah yeah I. Yeah, I think your line was like, she didn't feel like she could because you had to do it.
But yeah, it's a pretty common way of thinking about anarchism that I like a lot. Yeah, for sure.
Another part of the definition of anarchism that I put forward is the opposition to all authority. And that 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 as 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 authority. The definitions of those terms do get confused often because, like a lot of words in the English language, they do have multiple meanings.
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 another way in the same argument. 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.
Or that hierarchy, opposition to hierarchy is stupid because, you know, food chains or, you know, the hierarchy of needs. But as I 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 anarchists are for interest stratification of society, which gives some individuals, groups, or institutions authority over others.
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. And I really don't see the benefit in Chomsky's sort of unjust authorities or unjust hierarchies approach to define him.
Yeah, because, I mean, the thing about hierarchies is that every hierarchy argues that it's just. Like, you would get slave owners doing these whole speeches about the inherent morality of slavery.
It's not actually an ethical position that leads you to the opposition to hierarchy, because again, every hierarchy is self-justifying. 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. That is not an exercise of authority.
And the relationship between a parent and a child is something that can and should be interrogated. You know, that is a caretaking relationship, primarily a relationship of responsibility.
It does not have to be a relationship of authority in the sense that I suppose. Yeah.
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 harder to actually do politics that's useful. Exactly.
Because then it also makes it harder for people to question the authority they're more comfortable with or the hierarchies they're more comfortable with. So you'll see that where so-called anarchists say, oh, no, we don't actually oppose all hierarchies, you know, parents thing.
And it really, you see it in ground in a sense because you make it harder to identify and really question those things because you're shutting down that avenue of questioning, you know. And so 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 you know the right of authority is a guarantee to actions or resources that absorb the individual holding that right of consequences.
The right of authority compels and support needs the desires and needs of those below that authority. So, you know, authorities have the right to command, recognized and enforced by their underlings.
You know, they have the right to enforce the obedience of their underlings. They have the right to control all the properties the earth has been carved into.

You know, the right absolves them of certain consequences and sort of goes in one direction.

It's a unilateral sort of thing. 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. You know, an authority

can assault you, whether you're a soldier, a police officer, whatever. You cannot assault them.

Thank you. your house, but you can't take theirs.
An authority can assault you, whether you're a soldier, a police officer, whatever. You cannot assault them.
An authority can take the fruits of your labor. They can take from the wealth of what you produce, but you can't take from them.
That's theft. An authority cannot be an authority by themselves.
They have to have authority over. They have to have a hierarchical social relationship that deprives some to their benefit.
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. I read 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.
You know, just this morning, I was reading a bit of Emma Goldman and she was talking about Ferrer's schools. 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 imposition of authority is just extremely profound. 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. 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 fact would be gone in an instant.
It also only 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. 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. fortunately we have to go to ads

disaster fiasco

principles

in shambles

but here here's ads 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 marxist in particular love that's a conflation of authority with any use of force you know the the slave resistant slave owner is actually an example of authority incredibly silly people who are otherwise reasonably intelligent will just say this stuff it's like really what are we doing here just come on 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 they're not the source of authority they don't constitute and you could just as easily use them to resist authority. 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.
Like, that was their argument about federal tyranny, was that specific argument. So it's probably not a good theoretical basis for understanding what authority is if if you're if you're making the same argument as the southern plantation class it's gonna just just it's gonna leave the one out there exactly exactly and really we have to understand violence forces are things that are used by authorities but if i punch somebody in the face that doesn't't make me an authority over them.
If I defend myself from being a punch, that doesn't make me an authority over the person trying to punish me. 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. It's recognition.
The general of an army is not an authority because he's holding a gun to the heads of all the other soldiers and making them do things. The general is to be recognizing his authority because of his position and the privileges and rights and powers that that position gives him.
If tomorrow all the soldiers decided to turn on their general, has happened historically that is 100 possible that is an instance of force or a violence being used to resist authority yeah rather than being used to to you know be authority another thing that that gets confused with authority is influence or or respect so influence is really something, I mean, I might find somebody's abilities or qualities or achievements admirable, right? So I respect that about them. 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.
You'll find that a lot of the anarchist thinkers of the late 19th to 20th century, they were very influential. They were not authorities, but they had a profound impact on the people around them.
And they were profound inspiration to us even to today. Yeah, there's a paper I always think about where I found it, like a kind of liberal, well, maybe center

lefty academic, writing

about Malatessa, who we've

talked about a lot on this show.

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

So, when the Italian revolutions

are happening in 1918,

1919, Malatessa

comes back to Italy because he'd been

all over the world doing a whole bunch of other stuff.

And he gets called

like Italy's Lenin.

For those who have listened to some of my anarchist history episodes, you know, he kind of shows up sometimes. You know, he shows up in Egypt.
Literally everywhere. He shows up all over the place.
Yeah, all over Latin America. He's in the US.
And, you know, and so he gets called like the Lenin of Italy and this paper was about like, was he actually, did he actually act like Lenin? And the conclusion that they came to was like, well, no, he didn't try to, he didn't come back to Italy to attempt to seize control of the country. 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.

