It Could Happen Here Weekly 149
02:48:54 Share

Does your AI model really know code? Its specific syntax? Its structure? Its logic? IBM's Granite code models do. They're purpose-built for code and trained on 116 different programming languages to help you generate, translate, and explain code quickly. Because the more your AI model knows about code, the more it can help you do. Get started now at ibm.com slash granite. IBM, let's create.

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right, bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

Toyota has been building a legacy of excellence for years. From developing hybrid technology to upping the standards of safety and efficiency, Toyota is always innovating, always making progress. And with a superior lineup of in-stock SUVs, including the Adventure Ready RAV4 and capable, affordable Corolla Cross, you can experience the legacy of Toyota for yourself. Visit buyatoyota.com, the official website for deals, to find out more. Toyota, let's go places.

Chase Freedom Unlimited rewards all that you are with cash back on every purchase. We built a life together collecting vintage items that connect us to the Black community and our vibrant heritage. This is Kiana Stewart. And I'm Jana Handy. We're partners in life and in business. With Freedom Unlimited, adding antiques to our collection is

even more rewarding. How do you cash back? Learn more at chase.com slash freedom to be. Chase, make more of what's yours. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offers subject to change. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC.

The 2024 presidential election is here. MSNBC has the in-depth coverage and analysis you need. Our reporters are on the ground. Steve Kornacki is at the big board breaking down the races. Rachel Maddow and our Decision 2024 team will provide insight as results come in. And the next day, Morning Joe will give you perspective on what it all means for the future of our country.

Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election Tuesday, November 5th on MSNBC.

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.

Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's James today, and I'm joined by Luca and Sailor. They're both from Breadblock, which is a mutual aid group in San Diego. How are you doing today? We're doing great. Great. How are you? Wonderful. Yeah, I'm thriving. I've just received my 75th COVID booster, I think. So having a little miserable day, but that's okay. Not going to get novel coronavirus, which is always nice. So...

Can you guys start out by maybe explaining what BreadBlock does, how long it's done it, and why it does it? Yeah. So we are a mutual aid group. We mostly provide hot food. That's like the core of our services. We feed about 100 people, like 80 to 100 people, depending on the day, weekly in East Village in San Diego. We...

We also provide clothing and harm reduction supplies and other things like tampons and plan B when we can get our hands on it. And we try to be, we are there like at the same time every day. I will not say the exact location, but if you are interested in getting involved, you can always reach out.

And that's like what we're doing right now. And that happens weekly. And Selah, am I missing anything? Yeah. So this form of what we're doing with BreadBlock in a more like organized way has... We've only been doing it a few months. However, initially we started doing it in 2021 when I started getting into harm reduction stuff and I was working out of syringe exchange and realized a lot of people would be asking for food. Okay.

and we weren't giving that out there. And so that's why the initial idea came about. And then we just had enough people who were willing to do it in a weekly manner. So that's how we chose that location and got started doing that. There's just a lot of people down there on those nights. It's timed to happen at the same time that a harm reduction services happen, the needle exchange. So it's at a time when a lot of people are down there and the amount of time are like

collective doing this specific thing has existed i believe since end of march early april is how long we've been like consistently providing services every week yeah that's great that's a long time still especially through like summer can be a difficult time if you don't have a house in san diego like it gets increasingly it gets very hot and particularly the streets themselves get hot and that becomes dangerous for people yeah exactly so i want to start with like

at some point, right, say that you were doing your syringe exchange and you were like, these people need to be fed. They are hungry. And now we're here and you're feeding them every week, right? But you had to do a whole lot of things in between here and there. And like,

I know this because listeners email me all the time. So many people want to do that too. And it might not exist where they are. They might not know. So like, can you explain how you went about like seeing a need and then organizing to meet that need? Yeah. So I guess what came before that was we had already built relationships with each other around our needs.

leftist ideals and art and protesting and different stuff. So we already knew a lot of people who are interested in mutual aid in that capacity. Yeah. But I will say things like Instagram have helped just meet more people who are

looking to get involved in mutual aid. Yeah. Yeah. Like Selah said, we had like had spent some time building community with each other and getting a core group of people that trust each other that had gone to protests together that were maybe in like affinity groups already with each other. And then there was just sort of like enough of us that were in community with each other at the time that when Selah was like,

the encampment ban is like really making things so much worse for people and communities. And we really need to do something. We were like,

It just happened because we were all sitting in a room together one night after a social event. And Saylo was like, we need to talk about this. And we were like, okay, yeah, we need to do this. And we had enough people where we could pull together a first distro and then a second and then gradually adding more organizations so that we could continue doing it sustainably over time.

Yeah. That's like, I want to put a pin in the camping ban because the camping ban is, is making things worse for people who are already having a hard time just surviving here. And it fucking sucks. And it's Todd Gloria's fault. Shouldn't vote for him. Let's talk about though. Like I want to get into nuts and bolts, right? You're feeding a hundred people, right? You need a giant ass pan. You need loads of food. You need a place where you can cook. How did you identify all those things?

And how did you get to a place where you could regularly have those things? So in 2021, when I had initially started this with kind of a different group of people, but there was definitely overlap. We just did it and like used my mom's kitchen and found some big pots and just made it happen. And I feel like if you have the will to make it happen, you're going to figure it out. And, you know, maybe in the beginning it was a lot more chaotic, but,

Which, you know, we are anarchists, so we're okay with the chaos. But it just, after doing it week after week, it just became more streamlined. And, you know, we just buy a lot of essential products.

bulk food and we have a few giant pots. Yeah. We like to make soup a lot. Yeah. Um, currently our kitchen is like, like our, our cooking equipment includes two large pots and a rice cooker that someone recently donated to us. And then we needed a fridge. So we got a free fridge off offer up and cleaned it up and put some cool stickers on it and then plugged it into a garage and

Currently, the kitchen that we use is like a couple of us just live together. And so we use our kitchen and we have access to our garage and we just store the supplies in the garage. We store the fridge in the garage.

And we make it work through donations we get on Instagram. So we knew some comrades that work with the community fridges. There's some community fridges in San Diego. And so they already had a relationship with a grocery store. And so we were able to hop in on that and we get some donations from that. We get some donations from...

what's Selah, uh, the, the group. Oh, porch light. Yeah. And there's so much food waste that I feel like if we were to find the right people, we,

we could be fully self-supporting on just things that would be thrown away alone. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. We just have to meet the right people in order to do that, but we're getting there. And I do want to say the kitchen is a small slash regular size kitchen. So you don't have to have some big, crazy warehouse type kitchen to make this happen. Yeah. And then you're feeding people, right? Like presumably you're doing it like in the afternoon or evening. Have you found there are things that you said you like soup, but I know like we,

We fed a lot of people at the border last winter, right? And we found out that certain things worked, certain things didn't work. And we always tried to keep it vegan because of people's religious needs or preferences, right? Is there anything like that that you've found that works or doesn't work? We have done a lot of chili with our squad. And I know that Luca has done a lot of curry. So there are certain things and they can both be easily made vegan. Initially, a lot of people...

when we would have vegan stuff would ask for me alternatives to which I understand people, you know, they don't always have access to protein. So we tried out both options when we can. Nice.

Yeah, it varies what we have because our group kind of functions with four autonomous squads, well, semi-autonomous that take turns doing the distros so that you're only really responsible for it once a month, which helps reduce burnout. Yeah, definitely. How does that work? Explain how you came up with that and how it's organized. Yeah, so this was kind of like something we've been talking about for a while. Some of us are more

more into the theory than others, but we're just kind of talking about like, oh, well, like, how do we get more people involved? Because I think what happens oftentimes with these mutual aid groups is there's like a lot of people sitting in a group chat and there's like

a small core of people who do end up doing the majority of the labor and that often results in burnout for those people and building a resentment between like the people who are doing a lot and the other people. Cause I think also like sometimes people feel left out and they don't feel like they can get involved. And then they feel like the people who are doing the core of the labor are like in charge and they have to defer to them. Yeah. Um, which creates a lot of problems, which I'm not saying like we don't have any of those problems. Like,

We're still trying to work out the kinks, but the squad's dynamic makes it so that groups of about five to 10, because a distro you need about six people to make it happen. About five to 10 people take turns, so you just rotate. You know when your day is, it's once a month that you are responsible for the distro and you are responsible for choosing the food that you're cooking, making sure it gets cooked.

organizing with your other comrades, getting the donations, all of that stuff. But you can always ask the larger group for help or extra hands if you need it. Yeah. But it sort of shares that like responsibility. Cause I think the most stressful part oftentimes is like, Oh, the distro happening tonight is on me. And I, and if I,

don't do it, it's not going to happen. Yeah. And so it sort of spreads like that sort of labor, but we have members who like show up to every single distro because they want to. And that's totally fine. Even if they're in like

whatever designated squad they're in. Right. Yeah. Or some people who show up like once every few months because they have other stuff going on, you know, so it's very open and you don't have to be in a squad. You could just choose to join whenever you have the time with whoever's week it is. So it's pretty loose. Yeah. I would say, but it does give a good sense of structure. Yeah. That helps a lot. I remember one day last year, last winter, um,

I was out building shelters with an Uzbek guy and a few Kurdish guys. And we built these shelters and we built three of them and,

Afterwards, I was sitting down with some of my friends who were also there as volunteers, and they're all anarchists too. We each asked each other what we did, and then one of them said, so what did we all learn? What did you learn when you did that today, right? And I think that's a really valuable question that we should be asking ourselves in our organizing spaces. So from your first distro to now, I want to ask, what did you learn? I would say we've really learned everything.

how to trust each other. We're working on, you know, how to get consensus models, how to,

split the labor between different people, how to work with different people. And also, yeah, like I said in the beginning, how to really how to trust each other, which, you know, we all want to see the revolution happen at some point. And so I feel like one of the most important and valuable things we can be doing is building relationships and communities with each other where we can actually rely on each other. And so having a mutual task really helps with that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think for me, like,

We've tried to do stuff in the past like this. And I think the issue we've always run into was that sometimes there's a tendency to want too much structure right away and be like, oh, if we don't have everything planned out, we don't know how everything's going to work, then we can't do it. And we need to figure everything out beforehand. And we learned a lot doing it. And

Even if we didn't have everything figured out, we're still working on our consensus structure. We're still working on how we're going to make big decisions as a group and when the squads can make their own decisions and when the group can make their own decisions. We don't have everything figured out. It's very loose, but

We didn't need that and we've been able to do a distro for months and we don't have everything figured out. We have something, we had enough to get us started and we're working on slowly adding things as we need to without overburdening ourselves because I think sometimes lots of layers and lots of complexities can really make it difficult to organize and adapt to what's happening on the ground.

Definitely. I think, yeah, we can overcomplicate it and like be too anxious. Talking of anxious, I'm anxious. So we have yet to pivot to advertisements. So let's do that. And then we'll come back and we're back. Okay. So you spoke about like a lot about the logistics of cooking, which is great, but

I know from experience of feeding hungry people can be a challenge, right? It's no one's fault, especially when people are hungry, like we're not our best selves. There's a whole advertising campaign built around that. So how do you organize your distro such that everybody feels that they're being taken care of, everybody feels safe and knows that they're going to get enough to eat?

Yeah. So that also goes back to something more we've learned is we try to have enough people at the distro so we can have different people doing different things. And sometimes that means one person is just walking around, talking to people, deescalating a situation if need be. And then we also figured out that at the end, when we run out of food in order so that

So that people who have been waiting in line don't get mad, which it's understandable. You know, they've been waiting in line and there's no more food and they're hungry. Yeah, of course. We try to have like different snacks and like muffins or granola bars and water just to hand out at the end for those people who still need something. And so sometimes we have music and we all just try to bring a good energy and, you

So far, nothing that we haven't been able to handle has happened. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I know we found the music was really helpful when we were distributing food when really big groups at the border, like play some music, I have a friend who plays music, play some music. And then we'd always ask folks from the group who we were feeding to volunteer to help us and that helped us overcome language barriers and stuff.

That's happened a couple of times as well where people have just stepped up and wanted to help, which has been great. Yeah, it's nice. And it gives us all like part of what we're doing with mutual aid isn't just meeting material needs. It's also like the difference between solidarity and charity, right? Like we're there because we care about you as people, not just as like hunger mouths that we can take off a spreadsheet. And working together is an integral part of that. It's what distinguishes us from charity model. Yeah.

And thankfully, most of the time we have enough people that if somebody needs to step aside and have a one-on-one conversation with somebody because that's what they need in that moment, we can do that. Yeah, having floaters is really important. We always have at least two people serving food, and then we have a snack table, water table usually, and then we have a section for harm reduction that usually gets served on another table. And then we have...

a section for clothes depending on what we have and people sort of like go down the assembly line kind of like going down grabbing the different things and we give people like plastic bags that we get from grocery stores so they can get their things but we also have like floaters usually so that like if someone's like having like a medical issue or someone's like

upset or whatever is going on someone can like step aside and spend some time with them um like the other day we had a woman who was not feeling well because of the heat and she had been out and she needed to sit down so we like grabbed one of our chairs and we sat her down and got her some water and just like talked to her and we had a couple people who could step aside and do that and then everyone else just could keep like feeding people without it kind of stopping things but she still got what she needed and

And during that heat wave at one of the distros, I remember you ran across and got somebody Gatorade because they really needed electrolytes. So we're lucky that we have enough people that we get to be able to do stuff like that when we need to. Right. And I imagine that regularity is really important. Like people know that you will be there and that they can come and you will feed them. Like that builds trust, right? They can, uh,

Everyone, I think, benefits from a little structure. And being unhoused, it can be really fucking hard to find structure. Yes, exactly. And it's very hard to get home-cooked food. Yeah. This is something I've encountered living in my car. It's hard to get healthy food. The food you buy is shit. It's more expensive and it's less good for you. And these things compound over time to have health and psychological consequences. Yeah.

