All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Kash Patel: Trump's FBI Pick What Next for Syria? Luigi Mangione Was Radicalized By Pain The Moral Economy of Inflation or Why Trump Won You Already Know How to Organize You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources: Kash Patel: Trump's FBI Pick https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/politics/kash-patel.html https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/kash-patel-trump-national-security-council/679566/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/us/politics/kash-patel-bravado-baggage-fbi.html https://apnews.com/article/fbi-trump-patel-fisa-russia-2d215ded96ad8a08689b6f7f0b2d49ec https://www.mediamatters.org/truth-social/how-devin-nunes-and-kash-patel-appealed-qanon-extremists-build-truth-socials-user-base https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/kash-patel-fbi-trump-maga-merchandise-b2657380.html What Next for Syria? Defendrojava.org https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tJgepOyOt9cjXRjLE4kHdOhoCesJx-l_S9hJ2foQxnI/edit?tab=t.0 https://youtu.be/kuj8zPLY_4E?si=D2SVT1KBQzXwrxEU The Moral Economy of Inflation or Why Trump Won https://strangematters.coop/supply-chain-theory-of-inflation/ https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/157973/1/bna-259_20090522_nb_casp_full_indexed.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/650244See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Hi everyone, it's me, James, and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would like you to do, when it's very important to do so. Today, I want to talk to you about Syria, and specifically, northeast Syria.
So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have brought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing, and occupation by Turkish-backed jihadist groups.
In an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rojava revolution, Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forcibly displaced, and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worse, this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria.
If you'd like to show your solidarity with the people of northern and eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing emergency legislation to stop the violence, hold Turkey accountable, and commit U.S. support to the Syrian Democratic Forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today, you can go to defendrojava.org.
That's D-E-F-E-N-D-R-O-J-A-V-A dot org. If you are able to, the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives, one representative and one senator. The representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is 202-225-3461.
The other one would be Senator James Risch. He's an Idaho Republican. He's a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be 202-224-2752. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on DefendRoshaba.org.
If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to the humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations that I would suggest. The first would be Have Your Soul, the Curtis Red Crescent. That's H-E-Y-V-A-S-O-R.com. And you'll want to go slash E-N if you want to see their website in English.
You can donate there. The other one will be the Free Burma Rangers who are currently working in Raqqa. I was talking to my friend Habat who works with them. You can donate to them at www.freeburmarangers.com. We will put all of this in the show notes, all the URLs. So if you're driving, you don't have to write them down.
Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now in what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in North Syria. Thanks. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about Garrison Davis talking to me. Also, the world falling apart. How do you feel about that, Gare? How are you doing?
I'm pretty used to it by now, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. We've been doing this whole thing for quite a while. You sure have. Have you noticed that some of these cabinet picks are a little funny? They're a little bit odd. Have you noticed that yet? I don't know. I get kind of a funny feeling about some of these guys. Have you heard about this? Are you hearing about this? Yeah.
I don't love it either, Gare. They don't seem cool and good. I mean, not all of them are sticking around, I guess. Matt Gaetz is now out of the job. Tragic. Kind of like Icarus. He flew too close to an elementary school. Yeah.
We've already got our Scaramucci. I was going to make a Scaramucci joke, but your joke was much better.
It was a really fast turnaround for Gates, too. Yeah. And now we're all watching Pete to see if he secures the top job at the Pentagon. But today we're talking about this other guy named Kash Patel. How do you feel about Kash Patel, Robert?
Uh, not thrilled. Kind of worried. Not thrilled. Matt Gates really seemed like the kind of guy you use to make your sketchy secret police. And Kash Patel is, I guess, your backup to that guy. Totally. Yeah.
Yeah, or at least like, I don't know, Cash is different in a few ways. Like he does a lot more kind of dirty work because he's not like important as a person. He just wants to like be seen by Daddy Trump.
And this episode, we're going to get into a little bit of Cash's backstory, what his plans are for the FBI, as he is now nominated for the position of being director of the FBI, as well as kind of what Cash has been up to in the four years since Trump's been out of office. So let's just start all the way back to the beginning for background on Mr. Patel here. Okay.
So Kash Patel was born in New York, but after graduating law school in 2005, he worked as a public defender in Florida for nine years before becoming a federal prosecutor in the National Security Division of the DOJ.
Mm-hmm.
He didn't really want to be a public defender. It's that he really couldn't get any other jobs because he wasn't, like, that skilled. So he ended up just working as a public defender, even though it wasn't really what he wanted to do out of law. But once he got to the DOJ, he worked as a terrorism prosecutor.
According to a DOD profile, Patel, quote, "...led investigations spanning multiple theaters of conflict and oversaw the successful prosecution of criminals aligned with al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terror groups," unquote. Patel also worked with, quote, counterterrorism units to conduct collaborative global targeting operations against high-value terrorism targets, unquote.
Great. Okay. I'm sure he was good at that job. I'm sure he doesn't have any really embarrassing failures during that period of time.
No, no. I say that just for kind of his like more like surveillance background. But we will certainly get to his ability to complete these jobs on a reliable basis.
And like, although that info is directly from the DOD's website, Patel himself has exaggerated his career record, claiming in a YouTube podcast to have been the quote unquote lead prosecutor in the case against the 2012 Benghazi attackers.
Patel actually was not even part of the trial team, was only a junior staff member at the DOJ at the time, and he was removed from this case for clashing with the U.S. Attorney's Office. But this incident kind of marks the start of a few unfortunate events in his career that really started to kind of turn Patel against the justice system.
According to the New York Times, in 2016, Patel was thrown out of a courtroom for wearing, quote, rumpled khakis, boat shoes, and a too small borrowed jacket, unquote. Sigh.
I hate that he's got a My Cousin Vinny in his record because that movie is great and it gets me on his side in a way I definitely shouldn't be. Did he come in next wearing like a funeral director's tuxedo? Or a fucking band leader's tuxedo? Whatever. I don't know how to describe the tuxedo Vinny wears in the scene after that. Anyway.
No, he was just kicked out of the courtroom with the judge saying, quote, if you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer, unquote. Now, this judge was also like a racist asshole. Yeah. Not defending the judge here.
And to be clear, Kash Patel was not dating Marissa Tomei. He could never pull Marissa Tomei. He could never pull. I mean, honestly, Joe Pesci. Who can? Who can? That's...
But this incident is like an important part of his career trajectory. A profile in The Atlantic details Patel as growing increasingly frustrated and disillusioned by his failure to navigate and rise up in the justice system.
Just collecting more and more personal grievances that fuel an animosity towards the bureaucracy of the legal system based on people's apparent unwillingness to like help him excel in his own career.
But in 2018, Patel got his really first big break with Republican Representative Devin Nunes hiring Patel to be the House Intelligence Committee's lead investigator to disrupt the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump was impressed enough with Patel's work under Nunes that he gave Patel a job on the National Security Council and later served as chief of staff to acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. Trump mused about having Patel as deputy director of the FBI or director of the CIA in late 2020 after the election.
But this led to harsh resistance from within his own administration with AG Bill Barr saying that Patel would only become FBI director, quote, over my dead body, unquote. So I don't know if we'll have any updates on that. Yeah, we'll see. But instead, back in 2020, Trump just put Patel on the Pentagon transition team.
Trump basically tasked Patel with doing dirty work and awarded him with promotions for following orders. Patel advised on the Ukraine impeachment, spread conspiracy theories that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 election, created a list of intelligence agency officials to fire in February of 2020, and helped manage the now dismissed classified documents case against Trump.
The former deputy national advisor to Trump, Charles Kupperman, said in an interview, quote, Trump wanted to make cash a political executioner to root out and fire individuals on the White House staff who weren't being as loyal as he thought they should be, unquote. So that's kind of a good look at him as a person and like what Cash's role is, like specifically for Trump.
And with the possibility of the justice system becoming just more and more of like a tool to target Trump's political rivals, Cash is the exact guy that you would pick, especially for a job that has like an investigative focus like the FBI. But Cash isn't always good at his job necessarily. Well, who amongst us? We're going to talk about one specific incident here.
That's one of the wildest stories in national security that I've ever read. In October of 2020, four days before the election, the Pentagon was planning an operation for SEAL Team 6 to rescue an American citizen, Philip Walton, who was kidnapped in Niger and being held in Nigeria.
As the State Department was working to communicate with officials in Nigeria to clear airspace for the operation, Patel, who was not part of this operation, just called the Pentagon, saying that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had gotten approval from Nigeria and the airspace was de-conflicted.
So, as the SEALs were about to land in Nigeria, defense officials couldn't verify that the flight actually had clearance, leaving the aircraft to circle over the target for hours as they scrambled to get approval from Nigeria.
According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Patel was never in communication with Mike Pompeo about this mission, and defense officials concluded that Patel, quote, made the approval story up, unquote.
cool guy this is wild you almost got seal team six like shot out of the air because you made up a story about having a flight clearance it's like it's crazy yeah I mean this is exactly the guy you want running the FBI for sure A Pentagon official yelled at Cash, quote, you could have gotten those guys killed. What the fuck were you thinking?
To which Cash replied, if nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares? Amazing stuff.
Amazing stuff. Let him cook. Crazy stuff. Look, here's the thing, Garrison. If it had gone the worst possible way it could have gone, we'd have been saved at least four interminable books and at least three podcasts.
So like people like interviewed in The Atlantic and I think the author of The Profile on Cash kind of muses that like maybe Cash just wanted this operation done before the election to give Trump like an extra win leading up to the polls. I don't know. It's certainly odd. But like Cash has a very like inflated sense of like personal worth.
In an interview with Glenn Beck, he talked about how people should trust his expertise because, quote, I've read the entire JFK file. Well, I mean, geez, you and Oliver Stone. He makes comments like that. It's like, no, no, no. Like, trust me, I know everything. I've read all the classified stuff that you're not allowed to. I'm like the smartest guy in the room. I've read everything. Right.
Like he's he uses this as like a as a way to like inflate his own personal worth. And like flex to weird right wing online podcast grifters.
People have made this point, but it's guys like this that have convinced me that there's no, at least no like perfectly known to intelligent smoking gun about the Kennedy assassination. That shit would have leaked so quickly. No. If not before Trump was in office, then certainly by the time he was.
Yeah, because you have guys like Kash Patel reading these files. There is nothing in there.
Or at least if there is, it's the kind of thing. There may be a smoking gun that someone who is deeply knowledgeable at the time period would be like, oh, the fact that this guy was here at this time really means that this other thing happened. But Kash Patel doesn't know shit.
He's not smart enough to put any pieces together. Or maybe they're just even still redacted and the versions that he's reading don't really have any pertinent info.
Right. People are just like, let's not give this guy the real ones.
This guy who lied about prosecuting the Benghazi attackers and almost got SEAL Team 6 killed?
No. Oh, man. And of all the SEAL teams to get killed, too, that's the one that would be the biggest news day. Do you know who would never kill SEAL Team 6, Robert? I'm never going to say never about killing SEAL Team 6.
Well, I mean, hopefully, allegedly, these products and services would never wish harm upon SEAL Team 6.
Mm-hmm.
Alright, we are back. I'd like to talk a little bit now about Patel's actual plans for the FBI. Now, this job does require a Senate confirmation. So we will see, you know, if he gets past that process or if he's going to get pushed in through recess appointments, which we still don't really know if Trump will be able to pull off.
But in terms of the FBI, we do have some idea about what Cash has in mind because he spent the past two years just talking about it nonstop in books and interviews. Yeah, because he, like all these guys, cannot shut up. Can't stop talking.
Why?
In an appearance on The Sean Ryan Show this past September, Patel said, quote, I'd shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state, unquote. Okay.
Okay. Cool. Sure. I do feel like you're underestimating the expense of office space and overestimating the availability of it, but sure, why not?
Yeah, I don't think they can make a whole museum turn around in one day.
But I also I also think you are really, really underappreciating docents. It is not easy to get a docent up to speed. Like, for example, it's a much harder job than you currently have.
No, like Patel does talk about like trying to like clear out like the bureaucracy and red tape of the FBI. And and though he has criticized the wide footprint of the FBI and its surveillance operations, though really only the ones targeted against Trump and his campaign.
Cash's ideal FBI would not, in fact, have like a more limited presence out in the world, saying that after closing the Hoover building, quote, then I'd take the 7000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You're cops. Go be cops. Unquote. So this is what you give like a seven year old the keys to the FBI.
And this is this is this is the kind of stuff he's talking about. Yeah, it's like I'm going to send all these administrative employees out into the world to chase down criminals.
Now, you say that, Garrison, I absolutely would put a seven year old in charge of the FBI. You know why? That's a blockbuster movie. Now, to be fair, that's a 1997 blockbuster, but man, that could- Yeah, no, it's like 30 years ago. Can you imagine a young Mara Wilson running the FBI? Fucking- Kid FBI, yeah. Oh, perfect.