You know, a lot of the roles we have in the current system, coordination, authority get tied up together. 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 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 you know various regiments and that the soldiers within that regiment know exactly what their you know their goal is what their task is and how they can go about accomplishing it that is in many ways a coordinating role but it's tied up with the authority of the general, as in the right above the soldiers, you know, to command them, to enforce obedience, to punish, and that sort of thing.
So we get tied up between coordination and authority a lot, but coordination does not have to be tied to authority. In its simplest form, coordination can just be the communication of information between parties to ensure they work together smoothly and effectively.
That can and already does take place between equals. So, okay, here's a good example.
You're trying to move a couch into a house or an apartment. And for those of you who have had to squeeze a couch 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. 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 that person, okay, all right, so it's like this way. Because when you're lifting a heavy couch, you kind of just want to put it down.
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 the shared task that the people involved have can be executed effectively.
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.
Finally, one of the pet favorites of confusion is the confusion between authority and expertise. Authority and expertise are really an example of the equivocation I was

talking about earlier, because authority is a synonym for expertise by certain definitions. But the kind of authority I suppose has nothing to do with expertise, which is what Bakunin was talking about with his authority, the bookmaker argument.
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.

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.

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 just 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 marxist.org i think so it's like an incomplete version of that text available in one page and then the full version is available in the anarchist library incredible so you have people who basically use that that article to argue that actually you know vacuinen wasn't against authority but in context it makes sense what he's talking about authority there 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 he's just going to take their their perspective into account because he understands the incompleteness of his own perspective. That is a very different relationship from the sort of command and support nation that we see in an authoritarian relationship.
And while expertise often gets conflated with authority in positions in the current system, that often is damaging to authority itself. 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.
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, they trust them they trust them whatever the case would be of course there are places where because healthcare is inaccessible people don't have that relationship with their doctor but you know i'm speaking internationally here yeah 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 right yeah oh boy that is true that's a that is a time that is true that's that's the influence of you know cistern patriarchy and its its impact yeah and so it's also it's also an example of why you can't just sort of blindly accept the authority 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 health care 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 does not necessarily or should not have a monopoly on expertise and often does does not in practice have the full of the senate and the people who are produced by that institution do not necessarily have that full grasp and everything to see that you know they they can be treated as an unquestioned authority or expert yeah and it's something that you have to have a kind of balance between what you know kind of like neoliberal like technocracy where you get like we put the experts in charge and the quote-unquote experts running the economy like did 2008 or come on to like right-wing think tank yeah yeah and it's like on the other hand the kind of like reflexive contrarianism and desire to build a new expert that gets you like rfk jr as the future like Secretary of health and human services so you know you have to sort of like jesus you have to sort of like balance between sometimes these people fuck up and also vaccines are good this is not a problem that requires us to like fly through the pin of a needle we do have to have a little bit 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.

Yeah.

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 increase the sense of mistrust a rightful and valid mistrust in authorities that it can often be misdirected or exploited towards ends that are not necessarily equivalent so because these people in public health positions are tied up with the government people already don 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. 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.
So, I mean, I've spoken a bit about that those justified dogmas came at Swamsky a little bit, and we spoke about how that's sort of incoherent because every ideology opposes unjust hierarchies. So I think it's important that Anakism calls out all the justifications.

I'm sure you could think of some of the

main justifications that tend to be used.

One of the oldest justifications

is, of course, the divine rights of kings.

Yeah. That one's mostly

been broken. Hopefully we don't have to

deal with that shit anymore, but

I don't know. I have

eternal cynicism.

Maybe the American people yearn for the Trump dynasty. Yeah, we're going to create their god king.
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.
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. So, is it really consensual? No.
Some fucking assholes in Philadelphia, like 200 years ago, were like, we're going to set up a thing and also slavery is good. That's like, really? Like, what are we doing here? What do we, how, in what meaningful way did I agree to this? Yeah, exactly.
And it's not like I can step out of it. I mean, you, you hold a monopoly on literally every inch of territory on earth.
Some state leaves some claim to some part of the world. There's no escape.
So it's not a contract you can opt out of, you know. You know, another justification that authorities tend to use is an idea of meritocracy and economic Darwinism.
That the best of the best, they rise to the top. That there aren't really any systemic inequalities or structural barriers.
That there is a survival to the fittest, and the fittest win. And the losers are losers.
And they fail because they're losers. 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.
Another one is, also in conservative circles, the idea of natural hierarchy. The idea is that hierarchies are part of the natural order.
You know, people will use evolutionary biology or religious texts or scientific claims to justify the inequality between genders or races or classes. Colonial and imperialist powers, for example, would justify their dominance by claiming cultural superiority.
They would use ideas like the white man's burden and civilizing missions to enforce their authority over other peoples and their lands and that justification while questioned and challenged to be still is at the basis at the root of almost every institution in our modern world yeah it's something i think is going to become increasingly visible in the u.s over the next few years coming out of a period where it was like slightly more obfuscated but you know all of the people who are about to be

coming in in the U S over the next few years coming out of a period where it was like slightly more obfuscated, but you know, all of the people who are about to be coming into power, if you, 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 really pretty, pretty explicit ideology that they have that like of, of this sort of like racial superiority that they think they have.
That is the motivating ideological factor and also the thing that used to justify their power. Yeah, it's unfortunately becoming more and more open and common to see that sort of discourse on mainstream platforms like Twitter.

The necessity of order and efficiency tends to also be used as a justification for authority. The idea that authority is needed to maintain order, to keep things in place, to make decisions.