Everything we cook, we eat as well. And if we're cooking or we're helping out with distro, of course, that's a mutual and mutual aid. We can also eat it. Yeah. That is definitely something else we learned at the border. Especially if we're cooking something that's maybe not a cultural cuisine because we're meeting people from all over the world. A lot of times, it's like you were saying, chili and curry, it's like hot, wet food, right? Like, you know, that big semi-liquid.

pan of chili or whatever that we would cook and spaghetti and like folks being like what's that we're like oh do i'm gonna eat some do you want some yeah and like i honestly had some of the happiest moments of last year uh just like i remember one day i've been building yurts all day with an uzbek guy and then we sat down and had our beans and just like talked about our lives and it was really sweet and yeah i think that that is a moment of solidarity that yeah you don't get when you're

I've seen NGOs and the US military tossing MREs at refugees and they did the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, there shouldn't be a line between you and the people that you're providing mutual aid to. I mean, you should never give someone food that you're not willing to eat yourself.

And like, if someone's hungry while we're cooking, like they can totally eat the food that we're making too. It's not like cordoned off. Um, like of course, of course we like, you know, we wear our PPE and we like,

you know, aren't getting their hands or whatever. But I mean, cause a lot of the people who are like, who do provide mutual aid and work in mutual aid groups, like are also people who may face houselessness or have trouble paying for groceries or something. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. There's no separation, you know, between us and them at the end of the day. Yeah. I think that's super important. So I want to talk about the camping van. Maybe let's take another hour break. We'll talk about the camping van when we come back.

We are back. We are now discussing the topic which I love to talk about, which is evil things that Todd Gloria has done. And today, it could be the whole podcast every day of the week for years, but we're going to talk about this camping van. For folks who didn't listen to our camping van episode, can you give me like a 60-second synopsis on the camping van? And then we can dive into what it's done. Yeah, so basically earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned

basically an ordinance that you don't have the ability to cite or arrest somebody if there's not shelter available, but they overturned that. So now they can. And Gavin Newsom issued a sweeping order that the agencies have to clear encampments and ordered that cities and counties do the same. So now there's 14 plus cities in California that do have a camping ban in place. So that's criminalizing

Living outside. Yeah. The existence of unhoused people is now a crime. Yeah. So what have you seen post enforcement? Yeah. So I also like work in the field of harm reduction. And so, you know, I do this in my free time because I want to do it, but I also do it for work, which there's definitely, um,

Sometimes I feel weird about working for an organization and wish that I didn't have to, but it's just one of those things. And I've seen it's really hard and really sad because when people are in encampments, a lot of times they build a sort of community and family and they learn how to take care of each other. And constantly being split up is destroying these communities. And then they just have to travel further and further away.

so that they're disconnected from not only their community, but also resources that they do have. And so it's just really hard. And sometimes we lose connections with people. We don't know where they went, you know, or they end up in jail or it's been really horrible. And we were just talking about how it just seems like people don't really care and it's crazy.

that this is happening in our communities and people aren't talking about it and aren't outraged by it yeah yeah these bans also have like a really nasty ripple effect because when these people got pushed out of san diego then they go to other cities that don't have an encampment ban like chula vista national city and now chula vista national city and other cities are advancing their

their own camping bands and citing an influx from San Diego. Right. So it's like creating this really awful, like just progressive expansion of these bands. Yeah. And one more thing I'll add is that

Some people are like, oh, well, that's just going to, you know, be good because some people are going to get into shelters or find alternative ways of getting help. But that's not what's happening because we have not had any more shelters. It's really hard to get into a shelter, actually. And, you know, since Newsom has been governor, we've had apparently so many billions of dollars, 24 billion spent tackling homelessness. And it's like, what is there to show for it?

Right. People still don't have a place to go. And even if they do get into a shelter, a lot of the times there's so many rules and regulations that if somebody has a high level of mental health needs and they're not going to be able to stay there and there's just no solution. Yeah. It's giving the appearance of doing something to make homeowners, right? People who they think matter happy. It's really bleak. Yeah. Let's discuss a little bit then, like this camping ban, as you say, has forced people to other cities. Like

what do you think it does to the unhoused community like you talked a little bit about breaking up encampments like where do people end up right when their encampments get broken up when the community and like where do they end up and and how can people because this is something that's nationwide right yeah gavin newson is being a particularly odious turd about it but like other people other states are doing it too

Something I've seen in San Diego, for instance, people ending up in a riverbed. So can you talk about the risks there and then the needs that it creates and how we can meet them?

So you're right. Some of them are ending up in riverbeds. There's also like what they refer to as an island kind of close to old town where a lot of people have been going. But, you know, you have to get a raft to go there and it's not easy to get there. They don't have a lot of resources there. There's a lot of crime that happens and it's not the best scenario. And other than that, they're making these safe,

sleeping sites which are not actually safe and they're kind of like concentration camps and

they're from people i've talked to who actually live in them they're not good places to be at yeah at all and it's just kind of like pushing the problem out of view without actually doing anything or providing anything meaningful to people yeah which is the goal i think is to make poverty invisible like yeah yeah exactly and the other thing that happens is like

I live in an area where there are a lot of encampments and there probably would be permanent encampments if it weren't for the ban. And personally, I would prefer that because like what happens is these people get like

moved like their their encampment will like crop up it'll be there for like maybe a week and then like it'll disappear and like I'll wake up one morning and they're gone and All of their stuff often gets thrown away They lose access to their things if they're not there to take it They basically can take only what they can carry on their backs if they're lucky if they happen to be there when their stuff is being thrown away there they're sighted they could be arrested and then

usually I see sometimes the same people come back, but they just had to like go find somewhere else. So they're basically being forced to be like migratory rather than like staying in one place, which means that it often, it also makes like the people who live in neighborhoods, like, cause I can't form relationships with these people as much as I could before. Like I can't know my neighbors as much because my neighbors are constantly getting moved around. So like, I'll like form a relationship with someone and I'll be like,

you know, like I'll be like their beer guy and I'll like, you know, like there's people that I'll know that I'll like go buy a beer for, go get water for if I see them and I know their name and that. But then when, with the encampment ban, they might just disappear one day. And I don't know if they got arrested. I don't know if they've just been displaced. And that's like,

not great for me not great for them not great for literally anyone around because it's like people are safer if they're able to have like a stable place to be definitely yeah like everyone is safer yeah yeah if our stated goal is getting people off the streets like chasing them around the streets isn't doing that it's making it harder for people to find stability yeah and

And, you know, I've talked to people also about the reason sometimes they don't like the term homeless is because they're like, yes, we may not have a house, but we make our homes. We make a community. We make a home. And, yeah.

losing that sense of security, any little bit of security they have, constantly having to move, not ever feeling comfortable or safe, you know, that's traumatizing. Taking a bad situation and making it worse, which is what the state likes to do. I wonder, like,

Before we finish up, a lot of people, like I said, want to start a mutual aid thing. Do you have any advice for them? Things that you would do if you were starting over, things that you feel like you did well. If you wanted to start Breadblock now, how would you go about it? Get signal.

Start a group chat, maybe make an Instagram where you can post about it and find people who are also interested in that. Go to local events. What else, Luca? Having a place where people can congregate with each other, having a regular community event to meet people and get to know each other and trust each other. I really wish that we had started sooner because I think we had the capacity to start sooner way

way beforehand and I think it was like the encampment ban and like Sayla being like we need to do this like happening it like it just takes like one person being excited enough about something and then like their comrades being like yeah no you're right like we do need to do something and I think people are really afraid to be that person to like push for something to try to like wake other people up or like

convince other people that you have the capacity to because I think the state can be really disempowering and they make you think that you need like a budget and you need like all of these things to like be able to provide people like aid or like like mutual aid to provide people anything and like we did it with like literally just like a couple of our members just like gave some money that we had and that we had like you know like we had like a couple hundred dollars that we got from people and then money that was enough to start and

And like, you could literally start with like 50 bucks and figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. We did not come from a place of any of us having a lot of money. So we've basically just had to figure it out and anybody can figure it out. You know, I feel like our culture is so individualized, but yeah,

we do have the capacity to come together and yeah, just take somebody being like, all right, let's do this. And you'll, you'll meet enough people who are also interested in that because people do want community at the end of the day and people do want to help people. Yeah. Is there anything else you guys want to mention before we go? Yeah. The only last thing I wanted to mention is that we, uh,

do have a lot of future goals of expanding and doing more street medicine as well and expanding to different areas or also having mobile teams where we can go out and reach people who aren't in one location or who maybe have certain disabilities and can't walk and get there. So we have a lot of ideas for that. And that just takes meeting more people who are into this and

getting more funds and yeah. Yeah. So hopefully that's something we can do.

And I just wanted to briefly mention one of our members did some really great research on the way that Hillcrest Business Association is using the encampment ban to further harm and using, they're actually using like private security to push people out so people can enjoy their nightlife without having to deal with an objectionable minority that wants to live however it pleases. No, for fuck's sake.

The quote from Mr. Ben Nicholas of the Hillcrest Business Association. So they have a initiative called Hillcrest Clean and Safe Program, where they displace people from Hillcrest for the benefit of the businesses.

And they have like, if you go on Voice of San Diego, you can hear some, like, just the way they talk about these people is really insane and really dehumanizing. And it kind of notes how businesses, how like capitalism and the state are working together hand in hand to displace our community members. So the business associations and the businesses themselves are disorganized.

being empowered by these encampment bands to further perpetuate violence on people. Jesus, yeah. Yeah. And on that topic, the

the way that people actually are dressing it here is making it so much worse. Like San Diego has a hot team, which is part of the police department. It's called the homeless outreach team. And they're supposedly supposed to help get people into shelters and stuff like that. But anybody I've talked to who has tried to reach out for them and ask, Oh, you know, okay. If you're going to move me, like I need to get into a shelter. Um,

one of them who I was talking to about this was in his 70s and very medically vulnerable and instead of helping him find somewhere to go they just put his car which he was sleeping in because it was unregistered and so they're not actually helping at all it's just a cop and that's why you know just us regular people have to do something because the state's not going to

Yeah, I think that's a great thing. That's the fucking dark about the Hillcrest Business Association. Like for people who aren't familiar with San Diego, San Diego is like LGBTQIA neighborhood is called Hillcrest. One in three of our trans youth are unhoused. And like, I guess they don't matter to the Hillcrest Business Association. Not surprising, but just fucked up.

Where can people, if they want to support you, they want to follow you, if they want to come out and do food distro, where can they find you on the internet? Yeah, they can find us on Instagram. Our Instagram is breadblock underscore distro. If you want to provide like direct funds, bread underscore block is our Venmo. Block with a C, not a K.

B-L-O-C. Oh yeah. Yeah. B-L-O-C like block. Yeah. We are anarchist though. Yeah. And I also wanted to mention a couple of comrades of ours are facing houselessness themselves and there's a mutual aid post on our Instagram and you can also find them at ruster.music. That's R-U-S-T-E-R music.com.

or their Venmo is also in a post on our page, they could really use some help because they are really big individuals who like show up all the time and help us cook and are a big part of our group and, you know, also could use some mutual aid. Yeah, that's nice to have people to help them. Thank you so much for your time, guys. Thank you for doing all that important work and thank you for sharing it with us. If people have questions, they can reach out to you, right? Yeah.

Yes, yes. Of course. Thank you so much for having her. Yeah, thank you so much. It's much appreciated. Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right. Bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

The 2024 presidential election is here. MSNBC has the in-depth coverage and analysis you need. Our reporters are on the ground. Steve Kornacki is at the big board breaking down the races. Rachel Maddow and our Decision 2024 team will provide insight as results come in. And the next day, Morning Joe will give you perspective on what it all means for the future of our country. Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election Tuesday, November 5th on MSNBC.

With cash back on every purchase.

How do you cash back? Learn more at chase.com slash freedom to be. Chase, make more of what's yours. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offer subject to change. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC.

And come back to get free coins every four hours.

Only at HighFiveCasino.com. High Five Casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary. Void or prohibited. Play responsibly. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details at HighTheNumberFiveCasino.com. High Five Casino. Attention parents and grandparents. Are you searching for the perfect gift for your kids this holiday season? Give the gift of adventure that will last all year long.

... ... ... ...

♪♪♪

Visit GuardianBikes.com to take advantage of these deals and secure your holiday season gifts today. Happy riding! Welcome to Carappan here. I'm Andrew Siege of the YouTube channel Andrewism. I'm joined by Garrison Davis. Hello there. Once again, hello. And today, I regret to inform you that you must come to Brazil.

I've heard mixed things about Brazil currently, but I'm not against the idea. I have considered it before. Yes, well, we're not going to the Brazil of present times. We'll actually be time traveling, continuing the somewhat informal series I've been doing on Latin American anarchism. We'll be dipping our toes into the sand and the sea, the farmlands and jungles, the mountains and deserts, the cities and villages that make up the land and ground of the potential liberty.

of the people of Brazil, particularly the struggles for anarchism that they would have had in the late 19th and early 20th century. All this is, of course, down to the scholarship of people like Edgar Rodriguez, Jesse Cohn, Felipe Correa, Rafael Viana, Da Silva, Juan William dos Santos, Edilene Toledo, and Luigi Biondi.

And without further ado, let's get into it. So the Portuguese landed in the region that would become known as Brazil in 1500. Prior to their colonization, the land was home to ethnic groups linked to four main language groups: the Arawak, the Tupi-Guarani, the Xe and the Kalinago. Some of the specific ethnic groups included the Potiguara, Trememembe, Tabahara, Cayete and so on. After Pedro Álvarez Cabral landed

The following centuries would be marked by colonization and enslavement, as lands were dispossessed and cleared, plantations were established, roads were laid, bridges were built, and so on. All by the auctioned and purchased efforts of whipped and exploited human muscle.