You know, if we said it a little bit further, we could have like Will Wheaton as like the villain. Yeah, Will Wheaton as the evil kid heading the CIA.
They also put Will Wheaton in charge of the CIA. Yes! Damn. All right, you know what, Garrison? This podcast is done. You and I are writing a screenplay tonight. With the power of AI, we can just generate this whole movie instantly. Perfect. With a truly ghoulish guest appearance by Robin Williams. Just the worst taste imaginable.
No. Sorry, President Williams. Goddamn. Oh, dear. Nightmare. Nightmare fuel. Now, it's really unclear if, like, Cash's plans here are, like, rhetoric, right? Like, you know, more vibes than, like, actual plan. You know, like, expressing some kind of sentiment rather than, like, an actual practical, like, plan. But last year, Patel published a book called
titled Government Gangsters, The Deep State, The Truth, and The Battle for Our Democracy, where he also proposed relocating the FBI headquarters out of Washington, D.C. to, quote, prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship, unquote.
Though the bulk of this book also details like why we must root out politicians, journalists, big tech and quote unquote members of the unelected bureaucracy that operate the deep state. So, you know, like the FBI engaging in a little bit of political gamesmanship is OK.
In the appendix of this book, it contains the names of 60 alleged members of the deep state, most of them either like former Trump cabinet people who like turned on Trump or just like current Biden admin people. It's all pretty silly, but it's not like he actually plans to take out political prosecutions away from like the FBI's operational structure.
Like, come on, buddy, this is like your entire plan. In an interview with Steve Bannon last year, Patel reiterated the goal of targeted prosecutions against political enemies, saying, quote, Yes, we're going to come after people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you, unquote. So that's cool.
Again, this is, this is the basic stuff that Trump's been promising since like, you know, the past four years going after journalists, going after politicians.
Yep.
This quote specifically also just like reminded me that like, there's like a real possibility that like the head of the FBI legitimately thinks the 2020 election was stolen. And like, Then I got to thinking like how many of like the people operating the highest levels of government now genuinely believe the election was stolen in 2020, which is like kind of kind of threw me for a loop.
I like didn't really like process that like concept of like how just broken the reality structure will be with something like so like clear. Yep. That's his FBI plans.
Yeah. Great. Well, it seems like it's going to end well for everybody. I don't know. What do you think? Do you think he's going to get confirmed? Because he's one I'm seeing people are focusing now that Gates is out. People are focusing way more on Hegseth, which is probably the priority because, my God, that man should not be leading the Department of Defense anymore.
Because he's going to start a war, yeah. He's going to drunkenly and accidentally start a war. I'm not even worried about him launching a conflict with China, right? We're going to wind up fighting an insurgency against the Portuguese because he gets fucking hammered and mixes up a couple letters. I mean, I'm also really concerned about Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard is top of my list because she has just never met a dictator she doesn't like. And yeah, that's a scary person having that job.
Patel is really bad. And we're going to get into some more of his kind of crank beliefs. But there is a level of base incompetence. The fact that Tulsi has been able to get into this position despite... very clearly having like deep sympathetic ties to Assad and Russia is like super frightening.
She's evil, but smart and incredibly power hungry. That's all that matters to her is getting into power. And she has things that she believes and what we know of the things that she believes is chilling. Like, yeah, but that's, we don't, we're talking about someone besides Tulsi today.
Yeah, yes. Now, since 2020, Kash Patel has served on the board of directors for the parent company of Truth Social called Trump Media Technology Group. So he's been part of the team operating, you know, Trump's version of Twitter.
And back in 2022, Patel was openly talking about how like the Truth Social staff were trying to, quote unquote, incorporate QAnon into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences. So this is the section where we're going to really get into Patel's super, super heavy Q ties, which is kind of like a throwback, right? We don't really talk about QAnon as much anymore.
And I don't think Patel's interest in this is genuine. I think it is just to like grow both his own brand and help boost the stock of Truth Social. It's still like the closest that anyone in Trump's team has gotten to like openly endorsing QAnon and like repeatedly, right?
True social staff operate an account at Q, formed to piggyback off of QAnon's popularity and draw in popular QAnon influencers. In February 2022, Patel posted a photo of a beer pint and the arm of someone wearing a flannel shirt with text saying he was, quote, having a beer with Q right now, unquote.
Patel continued to frequently interact with the Q account, make QAnon-related posts, and do reoccurring appearances on QAnon-linked podcasts. Most notably, the X-22 Report, the Matrix XXX Grove Show, and Red Pill 78. It's been a while since I've listened to these types of shows, and it was like a huge throwback. Oh, man. And they're like all chugging along.
And now they're like chugging along better than ever, which is, you know, not ideal for me. On these shows, Cash has praised the QAnon fandom researchers, saying both he and the president have been impressed. It's all like very pandering, but it really works for these people.
I've seen on social media, on Truth Social, how good these researchers are. And I kind of wish I had some of them when I was doing Russiagate and some of these other things. You know, Devin and I talk regularly and then, you know, I talk with the president all the time as well.
And we're just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have and how quick they are to to grab it and suss through it and sort of thin it down and make it presentable.
Later in that interview, Patel openly said that he publishes government documents on his website, fightwithcash.com, specifically so that QAnon researchers will dig through them to make QAnon content. He openly said that's why he posts these documents.
See, again, I'm sympathetic. Everything I do is for content, Garrison. That's just the way the world works now. The content must flow.
You know, Patel also has books just like you, although he's been signing copies of his with the QAnon phrase, where we go one, we go all. I mean, I do that too. And he has defended his use of the slogan on these QAnon podcasts, like in this clip from the Matrix XX Groove Show.
Where we go one, where we go all is, as you said, from a great movie that I watched a long time ago and people took to it.
and so what you know it doesn't mean everyone's a conspiracy theorist and people keep asking me about all this q stuff i'm like what does it matter what i'm telling you is that there is truth in a lot of things that many people say and what i'm putting out there is the truth and how about we have some fun along the way there's so many people who subscribe to the where we go on we go one all mantra and it's a it's what's wrong with it
I'm going to quote now from an article in Media Matters by Alex Kaplan, who's been reporting on Patel and his ties to QAnon since 2022.
Quote, on yet another show in June of 2022, Patel went even further, saying of QAnon, quote, we try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the mega and America first movement.
And so what I try to do is, what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can't ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following, unquote. In that interview, Patel also said of QAnon, there's a lot of good to a lot of it. And he agreed with the co-host who said, Q has been so right on so many things, saying, quote, I agree with you.
He should get credit for all the things he has accomplished because it's hard to establish a movement. Let's call it that because that's what it is, unquote. Oh, boy. Do you know what's also hard to establish, Robert? An alibi? An alibi. And, you know, some people's alibis could be reading ads like the one that we're about to do right now. That's right. That's always my alibi.
That really is always your alibi.
Yeah.
All right. We are we are back. Now, in these podcast guest appearances, he would often plug his book and advocate that listeners just join Truth Social. And engagement with these more niche online streaming shows and podcasts fortifies the right-wing online media ecosystem and draws people away from mainstream news. This is why he was going on those shows so much back in 2022.
Patel basically says as much on this episode of the X-22 report.
They will never trust the fake news media again. And for us, that's always been the championing cause to get our people and mainstream America listening to your show rather than CNN and reading the New York Times and the Washington Post.
And I think part of why he's doing this and whether he was told to do it or whether he just did it on his own volition is that like having someone who's seen as being close to Trump, especially with national security experience, it helps keep Trump supporters politically engaged by making them feel like they are getting special access to like exclusive information.
It's all a part of keeping the mega movement alive when their side is not in power, while also building up a ground base of support in preparation for them to take power back. And that's what he did like a lot in 2022. Most of those podcasts were leading up to the midterms as well. So it is part of this general political strategy to engage with these like
much more niche, kind of smaller QAnon shows, which not only does grow their audience over time as well, it does help their audience grow. It also just establishes a completely siloed media ecosystem away from mainstream news. That is part of what they're doing. That's why Trump made Truth Social, is to create more of these reality tunnels, more of these information silos.
Now, Patel kept busy in between 2020 and 2024 with a variety of kind of grifty ventures. I'm going to quote from the New York Times here, quote, Mr. Patel's company, Trishel, collects consulting fees, including $130,000 last year from Mr. Trump's Truth Social site. He also made $325,000 over two years for strategy consulting for the pro-Trump Save America PAC.
and $145,000 in 2021 for fundraising consulting from friends of Matt Gaetz, the campaign committee for the now former House Republican from Florida, unquote. Now, last year, Patel's nonprofit charity, The Cash Foundation, received $1.3 million in revenue, mostly from donations, though its reported expenses totaled $674,000. Wow.
Which is the majority of the money, and nearly half of that was spent on promotion and advertising. According to the New York Times, the charity spent more on ads than they actually gave away. Which is fantastic charity work. Oh, fuck. Good work. Through this foundation, he also sells cash merchandise, which is spelled K money sign H. Yeah, that guy's going to really FBI well.
Including six packs of wine for $240 and $50 golf polo shirts. Part of these polo shirts have this like, you know, like pro-America branding. I want to read the description of one of them. Tired of seeing your money go overseas? Support your fellow Americans by purchasing our t-shirt. Where do you think this t-shirt's made, Robert? China? Well, it's made in Haiti. Oh, Haiti. Oh, okay.
The America of the ocean. And South America. So, you know, you're still supporting Americans. Just South Americans.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, my God. Now, this foundation has also funded defamation lawsuits for a Stop the Steal activist and his friend and former boss at National Intelligence. But Patel's grifting does go beyond his foundation. Just earlier this year, Patel was hawking anti-vaccine supplement pills from the company Warrior Essentials. Wow.
Specifically, the pills that claim to reverse the effects of the COVID-19 vaccine. I love that. What if these pills just give you COVID? They're just COVID pills?
Yeah, yeah. You just want to get COVID.
Want to reverse the effects of the vaccine?
It's a performance enhancer. You know, if we could convince, well, let's see, if we could convince Joe Rogan COVID's a performance enhancer, I don't think we could get Joe Rogan's fans to spread any more disease than they already do. Than they already do, yeah.
That's impossible. So this product that Patel was selling is called No-COVID-Em. And it's allegedly formulated to, quote, destroy the toxic spike, unquote, caused by the mRNA vaccine.
Now, we should have called the COVID vaccines no COVID-em. It's a good name. That was just leaving money on the table. Or Novid. Novid's good. Novid would have been a great name. Novid's good.
Novid's good. Yeah. According to journalist James Little, these no-COVID pills just contain basic supplement ingredients like turmeric extract, green tea extract, and vitamin D. Great. Yeah. A subscription for a 30-day supply is for $49.98. Jesus Christ. And a single order of pills is $59.98.
They're really pushing the subscription because you got to keep doing more pills every 30 days in order to really keep the vax suppressed. In a post this past February on True Social, Patel truthed, spike the vax, order this home run kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax, unquote. My God. I just can't believe that a guy like this could be FBI director. It's just, it makes me.
It's, it's, I mean, it probably will wind up being much more dangerous, but there is a version of this where the FBI just pivots to selling supplements. All right. Like where you, where you get, where you get your estrogen and testosterone from the FBI. Ooh. Look, as long as it's marketed as like a performance enhancer.
I would love to believe that a guy like this will lead to just general incompetence, but I just can't let myself believe that. Like, I think it's just going to become more and more targeted against like people who are good.
Yeah, they're going to start. Yeah, with them. I mean, it looks like just based on his enemy list, they're going to start with
biden administration officials and people in the government but like it won't end there it's going to depend on what happens like it'll be a reactive violent organization which to a degree it always has been but there's always been like more of a sense of like predictability that will not be present
And specifically, like, you know, Patel has also been a recurring gray zone guest and is pretty close with that whole crew. That's, you know, not great for certain people. But he really is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of like odd anecdotes. including his trilogy of books, which will be kind of the last thing I talk about here.
So over the course of the past three years, Patel has written and published a children's book trilogy titled The Plot Against the King, where Patel himself appears as a wizard to defend King Donald from enemy plots. Oh, God. Uh...
The one thing we all used to be able to agree on is that we don't like kings here.
No, but now we have the FBI director who fancies himself the wizard to protect the king. I am going to read the description from the first book here. Quote, a fantastical retelling of the terrible true story. Hillary Quinton and her shifty knight had spread lies that King Donald had cheated to become king. They claimed he was working with the Rushionians, but how could that be? Rushionians?
Rushion-onians. It's bad. Okay.
R-U-S-S-I-O-N-I-A-N-S. This is the kind of thing the FBI should be cracking down on. Yeah. So that's all I'll say about that.
Cash, the distinguished discoverer, join him as he uncovers the plot against the king and who was really behind all the lies, unquote. Now, Patel referred to this as, quote, the first ever children's Russiagate book, unquote, which I got to give him to him. That's probably true. That's almost.