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.
It ignores all the inefficiencies of bureaucratic systems. It ignores all the harm caused by authoritarian systems.
It just says that, you know, we need these things to function, but we don't. One of the weirder artifacts of the 2010s was David Graeber had an argument with Peter Thiel, where they did a debate.
And one of Graeber's arguments is like, well, what do you mean our technological, our technical or technological systems mean that we have to organize our society in a way? Like, is the argument that you're making that technological possibility makes us less free? It's like, no. Ducks.
What are you talking about? You know, there's a lot of people who make these arguments who 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. 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. It's multiple organizations that coordinate their activities to ensure that, you know, you get your mail.
Or we look at even basic supply chains of goods and resources. it's not all handled by one central industrial body.
It's not all handled by the government or by one corporation. It's a set of relationships between groups, between companies, between mining companies and resource extraction companies and shipping companies and processing plants and factories and all these networks already not undertaken entirely by one central body.
They may be organized internally, hierarchically, but that can very easily change. 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. 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. They mean it in the sense of, instead of having one central authority, they have one to compete in authoritarian powers, a bunch of warlords fighting for power.
That is not anarchy in the sense that anarchists pursue. that is, you know,

petty authority fighting for dominance,

which is if you think about it really how historically states came into being yeah i was like what do you think we have now like what what do you think that like 190 something states are doing like i i don't know 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, how would like communes deal with war? It's like, wouldn't the communes just start going to war with each other? 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? And the answer is they're dealing with a problem of war by going to war with each other.
Like, what are we doing here? Exactly, exactly. 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. 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.
You can find me on

YouTube at AndrewIsle and Patreon at St. Drew.
This is It Could Happen Here, the show where we

chronicle collapse as it happens and explore how we might build a better future. And in my case,

I'll occasionally take a look at the past as well. And that's it.

All power to all the people.

The Greatest Good 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? And the answer in this case is anarchy. Last episode, I gave a definition of anarchism.
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. 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. I didn't get into the positive side of the definition.
So today I am joined once again by Mia Wong, also who does this podcast and who is excited to talk about building the new world in the shell of the old. Let's go.
Swankism proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, a world without rule where self-determination, mutuality, and free association form the basis of our society. The unending pursuit element is another important part of the definition.
You know, it's ongoing, it's a strive, it's not something, some perfect utopia that we reach and stagnate with it. In fact, it's not even assuming that people will become perfect anarchists.
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. The idea of anarchy being a world without rule is actually something that gets some pushback from some anarchists as well.
There's this sort of rules-not-rulers version of anarchism that has a lot of sway in some circles. Ah, the anarcho-constitution.
Yes, the anarcho-constitutionalists. It was popularized by the sort of direct democracy, libertarian Marxist crowd that kind of got their popularity in the 80s and 90s.
But it's not something that I consider an accurate representation of what anarchism strives for. 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 era of democracy thing.
They want to 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 rulers, it's also no rule.
I've been brought into this understanding by the efforts of the translator and the sort of scholar of anarchist history, Sean Wilwell, who in my opinion is putting forward some of the best historical analysis of anarchism today. 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. But in this getting into this sort of no rules definition of anarchy, a lot of people might ask, you know, wouldn't we still need rules? But of course, enforceable rules are just really a form of laws that are backed by authorities, which anarchism opposes.
And unenforceable rules are not really rules at all. They're close's a 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 in fact norms can be even more dangerous if we let them

slide as just the way that things are the way we do things around here yeah like patriarchy for

example something that is i mean like obviously yes patriarchy is enforced by the state and by

I like that. them slide as just the way that things are and the way we do things around here.
Yeah, like patriarchy, for example, is something that is, I mean, obviously, yes, patriarchy is enforced by the state and by explicit violence, but it is also really, really enforced by norms in a way that requires you to 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 exist to aid and to reinforce that authority.
We tend to speak a lot of the people, the community and stuff in anarchist circles, but I think it's important to make sure it's clear that there's nothing special about quote-unquote the people or quote-unquote the community. What the people or the community thinks is right and wrong should not be a litmus test on what is right and wrong.
There's no virtue in being a majority. And there's also no virtue in being a minority.
Because we can see with instances where there are minorities, such as the elite, the rich, who obviously have us over all the time. And 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.
So a litmus test is not majorities, what a majority votes for, what a majority wants, or what minorities desire. It's really the absence of authority, the absence of this sort of power over others at all.
And it's also inevitably the absence of permission and prohibition, the ability to commit things, the ability to prohibit things. When a thing is allowed and a thing is disallowed, yes, people can do what they want, but everybody else can also do what they want.
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 you do things and your things are open to like any number of consequences and so if you want to avoid negative consequences you gotta get informed 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.
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 at mutual interdependence. The problem with hierarchy is that in a hierarchical society, to access that web of mutual interdependence, you have to obey authority.
You have to take part in the authoritarian systems to have access to human community. 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 absence of rules and rulers that makes anarchism work because for one harm can never be fully captured by rules and rules cannot capture all the possible circumstances where harm could occur The But also for two, the existence of rule often provides protections for authorities. This is something we talked about in our definition of authority in the last episode.
This idea that authorities, there's a right that grants it in 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.
You know, the bank can evict you from your home, but you can't be throwing molotovs into the bank. 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.
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. And yes, we might approach concepts like best practice and solving problems and conflicts, but that'll be different from rules.
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 it's far more flexible. 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. It's difficult because of how we've been socialized, how we tend to view human nature.
It'll take time to develop these ideas to dwell on food. I'm still grasping some of these things and trying to understand them.
But between this episode and the next, and all the books and all the work that is being put out there to develop anarchism to bring it to more people, and of course through practice we can get a clearer sense of how anarchist organization can work in all of its harmonious complexity. 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.
But you can't have organization and complexity without them. 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.
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. 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.