The oppressed enslaved Africans in this society would sometimes flee into the jungles and form quilumbos, or fugitive slave settlements, including the famous Palmares, which survived for almost a century with a population of between 11,000 to 20,000.

After Brazil gained independence from Portugal in 1822, retaining its own monarchy, it experienced numerous maroonages, reforms, and popular revolts, including the Setembrada and Novembrada revolts, the Ouro Preto uprising, the Sabinada and Bailada revolts,

the Camarachim Revolt, the Guerra dos Farapos Revolt, the Liberal Revolution, the Praira Revolution, the extremely late abolition of slavery in 1888, and the proclamation of the first Brazilian Republic in 1889. It was in this tumultuous socio-political landscape that anarchism would take root. As in much of Latin America, anarchism would be brought by immigrants, through port cities like Rio de Janeiro and Santos.

But revolutionary ideas would also come to Brazil by way of Brazilians themselves. Some went to France and Portugal for their studies and discovered anarchism there.

Others would find the words of Kropotkin and Malatesta in the bookstores of their native cities. Dr. Fabio Luz, a Bahian hygienist and doctor, wrote two novels which sought to grapple with the social question of exploitation of man by man in Brazil. Dr. Luz also spent his time working alongside unions and helping to fight the yellow fever and smallpox epidemics that plagued his nation.

Another novelist, Manuel de Mendonca, also published in this time, contributing to a slow-growing libertarian literary universe. These anarchist intellectuals, alongside others, would go on to launch a popular university,

Other contributors to the propagation of anarchism in Brazilian soil included Alessio de Carvalho, J. Martins Fontes, Pedro do Couto, Roger Pombo, João Gonçalves da Silva, Maximino Maciel, Benjamin Mota, Francisco Viotti, etc.

Anarchism in Brazil was actually quite diverse as well, as it found immigrants from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Canada, and England, alongside former black slaves and mestizos. It found children and it found women.

Lima Barreto, Domingos Passos, who was kind of known as the Brazilian Bakunin, Nino Vascos, Edgar Lewin Roth, José Oitica, Maria Lacerda de Moura, and Maria Angelina Suarez all made key contributions to the development of anarchism in Brazil.

Dozens of newspapers like Cliché, Avi, Pianchi, L'Avenir, O Il Livetario and O Despertar would also be published. Hundreds of lectures would be hosted, alongside language classes and artistic activities at anarchist cultural centres and schools like the Eliseo Recluse School and the Modern Schools in São Paulo, which also provided literacy courses and vocational training.

Revolutionary plays were put on in theatres by groups such as Grupo Arte Instructual and Grupo Dramático Jeremina, blending entertainment with syndicalist propaganda and fundraising efforts for the labour movement. Wugas festivals featuring poetry, song, dance and sport raised money for anarcho-syndicalist organisations and reinforced a sense of solidarity.

The anarchist workers, being so numerously immigrant, attempted to create a cosmopolitan counterculture centered on working class values and priorities. So all these projects and institutions were the results of their efforts. Over a thousand foreign agitators would be deported from Brazil as a result of their radical efforts, and a few would even be killed.

The first anarchist to be murdered by the state in Brazil was the Italian Polinice Maté, killed in São Paulo on the 20th of September 1898. Earlier that year, the first gathering of socialist-leading workers in Brazil would take place in Rio Grande do Sul, attended by delegates from various associations, anarchist groups, and a newspaper. As usual, the Italian immigrants were heavily represented.

The anarchist immigrants even managed to establish a settlement known as the Guararema anarchist colony, organized by Italian anarchist Artur Campagnoli, where perhaps the most notable contribution to anarchism by the Italians in Brazil was the Sicilia colony, which deserves special attention. It bears mentioning, of course, that this project, as with everything taking place in Brazil in this time, took place on colonial land, which seemingly went unacknowledged by the anarchists themselves, but it was regrettably common in the colonial conditions of Brazil.

In the southern state of Parana, in the rural municipality of Palmera, a group of Italian anarchists led by Giovanni Rossi and Gigi Damiani founded the Sicilia colony in 1890.

The land was originally granted to them by Emperor Pedro II, but after the proclamation of the first Brazilian Republic, the new government did not acknowledge that land grant and so the anarchists had to purchase it instead. The anarchists sought to experiment in creating a society based on collective ownership and free love. They built a communal shed for shelter and began the process of constructing individual homes. The population of the colony quickly grew to almost 300 people, including the Rossi himself.

But by the end of 1891, the colony was facing its first big challenge. They'd outgrown the infrastructure. With only 20 wooden houses and one community shed, the settlements simply couldn't sustain the influx of people. And to make matters worse, many of the settlers were industrial workers with little or no agricultural experience. And this lack of farming knowledge made it difficult for them to produce enough food to feed themselves.

They tried to organize tasks based on people's existing skills. Artisans stuck to their trades. But the farmers struggled, especially with the differences between Italian and Brazilian soil. While they managed to plant crops like maize, the results weren't immediate. With the money they brought, they could buy groceries, tools, and seeds. But it wasn't enough to sustain them until their crops started yielding results. So many settlers had to seek work elsewhere, with some even taking government jobs. The colony wasn't just about farming, though.

Over the years, they built roads, sheds, barns, a mill, and even a fish tank. They planted a huge cornfield, dug wells, and set up a nursery for seedlings. They even tried out free love, with Rossi himself participating in a polyamorous relationship. Many such cases. Many such cases. But despite all these efforts, the cracks were starting to show.

In 1892, seven families packed up and returned to Italy. By the end of the year, the colony's population had dwindled to just 20 people. Oh, dang. Yeah. It's a very, very rapid decline.

Yeah, the sustainability of these types of projects is always the big thing, especially when it comes to food and farming. That is, unfortunately, the joke whenever people talk about these sorts of projects now. All these artisan craftsmen don't want to spend out time toiling away in the fields. Yeah.

yeah yeah it's a challenge that the persistency so far it seems like there's like a decent mix of like labor organizing like social organizing like with like newspapers like theaters plays like that kind of like more like cultural engagement stuff with like unions and this little like anarchist society that they try they've they've kind of like like sped run through a whole bunch of like

I don't want to say social anarchism because that is a term that means something else. But there is a lot of stuff that's very similar to that, at least so far. And I'm not hearing very much stuff that leads me to believe there's a large degree of conflictuality towards the actual Brazilian Republic. But was that also an aspect during this time period? They would...

end up engaging in a lot more heavy, like you're talking about like direct engagement with the state. Yeah. I think in this early period when they were still building up and spreading the word, it was sort of a honeymoon period for the movement. Okay. In a sense, a lot of the dramatic confrontations are very soon pendant. Okay. Okay. So,

The cracks were starting to show. Families had packed up and returned to Italy. The colony had gone down to just 20 people. And because a lot of the colonies made up of intellectuals, doctors, engineers, artisans, many of them left for nearby cities where they founded the Giuseppe Garibaldi Society, which I couldn't find much information on that particular society from that particular historical period in my research, but it seems to have been a mutual aid society.

I'm not 100% sure. I mean, that would make sense as it's within a bigger city. Yes, yes. And Garibaldi has a rather interesting history that I'm only recently learning about. I didn't even know he went all the way to South America and Scalavanton and stuff. But I learned very recently that he had married, I believe, an indigenous or a mestizo woman while he was in South America. And they had this very romantic relationship.

dramatic life together, leading battlefields side by side, all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm not surprised that the Italian anarchists were perhaps inspired by Garibaldi, even if he himself was not an anarchist. Sure. So anyway, by 1893, new settlers had arrived, thankfully, and the colony was trying to manufacture shoes and wine barrels so they could make some sort of an income.

They eventually grew to 64 residents and they established two wells and a new access road. But even with those new developments, the colony was still struggling. They were dealing with material poverty, the neighboring Catholic communities were extremely hostile toward them, and they also had to deal with very poor sanitation conditions. And then in their fourth year, they also had a crop epidemic that pretty much decimated the colony. And of course,

As high-minded as the ideas may have been, they were the internal struggles. Free love and communal living may have been central to the colony's philosophy, but not everyone adapted well to the ideals. In theory, they embraced the values, but in practice, there was some insecurity and jealousy that was out of that. Also, many such cases. Many such cases. By the end of 1893, it was abundantly clear that the colony couldn't survive.

Labour was in high demand in nearby cities, and despite efforts to attract new settlers through socialist propaganda in Europe, the colony just couldn't maintain its population. And in 1894, Cecilia Colony officially came to an end. There have been many plays and dramatizations of the story of Cecilia Colony. Most of them, as you would imagine, are in Brazilian Portuguese. So good luck finding them. I'll try to find a dub somewhere, maybe. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's also in Portuguese. But anyway, so the experiment had held on for four dramatic years, defying pressure from the newly established Brazilian Republican government, heavy taxes, and even military incursions. But eventually material conditions, disease, and internal conflicts brought it home. And how are we entering into the 20th century? 1903 saw the founding of the first formal structure inspired by international syndicalism, the Federation of Class Associations.

This organization would take part in the first Workers' Congress in 1906, which brought together 43 delegates, predominantly anarchists, from across Brazil in over 12 sessions discussing 23 items of discussion. Giovanni Rossi, the guy behind the Sicilian colony, was among the attendees.

The Congress sought to advocate for economic resistance societies and laid the foundation for the Brazilian Workers' Confederation, or COB, for short, in 1908, which united over 50 unions, primarily from Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul.

Between 1905 and 1908, the workers' movement witnessed a surge in strikes, notably among shoemakers, railwaymen, and other industrial sectors. Porto Alegre saw a general strike in 1906. Sao Paulo was the scene of insurrectionary strikes in 1906 and 1907 as part of the campaign for the eight-hour workday.

In Santos, the strikes for the eight-hour day only ended in 1921, meaning they spent well over a decade, close to two decades, fighting for the eight-hour day. The workers' movement also held several congresses in this time, including the first and second Sao Paulo state congresses, the first Masqueres State Labor Federation Congress, and the Parana Labor Congress, which affirmed the movement's commitment to anarchist syndicalism.

And as with other anarchist groups around the world, they organized a demonstration to commemorate the death of Francisco Ferrer, the modern school founder who inspired rational education efforts across Brazil. They also supported the Russian workers in both 1905 and 1917, supported Mexican workers and peasants in 1910, and commemorated the Chicago martyrs on subsequent May Days.

1913 marked the second Brazilian Labour Congress, much larger than the first, where delegates from 117 bodies across eight states debated 24 items. In 1914, Anarchists in Sao Paulo organized a conference to select two delegates to represent Brazil at the London Anarchist Congress, which was eventually and unfortunately cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I.

This is such an interesting moment in international anarchism that at least right now, we have the internet, but that sucks. The style of actual international anarchism

It's just something that I've never really been able to experience before. But, Garrison, you're forgetting something. We have discourse. Oh, I'm sure they also had discourse, but they got to go to London to do their discourse, which sounds much better than doing it from my toilet on twitter.com. Sorry, x.com. My apologies. No, but that's true, though. I would much rather the discourse take place in person over...

you know, the Discord suvas and the Twitter and Reddit threads. I mean, like, especially in that, like, international aspect, like, there's certainly, like, anarchist gatherings and, like, conferences and convergences, you know, within countries. I've been to many in the United States. But, yeah, this sort of, like,

like having anarchists in brazil go to london to talk with anarchists from everywhere else in the world like compare their experiences and compare notes yeah then talk about like what their actual like political goals are it's something that i think just sadly doesn't really exist anymore and that's really a vital component for international solidarity because that kind of solidarity that kind of opportunity is very difficult to find

just through virtual interaction. There's something meaningful in shaking a person's hand and embracing them and laughing and crying together in person, sharing a meal, I think really makes a difference. I mean, yeah, especially when you have like the spread of anarchism is so built on that internationalism. Like you have anarchists from Portugal and Italy and Spain. The immigrant influence is very, very profound. Yeah.

But although there was the outbreak of World War I, closer to home, the anarchists were still involving themselves in that sort of regional discourse. They may have been flying to London, but they managed to meet with delegates from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay at the International Peace Conference and the South American Anarchist Congress in October 1915, all in an aim to foster both regional and international anarchist cooperation.

As the war raged on, in addition to their anti-war propaganda, Brazil's anarchists continued to rally against unemployment, rising living costs, scarcity of basic foodstuffs, while resisting the capitalists, the clergy, and the state which sent young men to the slaughter on the battlefield.

In response to the pressure levied by the libertarian proletariat, the government gave the go-ahead for direct sale by the producer to the consumer without taxes levied, easing the hunger crisis in the country. So their struggles worked.

This period, and particularly from 1912 to 1920, marked significant worker mobilization. The period from 1917 to 1920 in particular was marked by significant strikes, including the Sao Paulo general strike of 1917, which saw 70,000 workers participate, with sympathy strikes in Rio Grande do Sul and Parana, demanding better working conditions, wages, and aid on our workday.

This period also witnessed an increase in unionization and the growth of the workers' press, which provided critical platforms for revolutionary ideas. In 1919, an uprising exploded in Rio de Janeiro, leading to the death of three workers and the imprisonment or deportation of nearly a hundred. The government deployed police, troops, and even naval warships to crush the resistance of the workers.

And they also attempted to exploit racial divisions. They would take Afro-Brazilians and use them as scabs. And then once the strike was over, once they broke up the strike, they would fire those same Black workers to reaffirm the privilege of white labor. Eventually, the government would concede and force capitalists to make some concessions where wages were concerned. But this came at a cost.

Alongside the mass imprisonment and deportations, the state's efforts included infiltration of the unions, which eventually steered reformist unions into the leadership position of the working classes, supplanting the more revolutionary organizations. Thus, anarchism arguably entered a new era in the 1920s. There were still anarchist-led labor congresses, including the 3rd Brazilian Labor Congress and the 2nd and 3rd Rio Grande do Sul Labor Congresses,

the latter of which endorsed a declaration of principles from the IWA and established an international anarchist solidarity pact. But by the four Rio Grande do Sul labor congress, attended by 16 workers' organizations, two newspapers, six anarchist groups, Sao Paulo militants, and delegates from Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, anarchist efforts in Brazil had to become much more clandestine.