Well, no, because, OK, you know what? I don't think it is. But it came from the opposite side. You remember when the fucking Krasenstein brothers put out that children's book about Robert Mueller? No. No. Yeah. No, you're right. Yeah.
This is another lie.
With Weave Bannon because his hair was a weasel, I think. Yeah. This was another lie. This was another lie from Cash. The Krassensteins beat you to this. This is truly the tier of man we're operating with. I'm going to start pulling every connection I have to somebody in Congress so that when he's being confirmed, I can get up and hit him on this.
You claim to have written the first children's book that I bring in the Krassenstein brothers? No. Oh, they're going to sell MTG on crypto.
It's going to be amazing. Unfortunately, there's two other books in this series. Part two, quote, tells the fantastical story of how two inquisitive minds, Dinesh and Debbie, search for the truth to uncover evidence of a terrible scheme.
Dinesh, who has been forced by a court to announce in public that he did not uncover any scheme.
part two is titled 2000 mules it is no longer available on amazon due to like all the lawsuits around this just being fake because they broke a bunch of laws because it was criminal and lies yes search for the truth to uncover evidence of a terrible scheme to elect sleepy joe instead of king donald on a choosing day unquote choosing day just called it election man no because it's a king it's when they choose their king
There are kings that are elected anyway. The back of the book reads, come join Dinesh and Debbie as they try to answer some troubling questions. Why did the counting stop in the middle of the night? Why were there more votes than people in the kingdom? What is up with all the glowing poo? Unquote. That is what it actually says. Now, why? I'm not. What is the glowing poo supposed to be?
I don't know because I can't scam Amazon to buy the book and return it because it's no longer available on Amazon. I don't know what the glowing poo is. Sorry. Listeners, if one of you has a copy of this book. Oh my God. Then part three is titled Return of the King. Okay.
Quote, it continues the silly yet important journey of the Maga King as he returns to take down Kamalala and reclaim his throne. Unquote. Okay. So yeah, that's Kash Patel, possible new FBI director. Oh, who also produced a song titled Justice for All, which is a version of the national anthem, but sung by all J6 defendants in prison with proceeds going to the Kash Foundation.
So he also released a song, which was not on my wrapped this year, unfortunately.
That's a shame. And I'm just double checking something. Yes. And he stole the name of his song from a Metallica album. One of the better Metallica albums. This is the one that has one on it. Oh my God. You son of a bitch.
I mean, it's just, it's so odd to have the FBI director making a song with imprisoned J6 defendants. You know, it really does just throw my head into a little bit of a spin.
Yeah. It'll be interesting to see the current FBI agents react to that. But I guess we'll see. We're all going to learn a lot about the FBI one way or the other.
Any closing thoughts here on Mr. Patel now that we've done a very brief overview of his life story ending with this children's book? He seems like he's qualified to do something. That's what everyone's saying. That's what everyone's saying.
Every single person who's announced, you get a wave of headlines from people who work in government being like, this is the most unqualified person ever nominated for this position. It just keeps happening. I don't even feel obligated to quote or say any of these things because we all know what's happening. We all know why this is going on. That doesn't matter.
No, and I think that's one of the things I have no desire in focusing on, like what Trump is doing. That's like he's breaking the law. He's violating a norm. Like, I want to hear, you know, what are you going to do to stop it? Right. What is actually being done to try to resist this? Right.
Like otherwise, it's at least when it comes to stuff from elected leaders, you know, I'm just not interested in like, oh, he broke another law. Yeah, that's what he does. What comes next?
And he hires guys like Patel to clean up his messes and do all his dirty work. And if they do it, they can slowly rise to the ranks and become director of the FBI. Yeah. And that's the political strategy that they are all working with and have run to success yet again in 2024. Well, I guess stay tuned for more happenings here as they continue for the rest of this week and for the next four years.
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Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the things that are happening all around us, including, shockingly, in the last week, something we did not expect two weeks ago, the fall of the Assad regime. Yeah.
Which, our official stance as a network is that, fuck him, this is pretty good, but a lot of people feel differently, and to talk with me about that, another guy who's always angry about Syria, and also has been to Syria, James.
And, you know, just as a note, I think a lot of the people podcasting about this right now are talking about a place they've never been, although James and I have not been to Idlib, so... No, it's true. We're going to be fairly focused on our experiences in the Kurdish regions, but at least we're not just bullshitting about a place that we've read about on the internet.
Yeah, claiming deep on the ground understanding of a place from Reddit. Yes. That is not us.
Yeah, we... I briefly looked at regime-held Syria. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over from Kamishlo, where is kind of the governance capital of Rojava, but is also a big chunk of it was held by the Assad regime. So you would just periodically see that fucker's face on the wall as you were crossing the street. Yeah.
It's good times. But my fixer would come around noon for whatever reason when I was in Rojava. And I hate sitting in the hotel, so I'd go out for walks around the market.
Yeah. Not advised by the old safety people, but... No. One of the sketchier cities I've been in. Yeah. Because of the presence of regime troops. Yes, yes. Everything else was lovely. Yeah.
People are lovely. Yeah. I'd be walking down the street and like, I'd be looking around, see if there's anything interesting to go and see. And then, uh, you can literally take one wrong turn down the street and walk into, to regime Syria, as you covered in, in the women's war. Like I was walking down one street and this man walked up to me. My Kurdish is not very good.
Tried to say hello, told him my name and stuff. And then he starts getting more agitated and he just starts repeating a higher and higher volume. Assad, bad man. Yeah. Assad, bad man.
Assad, bad man. Stay away, bro. Stay away. Yeah. He's like, you're going to fucking die. Way to be a fucking Haval. Yeah, yeah.
Gellick spars to that guy.
Yeah, Bashi Bashi.
Yeah, it was a very strange situation. It is no longer a strange situation because in the last week, the Assad regime has crumbled. Statues of him have been torn down all over the country, which we love to see. That's another of our stances as a network is fuck a statue. Yes, yes. Fuck most statues. Most statues. There are probably some cool ones.
There's the lady hitting the Nazi with a handbag in Sweden. That's a good statue. But yeah, most statues. Most statues of dudes in suits. Don't love them.
No, very few dudes in suits I want to see a statue of.
Yeah, can't think of any right now.
Yeah, it's not coming to me.
Yeah, I'm sure it will. So these statues have been torn down because the Assad regime has basically crumbled. It failed to really put up any meaningful resistance to this advance by different rebel groups, right? By HTS, by SNA, by the Southern Front as well.
And despite, I guess, even what I would have said two weeks ago, even after they lost Aleppo, I assumed that they would regroup in Hama or Homs, and they did not. They completely failed to do so there. Russian backers more or less abandoned them, focused on getting their stuff and their people, those who survived, out of the country. And as a result, there is no more Assad regime, right?
Assad fled the country at some point. It was initially speculated that Assad had fled on an aircraft on Saturday night as rebels were entering Damascus. That seems to be untrue, or perhaps it was true, but there's speculation that aircraft had crashed or been shut down, certainly. It does not seem to be true.
Assad now seems to be. I think, look, I made the call About two days before the regime fell that I felt he was out of the country based on some reporting, including reporting from the Syrian regime that he'd gone to Iran first. I think he left days before it fell. I don't think he's, yeah, he's got enough instinct for self-preservation that I think he got the fuck out of there.
Yeah, he didn't want to be found in a hole in the ground like Saddam Hussein, right? Like he, yeah. Or end up like Gaddafi, I guess. So he left. It's quite possible that he was doing a sort of final please, please help me tour of Russia around, which turned into his eventual exile.
In breaking news, Robert, I don't know if you've seen this Telegram post, and obviously we can't confirm it because we don't have a Derek Lime's The Assad Regime, but... Allegedly, he is planning on setting up a specialized hospital in the field of ophthalmology in Russia, Abkhazia, and Dubai. Yeah, great.
Great place for him to be working. Yeah, wonderful. Cool stuff.
Yeah, cool. Not at the Hague where he belongs. Yeah. Anyway. He's gone, and we have seen in response some of the worst social media posting that I've seen. And I don't want this to be like Twitter review. I think that obviously that's pointless and pure-up. But I want to address, I guess, this kind of really disappointing response I've seen from a lot of people on the left that...
Oh yeah, well, you have the grey zone tendency, right? That Assad was great, actually, in the protection of human rights in the region, and Syria was socialism incarnate, which is obviously nonsense. This is a person who, as we have seen in the last week, whose regime prisons were... holding thousands of people, killed tens of thousands of people, tortured people to death.
In some cases in Sednaya prison, which is a big prison in Damascus, or near Damascus, I should say, it's towards the coast. It looks as if there were children in that prison who were possibly born in that prison and may have never been out of that prison, which is like one of the most horrible things I've ever had to think about, you know, like a little child, four or five years old,
never having seen the sky. It's just, it's heartbreaking. Like a lot of the things we are going to find, the things we're going to hear about in the next few weeks are heartbreaking. And anybody who's prepared to apologize for that or prepared to say that that was good, I think you really need to question if there's someone who's aligned with you. But,
In addition to that tendency, there's one that sort of holds that in Syria, what will come next is worse. What will come next, or we don't know. Of course, we don't know what will come next. None of us can see the future. But what will come next will make Assad look like it was a preferable option. And I feel that we need to address that because I think it's one of the...
long legacies of authoritarian socialist how do i say this like the authoritarian socialist media project and that kind of colliding with the iraq war anti-era anti-war movement yes you know yeah all the whole hands-off syria thing that groups like the psl the party for socialism and liberation were doing when the rebels started this offensive being like we've got to stop and
you know, these U.S.-backed rebels from taking, you know, Syria for the empire. And it's like, man, the fuck, it's not the U.S. that was primarily backing the rebels that did most of the fighting. Like, these guys are Turkish-backed, you know? Yeah, yeah. The extent that that even matters, right? Like, this is not, the CIA did not orchestrate all of this.
The guys the CIA were really trying to back in Syria basically all died. Yeah, they've gone.
Some of the weapons, sure, that the U.S. supplied, Timber Sycamore, are probably still in the hands of HDS.
Yes, some of them. But even that's not the bulk of the weaponry that those fuckers are using.
No, the entire weaponry of the Syrian Arab Army is now also in the hands of the... HDS, which we'll move on to, actually, because maybe we should address that now before we address the responses, actually.
When we talk about international involvement in Syria, right, we talk about the United States, who has supported the SDF not as a project – and this is important – they don't support the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria as a democratic project – What they support is the SDF as a partner force in the fight against ISIS.
And that's been very clear when they have failed to defend the ANES against ISIS. genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and Afrin, what we're seeing again now in the Tal Rafat area. I'll use that terminology because if you want to look it up on Google Maps, that's easier to find.
The violence that we've seen repeatedly from the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army or Turkish Free Syrian Army, as it's sometimes called, the United States hasn't defended the people of the ANES against that. And it won't because that's not what it's there to do. And as much as we would like it to, I don't think that that's in the nature of the U.S.
mission in Syria, and I don't think it's in the nature of the U.S. as a state. To support a project which is seeking to build democracy without the state, it's not in the nature of the state.
We stumbled backwards accidentally into exactly once supporting the good guys in a conflict, specifically in the conflict with ISIS. Yeah, like a broken clock. And we immediately, ever since, we have been trying as hard as we can to pull back and, you know, betray them. Yes. To their deaths. Like, that is the story of U.S. support of Rojava.
Yeah. This is not a U.S. proxy state, as some people are trying to tell you. This is not a CIA revolution, as some people are trying to tell you, indeed.
Now, part of what gives fuel for that is there are a number of photos of, like, U.S. troops really vibing with the YPG and YPJ. And they're vibing with them. And you and I could both say this, having been with those people, they're nice.
Yeah, they're fun to be around.
They're chill folks.
They have good music and they like to dance. Generally cool people, yes. Yeah, I enjoy their company. I have vibed with the YPG.
Hard not to see a bunch of young women who left ISIS captivity and immediately said, give me a gun. I'm going to learn how to use it and be like, yeah, that's pretty cool. Good for you.
Yeah, it's one of the cooler things that's happened to the Middle East in the past century. Yeah. And like the United States does not have a plan for what has happened in the last two weeks. And it appears to be trying to think on the hoof right now. Joe Biden's foreign policy has been dog shit. And it doesn't look like he's going to pull a 180 now. Yeah.
We should not expect the United States to save Rojava. We should do everything we can to get the United States to continue supporting the people that who gave more than 10,000 of their children in the battle against ISIS. The US didn't want to send ground troops, right? Obama didn't want to have another ground war, neither did Trump. And so they got people from the SDF to do the dying.
And a lot of the killing, well, they maintained an aerial presence with a light ground footprint. We shouldn't expect the US to show up for the people who showed up for it. That's not in its nature. The only state that had a plan for what happened in the last two weeks appears to have been Israel, disappointingly. Right. Russia and Iran seem to have largely scrambled, extracted their state assets.