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 or impose structures of exploitation and control.

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. Mutuality is feeling and action, a relationship that is based on shared benefit between individuals and groups in a society.
It is reciprocity, it is communication, it's a sharing of sentiments and an exchange of positive actions, and it's not unique to anarchy. Mutual interdependence, which is a component of mutuality, is also not unique to anarchy.
It can be found in pretty much every society because we rely on mutuality to survive and progress through our day-to-day life. 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. This is something that Kramer talks about.
In Debt the First 5,000 Years, he says, this is the glue that holds society together. 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? Of course.
You know, there are various prejudices, propagandized mindsets, socioeconomic systems, and material conditions that limit our practice of mutuality. But these are problems that anarchy seeks to rectify.
Obviously, issues like colonialism and white supremacy have fractured societies along racial lines and created distrust and competition where mutuality could flourish. The propaganda perpetuated by states and corporations also limits our capacity to imagine mutuality and create this sense of scarcity and this competitive mindset that creates an unnecessary dichotomy between the success of the individual and success of the collective.
Because of the very nature of these hierarchical systems are forcing us into exploitative relationships, things like mutual aid end up being replaced by transactional exchanges. Care and community become commodities.
Bater human needs become profit-driven markets. And the state takes on a lot of the role that was formerly filled by mutuality.
Now just the idea of disaster response, for example, is dominated by bureaucratic agencies that monopolize and direct the resources that could be used and more effectively used by people addressing their own needs locally. And of course, with the implementation of the property regime, with privatization, fencing off the commons that once supported communal life, it creates that sort of scarcity that limits our interpersonal practice of neutrality.
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. 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. They make it hard for people to form bonds of trust.
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. And then, of course, you have the intervention of the state into people's efforts to engage in mutual aid.
You know, the state punishes and criminalizes mutual aid efforts for migrants or for homeless people. You 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.
And all these are things that limits the free and full flourishing of mutuality. 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.
In fact, we can look at these limits and see what ways mutuality could flourish even further when they no longer exist. 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.
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.

Solidarity is about establishing

and recognizing the bond

between all people,

understanding that I sense again

from you doing well

and vice versa.

Remember that our system

incentivizes selfishness

that acts to the detriment of others. 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, but the real trick is really in creating systems that utilize selfishness to the benefit of others, making it so that even the most self-interested and self-absorbed 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. You can call it a kind of a selfish selflessness.
Yeah, and it's funny because that's the sort of justification that capitalism uses, that like, oh, if everyone purely acts in their self-interest, then everything will get better for everyone. 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. 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, it also ensures that that impulse and inclination has an extraordinary impact on the lives 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. 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.
Reshaping how we practice mutuality by building new habits of cooperation that work without rulers. And that's what social revolution is all about.
It's an ongoing and intentional transformation of our society, of our economy and culture and philosophy and technology and relationships and politics. It's the ongoing negation of all forms of authority and prejudice and the ongoing affirmation of freely associated equals.
It is in many ways a reconstitution of our natural initiative, our capacity for mutuality, and our responsibility for ourselves and each other, 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 they flourish.
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.
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.
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. To paraphrase Peter Kropotkin, practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other into all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually, and morally.
But mutual aid, like I said earlier, it derives its basis from our interdependence, which is another component of mutuality. Mutual interdependence is the very basic idea that we rely on each other for various aspects of our lives in every kind of society.
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.
Mutual responsibility is another manifestation of mutuality. And 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.
That actions are not pre-authorized or prejudged by external rules, but that each action is undertaken freely and subject to any number of responses, positive and negative. 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.
So anarchy demands a high degree of self-awareness, care, and reciprocity from individuals and communities. 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.
In hierarchical systems, punitive justice often escalates conflict. Imprisonment, for example, tends to breed resentment and resistance and further criminalization.
In anarchy, the absence of pre-authorized retaliation encourages us to find dialogue and to create restorative practices. 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.
So such a society will necessarily require responsibility. They're both responsibility for the environment and responsibility for other people.
You know, if you are costing the ecosystem its resources, you can't just offload that cost onto everybody else, as it's common in capitalist systems. 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.
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. 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.
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.
It's our beefed up and extremely demanding version of the golden rule. 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. and similarly our desire to prevent the escalation of conflict, to prevent threat to our being,