Following the deportations, the state intervention, the general repression of the successive Brazilian regimes, the anarchist movement had indeed weakened, and it took another blow with the establishment of the Brazilian Communist Party, the PCB, partially inspired by Bolshevism in 1922, which absorbed many former anarchists, including Edgar Leuneroth, who co-authored its charter, and Astrid Guilhom Pereira, who served as its secretary-general for nearly a decade before he was expelled.

The PCB competed for union leadership and worked with the governments of Arturo Fernandez, Washington Lewis, and Getulio Vargas to suppress the libertarian movement and the free trade unions.

The Bernadette's government, by the way, sent thousands of political prisoners, including anarchists, into the remote penal colony of Clevelandia. Thousands. Where the harsh conditions killed hundreds. Wow. And the Luis and Vargas governments, of course, were not any better. I was also wondering, like, where were these people, like, deported to? Like, it sounded like they've been in Brazil for quite a while. When you were, like, mentioning there was all those other people who were deported out of the country. Yeah.

Like, where did they go? Yeah. There was a story I was reading about that. I didn't maintain it in my notes. I'm only half remembering it. But one of my sources would have had it of the names I listed at the beginning. But they had spoken about how there were these, I believe, Portuguese people in Brazil. Some Portuguese from Portugal who had been living there and working there and whatever for years and years and years. And...

because they had naturalized they were like subject to like this these heavy attacks and i believe some of them were deported as well and so i'm assuming whatever country of origin they could be traced to they would be deported there or they would be deported to a neighboring south american country but i didn't really find specific details on where they were sent

I assume it's mostly their home countries or neighboring countries. Between that and sending thousands of people to a penal colony with hundreds dying, this is a massive wave of repression they're dealing with in the early 20s here. Indeed. And unfortunately, their supposed allies weren't exactly a help. In 1927, the anarchists Antonio Dominguez and Damião da Silva were murdered.

by the communists, who also wounded another 10 members of the printers union and attacked and stole the assets of the footwear workers union. So that further weakened the anarchist struggle when they were already dealing with that government repression. And...

In a sense, anarchists are like roaches, we just keep on struggling and surviving. And the persistence of anarchist resistance, in spite of all this repression, would trigger a further backlash by the bourgeoisie, which would also arise to challenge the survival of anarchism and the left in general in Brazil. From the very same Italy that brought many an anarchist, also came many a fascist, which brings us to the Brazilian Integralist movement.

But to find out what happened in the 1920s and 30s and onward, you'll have to wait for the next episode. I've been Andrew Sage. You can find me on youtube.com slash andrewism and patreon.com slash stdrew. And this has been It Could Happen Here. All power to all the people.

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right. Bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

The 2024 presidential election is here. MSNBC has the in-depth coverage and analysis you need. Our reporters are on the ground. Steve Kornacki is at the big board breaking down the races. Rachel Maddow and our Decision 2024 team will provide insight as results come in. And the next day, Morning Joe will give you perspective on what it all means for the future of our country. Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election Tuesday, November 5th on MSNBC.

With cash back on every purchase.

How do you cash back? Learn more at chase.com slash freedom to be. Chase, make more of what's yours. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offer subject to change. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC.

High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits at highfivecasino.com. The hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account. Hundreds of exclusive games, free daily rewards, and come back to get free coins every four hours. Only at highfivecasino.com.

High Five Casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary. Void or prohibited. Play responsibly. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details at highthenumber5casino.com. High Five Casino. Attention parents and grandparents. Are you searching for the perfect gift for your kids this holiday season? Give the gift of adventure that will last all year long.

a guardian bike the easiest safest and quickest bikes for kids to learn on kids are learning to ride in just one day no training wheels needed what makes guardian bikes special they're the easiest to ride thanks to thoughtful engineering lightweight frames and kid friendly components kids love how fun and easy they are to ride and parents appreciate the safety features like the patented braking system that

prevents head over handlebar accidents. Guardian bikes are the only kids' bikes designed and assembled in a USA factory, ensuring top-notch quality and durability. They're built to last and make perfect hand-me-downs. Join the hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today. Their holiday season sales have begun, offering the biggest deal of the year. Save up to 25% on bikes. No code needed. Plus, get free shipping and a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for their newsletter.

Visit GuardianBikes.com to take advantage of these deals and secure your holiday season gifts today. Happy riding! Welcome to Carapinha. I'm Andrew Siege of YouTube channel Andrewism. Today we're continuing the Latin American anarchism series with our exploration of anarchism in Brazil.

I'm joined by... Garrissa Davis. Hello there. And once again, thanks to the scholarship of Edgar Rodriguez, Jesse Cohen, Felipe Correa, Rafael Viana de Silva, Juan William dos Santos, Edelaine Toledo, and Luigi Biondi. When we last left off, anarchist labor resistance in Brazil had triggered a turning point and a reaction.

Weakened by the splits caused by the Bolsheviks and the military repression of the government, another faction would step in to cripple the anarchist cause even further: the Integralists. In the 1920s and 1930s, Brazil saw the rise of the Brazilian Integralist Action, the AIB, a nationalist movement led by Plinio Salgado. During a trip to Europe, Salgado became enamored with Benito Mussolini's fascist movement in Italy.

Upon his return to Brazil and at the height of Getúlio Vargas' dictatorship, which was ushered in thanks to a cool-weather liberal alliance, Salgado founded the Society of Political Studies, gathering intellectuals who were sympathetic to fascism. Then he issued the October Manifesto, laying out the groundwork for the Brazilian Integralist Action.

The movement closely mirrored Italian fascism, with its green-shirted paramilitary wing, regimented demonstrations, and militant rhetoric. Though Salgado publicly rejected racism, many members of his party adopted anti-Semitic views. Integralism was financed in part by the Italian embassy, with the Roman salute and the Tupi word Anaue, meaning, you are my brother, as key symbols of their unity.

Integralist action drew its support from lower middle class Italians and Portuguese immigrants, alongside sections of the Brazilian military, particularly the navy. As the party grew, it became the dictator Vargas' primary right-wing base of support, especially after he began to crack down on the Communist Party. Integralists frequently engaged in street violence and terrorism aimed at leftist groups. In 1931, Vargas introduced labour regulations based on Mussolini's Labour Charter.

Independent industrial unions were banned. Union membership had to be registered with the Ministry of Labor. Two-thirds of union membership had to be native-born or naturalized Brazilians. Oh no! Yeah.

And union officers were required to either be resident in Brazil for 10 years, if naturalized, or 30 years, if foreign-born. That's pretty fucked up. I would assume also just very damaging to the entire labor movement in the country. A very intense series of restrictions. Yes. That's a very immigrant-empowered labor movement. Yeah. Yeah, that was definitely targeted. Definitely, definitely targeted.

Obviously, like, the class consciousness of the immigrant workers was such a threat that they had to root them out from any position of influence within the sanctioned unions. Salgado and the Integralists, of course, welcomed these decrees and worked with the police to capture militant workers. The Communists also apparently welcomed the impositions, the Ministry of Labour. Meanwhile, anarchists and workers were weathering rightist violence.

One time, integralists kicked down the doors of the Bakery Workers' Union, the Construction Workers' League, the Mill and Warehouse Operatives, Stonemasons' Union, and Union of Cafe Employees, destroyed their assets, and extrajudiciously hauled away the workers as prisoners.

So they just started, like, kidnapping people and doing, like, basically state-sanctioned terrorism. Exactly. Another integralist, Gustavo Barroso, used his walking stick to break the arm of an anti-fascist 16-year-old worker named Nair Koleho as she was making a speech against fascism. Time is a flat circle. Indeed it is.

Instead of sticks this time, they're using cars, but it's the same principle. And sticks. Oh yeah, people are still collecting sticks. I have been hit by many a stick from a fascist at a street demo, especially as a teenager. Hmm, down. So with all this violence they're dealing with, in this time, the anarchist process had to hunker down and prepare to face further attacks. In 1933, the Libertarian Anti-Fascist Committee sounded an alarm on the dire threat of integralism.

as one anarchist press wrote like fascism integralism means to enslave and fetter the people let us now defend our liberty like men lest we be forced to weep like madmen hereafter on december twenty fourth nineteen thirty three the tensions were at an all-time high following a humiliating defeat at the salon celso garcia

Plenio Salgado's Integralists, known as the Green Shirts, planned a show of force to assert their dominance. Their target? Union leaders and leftists, particularly anarchists, who stood against their fascist vision for Brazil. According to reports from Nosovos on December 1st, the Integralists had organized 18 companies of Green Shirted marchers who would parade through the heart of Sao Paulo, prepared to crush any resistance that came their way.

Reinforcements from Rio de Janeiro, led by Gustavo Barroso, bolstered their numbers with 500 trained assault troops primed to attack.

The police, of course, were openly supportive of the integralists and had even stationed machine guns at key points throughout the city to ensure the march went smoothly. Colonel Arlindo de Oliveira had an additional 400 troops made up of infantry, fire brigade units, and cavalry ready to intervene. Seems like Claire Overkill, but it was a show of force, so it is to be expected.

By the time the marchers reached the Pracha da Se, a huge crowd had gathered, some curious onlookers, others outright opponents of the fascist movement. As the integralists arrived at the cathedral, cries of "Death to the fascists!" and "Down with the green shirts!" echoed throughout the square. Suddenly, shots rang out.

Some say the firing began accidentally, when a machine gun set up by the Civil Guard was nudged. Others claim it was the Communists lying in wait, ready to ambush the march. Regardless, chaos erupted before the anarchists had even initiated their planned attack. The scene quickly devolved into pandemonium. People fled in terror, shots continued to fire, and several were mortally wounded.

The planned pledge of loyalty to Plinio Salgado, the head of the Integralists, never took place that day. But by 1937, Salgado launched a presidential campaign, hoping to ride the wave of growing support for his movement and become a dictator in his own right. However, when Vargas cancelled the elections and established the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, he banned the Integralist Party along with all the others, sidelining Salgado.

In response, imperialist militants launched two uprisings in 1938, both of which failed. Salgado was imprisoned and later exiled to Portugal. After spending most of his life supporting the dictators of Brazil, his attempts to become one of his own utterly failed. There's a few interesting things in this moment here, particularly how the initial...

struggle against fascism once again and kind of laid at the feet of anarchists and communists had like a degree of hesitancy to like to like jump in fully and then also like i find it interesting the way that these like this era of fascists in brazil particularly were targeting unions but as almost as a way just to target like immigrants like it was like the easiest way for them to actually just do anti-immigrant violence um was like through the unions yeah

Anti-immigrant violence is almost always anti-worker violence as well. Yeah, in the States, at least right now, we're just seeing another kind of uptick in anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence. And yeah, a lot of it is tied to labor and how immigrants are taking jobs away from the lower classes, that sort of thing. Wow.

As always, remember that it could happen here and it's important to be constantly aware and on guard against even the ghost, the shadow of fascism creeping up in your communities. It's easy to be treated by the media or by others as just, "Oh, you're making a big deal about it. You're over exaggerating the threat."

Now these things snowball very quickly, they need to be nipped in the bud. And it's largely thanks to anti-fascism on the front lines that the situation is not as bad as it could be right now. Yeah. Even though it is getting worse every day. For the already weakened anarchist and labour movements in Brazil, integralism had posed a dire threat.

They were already splintered and in decline, struggling to maintain influence, and Integralism's rapid rise, with its militarized structure and anti-leftist violence, fully suppressed their hopes. The Communists weren't exactly a help either.

The anarchists lost a significant stronghold of their struggle on the premises of the Anti-Clerical League in Rio de Janeiro when communists sent to disrupt their meeting called the police on them, leading to the arrest of eight anarchists and the closure of the Anti-Clerical League center and its newspaper. With the help of the Integralists, communists, and leaders of Cardinal Sebastão Leme's Brazilian Catholic Party,

Getúlio Vargas faced little resistance in establishing his Estado Novo dictatorship. His authoritarian regime lasted from 1937 to 1945 and was marked by continuous crackdowns on labour autonomy and anarchism. But despite the common claims that the 1930s marked the end of anarchism in Brazil,

Anarchists remained active in unions and cultural spaces despite repression. Anarchists published influential periodicals like Aplebe and A Chal Direta and aimed to create a national anarchist political organization.

Post-1945, in the era of re-democratization, anarchists converged in São Paulo for Brazilian anarchist congresses in 1948 and 1959, which brought together veterans and motivated the reestablishment of social centers.

The anarchists resumed educational and cultural activities, like founding the Centro de Cultura Social , which became a hub for anarchist intellectual life, hosting lectures, conferences, literary events, and even theatre performances. The anarchists were back. The CCS had played a key role in building anarchist networks, even hosted anarchist exiles from Spain, and helped to establish similar cultural centres in the suburbs of São Paulo and other cities across Brazil.

In Rio de Janeiro, a similar space emerged in 1958, the Centro de Estudos Professor José Oitica, or CEPJO. Like the CCS, the CEPJO hosted courses, lectures, and debates. In 1961, it helped establish an anarchist publishing house called Mundo Libre.

In Sao Paulo, union activity surged, with 300,000 workers striking in 1953 and another 400,000 in 1957.

This period of intense mobilization provided an opportunity for anarchists and independent socialists to come together and form the Syndicalist Orientation Movement, or MOS. Created in 1953, MOS aimed to fight for the autonomy and freedom of workers' unions, resisting state and corporate control. By 1957, they had enough momentum to contest union leadership positions, especially within the graphic sector. Despite these strides, however, the anarchist movement faced considerable challenges.

The redemocratization after 1945 offered some room for growth, but the labour landscape was dominated by corporatist forces, the Communist Party, and the Brazilian Labour Party. Anarchists found themselves battling for influence in a crowded political field. Their efforts to revitalize the movement were fully stifled by a lack of resources and militants, which limited their presence in social movements.