Russia got some of its people out. They took some of the aircraft out. Iran. Likewise, the U.S. seems to be kind of scrambling. I'm sure there are still some like ODAs and special forces guys embedded with the SDF.
I'm sure that in the areas where ISIS has risen up, because in some areas where the regime has pulled back, there has been an increasing presence of ISIS sleeper cells trying to sort of once again control territory and attack the SDF. In those areas, I'm sure that there are US special forces like directing airstrikes, but I don't think the US is going to come and save Russia.
But the only country that had a plan was Israel. And what Israel's plan was, was to invade Syria in the Golan Heights, to increase their area of control, and then to bomb almost all of the aircraft. And perhaps, I don't know if it also includes air defense systems, but from what the IDF is saying today, they have bombed all of the Syrian Air Force's aircraft that had fallen into rebel hands.
This includes ammunition for the aircraft. It includes the ammunition dump at Kamishlo Airport. About half an hour before Robert and I started recording here on Monday, I saw a video from a friend in Kamishlo of the ammunition dump at the airport, which had previously belonged to the regime, now belongs to the ANES. exploding after it had been hit by an IDF airstrike.
So what they're trying to do, I guess, is deny any of those weapons to people who they perceive as a threat to their interests. And there's been, I don't know if you're seeing this also, Robert, but a lot of Israeli accounts being like, oh, we stand with the Kurds. Israel and the Kurds are one. And
First of all, I want to warn you, I want to warn you that we have an advertising break coming, Robert, is what I want to warn you about.
Oh, well, speaking of, well, actually not speaking of the IDF, thankfully, but speaking about maybe the California State Highway Patrol, here's some ads.
Mm-hmm.
We're back. Yeah, firstly, I think when you're seeing analysis about Syria, anyone who talks about things in terms of these monolithic blocs, these Israeli accounts are often like, we will support the Kurds. I would be, sometimes I'll maybe use that to refer to AANES or the SDF, but I really try not to because it's a multi-ethnic project, right?
Like the areas that we'll talk about in a minute where the SDF is being attacked are Those areas, the largest component of the SDF is Arab forces, right? And that is the case in the SDF as a whole, actually. The majority of the SDF is now Arab, not Kurdish. I would be very sceptical of the expertise of anyone who refers to things in these monolithic absolutes, right?
The Sunnis, the Shias, the Alawites, the Kurds. There are a lot of different groups in Syria, and those groups are comprised of individuals, and those individuals, shockingly... have different and distinct goals and experiences and desires. There are absolutely Alawites who will have remained loyal to Assad. There are others who demonstrably did not, as we've seen in the last week, right?
And so... I would be skeptical of anyone who tries to paint things in those terms. And I would be skeptical to return to what we were talking about earlier, Robert, of people who tell you that we should expect... The one I see most is Syria to turn into Lebanon, right? And you and I have been talking about this before we recorded, but...
That's not a useful example in my mind of what we're likely to see in Syria, right? And the reason for that is that in Lebanon, yes, there was a US air component as there is in Syria. That's true. But I don't understand why we would look at the example of Lebanon, a place thousands of miles away, when we have at least two examples of of governance in Syria, right?
People who have been governing, in one case, for more than a decade, significant parts of Syria. Like, they have... government project. In the case of the AANES, I don't think it's fair to call it a state project.
They would tell you that they're trying to build democracy without the state, which might not be popular with states, evidently, which doesn't net them the support of many states, as we've seen. But we have, and with HCS in July and the Salvation government, we have these two governance projects. They're extremely different, right?
The Salvation Government under HDS is people have been arrested for playing music at their own weddings. It is neither democratic nor particularly liberatory. And then we have the ANES, which I would argue is the only democracy in the Middle East. Certainly the only democracy where people of different ethnicities and genders matter the same amount.
Certainly the only multi-ethnic democracy in the Middle East that's functional. Yeah.
You're just straining the definition of democracy if you're constraining it by ethnicity, right? Right. So I think you can make a good case for it being the only democracy in the Middle East. I saw this really atrocious BBC interview this morning. Some networks now have reporters on the ground in Damascus, and I've been trying to watch those to see what's going on.
It can be very hard to just get your news from Telegram. I would also caution people who are perhaps new to this, who are finding these Telegram channels, to take everything you read on there with a pinch of salt. You'll see a lot of disinformation there. one of the BBC had an expert on and he was like, oh, every time we see people pulling down statues of dictators, I'm a bit concerned.
And like, I have to think about how to express this. It seems to me deeply Islamophobic or bigoted or racist. I don't quite know the right term to say, oh, the people of this country and the places in the last 10, 20 years where we've seen people pulling down statues of dictators have largely been in the Middle East, right? Yeah. To say that, oh, these people are incapable of self-governance.
These people are incapable of living in peace with one another. But they're not. We've seen that in Rojava. And I don't think that the right response now is to respond with skepticism to the... the Syrian people's ability to live in peace. They've been at war for 15 years, 14 years, 13 years, 13 and a half years.
But I think that there is not an appetite for more killing and more dying, certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard.
No, exhaustion is a factor here. You really cannot emphasize enough how long HTS and the SNA have been at this and how fucking tired, particularly HTS, has to be. This has been... more than a decade of constant terror and violence. So I do think that that's going to be a factor in like what happens next. I should hope it will be.
Yeah. I mean, some things I don't know how to interpret, right? HTS has asked the regime police and authorities in cities to stay on. Some of that is probably good, right? Like the people who ensure that the water gets pumped. I hope that they stay pumping the water. the people who were the police for the Assad regime, Syrian Arab Republic. I don't want those people to stay on.
I want those people to fuck off and I want those people to be held accountable for the crimes they committed. But it doesn't point to sort of wild sectarian violence. We don't have the situation we had in Iraq, right? We have a US occupation which sits inside its bases and it only leaves, seemingly, to kill people.
From the perspective of the people living in Iraq, that's what the US occupation looked like for the most part. It's guys in big military vehicles who kill civilians by mistake. We don't have that here. There's not that resentment, generational resentment that allowed the Islamic State to grow there.
Now, the Islamic State did grow through capturing a lot of state institutions, which is what HTS has done. But I don't see that same resentment and I don't see that same desire for sort of redemptive violence that we saw there. I might be wrong, right? There might be more intercommunal violence. I have seen some videos of what looked like summary executions in Damascus today.
That's very concerning.
Yeah, but also, I mean, look,
there's some people who need to be summarily executed you know yeah if you're gonna shoot someone fuck it yeah you're looking at the photos of just like thousands of shoes and decomposed bodies dissolved with acid at sednaya prison yeah like you're liberating those places you catch anyone who was working there i'm not gonna say that that's a bad thing to do i might do the same thing in their situ in their circumstances
Yeah, I can't blame someone. I can't understand someone doing that. What are you going to do? I can understand that in the next few days there will probably be more of that violence because we are literally, in some cases, opening the lid on some of the worst crimes against humanity of this century.
Yes, yes. And they are going to be catching. There are a lot of mokbarat, you know, secret police guys who didn't get out, who were thrown on. We've got videos of them leaving the palace, throwing on civilian clothes. Yeah. And I'm not going to be shocked if a lot of the justice process of that is ugly.
Now, I do suspect that Jolani is going to at least grab a chunk of those guys and do trials because he is really looking for state legitimacy, you know? And that's one way you get it. Yeah, that's his project now. But that's not going to be how all these guys go down. No, some of these guys are going to die. Yeah, they're just going to get fucking got.
Yeah. Yeah. And they got a lot of people. They kind of had it coming to them. I'm not particularly concerned about that. I'm more broadly concerned with, like, what are you doing on the left if you see people in the streets, you see people tearing down statues of dictators, you see people celebrating the end of a regime that oppressed them for decades, and you immediately go to, oh, this is bad.
Like, why do you even bother if we don't believe that people can govern themselves, if we don't believe that the people in the street are normally the people who are right, and if we don't believe that... the downfall of tyrannical regimes is a good thing.
Yeah, what do you believe, you know? If you're just torturing it to be like, well, no, you and I both read that there was a post earlier today with someone being like, these leftists, purity politics, you know, to be angry that Assad kept a lid on radical Islam and ISIS and just didn't do it super cleanly. And it's, man, he was fucking gassing children. Like, what do you, where are you here? Yeah.
What is wrong with you? Come on, man. Yeah.
Yeah, this is a person who dropped chlorine gas on blocks of flats with little children in them, right? Like, fuck this guy. It's good that he's gone. I wish he was dead. I'm sad that he gets to go and be an ophthalmologist. Like, he, of all people, needs to be held accountable for his crimes.
Yeah, yeah. Something could happen. We could have a Songham and Telerian kind of situation, right? Yeah. Who's the Armenian who shot a member of the Turkish government in Berlin.
Yeah.
We could have something like that go down. God willing.
Yeah, yeah. You never know. Yeah, I guess people... He's in Russia now. He's in Russia. Someone will find him in his high-end eye clinic one day.
Yeah, he's probably going to be going back and forth to Dubai. There's some Syrians who wound up in Dubai. Somebody might stab him. Yeah.
Yeah, we can hope. Robert, I want to take one more break. Talking of stabbing, maybe we will get an advert for knives, you know?
Yeah. We've never had a knife advert, have we? No, I don't know that we have, and I would sell the hell out of knives. Mm-hmm, yeah.
Almost any knives, even crappy gas-stitched knives. Like, if you make the ones that look like an oil slick, get in touch with the advertising department at iHeartMedia. We'll pimp them. All right, we're back. The last thing I want to talk about, Robert, is how the rebels won. Because there was not a lot of fighting after the collapse of Aleppo, but before there was fighting.
And in part, how that fighting went, I think, led to the downfall of the morale of the Syrian Arab Army, right? So there are some things here that... Both Robert and I are somewhat nerdy about conflicts, right? Like, it's something, even when we're not attending wars, we like to read about them.
And you and I both take a great interest in history, and I think we'd be unwise to not look at this and learn from it. Especially with HTS, who massively professionalized since the ceasefire in 2020. I think professionalized is probably the right word, like...
their command their technology the way they operated looked a lot more like a modern military than it did you know the militias like i'm sure you and i both remember the early syrian civil war for people who are a bit younger than us like some of the most incredible improvised weapons that I've seen.
Oh, yeah. There was literally at one point they had an Ottoman-era black powder cannon on the back of a flatbed that they were using to hit regime positions.
That they had literally taken out of the museum in Aleppo.
They had taken it out of the museum.
fucking amazing stuff like the only the only i thought the top of like that sort of thing was when fucking insurgents in afghanistan would use 17th century jazails to shoot at u.s troops but the ottoman cannon is really a was that's a flex yeah yeah it was a huge flex they uh they also work you know they fired propane cylinders out of uh huge tubes these improvised mortars they call hell cannons like
Really incredible, and it speaks to the ingenuity of people and their desire not to be oppressed, their desire to fight against state tyranny. But when we compare that to what we saw with HTS in 2024, a world of change, right?
In particular, I think it was very interesting that they captured armored vehicles and then they were able to combine armor and infantry very effectively, which is not easy to do, right? That is alluded even some professional militaries. They also...
very effectively use drones, both drones to drop bombs and drones to adjust their artillery and mortar fire, which I think is something that, again, that modern militaries do, but it's not easy to do, right? And it's not like HCS could do massive...
exercises in the lead up to this operation like they they seem to have professionalized very quickly another area that they were you can see that they've learned a lot from the conflicts in in ukraine and perhaps in myanmar too was their use of fpv drones a first person view drone how do you describe it it's like your eyes are on the front of the drone is that a good description Yeah.
It's like you're flying. Yeah. And there are videos of whole classrooms of HCS, I guess, soldiers, militants, whatever you want to call them, practicing flying drones or using the controllers to play a computer game where you have to go through checkpoints and follow a route and things. And they seem to have developed a training course that then gave them this drone brigade, which they used...
incredibly effectively. They had these massive first-person view drones that were almost like a sort of ersatz cruise missile. And it was, I think, one of those that penetrated some kind of command headquarters in Aleppo in the early days of the battle there, killed several important officers and commanders, and helped to then spread that panic which they rode all the way to Damascus, right?
So this use of drones was extremely consequential. The other thing that they used and which we've seen the SDF use a lot is these pulsar thermal optics. So a thermal optic sees heat, right? I guess would be the easiest way to describe it. And it maps heat in a visual fashion for the user. And in this case, they put them on their rifles and they're able to see other people at night.
Our friend Carl, who we had on last week, week before maybe, Carl made a really good video about thermal versus night vision on his InRangeTV channel. I'll link it in the notes because I think it's worth people checking out if they're not familiar with this technology at all.
The optics he used were not the optics they're using, but these thermal optics, you've seen them a lot with the SDF, especially in Afreen. They'll do these night missions, right? Yeah. When you look at the recording from the thermal optic, it looks like people are glowing because... They are the hottest things in that area. And it makes it very easy to target people.