and to prevent the escalation of conflict, to prevent threat to our being, and to prevent threats to our social harmony or society's integrity, would thus develop a sense of mutual defense. It's in all of our interests 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.
And for 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 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. Free association is free from the impositions of wage labor, from the boundaries of citizenship, and from all other hierarchical relationships.
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 so being free from authority we still have to do what we have to do because we're still mutually interdependent 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. 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'll be unique to a particular interest, such as those who are interested in maintaining the cleanliness of a local river.
So groups don't just exist for the sake of existing. They don't exist to perpetuate their own existence.
They exist with a particular goal in mind, whether that is maintaining roads, producing and distributing food, or building housing. And then such groups may exist for a long time, or they may dissolve frequently.
They may split, or they may merge. They may overlap or come into conflict.
And the spaces Spaces where they interact could be called spaces of encounter. They can place in factories or in gardens, specifically tailored online platforms, or some sort of community center.
So free association may occur on the level of networks of individuals or federations of groups. But I need to explain the commune and the federation because those are things things that can be interpreted in a few different ways.
You know, federations, people might think of government, communes, people might think of, well, local government or counties or something of that nature. Yeah, hippie cults.
That's it. So anarchism will find ways to cooperate in ways that are not bound by the traditional boundaries of authority, and that includes the traditional boundaries of shared territory.
The anarchist commune has been confused very often with things like intentional communities or administrative divisions. 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.
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, a synonym for the grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The social commune soon cease to be a clearly defined entity.
Each group in the commune will necessarily be drawn towards similar groups in other communes. They will come together and the links that federate them will be as solid as those that attach them to their fellow citizens, and in this way there will emerge a commune of interests whose members are scattered in a thousand towns and villages.
Each individual will 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.
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 so don't expect to see like a bunch of like mini governments all over a bunch of mini community governments all over anarchy because an abstract group in that community may not even necessarily share many real interests in common 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. It tends to subordinate individuals to the will of a nebulous collective, a nebulous majority.
And so the alternative to this sort of polity form, as Wilbur describes it, is the federative principle, understood in its most radical anarchic senses. 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.
We can 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 interest or needs and establish the involvement in large-scale collectivities that are formed on the basis of those conversion interests. 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

but the recognition where relevant of expertise. So there might be such associations based on

armed defense or cohousing construction or agroforestry. There might be consultative

associations with a journalistic focus or with a rewilding focus or an accessibility focus. And they may exist on any scale, depending on the specificity of the information needed, from as a local as an apartment building to as far-reaching as a continent or even the entire globe.
Consultative associations could create blueprints, they could document their available labour and expertise, they can source resources and they can share feedback, also that interested and affected individuals and groups can easily access everything they need to make informed decisions. 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 their goals, resolve their conflicts, and maintain social harmony.
It can be difficult to imagine this possibility due to how thoroughly our disempowerment and domestication has been. 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.
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. 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.
Some are not convinced by intellectual anarchist arguments. They have to be transformed through experiences.
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. 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.
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.
End quote. 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, Andrew Zum, on YouTube.
I talk

about things like this all the time. I've been Andrew Sage.
This is It Could Happen Here.

All power to all the people. Peace.
Oh, welcome to Executive Dysfunction, a podcast that if you... ED? Electoral Dysfunction? Electile Dysfunction, a podcast that if you...
That's not what it's called. ED? Electoral Dysfunction? Electile Dysfunction? Executive Disorder.
Jesus Christ. Our weekly newscast.
Whatever. Covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
It's not about dick stuff. Sponsored by HIMSS.
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.
In my defense, I'm on a lot of podcasts. I was going to say, just because Robert Evans lives in like a constant podcast.
This episode, we are covering the week of February 12 to February 19. Let's start with a brief Eric Adams update, or as I call it, an EW.
That's the Turkish for Eric Adams update. 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.
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.
And also the city council speaker has called on the mayor to resign. 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, you know, Trump's efforts to have these charges dropped to help to help Adams make sure that ICE raids can continue in the city in a very, very clear quid pro quo.

So this is a developing story.

We will continue on the Eric Adams front as this changes.

By the way, people could 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.
We're not going to talk about them here, but it's very, very funny corruption. Yeah, if you didn't get the turkey joke, we explain it in detail there.
I'm sure people are familiar with the turkey situation in general. Alright, next, on a related note,

on Tuesday, President Trump instructed the DOJ

to fire all Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys.

Now, usually, these types of

appointments do resign

at the end of their

president's term, but Trump

just immediately going out to fire all of them

is new, unique, and

noteworthy. And Trump has

done some other noteworthy things to expand executive power. And for more on that, I will turn to Mia Wong.
Oh boy. So yesterday on Tuesday, the 18th, Trump signed an executive order that effectively is just him saying the words, I am the law over and over again.
The actual sort of content of the executive order is convoluted, but basically what he's saying is that, like,

the... I am the law over and over again.
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 of all government agencies.
And this is an end to a very, very longstanding practice of, well, OK, an attempt to end the longstanding practice of there being like independent regulatory agencies, which were set up by Congress.

And what Trump is doing here is claiming that, you know, this is the thing called the unitary executive theory. There's a whole history of this Republican Party.
This is the 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... 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 answered to him and not to Congress or as function as independent bodies like they were set up to be by acts of Congress.
It states that everyone's legal opinions that come out of these things have have to agree with legal opinions of the presidency. And 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 one of the co-authors of Project 2025.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So in some sense, it's a codification of the stuff he's already been trying to do.