The momentum gained in the 1950s came to a crashing halt with the military coup of 1964. Once again, Brazil entered a period of authoritarian rule, placing anarchist activists in a precarious position.

In May 1964, anarchists from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo organized a secret meeting to strategize, focused on safeguarding anarchist resources. Many went underground, facing renewed repression and uncertainty about the future of their movement. They shifted focus to educational and cultural spaces to survive, with initiatives like the newspaper O Protesto and the publishing house Germinal.

Anarchists, including young students new to the cause, formed the libertarian student movement, the NEL, in 1967 with the intention of fixing a position and fighting back, as well as having an active presence in class and ideological struggles, marking all directions more in accordance with Federalist principles which had governed the life of every class organization.

But after one student, Edson Louise, was murdered by the military police, the Mell and other student initiatives faced heavy persecution after the 1968 Institutional Act No. 5, or the AI-5, which suspended most civil rights, including habeas corpus, allowed for the removal from office of opposition politicians,

enabled federal interventions in municipalities and states, and enabled the institutionalization of arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing by the regime. This military dictatorship that corrupt Brazil from 1964 to 1985 forced anarchist movements into survival mode.

In Rio de Janeiro, the Centro de Estudos Professor José Coetica operated secretly, while in Sao Paulo, the Centro de Cultural Social kept the flame of anarchist thought alive through underground propaganda and secret meetings.

These centers were vital in maintaining connections with international anarchist movements, ensuring that the ideology persisted despite the harsh political climate. You see the importance of international solidarity rearing its head yet again, and you see also the importance of having cultural centers, social centers, community centers, where the movement can draw strength even when it's not directly engaging in labor organizing or direct political struggle.

Just that rejuvenation of community is enough to maintain the survival of that ideological struggle, even when all hope seems lost. No, I mean, this is something like you see a lot, especially after or during like a movement that's faced incredible repression is that kind of it goes back to kind of its earlier forms, at least in terms of like the social aspects. Like in some ways, it feels like it's kind of regressing.

Back to kind of where it started back in the last episode with some of those same underground newspapers, all this cultural engagement. As you said, kind of like a way to keep the light alive during an intense military-style effort of repression. Yeah, it's really quite necessary. Unfortunately, in 1969, the headquarters of SEPJO was raided by Air Force agents.

The invasion resulted in the arrest and prosecution of 18 members, including the anarchist Ariel Perez, who endured a month of imprisonment and torture. So between 1972 and 1977, anarchists were forced into even greater degrees of secrecy, meeting in very small, tightly knit groups. In terms of organizational strength, this might have been the lowest point for anarchism in Brazil.

But things began to shift in 1977, as the dictatorship started to lose its grip. That year, the anarchist periodical "O inimigo, lo re!" was launched in Bahia, marking a significant moment for the movement.

This newspaper brought together student and union militants from various parts of the country: Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraiba, and Pará. Despite internal conflicts and ideological differences, the paper played a crucial role in reorganizing the anarchist movement.

Under the influence of the counterculture, O Inimigo Doré tackled issues like revolutionary unionism, anarcho-syndicalism, the student movement, gender, sexuality, and political theory. The paper ran until 1982, and after a hiatus, resumed briefly between 1987 and 1988. During this same period, there was the first sign of notable anarchist engagement with the labour movement in years.

Following a wave of strikes involving more than 40,000 workers, Anarchists began questioning the bureaucratic union structures. In São Paulo, the Colectivo Rebutário de Oposição Sindical, or COLOPS, was formed, closely aligned with the ideas of the metalworkers opposition movement. COLOPS was officially established during the first national meeting of workers in opposition to the Trade Union Structure, or NTORS, held in September 1980 in Niterói.

This meeting brought together union opposition from 16 states across Brazil, further sparking the revival of anarchist involvement in the labor movement. But one of the most significant developments to come out of this period was the rise of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurales Sem Terra, the Landless Workers Movement, or MST.

Emerging in 1984, just before the end of the military regime, the MST became a mass movement with distinctly anarchist-communist characteristics. It adopted a decentralized, non-hierarchical structure that prioritized autonomous, direct action, principles deeply aligned with anarchism. However, the MST has resisted being identified as explicitly anarchist, avoiding the label to maintain broader support and avoid the stigma attached to anarchist movements.

Over time, while maintaining its independence, the MST has built alliances with various political parties, including the Workers' Party, which would go on to form the government in 2002. By the 1980s, Brazilian anarchism began reflecting the broader new social movements that had emerged globally after the 1960s. Ecology, feminism, and new discourses on sexuality were now key components of anarchist thought.

The 1980s saw the rise of pro-homosexual actors like Nestor Peronguer, an Argentinian-born intellectual who became a central figure in Brazilian anarchism. You know, some have considered me a pro-homosexual. Okay.

But no, this is a continued. It is interesting to see this starting with student movements and then getting back into labor over time after they rebuilt their movement.

through students and then continuing to like adopt more and more like modern social views and like cultural engagement have an image here of one of their newspapers that has what looks like two men having sex right, right on the cover of like the seventies, which is, which is quite something. Incredible.

Must have been very scandalous at the time. Yeah. So, in the 1990s, as Brazil transitioned to the New Republic and embraced neoliberalism, anarchists became key players in shaping a wave of social movements. They actively helped to create and integrate into these movements, advocating their principles and strategies.

One prominent example was Brazil's involvement in the global anti-globalization movement, inspired by protests like the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999. In Brazil, this movement began in Santos on the same date, led by anarchists, ecologists, and libertarians. By 2000, a coalition of these groups emerged, particularly in São Paulo, and continued organizing actions against neoliberal policies until 2003.

The protest targeted institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, and introduced the Black Bloc tactic to Brazil. Anakis also helped establish Brazil's Center for Independent Media , part of the global Indymedia Network, which aimed to challenge mainstream media dominance. Active between 2001 and 2005, CMI was a key platform for independent journalism across 14 Brazilian cities.

Beyond protests, anarchists were involved in broader social movements, contributing to housing struggles in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as supporting feminist, indigenous, black and LGBT causes.

They played significant roles in movements like the National Movement of Collectors of Recyclable Material , the previously mentioned Landless Workers Movement , and the Homeless Workers Movement , reflecting their deep involvement in Brazil's diverse social landscape.

In the early 2000s, the Anarchist Popular Union helped form networks such as the Class and Combative Student Network and the Federation of Revolutionary Syndicalist Organizations of Brazil , further cementing anarchism's influence in student and workers' struggles. Despite being considered part of a broader leftist current, anarchists specifically made a lasting impact on Brazil's social movement during this period.

Today, Brazilian anarchism continues to evolve, shaped by the principles of Especifismo, a strategy where anarchists work alongside broader social movements while maintaining their own distinct ideology. Many anarchist federations have found common cause with groups like the MST, supporting their struggles while promoting their own vision of a stateless, non-hierarchical society. The story of anarchism in Brazil is one of endurance, adaptability, and reinvention.

Despite decades of repression, the movement has continued to shape Brazil's political landscape, from underground propaganda during the dictatorship to the mass mobilization of landless workers and intellectuals alike.

Similar to what they were doing 90 years ago, we've also seen a resurgence of anarchist anti-fascism in Brazil. Indeed. Around the same time, we kind of saw this rise in the United States as well as in Europe with the emergence of these right-wing populist politicians between Trump and Bolsonaro. You've been seeing more of the black bloc style anarchism in Brazil, which often kind of in this era...

went hand in hand with like anti-fascist action and organizing. Indeed. So that's been the story. A very summarized account. I would recommend that you check out, of course, the scholarship of the folks I mentioned at the beginning. The resources all across the internet, particularly in the anarchist library discussing Brazilian anarchism. This has been It Could Happen Here. I've been Andrew Sage. You can find me on youtube.com/andrewism and patreon.com/stdrew.

I've been here with Gale, and that's it. Peace. Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right. Bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

The 2024 presidential election is here. MSNBC has the in-depth coverage and analysis you need. Our reporters are on the ground. Steve Kornacki is at the big board breaking down the races. Rachel Maddow and our Decision 2024 team will provide insight as results come in. And the next day, Morning Joe will give you perspective on what it all means for the future of our country. Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election Tuesday, November 5th on MSNBC.

With cash back on every purchase.

How do you cash back? Learn more at chase.com slash freedom to be. Chase, make more of what's yours. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offer subject to change. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC.

High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits at highfivecasino.com. The hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account. Hundreds of exclusive games, free daily rewards, and come back to get free coins every four hours.

Only at HighFiveCasino.com. High Five Casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary. Void or prohibited. Play responsibly. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details at HighTheNumberFiveCasino.com. High Five Casino. Attention parents and grandparents. Are you searching for the perfect gift for your kids this holiday season? Give the gift of adventure that will last all year long.

a Guardian bike the easiest safest and quickest bikes for kids to learn on kids are learning to ride in just one day no training wheels needed what makes Guardian bikes special they're the easiest to ride thanks to thoughtful engineering lightweight frames and kid friendly components kids love how fun and easy they are to ride and parents appreciate the safety features like the patented braking system that

Prevents head over handlebar accidents. Guardian bikes are the only kids bikes designed and assembled in a USA factory. Ensuring top notch quality and durability. They're built to last and make perfect hand-me-downs. Join the hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today. Their holiday season sales have begun. Offering the biggest deal of the year. Save up to 25% on bikes. No code needed. Plus get free shipping and a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for their newsletter.

Visit GuardianBikes.com to take advantage of these deals and secure your holiday season gifts today. Happy riding. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast in which every week I sit down with my friends, me

Mia and Garrison, and I walk them through a little backyard chemistry project. Now, today we are building a common, commonly used explosive. No, no, we can't. Oh, what's that, Garrison? That is, we cannot give those instructions on air. Oh, oh, oh. Well, what about, what about for RDX? Like hexogen safe? We can make hexogen, right? I think you need a special, uh, uh,

tech stamp or permit to teach that. Sorry. All right. Well, what if we talk about how to make it in Roblox? Oh, yeah. No, that's fine. They haven't cracked Roblox yet. Yeah, they cracked Minecraft. That's good. That's good. The feds don't know about that one. Okay. They don't know about that one yet. Well, in that case, I'm going to read this ingredient list for PETN that I found in a torrent of Taylor Swift songs. So this is, I'm certain, the best information available right now.

Anyway, we're talking this week about explosives. We're talking particularly about the fact that Israel just carried out an attack against Hezbollah, a militant organization in Lebanon, using PETN, which is one of the two ingredients in Simtex. It is commonly used as the detonator. It's a stable high explosive detonator.

So it's often used to like basically trigger the larger explosive charge, which is generally like hexogen. You know, you mix the two together with like plastic agents and you get like that's where you get the traditional plastic explosives.

And it's come out recently that the Mossad managed to sneak some of this stuff. Well, sneak's not even really the right word, but they managed to impregnate a batch of pagers and radios with PETN. Now, this was a pretty big story last week. I think a lot of people are focusing kind of on the wrong parts of it. But yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about today because PETN

There's an element of this story that hasn't gotten out, which is the degree to which what Israel did to Hezbollah here is something that anybody with roughly $30,000 could imitate, to a surprising degree of fidelity. Like, this is an attack that is deeply easy to carry out. And the fact that Israel has kind of made the decision to pull this off

Is a kind of the breaking of a seal in a way. And I think it portends some very frightening things for all of us and particularly for air travel. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Do you think like the the either like hijacking or infiltration of the supply chain is as replicable for. Yes. A non like state agency. Yes. That is the thing that is scariest about this attack to me.

And that is going to be kind of the meat of what we're talking about. We should probably start by this sort of laying out the scale of the attack. I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager?

So Garrison, once upon a time, we kind of had the ability to broadcast signals over large areas, but it was a real pain in the ass to like do that with a phone call or anything, but a couple of words at a time. Oh, so like a text message? Like a text message, except for you can't really respond to it

Oh, OK. But it looked pretty cool to clip on your belt in the late 90s. If you were like one of the doctors on the set of ER. Did you ever watch ER Garrison? Were you too young for that? That's the George Clooney show, right? Cloon Tang. But yes, he looked great in it. Yeah. So that's that's where pagers came from, was the television show ER written by Michael Crichton, which means pagers are related to dinosaurs.

And yeah, so Israel managed to get, we'll talk a little bit later about how, but they managed to get explosives and explosives.

An unknown number, but certainly hundreds of these walkie talkies, particularly in the batteries. By the end of the first day of attacks, around a dozen people were dead and 2,700 had been wounded. Many people seriously, there's like horrible videos of folks going flying off of bicycles and the like when this stuff detonates. Like it takes very little time.

PETN to create a pretty significant explosion. And we're looking at about like 0.11 grams, I think, of explosive agent actually in each walkie talkie, which was enough to kill and maim a shitload of people. Some of these folks were members of Hezbollah. I think Hezbollah has confirmed that eight of their fighters were killed, at least four of the dead,

Our children and the second day of the attack, a bunch of radios went off as well. Another 20 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. So you're talking about a very sizable attack.

Israel has not claimed credit for this, but the New York Times has done some pretty deep reporting on this. And per that quote, 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attack say the Israelis were behind it. And it's just also obvious that this was Israel. Who else? Who else would do this? Now, one of the reasons I'm getting into this is that

there were a lot, like, the first kind of concern that people had when this attack was carried out is like, oh shit, was this some sort of a hack? Did Israel exploit some sort of a glitch in how these products' batteries worked and basically, like, hacked them to cause a runaway thermal escalation within the battery that led to it detonating? Is all of our electronics just one hack away from turning, from being turned into a bomb? No. And

And I understand why people focused on that aspect of it, but it led to, I think, some articles that are, this is going to be one of those, we try to, I hope we usually manage to be the like calm voices in the room, but this is one of those cases where really people need to be less calm. And I do want to highlight an article that I think went in the wrong direction on that front. It's a CNN business piece called, We Still Don't Know How the Lebanon Pager Attack Happened. Here's What We Do Know About Our Own Electronic Devices.