And HTS used these a lot when they were attacking Aleppo, right? These thermal optics that they mounted on their rifles and that allowed them to pretty much The United States used to talk about owning the night, right? Because it had night vision when no one else does.
Night vision has proliferated a long way now, and that means that some of the ways that they used to use night vision, they can't anymore. Like, for instance, they used to send out lasers that were only visible under night vision to aim weapons. If your adversary has night vision as well, you've now created a giant line that goes right back to you if you're using a laser aiming device.
So you can't do that. But these thermal optics, especially when they're fighting against the Syrian Arab Army, who, I mean, these conscripts are massively demoralized, right? They're underpaid. They're underfed. Did you meet any when you were in Rojava? Did you meet any people who defected?
Yes, yes. I'd met a number of people who had, and some who had also had to flee, like from Aleppo and whatnot, because... because they had been on rebels fighting the Assad regime, and some had wound up in the SDF, some were just civilians living in the area.
There was also a number of folks who commuted to and from regime-held territory, just because if you were someone that wasn't particularly wanted, you could do that. It was a very confusing situation for a lot of people.
Yeah, extremely. And I think when you meet the people who have been regime soldiers and come across, often they're like... They seem to be happy being waiters or working in the market in Rojava because their pay was so bad and their lives were so miserable as conscripts that they'd rather just come and work any job they can get in AANES. And I think...
When you've got those guys going up against well-trained people from HTS with these thermal optics, with these using drones, their communications were solid. You can tell from their appearance that a lot of these guys are professionalized. They're almost indistinguishable from US troops.
I think you and I had both responded to this tweet about some YouTube guy was shocked that people were wearing helmets online. and body armour, which that has been the aesthetic of violence, at least in places where the US has operated for decades. I don't know, half a decade, would you say? Like the sort of US special forces look.
Yeah, I mean, and that's just the norm for dressing. If you're fighting in a war anywhere on the planet now, like whether you're the Russian army or some militia in Syria, it's, you know, plate carrier, usually like some sort of fast helmet. You've got, you know, a belt with sidearm mag pouches and then usually either an AKM or some sort of AR style weapon. Like everybody dresses that way.
everybody looks very similar now because it's just the most kind of, I mean, number one, there's a lot of that gear lying around and it's cheap. And number two, like it works. It's a loadout that works. Yeah. It's very practical for what they're doing.
I think number three as well, like we should not understate the desire to look like your avatar on call of duty.
Yes. Yes. It's also looks cool. It looks like being in a movie. And that is a, that matters a lot to the kind of young men who start fighting in wars.
Yeah, people, I think, if you've not been, you won't realize how young a lot of these people are. This incredible professionalism, incredible professionalism, I'm overstating it, but this dramatic change in the appearance and conduct of these rebels, particularly HDS, occurred over about three or four years from the ceasefire in 2020 to this offensive in 2024. And I think...
gives us an insight into the way that war is changing, right? That access to information is easier than it ever has been. And access to a lot of these technologies has proliferated massively. Because we've seen in Myanmar, right, drones proliferate. People 3D print little night vision goggles in Myanmar. I spoke to Meowc about it about a year and a half ago.
People remember Meowc from our Myanmar series about 3D printing little night vision goggles that use the camera from those security cameras that can kind of see at night. They use those and then a tiny LCD screen. Of course, drones are everywhere now, right? Things like plate carriers. Even you see rebels in Myanmar wearing them, buying them from AliExpress.
All of the technology, all of the tactics also look much easier to find on the internet. Robert and I have both spoken to people who have said they go on YouTube to learn about military tactics and small arms even, and how to use different weapon systems when they capture them. I think it's a real change in the way that conflict is conducted.
And it's one that we will probably continue to see as like... you know, the world isn't getting any more peaceful. Nope. And with a lot of, you know, Russia and Iran took a massive L in Syria. That doesn't mean that they're not gone as sort of global actors. We will continue to see, particularly Russia, obviously fighting in Ukraine.
And I think it's worth looking at what happened in Syria so that we can understand what we're going to see in other parts of the world.
Yep. One of the ways I like to think about it that is crucial for people to understand is that Syria has largely been the laboratory in which the 21st century was cooked up. Like, all of our futures have to some extent been built in Syria, both like...
this is where we get a lot of the fuel behind the right wing surge that has been occurring over the last few years started because of the refugee crisis, you know, but also a lot of the tactics and weapons shit that like Israel is doing right now in Gaza, like Syria was the lab to a significant extent for how authoritarian regimes would crack down.
And it was also the impetus behind a lot of the most significant things that have been happening over the last decade and change. So yeah,
And it might still be. Already, Germany and the Netherlands have stopped processing asylum applications from Syria, which is concerning. But yeah, I think it's worth continuing to keep an eye on. I will continue to post about it. We will continue to inform you about it here. We will continue to bring on people who have more expertise and insight than we do.
So yeah, we hope you'll keep an eye on it. I just want to end by saying that the democratic project in Rojava is under a great deal of threat. Yes. Currently, more than it has been for perhaps a decade. Yep. They do not have an ally in the United States. They do not, as far as we know, have an ally in Israel. And from what we've seen, It's one thing what Israel says.
It's another thing what Israel does. And what Israel has been doing today is bombing ammunition that they already have in the ANES. And that means that it's more important than ever that you do what you can to support them. If you go to the emergency committee for a Java, you can find them online. You find them on all different kinds of social media sites.
They have a toolkit for supporting Rojava right now. I would urge you, if you care about that project, if you care about building democracy without the state, if you care about building a place where women and men are equal and the revolution was led by women. It's not a revolution that includes women. It's a revolution by women for women. I would encourage you to do what you can to support them.
All right. Yep, that's all.
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Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here. Obviously, one of the things that's been happening here, probably the biggest story of the last week or so at least, is the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Magione is, you know, an interesting character.
People have had a lot to say about him, and so I went through his online footprint, everything I could find on his social media, and I wrote an article for my sub stack, Shatterzone, and I'm going to be reading that in a slightly amended form for you now as today's episode.
I've spent much of the last 10 years reading manifestos and being a fly on the wall in different little online bolt holes where extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione, the suspected shooter of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity.
I will tell you now that nothing he read or posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better than this single image in the background of his Twitter profile. And the image is, of course, of an X-ray showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery.
The day after I wrote this article, the New York Times published a piece after finding Luigi's Reddit. The piece by Mike Baker, Mike Isaac, and my old boss at Bellingcat, Eric Toller, confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery, that he had dealt with back pain for years...
which had been minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury, and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece of paper, caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down, twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his groin and bladder, according to the New York Times.
He had that spinal fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain,
It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain and about his struggles with various other health issues, including a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get care for.
His friend RJ, who lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting in 2022, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there. This laid him up in bed for about a week, unable to move. His friends had to seek a special bed to help him with the pain.
In general, we have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with a series of escalating health issues that changed him from an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who felt like they were no longer able to do or enjoy the things they had previously been able to do and enjoy. Now, this is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Mangione.
as of December 10th now, when I record this, 2024. As I write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online, which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear if that manifesto is real. Ken Klippenstein has finally gotten access to what he claims is... The draft of the manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was arrested by the police.
I don't know if that's a manifesto or something he wrote while nervous because he largely addresses the cops in it and tells them, you know, what to expect when searching him. But anyway, Again, at the moment, this purported manifesto that was also posted on Substack, very unclear as to whether or not that's real. So for this today, we're going to stick with what we can verify.
And what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from chronic back pain. He had five different books in his Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and healing from back pain, as well as other chronic health issues. If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he also chose to act out by targeting an insurance CEO.
The New York Times has stated that he was arrested with a 262 word manifesto, which has since been leaked. And in that manifesto, he describes the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who, quote, continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. In addition to all this, we know that Luigi came from a wealthy family.
His grandfather made millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes, and office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family money, but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community.
He had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This is a man who had options. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be. And the thing that he ultimately chose to do with his life after suffering a debilitating series of health issues was to shoot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain
It's a well-known fact that most terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent watching 8chan turn from an image board dedicated into Gamergate into a machine for generating white nationalist mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally in and by a community.
Much will be made in the coming days and months about Luigi's online footprint. I will go into some detail about where he spent his time and how we should characterize it, but I want to be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be what made him choose to take action, although it may have influenced the specific kind of action he took.
Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter that are wildly popular with young men like Joe Rogan. He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed with them on certain things, but he also had cogent criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said about Jordan Peterson on May 14th.
This is why Jordan Peterson always bothers me, overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher it. The best teachers are the best communicators. Clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind of gel with the fact that he wrote three words on the bullets he used to shoot that CEO.
Luigi also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on the libertarian tech-influenced right, like a belief in the social benefits of Christianity without expressing popular religious beliefs himself. I found one post where he talks about how nature abhors a vacuum and shares an article about how Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods.
Some of his posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse of this type. But I've also read an essay that he wrote when he was 15 years old discussing how Christianity persevered over paganism in ancient Rome. And that essay exhibits a longstanding interest in this topic and a capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is very well written, particularly for a 15-year-old.
And while his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of someone hopelessly brainwashed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to think and read and come to his own conclusions. He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension, and in a constellation of tech bro-adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described as the Gray Tribe.
I found one post where he talks about a senior speech he gave on the future. Quote, topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality. The term Gray Tribe was coined by an influential rationalist, blogger, and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskind.
He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley-influenced ideology descending from the online rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right-left ideology. Now, I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures associated with this big tent movement, including Peter Thiel.
If we described Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks closer to the right-wing side of things. The worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teal associate Balaji Srinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging of progressives.
However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione never expressed any support for this end of the ideology that I can find. He was a young man of libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still making his mind up about the world.
As information about him has come out, I have seen people on the left who initially saw his acts as heroic lament that he was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described as a eugenics supporter, as have many other people adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in which Mangione dabbled.
Luigi's Twitter account does indeed include weird posts from his time in Japan where he theorizes on how to solve falling birth rates by banning pocket pussies and video game cafes. At other points, he complains about Japanese citizens acting like quote-unquote NPCs.
But race science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly reductive about a 26-year-old's beliefs based purely on a handful of posts that bear no relation to his actions in the world. The evidence that we have of his online footprint suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain arguments rooted in social justice.
He expressed admiration for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five about criminalization of poverty in the United States. America is the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, "...it ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be."
It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of the poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor, but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.
Now, Luigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icon some had hoped, but he doesn't easily fit into any other box we've got. His interest in gray tribe-adjacent thinkers and self-help books written by productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has been made of the four-star review he gave Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski.
But as with the rest of his media diet, he did not view Ted through the simple lens of hero worship. Here's what he wrote, quote, He was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy Luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.
Now, we know those words, his condemnation of Kaczynski maiming innocent people, are not just words because we have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out. Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people with no real power in our society, but a surgical strike against a man at the very top of the system he hated and one that caused no collateral damage.
He was capable of appreciating some of Kaczynski's conclusions, but ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post made by a guy with the username BossPotatoNess, who otherwise mostly commented on the Grateful Dead.
This post praises Kaczynski for having the balls to realize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and complains economic protest isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense. Quote, these companies don't care about you or your kids or your grandkids.
They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck. So why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive? This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what he did and how.
But boss potato-ness is not some Nazi on 8chan trying to provoke a shooting spree for the lulz. He's a random dude angry about the things 70% or more of the country is angry about, and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful way forward.
If you read this post in its entirety, as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one, Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
I know many people who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments after fruitless hours-long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills for them to joke about what they'd like to do to the executives who run these companies. These are jokes made in moments of despair and pain.
No one I know would ever act on them because they all have lives, people to care for and to whom they are responsible. They would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe. In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off all contact with his family. He admitted this in court.
His parents eventually filed a missing persons report in November of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried to contact him on his family's behalf via social media. As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalise, a tech lawyer, writer, and prominent poster who writes about the Lindy effect, a concept that boils down to this.
The only effective judge of things is time. Scalise is popular among the set of people Mangione found himself drawn towards and writes about the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient Rome might see in him. On December 4th, 2024, Paul made this post.
Look, if you don't have any kids and you're one of these guys just floating around the big cities, you got your education, but you never really used it to make money. You got a dead end back office job and a future of just working somewhere until you're 75 and then dying. Go ahead and do something.
It's been suggested that this may have influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear that cannot be the case. Luigi cut off contact with his family and most of his friends months before this. The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for quite some time. He arrived in New York City on November 24th on a bus bound from Atlanta, where he did not reside.
So I don't think this post represents a piece of his radicalization journey, nor was Scalise advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation and mindset Scalise described does speak to a lot of young men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities or much hope for the future.
This subset of society has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course, mass shooters. The United States has a mass shooter culture. Over the last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to the idea that people who are angry and no longer care if they live or die will sometimes choose to go down killing strangers.