Yeah. Ever since basically he got inaugurated again, they've been trying to push for this complete unitary executive power as like running the not just running the entire 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. 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 to 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.
like last week, he had the he who stays his country does not violate any law, which is like, I think a fake Napoleon quote. It's a fake Napoleon quote from a movie made in the 1970s in the Soviet Union.
I believe the name of the movie was Waterloo. That rules.
It's famous because they had some massive thousands and thousands of actual like soldiers, like set piece battles. 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. 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 yeah then again that was the that was the official twitter account of the white house which has also been doing some like unhinged posting including like asmr deportation videos yeah it's like really dark stuff like like viscerally upsetting yeah it is like the opening credits of a disaster movie the uh the white house twitter feed right now yeah it's like really dark stuff like viscerally upsetting yeah it is like the opening credits of a disaster movie the White House Twitter feed right now yeah it's the stuff like you used to not be able to talk about being a king in American politics pretty recently that's kind of the whole point of this country there's a state where the whole motto is Six Semper Tyrannus and the unit United States military.
Yes. Yeah, 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, you know, 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 like a big step yeah this is a massive step towards that and I think you know and again this is one of these things where we literally have no idea what the consequences of this will be because like 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 and this is stuff 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 has been talking about about.
My article last week on Shatter Zone underlines where they are going with this. And yeah, the consequences are so vast and unknowable because we've never had an executive that is kind of this successfully or this focused in his attempts to seize 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. Never been done before.
Like that. And also specifically that Napoleon quote about like he who saves his country, he's not violating the law.
That is literally the legal principle that Carl Schmidt developed specifically to put Hitler in power as the Fuhrer. This is great.
Musk and Trump have been saying stuff akin to that in interviews, being asked, how is Doge allowed to do this sort of stuff? Musk and Trump have been saying, well, the people voted for this.

We are enabling

the will of the people.

Even if that goes past

our technical authority,

it's what the people wanted, so we're going to

remove all these bureaucrats that ordinarily

would try to stop us because we have

the consent of the governed.

The mandate of heaven. Even if that

completely bypasses Congress, even if that

denies the courts, which we'll talk about more

later, they are willing to go as

Thank you. like the consent of the governed the mandate of heaven 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 as they can yeah and no one stopped them yet right like i mean some of the courts are trying but trying isn't good enough they seem to be an open violation of that though yeah like they were told to keep paying usaid stuff they just said they won't.
More on that later. Let's touch on immigration with James, and then we will have a quick break.
Yeah, perfect. Okay, so what I want to talk about is this.
It was first reported by the New York Times. I've since confirmed it with sources on the ground in Panama.
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 US doesn't have good relations with their government, right? There'll be Afghans, there'll be Iranians, people like that.
The US seems to have found a way to deport Venezuelans using an airline that was sanctioned until the day it apparently landed in the US military base to take Venezuelan people back to Venezuela. 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 Dalian Gap.
They came out late October and November of last year. 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. 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.

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.

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.
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. It's a vast detention facility.
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 too big for what its stated purpose was.
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. I've spoken to half a dozen to a dozen people who were detained there.
And I just got one quotation on it to read and then we can talk about this. 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. Jesus Christ.
So is this a result of like Rubio's negotiations with Panama? Like, how is this like logistically operating in terms of like the US dropping people into a totally different country that like they also just don't have citizenship to? Yeah. 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, they've 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. The United States Department of Homeland Security, the Secretary for Homeland Security, attended the inauguration of the new Panamanian president.
Like DHS and the Panamanian executive have a very close relationship got it the u.s was funding deportations from panama under biden they claimed that these were only people who had warrants for their arrest in the countries they were being deported back to 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 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 and like if you 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 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? Taking people. 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? Like whose custody are they in? Yeah.
Like, is this like a DHS black site? Like, is it? Yeah, no, absolutely. Are they on US soil in San Vicente? Certainly when I was there, it was secured exclusively by Panamanian authorities, not by US authorities.
So, like, 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? There's been reporting that Donald Trump is upset that his deportation numbers haven't hit the numbers that biden did yeah 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 i mean it's the entire motto of the new trump term in general and things are being broken yes they are yeah including lots of human rights conventions as 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. So those are the people who seem to be in legal limbo right now in Panama and San Vicente for a matter of time that we don't know in a status that we don't yet know or isn't clear.
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. 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.

So I would expect us to have something out on this

in the next couple of weeks, hopefully.

All right, let's go on a quick ad break

and come back to talk about RFK Jr. okay we are back i need to take off my plate carrier it's crushing me as james takes off his plate carrier that he's wearing for some reason 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 garrison say something rude or or offensive when I had to take my headphones off to take on my leg carrier? Yes.
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, no, they are beaten into a corner.
Oh, I didn't put up much of a fight. On February 13th, Trump signed an executive order establishing a commission to make America healthy again.
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.
Not great, not ideal. 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. To one of the, like, new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety.

Unquote.

Fresh thinking.

Yeah, like one of the like types of guys who I've run into when I'm out in the mountains

is people who like 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?

That's a fair enough assessment.

Sure.

To go from that to like, and I just want someone who will do something about it, so I guess this RFK guy is okay. No.
No. Everything in this order has the most dog-whistly language.
Oh, yeah. That not only directly targets life-saving medication, but it can also be used to target vaccines.
It's really worrying. And there's and there's a measles outbreak right now right in laredo like in texas 300 people last i checked in laredo around laredo yeah there's been an increasing number of measles outbreaks the past like five years in this country yeah 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.
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. Yeah, they ran out of child-sized coffins and had to ask for people to send more.
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.
Anyway, 10% off. Yeah, RFK gets you 20% off.
It's a good business to be in. 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.
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 lifestyle changes and changing your diet habits and a whole bunch of extremely worrying stuff. Section 5 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., is supposed to submit their findings that, quote, assess the threat that potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures posed to children, and assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight loss drugs, unquote.
The idea that we're going to be trying to take away people's antipsychotics while also making handguns more available across the country. Yes, more children with handguns, less children on antipsychotics.
But this is targeting depression medication, mood stabilizers, meds for ADHD, antipsychotics. And then also lines about certain chemicals absolutely being an anti-vaccine dog whistle.
Also, we have to mention, too, the diabetes part of this. Yeah.
Where that is an unbelievably alarming thing for him to be saying. Yeah, it's pretty bad.
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.
Yeah, and like, I'll just say, like, I've worked in diabetes education in the past, right? And in various 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.
Like, I know the people who have lost children and loved ones because of this.