And I'm going to read a quote from that.

But he said it seems like the devices were intentionally designed to explode when triggered, not a pager that everyone else in the world is using. If you're a normal person with a lithium ion battery, I would not be over concerned about this, Capo said. And I think that that is an error. And we're going to get into as to why, but let's talk about how Israel did this first. And this is, again, all kind of per the New York Times reporting, how Israel built a modern day Trojan horse. They seem to be the first people who have kind of

put all of this together to an extent that is probably pretty close to accurate. There are some debates as to like, did they actually have a detonator in here or did they cause a thermal? Because PETN, while it's very stable, can be set off by heat. So it's theoretically possible to get a battery hot enough that it can detonate PETN, but it's not going to be as reliable as using something like a bridge wire cap, like a traditional triggering device.

And so it's a little bit unclear as to how this was made. But whatever the case, basically what Israel did is

They made their own batteries for walkie-talkies that were clones of an earlier kind of walkie-talkie made by a Taiwanese company that were no longer in production, right? So this Taiwanese company had made real walkie-talkies for a while. They stopped making them. Israel got their hands on some originals and manufactured copies. Now, that is the part of this that would be hard to replicate. But the copies of the walkie-talkies themselves were...

were not the explosive agent. What actually, where the explosives were was in the detachable battery. And Mossad crafted batteries themselves for these walkie-talkies and wove PETN into the battery. So if you haven't really looked

at a lithium ion battery, like one of the kinds of batteries that you're going to like. I mean, it's similar to the ones in your phone, but it's just also like any kind of electronics battery. They are kind of these weird folded things. Like they look just like a little square packet, usually with like a cord coming off of it if you actually look at the battery. But the way they're assembled is they're like laminated into an aluminum foil pouch and

And while you are kind of doing that laminating process, you can basically just weave some PETN into like alongside the battery and it will cost you a small fraction of the batteries like life. Like you won't get as much actual battery time out of it, but it's not going to detonate on its own. PETN is they actually just conducted in 2020 a study to show that it can last for years.

This is like the compound we use in the detonators on our nuclear devices. Once you get a bunch of walkie talkies that are impregnated with this stuff out there, you could sit on them for years until like you needed to actually use them.

Now, the key thing about this, it seems like when you're talking about wrapping a battery that's got, you know, plastic explosives in it. Well, that's the kind of thing that only a state level actor can do. And this is going to bring me to the source that I really want to get to people for this episode, which is an article by a guy named Andrew Huang at BuzzFeed.

Bunny Studios. Andrew is a computer scientist. He's got a doctorate in philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And kind of critically for some personal projects that he had done recently, he has manufactured his own lithium ion batteries. And in doing so, he's figured out like how to actually build a personal production line to make batteries like this that you could customize to fit into kind of basically any kind of electronic device you want. And

You can buy an entire pouch cell production line that will allow you to make your own custom lithium ion batteries using Alibaba.com. Yeah. Oh,

Oh, boy. Yeah. So that's great, right? Or lithium. Yeah, these are lithium pouch batteries. And it cost about $15,000 in order to be able to make somewhere between like a few dozen and several hundred of these, right? So 15 grand will provide you with all of the materials you need to, from the ground up, make at least, you know, probably a couple hundred pouch cell batteries, right? And it's the kind of thing where it's not just any...

idiot could do it, but any reasonably intelligent person with the degree of like experience in engineering can do it, right? Andrew is obviously a very smart guy with a lot of capabilities that, you know, a lay person might not have, but basically any kind of competent engineer could figure this out pretty much. And you're talking again, a few thousand dollars to get potentially, you

Now, the other side of the attack here is that the Israelis created a bunch of shell companies. You know, they started manufacturing copies of these walkie talkies so that they could put their own explosives, impregnated batteries in them. And then they built a bunch of shady ass companies in order to sell them. And this was effectively what they were doing was creating like an Amazon, like shipping company. Right. And the same way that like

anybody who wanted to can, you know, get a business license and get access to like a bunch of electronics and sell them on Amazon. Like you could buy a consignment of a thousand walkie talkies, make your own batteries for them and sell them on Amazon. Amazon does not

do a particular, like any really checking up on the people who choose to sell through their site. And even if they were to do that, PETN is effectively impossible to find, right? There is a way to scan for it, but it takes like a half hour per package. And it's the kind of thing where even if you're taking this stuff apart, unless you have someone who is like doing chemical tests on what's in there,

anyone who's even like even someone who is moderately trained is not going to be able to recognize a battery that's had some PET input into it from like a regular battery. So I'm going to read another quote from that New York Times article about how the Mossad kind of structured the shell companies here that allowed them to pose as a company making pagers.

By all appearances, BAC Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. BAC did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary.

Why were Hezbollah using pagers in the first place? Oh, yeah, I can talk about that. Couldn't they afford an iPhone? Great question. Or something... Well, I think we'll let Mia talk about that a second. But, Gary, I will say an initial response to that. You know how, like...

All of the activists in the United States after 2020 especially are saying like, hey, your phone isn't safe. Don't use your phone, you know, for for any kind of like actions. The state can listen in on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Hezbollah has been paranoid about that for a long time. And the Mossad actually has spent a lot of effort spreading propaganda.

rumors within Hezbollah about how capable Israel's smartphone exploits are, like how strong their ability to like listen in on conversations. And that played a significant role in changing like policy from the top and Hezbollah to like, we are going to use the lowest tech communication solutions possible. And we're going to talk some more about that. You know, it's not low tech.

these products and services that support this very podcast? That's right. High tech and absolutely no explosives in them, probably. But really, there would be no way to tell if there were.

And we're back. Mia, you wanted to talk. Yeah, the only thing I want to mention about that is, so there's been a lot of focus in terms of the pager use on like, on Hezbollah trying to build this communications grid that's like more difficult to like do. To compromise, yeah. Yeah, but well, to compromise from like digitally, right? But the other thing that's kind of going on here that I think is getting a lot less attention is that

So Lebanon's economy has been an absolute shit show for probably like eight, nine years now. There's a massive dollar crunch. Kind of the terminal like heart attack moment was that barge exploding. But it had not been doing it had been on the road down for a while. I mean, there were there were I mean, there were there been huge riots there over. So part of what's going on is like there aren't dollars in the economy.

And this has made everything unbelievably expensive. And one of the things that's unbelievably expensive is phone calls.

And so there are, I don't think there's been much coverage of this, but it's like, there's also just regular people also use pagers for things in order to set up what a phone call is going to be. Because like, if you're, if you're going to have a phone call with someone, you have to make sure that both of you are like there. Yeah. So it's, it's not purely just a military thing. It's also just because of how unbelievably expensive, like calling people has gotten. And like,

this sort of terminal crisis of the Lebanese economy in the sense that like there aren't dollars to pay for things. And so we've gotten to this point where even sort of stuff that we consider like fairly basic and not that expensive like phone service has just gotten unbelievably expensive for everyone. And this is sort of caused a lot of like regular people who have no affiliation with us whatsoever to sort of move down the technology chain because it's just expensive. Yeah.

And again, it's this kind of perfect storm of like paranoia and economic sort of factors colliding here. But the sort of gist of it is Israel definitely wanted to push Hezbollah to adopting. Like they clearly had an understanding of like what they could do and what

wanted deliberately to kind of push for this because it's a lot easier to get some manufactured explosive. And it would have been a lot harder to do this with like iPhones. Right. Not that Israel hasn't done this with cell phones in the past. Sure. Very famously back, I think it was the 90s. There is this Palestinian man, Yaya Ayyash, who was, I think, generally credited as like kind of an architect of like car bombing attacks and

who the Mossad killed with a cell phone that they had put explosives in. But in that case, it was a very labor-intensive process with a single phone meant to target and blow the head off of one guy.

This is like a much more reckless and much more like civilian casualty open operation. Again, I'm going to quote from that New York Times article in Lebanon's Baka Valley in the village of Sarain. One young girl, Fatima Abdullah, had just come home from her first day of fourth grade when she heard her father's pager begin to beep. Her aunt said she picked up the device to bring it to him and was holding it when it exploded, killing her. Fatima was nine years.

It's probably worth noting here that while Hezbollah is a militant group, they are also effectively the state in a decent chunk of Lebanon. And a lot of the folks who would have these because these these pagers and radios were generally seen as part of like a defensive measure. Like if there is an attack, if we go to war again, these are our safe comm system. Right. Like this is our like low tech comm system to allow us to like stay in touch, right?

So a lot of these people would have been folks whose role was more on the social side of things rather than like actual armed militants. You have no way of knowing who you're blowing up. Everyone's just getting these devices. And it's interesting to me that the Mossad or that Netanyahu, because I'm sure this order had to have come from the top.

gave the order to carry out this attack now. They had had these in place for a while. Exactly when is a little bit unclear, but long enough that there was like a nickname for the attack itself that everyone knew they were going to carry out at some point. So it's a little bit like I wonder why this was specifically targeted for this point in time. I kind of suspect it may have been due to the fact that it's

Israel's actual ground forces are still tied up in Gaza, and so they were looking for a way to escalate with Lebanon, with Hezbollah, that didn't necessitate the deployment of forces that would still have a massive impact and be disruptive, which this certainly was. But when it comes to us and why we're talking about this today,

it's the fact that this is, I think, a Pandora's box style attack, right? Like you have at this point opened up the possibility to doing this to any actor that has the resources. And as we've noted, about 15 grand will get you the capacity to manufacture battery packs like this. You can just go on Alibaba and buy things like radios or other. It doesn't have to be that you could get, you know, like most, a lot of people now carry around battery packs.

devices, right? Like external batteries to charge their phones when they're out. You can purchase those from Alibaba by the thousand. You can disassemble them, stick in your own batteries. And it's not the kind of thing where you have to be capable of doing this on the scale that the Mossad did. You could stick this and you could buy 2000 batteries. You could stick this in 200 of them, your own replacement explosive packs, and you could just send those out

into the world, right? Especially one of the things that scares me is the idea of you get a bunch of these shipped, you impregnate a few with explosives, but you have a bunch of batteries that you then have on, you know, shipping through the air, right? And trigger in the air, like while they're being shipped to a destination. Like it's the kind of thing you would eventually be able to unravel who had created the front companies and the like, but there really is nothing built into the system that

That would very effectively be able to tell that you'd done this as long as you there was a degree of like care taken in the manufacturing process. And I want to turn back to Andrew Huang's article here. And this is him talking about the way in which you could hide the fact that you had impregnated these battery packs with explosives.

Once folded into the core of the battery, it is sealed in an aluminum pouch. If the manufacturing process carefully isolates the folding line from the laminating line and or rinses the outside of the pouch with acetone to dissolve away any PETN residue prior to marking, no explosive residue can escape the pouch, thus defeating swabs that look for chemical residue. It may also well evade methods such as x-ray fluorescence because the elements that compose the battery separator and PETN are too similar and too light to be detected.

And through case methods like SORS, spatially offset Raman spectroscopy, would likely be defeated by the multi-layer copper laminate structure of the battery itself blocking light from probing inner layers. Thus, I would posit that a lithium battery constructed with a PETN layer inside is largely undetectable.

And this is from like folks I have talked to who have a degree of expertise in the matter, I think very accurate. And I think, you know, even if you're not striking air travel here, number one, it would be easy to get stuff like this on planes. And people there was in December, somebody attempted to and just kind of their detonation method failed.

which is kind of with explosives when people don't die and explosive attacks, what always saves them is it's kind of tricky to get the detonators right. But I'm very worried that the Mossad has effectively provided people with a perfect plan of attack to fuck with air travel or to fuck with the supply lines. Because imagine just like,

a couple hundred people over the space of a week or so have battery packs or other electronics detonate on their person, like, or a couple of dozen people. What that does both to the economy, to the supply lines, like the extent to which that would be disruptive in society is, like, the potential is enormous. And the potential for, like, runaway terror is enormous. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the first things that we talked about once news of this dropped is, like,

Beyond the actual physical injuries and death caused by this attack, this is primarily an infrastructure attack. In this case, it completely destroys the communications infrastructure of Hezbollah, but in the strategy behind this attack, it can be used just to target various types of infrastructure, whether that be supply chains, travel. It puts distrust in your own equipment. And certainly its application on airlines is obviously very worrying.

Well, it's very worrying. And one of the things that I keep thinking about is the degree to which the way Amazon has restructured the economy and particularly the way that like digital commerce works is

has created an opportunity for a malicious actor to carry out an attack like this with excellent security. Because you don't even have to be the one shipping these out, right? No. You can get, I mean, you have to ship them at some point, but you can ship them to a third party that is the actual company that deals with Amazon. If you have enough kind of resources and ingenuity behind it, basically set up a drop shipping scam where you are having someone else send explosives to Amazon and

which provides a lot of opportunity for you to both get away and a lot of opportunity to you could seed with a couple of different manufacturers, different devices. It's like terrorism in the era of the gig economy. Yeah. And that was one of the reasons I liked Fincher's recent movie, The Killer. Yeah.

Just in terms of how much of the gig economy was like worked into these like traditional like industries, whether that be like terrorism, uh, cause like hit men aren't really real, but, uh, certainly terrorism is. And I think there's a lot of ways that these things can be, uh, applied in this,

kind of bizarre Uber, Amazon world that we've created where the economy is just so fractured in all these little ways. There's also, I think, the sort of production angle too, which is that because the way that manufacturing is happening has become so decentralized and because it's become based on these... It's kind of less so now, but a lot of Chinese manufacturing had worked like this where you'd get these sort of smaller pop-up things and each of these sort of like

small production facilities is shipping stuff to a larger one who's doing assembly or whatever. But that means that, yeah, as you're saying with Alibaba, it's like all of this stuff is just available to purchase because it's designed to be sold to these people who are starting their small-scale production line. Yeah. There's no quality control. There's no intense vetting. It's all extremely accessible. It's very easy to infiltrate this process. Exactly.