In most cases, these shootings are totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since 2019, mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right-wing, have used them to put theory into praxis and earn free PR for their causes.
Most people abhor these actions, but we have grown used to the idea that other people will use such acts as a way to spread messages that might otherwise get ignored. It is not coincidental that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terrence's Christchurch Manifesto are now mainstream talking points in conservative politics. Luigi Mangione grew up with all of this.
He would have come to the same conclusions about the role shootings play in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What he did was, of course, not a mass shooting. But the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew the social script for how this kind of thing goes in the USA.
In the wake of this shooting, every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right-wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the internet.
This is because they, too, understand the shooter culture of the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's attention in a way that most mass shootings don't.
At almost the same time the UnitedHealthcare CEO was gunned down, a gunman walked into a religious school near Oroville, California and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out by the execution of an insurance industry CEO.
The armed and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow him will all have their own reasons for what they do, for their own journeys to that violent end. But ultimately, they'll do what they do because Luigi proved it's what gets attention. For now.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I, your host, Mia Wong, talks about inflation. We have covered inflation on this show extensively, and now it is once again time to return to it as we head into a world where concerns about inflation and the economy are the most cited justifications for people voting for one Donald Trump.
But unlike our other, oh God, so many episodes about inflation, this one is going to be a bit different. It's going to start out somewhat similar in that I am going to lay out a brief explanation of the sort of material causes of the inflation cycle and talk a bit about inflation theories, which is what we've been largely doing on this show for a while.
And then I'm going to explain why none of that shit mattered, why none of what was actually causing inflation mattered a single bit, because ultimately our experience of inflation, and more importantly of price in general, is based on a sense of justice, or as the academics call it, a moral economy, and not on, you know, anything that's sort of going on.
So let's begin with what is going on with inflation. Now, as we've discussed before on this show, most economists do not understand why inflation happens. People will take theories. Those theories are usually quite bad. There is no mainstream consensus on what is going on. As both me and my friends at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out,
Former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo said, quote, the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policymaking. So again, this is a guy who used to be a Federal Reserve Governor who has admitted that they have no idea what the fuck is going on with inflation.
Looking at the extent to which people don't know what's going on to inflation and how the various theories simply don't work is a large part of Steve Mann's notes towards the theory of inflation, which is a strange manners article that a lot of this will be pulled from. And we've had Steve on the show talk about this before.
So there are a lot of theories about inflation and none of them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental level is just prices going up. People have this tendency to think about inflation in terms of the value of money going down. But on a pure level, all inflation says is that prices go up.
Now, the most common theory of inflation is, you know, inflation is based on there being too much money in the economy.
And the thing about those theories is that they don't work outside of like a very few specific examples of hyperinflation that loom large over our understanding of what inflation is, even though they have absolutely quantitatively and theoretically, they have absolutely nothing to do with the inflation that we've seen over the past four years.
So instead of talking about that shit anymore, Mann and the Strange Matters crew developed what they call the supply chain theory of inflation. So I'm going to read the quote from Notes Towards the Theory of Inflation. As economist J.W. Mason recently remarked on his website, inflation is just an increase in prices. So for every theory of price setting, there's a corresponding theory of inflation.
If inflation theory is downstream of price setting, this is still a quote from that article, but not the J.W. Mason quote, If inflation is downstream of price theory, then no account of inflation can begin with the macro economy at all, since prices are set at the micro level.
Rather, you need to look at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains, and ultimately the pricing decisions of their firms. Only then are the true causes of inflation, both the internal failures of the industrial system and external shocks to it which can cause price rises, revealed. Mann's price theory is fairly simple, right?
It flows from the basic observation that prices are set by guys in offices, not by something, you know, abstract as like market forces and supply and demand. In economic terms, what this argument amounts to is the argument that corporations are price makers and not price takers, right? There's a bunch of guys, they sit in offices and they develop a strategy about what prices are going to be.
And that's, you know, how they're set. And what matters to the people who develop prices are things like goodwill, which is to say not pissing off their customers by raising prices, and things like their balance sheets, which reflect, you know, their incomes and costs. Price in this model is just cost plus markup.
And we know this is how prices are actually set because, as Mann points out, people have gone through and done surveys of pricing managers and asked them how they set prices, and the answer is cost plus markup. So what would cause these guys in offices to increase their prices?
Well, these are companies that are all part of a global supply chain, a very, very broad global supply chain and a very complicated global supply chain.
This means that if the cost of the stuff they buy from other suppliers on the chain in order to produce what they're selling, if those prices go up because there is, to use a purely hypothetical example, a giant global pandemic, those cost increases eventually had to be passed down to the people paying the products so that the corporation can maintain its balance sheets and maintain its sort of price plus markup as something that covers their costs, right?
This is what set off the giant inflation spike in the US and the Biden administration. You know, the cost side of cost plus markup exploded. But it doesn't really matter why the prices increased for our purposes. And our purposes are looking at sort of why Trump won the election. What was important, you know, about inflation wasn't even the price increases.
It was the narratives around inflation and how we understand the economy at a moral level. And for that, we're going to turn to one of the most popular accounts of inflation, so-called greedflation. Now, as we've said, price is cost plus markup. And you can raise prices because of cost. But you can also do this because you want to increase your markup.
And this is something that happened during the inflation surge. Companies realized that consumers were willing to accept higher prices without the usual goodwill hit because they thought the prices were going up because inflation was happening.
And because they were willing to accept the higher prices and not try to shop somewhere else, corporations went, fuck it, let's just keep jacking the prices up. And this really, really pissed people off. It still does. And this is something that was true across the entire political spectrum, right? People were very, very angry about this sort of re-inflation thing.
And that rage is more important than the technical details of why inflation happened. Because the way we understand inflation is not through conventional economics. We understand it through the moral economy.
And when we come back from a different kind of economy, which is to say this ad break, we are going to examine what the moral economy is, how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now. And we are so back. All right, let's talk about the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed by the British historian E.P.
Thompson in the early 1970s. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century and a half of bread riots by what he termed the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions. I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd here.
It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc.
This, in its turn, was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic function of several parties within the community, which, when taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action."
Now, the moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century is about a very specific period in British history, which is to say the 1700s, and about how people thought bread should be sold.
Peasants and the new urban workers had very specific ideas about bread, about how bread should be produced, about who should be allowed to sell it, about where and when they should be allowed to sell it, about how it should be sold, how it should not be sold.
And because of this and, you know, because of their experience in sort of previous systems that before the sort of imposition of the free market system or quote unquote free market system, they have a very specific series of hatreds. They hate middlemen. They hate grain hoarders. They hate all of the aspects of the new quote unquote free market that impose additional costs and burdens on them.
And they also believed that elites have a kind of moral duty to the masses based on the norms and traditions of their society. And when they welch on that deal in a way that makes people's lives worse, people get extremely pissed off. These peasants and, you know, urban workers particularly hated price increases. And they hated price increases so much that this frequently turned into riots.
But the actual contents of these riots are very interesting. Instead of simply seizing all of the grain, they do something else entirely. Here's Thompson again, quote, the central action in this pattern is not the sack of granaries and grain or flour, but the action of, quote, setting the price.
from a few lines later, they might then order the farmer to send, quote, convenient quantities to market to be sold, quote, and at a, quote, reasonable price. The justices were further empowered to, quote, set down a certain price upon a bushel of every kind of grain. So if you follow this here, right, what's happening in these British bread riots is that the revolt isn't just
about there, you know, being a price to grain, it's that people have a very, very specific moral understanding of what the price of grain should be. And they take direct actions that are designed to set the price of grain to the level they thought it should rest at. And this kind of action is extremely common sort of across Europe in this entire time period, right?
It's also a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can see in this, right, in this sort of rage over price in the sense of justice, the outlines of our current moral economy.
You have, you know, staggering outrage as price increases seen as unjust, which is re-inflation, or just inflation in general, because people are just mad about the concept of the price going up, paired with rage at the elites, which manifests in sort of hatred of Joe Biden and the Democrats for being the people who presided over these price increases.
We also have our own rage about price gouging. In immediate market terms, and this is something that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders of the market love to point out, there's nothing actually wrong by market economics about, say, Martin Shkreli jacking the price of medicine up until you can't afford it anymore.
Or, you know, other things that we find extremely terrible, like people jacking the price of water when people need water, like bottled water during hurricanes. We are all outraged. So why do we feel morally strong about it? And that is the moral economy, baby!
This is something that, you know, these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this, the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost entirely outside of the realm of what you would call traditional economics, right? And that's because we're functioning on something that is, in some senses, older than that kind of economics.
But there's something else going on here at a fundamental level. And what's important about price and the reaction to inflation is that it's an outrage based on a sense of justice, right? This rage is not a measure of direct exploitation necessarily. I think it was the political scientist James C. Scott who wrote his own book called The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
And Scott argues that, you know, and E.B. Thompson also argues this, that it's the moral angle that causes people to revolt, not the direct level of exploitation. You can, in fact, you know, inflict hideous exploitation on people as long as they think that it's just. But when you violate these moral principles, that's when people really lose it.
But it also means, right, the fact that the sort of sense of outrage is not necessarily directly tied to to the exploitation level, it means that rich people can be bad about inflation, even though they're completely fine, because these people also still have this sort of sense of justice about what prices should be.
Now, it's also worth noting here that it is possible to have high inflation rates and have everyone be fine. In fact, we have discussed scenarios like that on this show. In my episodes about the rise of Lula, the current president of Brazil, we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced an economy that was, you know, you had 20% year-on-year inflation, right?
But also you had 40% yearly wage increases. And so everyone was like kind of fine with it because because the amount of money you were making was going up every year, so nobody really cared about even things like the military dictatorship itself. There was not an enormous amount of opposition to it.
But then Brazil's trade unions figured out the government had been lying about inflation numbers, and this started off a series of protests that would send Lula into his political career, and eventually this is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's because the level of exploitation people were living under hadn't changed
But the deal that they had made, right, the sort of deal with with the military government of like, we won't do anything. Our wages will continue to go up and inflation will continue to be work at a certain level such that we're still getting paid.
That deal was violated and that sense of injustice was powerful enough to really kickstart an extremely powerful Brazilian labor movements and kickstart the fall of a dictatorship.
Now, one of Thompson's arguments was that the success of Adam Smith and his cohort, and Smith is moving around and making his arguments about what the free market is in the period where we're dealing with all of these sort of grain crises. His argument is that the success of Smith was moving economics out of the domain of morality where it was born.
Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right? It was part of that discipline. But, you know, Smith and his people move it out. And this is why liberal economists find the anger about inflation so incomprehensible. They see it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the economy is great. Why is everyone mad?
And, you know, I could get into here a bunch of arguments about whether or not this is actually true. I mean, I'm going to return to my sort of classic argument about like, well, yeah, OK, even if you believe all of the economic indicators are great for cis people like I'm trans for me, the economy is it has an unemployment rate of like 1936 U.S. Great Depression.
So, you know, there are a lot of people for whom the economic outlook is not good. People for whom, you know, even the wage increases that they got in this period still leave them in sort of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of that shit matters because the statistics that these people are trying to use to try to get everyone to calm down are not operating in the inside of the moral economy.
They're operating outside of it because they're from a tradition that is specifically about not working inside the moral economy. And the people they're interacting with are in the moral economy. But why is it like this, right? Why do we have a moral economy that functions this way?
In the case of the peasants and, you know, the working people of the 1700s across Europe, and, you know, this goes on through the 1800s too, right? We can trace the moral economy to a very, very specific set of conditions and traditions and expectations rooted in how people traditionally bought bread. But what are the conditions of the modern American moral economy?
To understand that, we need to turn to the concept of price itself. But first, do you know what guarantees low price? Actually, I probably should not say the word guarantee. That is probably staggeringly illegal. You know what probably has low prices? It's the products and services that support this podcast. We are back. So let us now turn to price.
The political economists Shimshong Bickler and Jonathan Neitzan argue that price is the unit of what orders capitalist society. You know, price is like the fundamental unit of political economy. It's the thing that orders and structures the entire society. If you want to know more about this, read their book Capitalist Power. It's quite good.
I am mentioning them because I'm about to misuse their argument completely in tandem with a quote from Marx that I am also about to misuse. And I am going to do this to make a different point. So I agree with Bickler and Nietzsche that price is the unit that orders capitalist society. But what I'm interested in is price as what's called a social hieroglyphic.
Now, social hieroglyphic is a term that's a one-off term that Marx used once to talk about how price mystifies the nature of value, whatever. I don't care about that. I care about it because price. there's something very interesting about price itself. And there's something interesting about the notion of a hieroglyph.