And it is heartbreaking

to think that somebody,

normally it's somebody trying to make money,

would lie to someone about their health.

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.

On Tuesday, RFK Jr. 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. 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 glyphosate. So that seems to be some of their first targets.
Ah, 4G, 5G cell tower shit. Great, great.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, no.
I am excited for people to both not have food and also not have Adderall. That's really going to make quite an interesting mob.
Our economy is going to crash. If they remove Adderall, this whole country is going to cave.
No, we are going to see stockbrokers leaping out of windows at rates unheard of. That stuff works.
Either that or we are simply going to move to an economy that is entirely based on the consumption of cocaine and meth. One of these things is going to happen.
That's true. Adderall is going to be worth more by weight than gold.
People vans will be the new legal currency i'm gonna start storing them like peppercorns i bought a house with two months of vans yeah jesus 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. You can ask them to leave.
You can stay silent. You don't need to share personal information.
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.
And this is really upset Bordersar Tom Homan, who last week went on Fox News to accuse AOC of impediment, which is not a real word. 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.
I have a clip here I'm going to play in the podcast with Homan on Sean Hannity. When does it cross a line into aiding and abetting lawbreaking? Would it have to have direct involvement by her in helping people to evade ICE? That's exactly the question I posed to the Deputy Attorney General.
I asked him to look into it. I said, I know through my career someone steps in front of you and between you and the person you're arresting and repeating.
Yeah, that's a violation. 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? So I've asked that question to the Department of Justice for clear guidance so I can share that with the officers of ICE.
So we're looking for that clear direction so we can start taking action on people who want to help educate these people to evade ICE. So hopefully any day now we get that guidance sent out to the field.
Let's turn this over to a discussion. James, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this.
Yeah, this is kind of foundational to the Constitution, right? It's access to an attorney, the right to an attorney. And it's, again, something that, like, even under Biden, the DHS have been taking a swing at.
Specifically, we've done an episode last year about transferring detained people in ICE custody away from their attorneys, right? In 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. So like, you're either going to bleed that program dry, flying attorneys to Texas, or have them do it over a phone call.
But a lot of these people who are detained because they come from dictatorial countries don't feel like phone calls are secure. 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.
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.

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.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like, they're not going to tell you necessarily what rights you have.

No.

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 aoc he really wants her to get arrested for this thing that's not a crime? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what they're going for throughout, right? 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. 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. 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.
That is not a smart way to approach this. But yeah, like immigration agnostic, know your rights trainings, they're kind of foundational to constitutional rights.
They're pretty much front and center of things you're allowed. Do you know what else and center advertisements that's right it's in there article 22 it's like they can't put the

soldiers in your bedroom unless they're sponsored by i mean look depending on the soldier all right we are back. Mia, it's time for Tariff Talk.
Yeah, time for Tariff Talk. Tariff Talk! Dan, I'll insert a little musical jingle here for Tariff Talk.
Dan, I've not been an editor on this podcast for years, but sure. Tariff Talk, Tariff Talk, talk about tariffs.
Tariff talk with Mia Wong. There we go.
I thought Garrison said turf talk in a Canadian way. Very different podcast, much more cursing.
Why not? Mia, Mia, tariff talk. Okay, okay.
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 one of those is pharmaceuticals which would actually would actually like possibly impact transgender health care so there's my tie-in okay but the main thing is it's auto imports like computer chips and pharmaceuticals are supposed to get we think in april like a 25 tariff it's again unclear whether these these will go into effect. But I think it's worth noting this because, and this is something I haven't seen anyone put together for reasons that are absolutely baffling to me, but I actually think that a big part of the pharmaceutical 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.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
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 the cars, the auto import one, I think is pretty specifically, it's all auto imports.
I think it's pretty specifically targeted at Mexico because there's a whole bunch of U.S. auto, like full car imports from Mexico.
But yeah, 25% tariffs. We'll see exactly what happens with this round of negotiations.
But who knows? They might go into effect. This might also be part of the push for the U.S.
to seize Greenland. This is also less of a Trump thing, but I think it's worth noting the sort of seriousness that both the kind of people around Trump and also the media in Canada is taking a potential U.S.
attempt to just seize Canada. Oh, yeah.
They might really do that. 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 yeah yeah and trump's actions have really upset the country even the conservative factions yeah um you are seeing support for the for the liberals swell which has been like in like rapid decline for the past five years so it's actually actually causing a pretty big shakeup in Canadian politics right now, which I'm sure I'll do an episode on in the future.
There's even, I don't know if it'll, things are going to change enough to have a big influence. 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. That's so funny.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God them still doesn't have any juice quick send him to the uk we could kill reform now send him to the uk yeah god i would love to see that i i wish to get back on the war on woke front i'd like to talk about attempts to to purge dei uh gone, specifically in OSHA, who has now trashed workplace safety guidelines by banning and removing like 18 workplace training and safety publications per popular info.
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. 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, unquote.
The alleged reason for removal is because the document contains a sentence about how EMT workers work under, quote-unquote, diverse conditions, and that EMT agencies have a, quote, diversity of state-specific certification training and regulatory requirements, unquote. There was also a special education program dedicated to helping young adult special ed kids transition into the workforce that got cut.
And the suspicion is because it was a child program that included the word transition. Like, we're not going to know for a while the precise reason, but all of this lines up pretty well.
Well, I mean, I'm sure it would also be removing programs with the word disability, frankly. Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, and they're doing that elsewhere, too. I just, yeah.
And this is affecting a huge number of agencies, right? Like, we could do, and we probably will do whole episodes on this. 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. 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 1159 p.m., February 14, 2025. 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.