Yeah, here's another line from that Andrew Huang article at Bunny Studios, B-U-N-N-I-E Studios, which is his blog.

You don't even have to go so far as offering anyone a bribe or being a state-level agency to get tampered batteries into a supply chain. Anyone can buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap out the batteries, restore the packaging and seals, and return the goods to the warehouse. And yes, there is already a whole industry devoted to copying packaging and security seals for the purpose of warranty fraud. The perpetrator will be long gone by the time the device is resold. Yeah, and the other worrying part about that, too, is that

You know, OK, so getting the explosives to work is kind of difficult, right? Like bomb making is not easy, but you have to have a degree of competence. Yes. But the actual cost, fifteen thousand dollars, like that's not even like you're looking at like a millionaire. That's like that's something your local dentist can afford to pull off. You could carry out an attack like this in terms of cash expenditure for the cost of like a reasonably nice car.

which is not prohibitive to a large scale international terrorist organization. Or even just like a rich guy. Yeah. Not, not even that rich guy can pull this off. Yep.

Which is... I guess the main inhibiting factor is we still don't quite know how Israel got these to detonate. Yes. Whether that is some sort of hack that overheated the battery, whether it was a message that was sent out that triggered something within the device. It seems to have been a message. That made the explosive detonate. Because they did send a message immediately before, so it seems to have been tied to some extent with a message. Right.

Andrew Huang kind of looked into and came to the conclusion that you could very well do a thermal runaway to set this off. But obviously the Mossad doesn't have any trouble getting a hold of military detonators. Huang also walked through how you could build a circuit into the actual battery itself, like a trigger circuit.

You know what? I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to go ahead and talk about this a little bit when we come back. But let's do our second ad break now before we tell everyone how to detonate plastic explosives. This is going to be the one that gets all arrested. Yeah. And we're back. Here's a quote from Andrew on how these might have been detonated.

Detonating the PETN is a bit more tricky. Without a detonator, PETN may conflagrate, burn fast instead of detonating and creating a much more damaging shockwave. However, the Wikipedia page notes that an electric spark with an energy in the range of 10 to 60 millijoules is sufficient to initiate detonation.

Based on available descriptions of the devices getting hot prior to detonation, one might suppose that detonation is initiated by a trigger circuit shorting out the battery pack, causing the internal polymer spacers to melt and eventually the cathode-anode pairs coming into contact, creating a spark.

Such a spark may furthermore be guaranteed across the PETN sheet by introducing a small defect, such as a slight dimple in the surrounding cathode anode layers. Once the packet's to the melting point of the spacers, the dimpled region is likely to connect, leading to a spark that then detonates the PETN layer sandwiched between the cathode and anode layers. But where do you hide this trigger circuit?

It turns out that almost every lithium polymer pack has a small circuit board embedded in it called the PCM, or Protection Circuit Module. It contains a microcontroller, often in a TSSOP8 package, and at least one or more large transistors capable of handling the current capacity of the battery. And basically, that's where you put it. Oops.

Oops. Oops. And again, I did talk to someone with expertise in explosives who said that they thought it was likelier that there was a conventional detonator, not because it would have been impossible to do with a thermal runway or the way that Andrew set up, but because this is the Mossad, they have access to detonators and a detonator guarantees that you get the proper kind of explosion. But again, even if you're using kind of the

the less Gucci method here that would be available to a non-state actor, if only 50 out of the 300 devices you impregnate with explosives do a proper explosion and the rest just kind of conflagrate, well, that's still a very successful attack. You can do a tremendous amount of damage to people's sense of well-being and to the economy, to supply lines by carrying out an attack like that. This is so terroristic in nature and like,

If any other group did this, like if Hezbollah did this attack, if Hamas did this attack. Oh my God. We would be, we would be bombing them right now. Yeah. If some like just random like accelerationist network somehow pulled this off, like we would be pulling our hair out. We would, we would like go to war over something like this. And the fact that it's like, it's this type of attack is only okay when this one military does it is, is just, I don't,

know what to do anymore. They have endangered everyone, right? Like, every single person listening to this is less safe because Israel carried out this attack. What is airport screening going to look like if this keeps happening? Most importantly, am I going to be able to take all of my batteries on the plane so that I can play video games on a 14-hour flight, Garrison? You know? Yeah. The plugs in the seats don't always work. Well, I mean, and even, like, what if you're able to do this to, like, the electronics of, like, the pilot? Jesus. And then you just...

you just take out an entire airport. It's such a fucked up Pandora's box that it feels like there's going to be no real consequences for it, which is just kind of how things have been this past year, I guess. Yeah, and the other issue with it is that the only way to fix this would be an actual...

You would you would have to change how our supply chains work. And it's like, well, no one's going to do that. No one. There is no number of people that you know. Maybe if they literally killed the president of the United States, maybe you could get enough political capital together to try to do something about it. But like, there's no way.

And there's no way, and the way the state will respond to this is by making air travel vastly worse, right? It's probably not the only thing that they will do, but that is like, because there's just not an actual, it's not really, with present technology, there's not an easy way to actually do

find these things like within kind of the, the context of like air travel or the way in which like digital merchandising works. Right. Which is again, why the massage probably shouldn't have done this. Many reasons. One of many reasons, the dead kids being another. Yeah. I, I do, I do want to conclude. I've quoted a lot from Andrew Huang's wonderful article, turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea. And,

But I want to quote from his conclusion here.

Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics. The difference between a patch and an exploit is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en masse because, while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its redeployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation.

However, now that I've seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it's relatively easy for any modestly funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this. A wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation states to cartels and gangs to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday. If chemical suppliers can moonlight and elicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions?

The bottom line is we should approach the public policy debate around this, assuming that someday we could be victims of exploding batteries too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies.

And that should be something everyone can agree on. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think so. Jesus Christ. It just is enacting terrorism through like the gig economy ecosystem. Yeah. And Oh boy, what a fun time we've, we've built for ourselves. What a great fresh hell for us all. Yeah. Very excited for us to have our first drop shipping terrorist attack. It's going to be great. It's going to be, it's going to be great. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, folks, maybe drive next trip. You got to take, uh,

Probably should note before we come out here, the obvious question, and there's not a long answer to this for obvious reasons, is like, well, could a non-state actor get their hands on PETN or RDX, you know, these kind of explosive compounds that you can make into plastic explosives? And the short answer is yes. Any moderately competent chemist

with the right ingredients could make this stuff and they're not super hard to find, but also a lot of people in commercial spaces particularly have access to PETN. It's a kind of thing that like is, is. It's common in like demolition, right? Yeah. It's common in demolition. It's also something artists use a good amount. There is a specific formulation of PETN where they make it in like a thin sheet that you can use to suddenly weld metals together explosively. Um,

And there are a couple of specific famous artists who use PETN in order to make bas-relief sort of artworks.

So it's, again, not something that is impossible for people who are not the Mossad to gain access to. You need a chemist, an engineer, and someone who knows how to set up businesses. And between the three of them, they're going to have enough money to do this, which is not great. Yeah. Not great. Anyway, everybody, have a good night. Enjoy your next plane flight.

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right, bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

You have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

The 2024 presidential election is here. MSNBC has the in-depth coverage and analysis you need. Our reporters are on the ground. Steve Kornacki is at the big board breaking down the races. Rachel Maddow and our Decision 2024 team will provide insight as results come in. And the next day, Morning Joe will give you perspective on what it all means for the future of our country. Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election Tuesday, November 5th on MSNBC.

Chase Freedom Unlimited rewards all that you are with cash back on every purchase. We built a life together collecting vintage items that connect us to the Black community and our vibrant heritage. This is Kiana Stewart. And I'm Janna Handy. We're partners in life and in business. With Freedom Unlimited, adding antiques to our collection is

even more rewarding. How do you cash back? Learn more at chase.com slash freedom to be. Chase, make more of what's yours. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offers subject to change. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC.

High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits at HighFiveCasino.com. The hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account. Hundreds of exclusive games, free daily rewards, and come back to get free coins every four hours. Only at HighFiveCasino.com.

High Five Casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary. Void or prohibited. Play responsibly. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details at highthenumber5casino.com. High Five Casino. Attention parents and grandparents. Are you searching for the perfect gift for your kids this holiday season?

We'll be right back.

We'll be right back.

pick for 2024. Join the hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today. Their holiday season sales have begun, offering the biggest deal of the year. Save up to 25% on bikes. No code needed. Plus, get free shipping and a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up with their newsletter. Visit GuardianBikes.com to take advantage of these deals and secure your holiday season gifts today. Happy riding!

Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here, your daily dose of the horrors that are in fact already happening all around us. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am delighted to be joined today by the critically acclaimed author of Culture Warlords, journalist, researcher, sword enthusiast, sandwich expert, and my friend, Talia Levin. Hello! Yeah, I once introduced myself at an event as a sandwich historian.

um which i think was the pinnacle of my public speaking career but this is the second pinnacle hey molly what's up thank you so much for coming on today to talk with me about your new book wild faith it is coming out in just a few weeks uh october 15th right yeah wild faith how the christian right is taking over america not the terrible b movie entitled wild faith

Yeah, the SEO is scrambled on that one. But the book, however, is very good. I mean, first of all, I just want to say, like, so I've been reading the galley copy that you sent me, which honestly made me feel very fancy. I've never received a galley copy of a book that's not out yet before. So I felt, you know...

Kind of a broadcasting professional with my special book. It's an exclusive club. You're one of like five people that's read it. Oh my God, that is very exclusive. Yeah. Well, it's about to become a lot less exclusive. So feel special while you can. That's right.

But I realized while I was reading it, you know, I have my little sticky tabs because I'm reading a lot more books lately. Regrettably, not a big time book guy. I read a lot of court documents, but I'm reading a lot of books right now for research for my show. And it's like I'm a little sticky tabs. And as I'm reading it, I realize I'm not marking passages that I think would be useful for us to talk about in this interview. I'm just putting my little tabs on passages that just like

Punched me in the gut, you know? Sorry for punching you. No, but I mean, I mean, with the, with the power of your words, because like a lot of what I'm reading sucks. It's just like, I spent all day yesterday reading like 25 year old issues of resistance, which was the quarterly magazine for a white power music label.

So this, I mean, it's a real departure. So, you know, really just reveling in the richness of the prose and the fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me.

Yeah, no, I also have experienced neo-Nazi research fatigue and also just like the sort of relentless grimness of plowing through these like fundamentally hostile texts and also like academic texts, which are difficult in their own way. I try to write excessively or just like excitingly. I find that a lot of...

especially nonfiction sort of journalism me books tend to be a little dry. And I'm like, let's not be dry. Let's be like spicy. And you know, like form and function, like you're more likely to be moved by a message. If you find the writing compelling, you know, it's just, you have such a way with words. I mean, you know, this, you're a professional writer. I don't want to embarrass you on the show, but,

I feel like I'm twirling my hair and being like, yes, I do write for a living. If you'll indulge me, if it's legal, if the publisher will allow this, I just want to read this passage from the introduction that I think is a good jumping off point. And it was one of the first things I marked because I was just like, oh, hell yeah, we're getting into this. There's good words in here. Okay. Yeah.

The Christian right is a force in American politics, and has been for decades, half a century to be precise, during which it has steadily gained power. It started in schoolrooms, continued in courtrooms, and perseveres with the aid of people who are perfectly willing to call in bomb threats to hospitals and attempt to overturn elections. It features self-proclaimed prophets with a distinct interest in politics, newly minted apostles with very definite ideas about spiritual battle and its earthly components, and pastors eager to usher in the end of the world.

Its adherents have hymns and devotionals and speak in tongues on occasion, and the showiest among them are known to march through cities blowing ram's horns in an effort to topple, as Joshua once did, the wicked cities of the world. They have their own insular world, their own media apparatus. They have legislators who give fire and brimstone speeches from the badly carpeted rooms where laws are made. They have lawyers, too. And in case the lawyers fail...

there's always the promise of congregations that might coalesce into mobs or arsonists whose burning holy zeal coalesces into the tiny pinpoint of a Molotov cocktail.

And I knew from the intro that we were in for a ride. Yeah. It's like cast of characters, the worst people ever, but let's write about it in an exciting way. I think that one of the themes of the book is really how these extra legal extremist movements, like the anti-abortion terror movement and the legal framework of a movement work together.

I actually initially heard about this from a friend who was talking about how like during the gay rights movement, you had sort of the act up, well, demonstrations, the die-ins, and then you had the sort of like more respectably coded, like gay people who, you know, were talking to the government and trying to get elected and, you know, really trying to influence research and that every movement needs sort of a radical outside and then a respectable inside. And I'm like, oh, this works in like,

theocratic movements too where you have like this you know fringe that's burning down clinics and then people steadily working for 50 years to like ban abortion and they have the same dna and they have the same goals they just go about it differently but complement each other and i think that's like a running theme in the book is that like

You have lawyers and you have legislators and then you have mobs and they're sort of all working towards the same goals. And that's really what we're seeing, I think, on the Christian right after decades of building power.