Now, Marx is using hieroglyph in the term of like, it's something you have to be decoded, right? Because he's writing in the 1800s. This is, you know, everyone's obsessed with hieroglyphs. I am using hieroglyphs because hieroglyphs are also a method of encoding complex information into a single character, right? Price as a social hieroglyph
is important because price is the mechanism through which we understand and often through which we fail to understand the world. Our entire lives in the eyes of the people who rule this world, our entire lives are captured in a single number. Everything you do at work is ultimately just a price on a corporate spreadsheet.
The entirety of the labor process of producing a good, every hour worked, every drop of sweat, every tear, every broken body and shattered city and trade union is lined up in front of a firing squad, appears in the end as a simple number. Price. To express it another way, here's Daniel Cahn and the Painted Bird from their song, The Butcher's Share.
Let's take a walk around the old bazaar where every little thing has traveled far. Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains this horror story and its price. A story of the power people wield. A story about factories and fields. A story of what you'll never have to be aware just as long as the butcher gets his share. Price, this single number, is how we understand the world.
And it causes us to treat price, and thus inflation, as a matter of morality and not economic rationality. Because price is the way that our society causes us to interact with people. It's the way we interact with objects. It is the thing that structures the way we all behave and understand the world. But price has another function. It is the gatekeeper of capitalist society.
Because price and a man with a gun is what's standing between you and the ability to live your life. Outrage at the moral economics of price increases are similar but not identical to the impulses behind looting. Everything that you've ever need and have been unable to get is, when you walk into a grocery store, just sitting there right in front of you.
But between you and it is a number and a man with a gun. And the man with a gun fucking hates you. So the moment you're free, you just take it. Price, and the entire economic system behind it, is organized very specifically so you don't do this. E.P. Thompson argued that the moral economy was pre-political.
The movements that it produced could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were not the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. In 2020, we, for a brief moment, saw the outlines of that movement. The uprising was brutally crushed. In its place, we saw the emergence of pre-political concerns about price, right? We saw, once again, a massive panic about inflation.
And this is not to say that inflation didn't hurt people. It did. It was, in large extent, a fiasco. But look at the politics for a moment that this has produced, right? What the media understands is economic anxiety.
And what I think we can now better understand as the moral economy that is a result of the fact that our entire economic system is structured by price and that we encode all of the information in our life into prices that we sell ourselves for and that we in turn are sold things for. those prices going up, the product of it was Trump, right?
And there's, I think, a reason why these sort of pre-economic explanations are preferred to the answers and, you know, to the actions that people saw in 2020. Four years later, Portland, one of the centers of the uprising, now has almost every grocery store at the exit of it is armed guards with guns. And these guards are there to maintain the price system.
They're there because for a very brief moment, people started thinking something dangerous. They started thinking, what if this didn't have a price?
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It could happen here, the podcast that's happening right now. This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. A guy who likes to put things together. Yeah.
And, you know, on the subject of putting things together, over the last, I don't even know, three, four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is, how do I start organizing?
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, the problem with how do I start organizing is that it's not a question that has clean or simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you are hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org.
Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that are currently dominating leftist spaces in the United States are trash. Yeah. And bad for people. Bad for people in them, bad for people who are not in them. Yeah. Here's a little test you can do. Is your org currently sad that Bashar al-Assad is no longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave.
Yep, and that's a lot of orgs. Yeah, that takes most of them, right? Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit, but what I'll say about orgs is that, okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, join them. It'll be good.
But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later, the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah. And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah.
But something I realized, the more I had these conversations, right? You know, I'm having it with friends. I'm having them with strangers. I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling. You, the person listening to this, almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing?
Yeah, that's a very good point. I have encountered some of the most stunning... I mean, organizing that, like... I can't discuss the specifics of, but some of the best organizing I've ever encountered, I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. And I was like, what? Like...
People are winning victories that the hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like 30 years. Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.
Yeah. Can I tell a little organizing story? Do we have time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, go for it. So I remember in like 2018, I am on a trip with a friend. We're coming back and we see the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the migrant caravans, the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow about right before the 2018 midterms.
And at that time, they were corralling the people of the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana. And, like, it was raining every day, so the baseball stadium ends up looking like the Battle of the Somme after, like, a couple of days, right? You know, kids in needy mud and shit. And I didn't particularly know what to do, but evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty.
And so I get three of my friends. At this time, I was still making... about half my money riding bicycles and the other half writing. So my friends and I are supposed to do a long bike ride. All of us are people who make a living riding bikes, right? We're not like expert organizers. And I was like, hey guys, this is fucked. What should we do?
We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles. We obtained as many waffles as we could physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't able to get in. We found a way to get in. We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online. People sent us money and we continued feeding people for months. None of us, I think, had a particular plan or a schedule.
Yeah, it was a bit chaotic at times. But A, we were able to do that with a lot of other people. Clearly, it wasn't just us, right? But we were able to process tens of thousands of dollars and feed thousands of people.
B, everyone there, and I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with, well, with refugees for the most part, people are so good at organizing each other and themselves.
Like when we got there with bottles of water and food, there were a thousand people there who have not had sometimes a drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot to eat, right? Yeah. Everybody made sure that the children and the sick people got what they needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people.
It just, we don't call it that.
Yeah, and that's part of what I want to try to, the myth I want to try to puncture with this, because I think, particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer, sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this sort of, I guess, particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy with specialized knowledge.
And that's just not true. This brings us to something that I think is actually really important, which is what even is organizing, right? And the answer is that most organizing is you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something, right? And the thing about this, right, That's something all of you know how to do.
If you can organize a dinner party, right? If you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is largely the same skill sets. And all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to, you know, work a job, right?
You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but, you know, you have to manage it, is that organizing is about people. Mm-hmm. And sometimes you have to, you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have worked jobs, right?
You have had to like deal with your boss being on one, right? You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's just what it is. Yeah, that's the core of it, is getting people to do stuff.
Like, you do it every day.
Yeah. And the way you do this is by building relationships with people. Right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends. You have preexisting relationships and being like, OK, motherfuckers, we got to go do something.
And actually, I love that the first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium-ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower.
I know people who've done this just solo, is that you can just go give food to people.
Yeah, literally, it was this morning. So I'm tired. Yesterday morning, I have some of my house neighbors, right? And it was cold. And so I went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee. It's super easy to do. If you are struggling socially, wherever you are, maybe you're finding it hard to make friends.
I know that's the thing that people often struggle with, especially if you've moved to a new place or post-pandemic or you're still concerned with large gatherings or any of those things. If you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too. So many of my friends I organize with are people...
Like, when we had the end of Title 42 and people were in between the fences there, a lot of the people who I organize with now or who I help people with now, I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant solar generator that I happen to have and some stuff that we had to whip around a cool zone for.
And, like, people who care about the same things as you are generally cool, and it's a good way to make friends, and then you can go on from there.
Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here, too, which is that... You know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common exception.
I mean, this is I literally had this conversation with with one of my friends who's like an old school Food Not Bombs organizer. Food Not Bombs is a very, very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a Food Not Bombs chapter online. They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world.
Yeah. Because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is, from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly you're
Once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah. And that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing?
And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably at some point in your life have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right? Like you've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.
Yeah, it could literally be anything, right? Like if you've got some people to go to a bar, you have the skills.
One way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew. Yeah. Okay, I could vouch for this, right? The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want you. It feels, you could just do it. There is nothing stopping you.
Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as good as you think it would for a heist movie. It rules. It's so fun. Amazing. Yeah, but this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this.
There's, on the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know, right? And a lot of organizing is just about... Here is a problem, and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can help deal with it, and you put people in touch with each other, and that's organizing. So much organizing is literally just, hey, I have a broken part of my car.
I know someone who's a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch, and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships, and you have made... all of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've made it stronger. Yeah.
It also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break the isolation we're all under.
Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is... I'm thinking of a quotation here, something, the busy bee has no time for despair. But the thing that makes me feel better about the world is that I have seen that people can fix massive problems with very few resources by just showing up.
And I think organizing is what gives me, what allows me to enter this period of time that we're entering into with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done.
Yeah, and do you know what else will help you enter a situation with more hope?
Is it the products and services that support this podcast?
I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads. They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We are back. So I want to return to my heist career. I don't know, if you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons & Dragons party or like an RPG party.
And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure it, you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's... You know, I want to start I want to start doing tenants organizing.
I want to start because my rent is too high. Right. People are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense. Yeah. And from there, you make a list. And that list is, you know, what you're interested in doing. And you try to match what things need to be done with people, you know, who have those skills.
Yeah.
And this is where you really get into the heist things, right? Because everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously, part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams, right? You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing.
And part of the way that successful organization works over time, and I mean, just how successful organizing works, is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, or just you're gone, or you cycle on to a next thing, or any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you.
And you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's organizing the thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And at this point, we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing.
And a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people and like, especially women and especially like a lot of binary people and trans people particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills. And then you talk to them for five seconds, and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right? I'm good with kids, which is a huge one.
We'll get to in a second, right? Or like, I don't know, I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of, like, the kinds of things that there are massive roles for.
So one of the most important ones, and this is something you deliberately look for, you know, this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Because, again, most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships.
And, you know, one of the things you do when you're doing your sort of – they call it power mapping. But when you're figuring out –
How you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects and you talk to that person because that person can, you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have they have the relationships already. And also they're good. They'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and spreading the organization that way. Mm hmm.
And so like, you know, if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations and is charming and is good at making friendships.
That person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill. There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think. To take like a tenants organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right?
And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard also. I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies. Not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it. But there's also even just easier things than that, right?
That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah. And this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaigns, you know, bosses.
If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps, especially if you're a woman, then you know how to OSINT, actually. Maybe you don't credit yourself with that skill, but 100% that like you've developed that skill to keep yourself safe.
And you can use it for good. Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works?
Yeah, sure. So open source intelligence is an acronym that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information from open sources, things that are openly accessible, as opposed to like HUMINT, which is like being a spy. or SIGINT, which is capturing signals.
Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that they put on Goodreads, right? All the data that is out there largely on the internet about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the internet and it's very easy and...
I would imagine if you're under 50 and maybe if you're over 52, you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway when you want to find out about someone. Especially if you are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself safe.
Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with a local Nazi and you're trying to organize around, like, running them out, keeping people safe from them, and you can find information about them. But, I mean, it's useful for, I mean, cops who are beating people.
It's useful for, like, politicians, particularly. It can be very useful for, it's useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very, very useful for banks.
bosses in union campaigns unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff but the thing is also and this is something i don't think people understand those guys they're like the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you but they got a job being a researcher for a union They have the same skills as you.
They know how to Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's dating profiles and look through their Facebooks and their Instagrams. A big one, a big one that rich people especially do not think about is Cash App and Venmo. Oh, Venmo is gold. Particularly Cash App. Because, yeah, yeah, because people just leave public transactions out there.
Like, that's how they got, what's his name, the congressional... McGate. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess I'd call him the accused pedophile. Yeah, yeah.
The man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman lots of times.
And one of the ways they found that was that and also like paying for that, right? Yes. Which is rape, by the way. I want to be very clear about that. Like having sex with someone who is underage is rape. It is always rape. And the way people found that was that they just looked through like his Cash App history and they found all of these money transfers to people.
This is all very, very simple stuff that's very, very useful organizing wise that you already know how to do. Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute bang.
Yeah.
So much Pinterest.
People are pinning.
They'd be pinning. You know, if you're hearing some of these things and you think that you can figure out how to do this, that's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is... is a huge benefit to organizers because this gives you a flexible person, right?
It gives you someone you can flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place. Oh, yeah. Huge.
Staggeringly useful.
The amount of things that people can't access because they can't get there is vast. Especially when I talk to migrants who have recently arrived in the US. They don't have a US cell phone. They can't Uber. Oftentimes, nowadays, you can't even pay for mass transit with cash. You have to have a special card. And then you have to get to the place to get the card, right?
The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous. Yeah. especially in the US where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times. Yep.
Yeah, and like transport-based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike, very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue.
There's a lot of, you know, James, like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants like... being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill. Yeah.
It's useful. It's important. It's okay if that's not something you can physically do or that works for the way you like to live your life. Another thing I was thinking of, which can be massively important and people don't realize, is If you know how to take off a taillight and replace the bulb in it... Yes.
Like, we're entering a time when people with DACA, people with TPS, people who are undocumented, people who are on temporary migration statuses are going to be deathly afraid of any interaction with law enforcement.
Yeah.
If you can... change the bulb on someone's taillight or their turn signal indicator for those of us in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way.
And it can literally take 10 minutes. And this is something that, you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have, right? There's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But, you know, like if you're a carpenter, right? If you're an electrician, You do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right?
That is a thing that is massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah, is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting, right?
And like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything free.
That is what literally genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here? Yeah. And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time?
Yeah.
So we're going to close out this sort of skill section with some, I think, just sort of like domestic skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. I love that.
Yeah.
Or you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use, but if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome.