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.

This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the administration and this department rejects it. Unquote.
So even though they've been ordered to have these webpages still online, they are basically defacing the webpages with these notes from the Trump team. Yeah.
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 that's also a violation of the court order. Pretty much.
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.
But speaking of violating court orders, 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, you know, lawful ability to operate.
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. 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.
Now, longtime Social Security

official Michelle King has quit the agency amid fights to prevent Doge from accessing sensitive information. 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.

Social security is just one of the agencies that Doge is either gutting or has already gutted.

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? everyone who's receiving that fork in their own email,

but also just like top ranking like officials who've been doing this their

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, who should be fired. In late January, David Lybrick, 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.

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, actually five now, considering one this morning.
And then there's also that whole upside down Delta flight from Minneapolis to Toronto. And this is all happening amidst the Trump admin's mass firing of several hundred probationary employees at the FAA, an already understaffed agency.
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. Great.
Cool. Luckily,x has had no notable uh incidents and so i'm sure that will be fine no they didn't just hide a rocket going off there's there's good news there is there is good news on this front which is that uh president trump is very very mad that his new boeing like 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 so he's he's he's now encouraging them to like do a rush job on it and like let people in don't have the right security clearances so so this whole thing critical support to boeing critical support boeing you motherfuckers you have one job that is to produce an airplane at your normal quality and standards uh 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. So they were forced to turn around.
So again, critical support to Boeing. I only wish them the best in securing more and more government contracts.
Absolutely. You know, I think we, well, actually, we should probably call it as an episode before I make any more jokes about air travel.
Which is increasingly scary. I flew so much last year and I am less willing to now.
I do not want to now. That said, it is worth noting.
I think there's two things that are worth noting. 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.
Yeah. Those are much more dangerous than cars, like tiny personal aircraft, which is why I always enjoy it.
CES when they try to sell even less regulated flying cars. 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.
It's not about what's true. It's about what you can use to make political hay.
And this is something that you can hurt Republicans with. Every time someone dies in a plane crash, lay it at their feet, right? Like, what do you get from being honest? And it has been one of the more deadly months in aviation history.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Specifically for like American soil.
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. You make it, you make every time this gets in the news, you make it on their head, you know, it's certainly not helping, right? That like the FAA was already understaffed.
Like as you, as you said, people were already dying in plane crashes. Taking staff away from the FAA is not helping.

We can't isolate that from every crash that happens. And it's not just that.

It's also the continued hiring freeze.

Largely, air traffic control operators have not been affected by the firings.

Other support staff have, which are still just as crucial.

But it's also preventing them from hiring more air traffic controllers,

which they need to because it's so understaffed, which actually does lead to an increase of these like small plane collisions. And this is this is like a similar pattern across all departments, though.
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 and now usda is trying to rehire them have we explained the provisional employee firing thing that they're doing for all of these on here yet you should explain what a probational employee is well yeah it's employees that have been hired for less than a year and have different protections than other career employees. And part of Doge's campaign to do

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.

And this is just the first

batch of mass layoffs

because they're the easiest to do. They don't have

union negotiations.

They can't appeal the firing.

So this is the first step in

a larger series of events

So, let's see. Because they're the easiest to do.
They don't have like union negotiations. They can't appeal the firing.
So this is like the first step in a larger series of events that will lead to, you know, a severely reduced government workforce. And like the situation with the USDA is a very similar situation with the nuclear strategy employees who the government is struggling to rehire because they lost contact information with them after firing them.
They fired the nuke police! They fired the guys whose job is to transport and make sure no one steals nuclear weapons. The one kind of cop we can all agree we need as long as we keep having those things.
This is one of these things where it's like, I've been saying, not even really as a joke that millions of people are going to die from this, but like, if these people are not stopped... Oh, we'll have a broken arrow.
We are like two months into this. This is the second time they have tried to fire the police, and they actually succeeded this time.
Like, millions of people are going to die. And they their phone number they can't even call back like 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 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.
I have an episode on this that I'll put out at some point, but I, 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. And what I mean by that is an incident in which a nuclear weapon 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.
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.
Like, I'm talking about something incomprehensibly silly. And yeah, millions of people will at least potentially die.
Well, what another uplifting episode of It Could Happen Here. It Could Happen Here.
Stop them now. They're weak right now.
Before they do this. They could only get stronger.
Yeah. Well, until someone else gets a nuke, then all bets are off.
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. And Cool Zone would love to become a nuclear power.
Also, unrelated, we have a tip email, James, we're going to talk about. For legal reasons, this is a joke.
We do not want any nukes. It is coolzontips at proton.me.
You can contact us there. It is protonmailisencrypted.
That only means that the mail is encrypted 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.
If you'd like to reach out

to us, please feel free to do so.

Cool zone tips at proton

dot me.

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from now until the heat death of the universe.

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of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts Thank you.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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