That's a badge for those of us in the Commonwealth. Also, if you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to mention that. Yeah, you're a hero. Yeah, one of my friends recently made me a little patch and it's really cool and I like it and I'm putting it on my stuff. But if you can sew, like that's a skill that I do not have. And it's so great when people can...
like fix stuff for someone or you know make stuff fit someone you know if you're a person who finds it hard to get clothes that you like to wear that make you feel good and someone one of my friends could do that and uh one of my friends was making uh clothes for another friend for like a uh renaissance fair and like it was the nicest thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time it really made her like yeah
feel nice and cared for. And you might think that this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that.
Yeah.
And that's a huge part of what organizing is, right? And that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is, I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people and having people around who are good at keeping groups together.
Yeah, that's its own distinct kind of person is someone who can, you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable.
And it's something that you can look for, you know, and if that's not you, like you can, that's something you can, you know, find in your friends, you can find in the sort of the people around you. Yeah, definitely. There's also something I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing where the quality drops.
Drawing and graphic design are very, very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And...
Yeah, you know, and this is also something, you know, later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. And along this line, there's things like making music. And there's a bunch of different ways this can go.
This can be an immediate thing where, you know, like you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs. And this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows. Oh, yeah.
This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause, that's great.
I remember one of, we had one night last September, it was so cold, we were in the desert, and there were like a thousand people, right? And we were, at that point we were really struggling to feed everyone even, you know, because there was so few of us. But my friend bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had, and I think I had my harmonica in my truck.
And we were sitting around with these, we had some Sikh guys, had some Uyghur folks come from China, and then some Kurdish people, and they were all just playing their different music. And it was so nice. Taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music, again, don't underestimate how important that is. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.
No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who is a curmudgeon-y Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. And being able to raise people's morale...
It's it's this massive if you want to get want to go into technical language is a massive force multiplier right it makes everyone you have enormously more effective the better they feel about themselves the better they feel about situation they're in and things like music things like art I mean things like pulling pranks.
if you were a good practical jokester this is a staggeringly useful skill both like in terms of you know you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on like other people in the org but like you know if you know how to just like pull pranks this is a really really useful thing in like union campaigns in tenants organizing there are a lot of people who you can prank and it's very funny and it lowers their morale and it raises your morale
Yeah. And going back to your music as a, like, morale is a terrain of struggle. Like, the other memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rojava, being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck all the time. And it was dangerous to be driving around, sitting around with some Azidi friends. And, like, we spent all night playing the Oud, which is like a...
It's like a guitar with a gourd on the bottom. I don't know how to describe it. It's a stringed instrument. It's a stringed instrument is what it is. And that made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to get through this relatively difficult thing.
It sucks that people are being killed just for driving around or existing and they're bombing all the civilian infrastructure and the power keeps going out and all these things. But there's a reason those people have kept Ood around after 15, 13 years of war. And it's because it is important. And so don't overlook that.
And resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right? A lot of the ways that people, like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly, are very, very important.
And on sort of this note, one of the things that, as you've assembled your group of people, right? One of the things that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the capital T organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.
There has to be actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.
Yeah.
I don't want to call out any organization in particular. There is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely in the realm of wearing a high-vis vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And maybe there are several organizations like that. I don't know. I've perceived one locally.
If you don't have those bonds, those interpersonal relationships... These things won't hang together. So many of my happiest organizing memories, again, going down James's memory lane, I guess. I have a memory of Christmas Eve last year, 2023. Me and my friends have been out.
I know some of them listen because some of them have come across from different states to help us over their Christmas holidays, which is nice. And it was cold. And we had been feeding people all day. And then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find.
And then we got to the end of the day and like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of, we had some MREs left, the refugee MREs, sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan. So we were like, oh, we're not going to find any other place. vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here.
So we all sat around eating our little vegan MREs and like just talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experienced over the last months of doing this. And like, it's those moments that make your organizing group so much stronger.
No one's telling anyone to do anything, you know, like those genuine bonds and the love and friendship we build up between each other, doing things that are very important. Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.
And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? No, probably not. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something like really sort of Hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them.
But like the odds are, no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and, you know, you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's that's all organizing is.
It's finding ways to you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it.
Yeah.
And the stronger your relationships are, the more likely that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like, you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh, yeah. And like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O, capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done.
But mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
Yeah.
If you're a baker, you know, you can bake for people. It's a wonderful thing to share. Oh, my God.
Yes.
Yeah. And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It's useful in literally every, literally any kind of organizing you can possibly be in. It is a thing. It is a skill that is useful in like, it's useful in war zones. It's useful. Like literally no matter what organization you are in, if you can cook for people.
Oh yeah.
And you don't even, and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like, you can show up with food that you have made. You, you have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
Yeah, definitely. I've had some wonderful meals in war zones and I've deeply appreciated those people. More broadly, though, those ties, like the way we organize without the state, the reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and the way we will continue to organize in a way that we can make the state irrelevant is different.
because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people. And then we approach our organizing holistically, right? With everyone in it, knowing this person is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now. And I care about them. So I'm not going to make them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot.
And in a way that capitalism cannot, right? Because, uh,
fucking hurts rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people and care and love one another do and like that's where organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism or the state yeah unfortunately speaking of capitalism or the state we're taking our last ad break yeah hopefully it's hurts rent a car
We are back. So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult, but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing.
Because it's really not that hard, right? If you just go do the thing, it will happen. And suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge or this like, oh, this is a really difficult thing. If you just, I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.
So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff, knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities. Yeah. is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings in places that are wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco.
And you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
Yeah. Literally, I reached out to a friend to book a room last night because I knew they were good at that stuff.
Yeah, you know, there's a range of people's schedules, getting people to show up for stuff. Things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right? Getting together a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization. Yeah.
Now, how formal or informal you want it to be or just, you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you. In tandem with the email, something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes.
When Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate, right? They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this.
Mm-hmm.
And childcare is something that's important. I did. I mean, a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare when I was organizing and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids. And so, you know, there's a couple of ways that this could work. One is that, you know, you have you have everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space.
You bring them like coloring stuff. You bring them toys. You bring them games and you just sort of watch everyone for a while.
Mm hmm.
And as an organizing thing, again, if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill. Yeah. Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls together 10 bucks and you hire a babysitter. Yeah. For a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing thing.
Yeah, I organize with people who have kids. I remember four years ago, fuck me, 2020, a long time ago and also yesterday. But like we were organizing to feed unhoused people and we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner. And like some of my friends have very young children and they bought them. And I think that's actually really cool to do that. A, like for those kids, it is normal that like,
We look after people in our community. This is what we do. And ever since I've been little, this is what we did. And like, it's also very nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also brought their children down to the border, especially last year when we had, because there were children there anyway, right?
Yeah.
Some of my friends who bring their children down and their kids would play with the other kids. And like, it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdish and some of the kids are from China and some of them are from Colombia or whatever. They'll get along just fine when they're four or five years old. They don't care. They just want to kick a ball or see a teddy bear or something.
And I think it's really good for your children to, you know, you're bringing them into a world which is...
cruel and and at times unequal and like your kids seeing that like we can make a difference and we can do this i think it's it's one of the best educations you can give your children yeah and it's something that's good for everyone involved yeah exactly and it's also very i think one of the things i see a lot when people are organizing with refugees of the unhoused is like they're just people like you don't need to be afraid of them like they don't want to hurt your children and
Having your children around shows that you have grasped that they're just people and that you feel safe and your children are safe around them. And I think that's valuable too. You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment.
Yeah. There are some other very basic things that I think are very important if you've never done this before. I'm going to talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah. And you would think that this doesn't matter until you watch a group of 100 people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done. And it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups. Yeah.
So I'm going to give you how to run a meeting 101. Okay. Okay, a very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world and it's very effective is you have two things. You have an agenda and you have a stack. And those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean, it's an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is. You put the things that you need to do on it.
And another thing that's very helpful with these is, you know, you're going to be operating under time constraints because people don't have 45 hours to be in meetings. And my God, you don't want to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah.
You know, knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is very, very useful and making sure that you're sort of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff that you need to talk about. Yeah. All of this, again, like this all sounds very obvious. And again, you know how to do it. But until you've been in a room where people...
have not realized they need to do this. You don't understand how important this stuff is. Yeah, the pain of it not happening. God, I have watched rooms full of like, these are like professional scientists, right? This is an entire room of 150 people with physics PhDs who don't know how to run a meeting. And it's a shit show.
And all of this stuff could have been avoided with some very, very simple things. Yes. The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right, is the stack. It is very simple, right? You have one person who is the stack keeper and when someone wants to talk, you have one person talking at a time.
And when someone wants to talk, they raise their hand or they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper and that person writes their name down. And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order. And so you go down the list and people get to say things. And again, you know how to do this. This is not like a complicated thing.
But again, I have watched people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week. Like... who know I cannot be able to figure this out. And you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you can do this. There's a very common... Sometimes this is one person. Sometimes this is two people.
A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator. And the facilitator's job is to call on the people and to try to move the conversation forwards and make sure everyone's involved. And also, another important part of this, and this is, again, something you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up.
Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off and you have to get to the next person.
Yeah, and doing that courteously is a skill.
Yeah, yeah. And finally, on this note, there's a lot of... If you want to go into more technical stuff, part of the things the facilitators use and part of...
You know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time. Yeah.
And, you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right, is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in the group, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first. Yeah. And sometimes this is literally just like, Hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time.
And you can like ask them what they think about something or ask if they have anything to say. And a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is, this is a very, very important skill for a facilitator or just even, you could just do this in a meeting too, right? Like,
You can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really, really valuable ideas and contributions and plans.
And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
Yeah, definitely. If you've been a teacher or in any way, you probably have this skill. You might not consider it a skill, but even if you've been a TA in grad school or something like that, you probably know how to do this.
Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly, and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever did, which was at a tenants' union in Chicago. Okay. So, and this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was... Okay, so one of my friends is an experienced organizer.
I was like a tiny baby, right? This was my first offline organizing project ever, right? I had no idea what I was doing. I still thought I was a guy, which, like, that's how much of a fiasco, like, little tiny baby Mia who doesn't know anything this was, you know.
And so my friend talked to some people that he knew, and he knew that I, you know, I was interested in getting involved in tenants organizing, and we, like, went to a cafe.
Mm-hmm.
And we sat down and we ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were, what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff. And that's actually is something that's important, too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions. and think politically about their actions. Yeah.
And that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club. Book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure your organizing group, if you're trying to do a thing, hasn't just become a book club. Yeah. But that was something that was very useful to us, and we started making a plan.
And our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers, and then we went out, and I did this, and I walked around through a bunch of streets, and we put them on light posts or whatever, and then we put them... Like, we hung them up in the buildings of tenants. Because you can just, like, walk up the stairs, right? And you just put them on the walls. And, you know, we had this flyer.
This flyer had information. This flyer said, okay, we're starting a tenants union. If you have issues with your landlord or you want to talk about tenant stuff, like, come here at this time. We had an email. You can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call. You know, and so, okay. And so, parallel to this, we, like... I forget if it was a church or if it was some building...
some center or something. We, we booked a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people. Nice. Who we sort of knew.
And this is another useful, like if knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill, because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it because, you know, we're, we're finding, we're founding like the first tenants union in this place. Right. Yeah.
And you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed with, when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night. Yeah. But people still came. Like, people still came in the blizzard. Like, a lot of people showed up for this. What are things we do? We also, like, you know, we just started talking to people, right?
We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just, you know, we talked to our friends. We talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone. You know, and this is the thing that just happens. As this spreads by word of mouth, right, people start contacting you. We ran into a really long-time tenants organizer, right?
in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by betraying the old tenants organizers. Right. And I guess everything is, you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll, you'll sometimes you'll just, you'll just pick up someone who's, you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah.
And it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they, they want to go, they want to do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting. You know, we were going to do some political education. We were going to have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff. And we were going to, you know, get people to understand what we were doing, how they can start organizing.
And then we did it. And I, unfortunately, don't remember much of what we talked about because I was off in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice. But I don't remember what we talked about. But like, you know, but like all of those things, right? All of those steps from the start of organizing
You get five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you talk about what you want to do through someone makes a flyer in, like, Microsoft or whatever. You make it in, like, PowerPoint. MSP. Publisher. What's the one I'm blanking? I haven't used it in so long. The one you make greeting cards in. WordArt. WordArt.
You're asking the wrong question.
There's like an actual program and I forgot what it is. Used to use it to make Christmas cards. But like, you know, okay, so we made a flyer and we walked around and put the flyers up and we made an email. You know, we got a space together. We figured out what we wanted to do. And then we did it. Yeah. And, you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right?
But, like, we had started a thing. And you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing, you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah. You just have to go out there and do it. Yeah. You can have faith. Yeah. And this has been It Could Happen Here.
Go organize.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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