One of the notes that I wrote down in that vein while I was reading was that, you know, the Christian right drives its power across a spectrum, right? From the clinic bomber to the senator. But it's not, you know, you might say it's two sides of the same coin. But to me, it looks like this isn't two different spheres of power or two sort of separate but coexisting or comorbid ideologies. They're just different numbers on the same dial, right? It's turning up and turning down. Yeah, it's like the hand that

lights the torch on the hand that puts it to the, you know, pyre. They perform different functions, but they have really the same goals. And if like me, you view stripping half the populace of its bodily autonomy, imposing a theocracy, hounding queer people out of public life slash into death as fundamentally violent goals, then,

Yeah, I don't think there's like a respectable iteration necessarily. There's just cosplaying respectability. Right, you can say it with a tie on on the Senate floor, but it's the same message. Yeah, and I think so much of our media apparatus and governmental apparatus is really sort of

views like again this like form and function right like if you are if you say something politely um it doesn't really matter what you're saying like if you say something with a suit on in the register of like you know in a calm sort of mike pensian way

Rush Limbaugh on decaf as he called himself voice. Jesus, did he say that? Yeah, that's what he called himself when he did an evangelical radio show. Yeah, no matter what you say, as long as you are white and you say it politely, this is fundamentally sort of fine. And then if you look at it from a step or two back and you're like, no, actually, no matter how politely you say it, this is a violent, deeply unpopular thing.

theocratic agenda that like fundamentally is incompatible with multiracial democracy i also think and i keep running into this like well-meaning liberals being like but isn't there a separation of church and state i'm like i don't know do you fucking think there is in alabama do you think there is in arkansas and all of these you know in texas like all of these

figures are like, we're Christians. We're making laws for Jesus. And we have covenant marriages and we want you to too. Yeah. Like we're going to outlaw divorce because of God. And like, you know, women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots is what Jesus wants. And like, and I experienced this. I think you probably have too. When you like report on, you know, zealots and extremists and people inevitably wind up

like measuring other people's wheat by their own bushel. In other words, they're like, they can't really believe this stuff. And it's like, no, they really do. They can't really have these goals. First of all, they do, but also does it matter? Right. I mean, the question of like impact versus intent, first of all, it's, I think it's perfectly possible to be both a grifter and a true believer at the same time. That's just synergy, baby. Yeah. And, and,

And also, fundamentally, this is a world premised on grievance, where it's this idea that, like, the world has got one over on you. And so, in a sense, Grift is just like, well, you know, the world's corrupt and I'm fighting a righteous cause, so what does it matter? The ethics that I sort of...

skimp on along the way. I mean, once you've amped the stakes up to we are fighting the literal devil and everyone who's getting in my way is animated by actual demons from hell. I mean, the stakes couldn't be higher. So you do what you have to do.

Exactly. And it's this theory of power. And so then people sort of standing outside of that paradigm who are not keyed into this idea of like, we're in an epical spiritual battle, like, and we must create like a kingdom of Christ on earth in America.

to win against the devil. And then people outside being like, you're hypocrites. And it's like, it's not a valid criticism to them because they're like, first of all, you're not like a Christian if you're a liberal, but also like, you're not on our level. Like we're fighting Lucifer.

And you're probably a stand like on his team if you oppose us. So, you know, a multitude of apparent hypocrisies can be excused by, by the idea that like, this is a holy war. And in, in war there's like,

all kinds of a bear behavior. That's okay. They're doing holy war crimes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is why, for example, you see a lot of like prominent female figures from Phyllis Schlafly, you know, in the seventies and eighties to like the trad wives now. And it's like,

How does this fit in with your overall sort of idea that women should be chaste and submissive and meek and silent? I mean, first of all, trad wife stuff is often fetish. That's fetish content. But yeah, I mean, Phyllis Schlafly made a living professionally saying that women shouldn't make a living professionally. But that contradiction doesn't matter.

Yeah, I mean, I think I call them Valkyries for feminine submission in the book. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, like, if you believe that this is your calling, your mission, you know, your mission field in the service of the Lord to undo the demonic sort of influence of feminism, like, of course, you're going to speak. You've been moved by God to do so.

And of course, like female leaders within the evangelical community, like sort of minority Republicans can be like knocked off their pedestal quicker and easier, but like they still can come out and exist and testify. And Schlafly throughout her very long, prolific and lucrative career, you know, was like, I'm a housewife with six kids. And that was her, that was how she defined herself even while being this incredibly prominent

figure and one of the sort of key architects of the current Christian right coalition of like

right-wing Catholics, she and Paul Weyrich and Leonard Leo and some other right-wing Catholics brought these Catholic values of being all about abortion to the evangelical right, which prior to the seventies was like, that's a weird Catholic thing. We don't really care. I wanted to talk about that. So I, I'm not, I'm not sure how sort of common knowledge this is, but the Protestant Christian community in the United States is

did not care about abortion until the 70s. It was not an issue in their communities. They were generally pro-abortion. They were, you know, the Baptists were in favor of Roe v. Wade. Yeah, the fucking Southern Baptist Convention came out in like 74, I think it was, and was like, yeah, we approve of Roe v. Wade.

So it's not like, you know, opposition to abortion is baked into Christianity. It is baked into the American evangelical Christianity of post 1975 or so because of this sort of conscious, cynical, political decision. And that, I think, is so interesting because, you know, when you get into this conversation of, well, what are their deeply held beliefs and do they really believe it? And does that matter?

But we can pin down the moment they started believing this and we know why. And it's segregation. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would say like people can still like, this is like several generations later of like constant barrages of extremely violent propaganda against abortion. Right. So the belief is sincere today, but you could look at it where it was born. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It should have been aborted. Right. Yeah, no, it definitely should not have been carried to term. But like, it's crazy. And in addition to Moi's book, Randall Bomer does some really good coverage of this. So the sort of general arc is like,

Pre sort of 1970s, you had this like generally conservative population of Southern Baptists who were like on board with McCarthyism, hated the godless reds, but kind of viewed politics as like worldly and not really their sphere. And we're not particularly politically engaged. And then Brown versus Board of Education passes.

Immediately, the white Christian populace just disinvest, squeeze from the public schools, leaving multiple counties in the South without functionally any public education at all. And this mushroom crisis

after rain kind of like patch of patches of, of parochial schools with church or Christian in the name start popping up and they're all white schools. They're segregation academies is the sort of term of art for these. And they're explicitly under a Christian ages. They're religious schools. They're tax exempt as a result. And then in like the late sixties and seventies,

The government was like, you can't be tax exempt and considered a charitable organization if you are segregated and don't have any Black students or minority students.

And that is what woke the sleeping dragon of the Christian right. Really like, you know, get your filthy government hands off our tax exemptions. Like they just went, you know, nuts. They were really mobilized, you know, like these are the people who are like throwing tomatoes at Ruby bridges. Like, you know, they're really politically motivated for the first time because they're experiencing like a consequence, right?

for segregation. And so this is when like Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and, you know, James Dobson start sort of coming forward and being more prominent. And then by the sort of mid seventies to eighties, you had these like savvier political operators coming out and saying, Hey guys, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever is like, it's

It's great that it really fired y'all up, but it has sort of a limited appeal. And they shot George Wallace. It's over. Yeah. Like there's going to be a ceiling on that.

And a lot of people think you suck. So why don't you get in on the ground on this new civil rights struggle, abortion, where you can fight for the unborn who conveniently will never disagree with you. Right. Their voices don't have to be centered here. We can speak for them. I mean, they're the most convenient political constituency in history. Right. Because they're so innocent and you can't milkshake duck a fetus. He's not even here. Yeah. He can't talk, but he's not going to say shit.

So, I mean, that's like the very capsule history. And then of course it becomes this idea of like the moral majority and we're the guardians of America's soul. And we're going to get really weird about sex also. It's just like, if you strip it all the way down to the studs, like the core of this is women are bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because Jerry Falwell didn't want to pay his taxes or stop being racist. Yeah. I mean,

I mean, that's not fair. No, people sometimes like are a little skeptical when I'm like all of the hatreds are interconnected. But then you look at like concrete historical examples of like this world historical wave of misogyny. I mean, it's not that this population wasn't like

weird about sex or weird about women, like to start with. I mean, maybe they would have gotten here a different way, but that's how we got here. Yeah, we got here by just like, no, we will pay taxes on our segregation academies. Bob Jones University's interracial dating ban is perfectly great and we're going to mobilize about it. And so what you have then now is just like 50 years of political lockstep

Because, and you see this in, like, other religious communities. I mean, like, I know, like, it's sort of notorious how much corruption slides by in New York because, like, the Hasidic communities vote as a bloc. Like, it is...

very useful to have a congregation that all votes the same way. It's politically useful. I mean, what other populations can you get together once a week as a captive audience and speak to with authority? If you can mobilize those people, and that's what Jerry Falwell saw, right? It's like, this is a great way to get a lot of people to vote the way I want them to vote. Yeah. And, you know, the church has always been like a really prominent institution in American civil society, especially as,

the rest of sort of civil society has fallen away and degraded. Like churches are some of the only social outlets that Americans have. And what's interesting when you talk to evangelicals and ex evangelicals is just like being a Republican is like part of their religious identity in a major way. It's like,

this is how you vote and this is, you know, how you dress and this is how you go to church and, and, and so on. But like the idea of being a Democrat is like not only, you know, a little bit out of step with your community. It's heretical. I mean, that's how the demons get in. Yeah. Yeah. Demon crats. I mean, I'm like, yeah, it's stupid, but it's also like half of the people saying demon crats, like literally mean Democrats are aligned with Lucifer. And I,

And I think that's a point that I don't want to get lost on the listener. This idea that people literally have demons in them, that demons are active in the world, that demons are motivating the actions of their enemies is real for them. And I'm not saying that to be derisive or, you know, it's real. It's real. It is an animating factor for a lot of these people.

And that's hard to wrap your mind around. I mean, I struggle with the idea that that is real for them, but like, that's how you get things like satanic panic. And we see echoes of satanic panic in this idea of, you know, groomers in kids' schools. They really have this fundamental, like foundational belief in this, you know, whether or not they're calling it demons, that the existence of some sort of ontological evil, right?

That is coming for their children. And once you arrive at the place where you understand that that's real for them, their actions make more sense. They're not behaving irrationally. If you truly believed that these things were happening, you'd act crazy too.

Yeah. I mean, it's really hard to get people to step outside their own worldviews and in both directions, right? Like I don't believe that demons are, you know, abroad in the world and motivating like every element of political action to someone who... I'm starting to see them some places, but generally no. Um,

someone who does, my viewpoint is incomprehensible and vice versa. So I think part of, I mean, not that I'm like one of those people that's like polarization is the big problem, like, you know, as opposed to anything with like concrete policy, like,

You know, where it's like the big problem is we all don't like each other enough. And I'm like, no, the big problem is like people are espousing policies that will cause deaths. And like also that people like believe their political enemies are like literally agents of Satan, I would say is like a bigger problem than us.

polarization and the abstract. But yeah, I mean, this doctrine of sort of spiritual warfare, which if you like Google it, it's just like, oh, this is the mindset. And it's like you, the listener to It Could Happen Here, like you've been drafted into the spirit war from like birth. Congratulations, private. You're probably on the side of the devil. So good job. I mean, I don't know. Like a lot of Americans believe in angels and demons and that's fine. But it's like when that starts happening,

impinging on the political sphere in a very serious way. It's like, how far would you go if you believed your opponent was under the thrall of like Satan, you would go pretty damn far. That's, I mean, that's why, you know, clinic bombings were, and I guess are on the rise again, right? Like these arsons of clinics, it's not like other kinds of crime in my mind, right? It's not a crime of passion or an interpersonal dispute or,

It is people who have been motivated by this belief that this is a place where a genocide is happening, that there's a Holocaust going on in there, that people are ripping, you know, actual living babies limb from limb. And if you really did believe that, their actions make sense. And that's why it happens so often, right? Because these people are motivated by this belief that God commands them to take this action.

Yeah, I mean, there's sort of dual element to that. I mean, first of all, absolutely, yes. Like, I've read some anti-abortion terror manuals speaking of extremely unpleasant research. And it's just really, like...

these people are murderers. It's mass murderers. Like you're like killing Hitler, right? And wouldn't you, wouldn't you kill baby Hitler? Exactly. About baby Hitler in like a countrywide scale. And when specific abortion doctors have been mentioned in right-wing media, those guys end up dead and that's not a coincidence. So there's, there's that element of it, which is the majority of it. It's huge, but there's also this idea of,

of demonic geography where like demons can possess sort of places like abortion clinics or institutions like Planned Parenthood or even the Democratic Party, which, you know, I read a lot of demonology books and like taxonomies of demons. Pigs in the Parlor was this really big hit in like the seventies. And it's been like reissued and reissued and millions of copies. And it's just like on one level, it's really compelling because it's like,

Are you tired? Are you sad? Are you feeling clumsy? Do you have like persistent stomach aches? It's demons. And here's how you deal with that. And like in a country with shitty health care, I can totally see why someone who's like really depressed might go to like an exorcist or a deliverance minister, which is the Protestant. If you'll try anything in this guy's going to do it for free.

I watched so many videos of deliverance ministers doing their thing. And it's like crazy. It's like people, you know, are just like sitting there and they're like people praying over them and screaming in their face. Like, and, and they wind up vomiting and crying and it's all very like intense. And,

you know, if you think about it from a placebo effect perspective for like one second, you're like, obviously this person would feel a weight lifted from them. They've had this ecstatic experience. And this isn't the majority of America. This is about 14% of America identifies as white evangelical. So many. It's still so many people because people keep asking me like, how many people really believe shit like this? And I'm like, well,

About 80 to 90% of like people who identify as white evangelical Protestants espouse most of these beliefs. So that's like 30 million people. Yeah. Yeah. And then you add in the Catholic right, which is getting weirder every day. Yeah. JD Vance. I hate women.

Women exist to reproduce, breed you filthy sow. But like even beyond the adult Catholic convert style weirdness, like right-wing Catholics are an integral part of the Christian right movement.

like Amy Coney Barrett, you know, Antonin Scalia, that kind of thing. That's another bunch of millions. So this reactionary force has like numerically significant constituency. On the other hand, it definitely punches way above its weight in terms of... Right, they have an outsized influence on both, you know,

on the legislative floor and when it comes to, you know, who's racking up the most bodies. Yeah. And also even like the culture wars, right? Like the, the sort of loudest, um,

culture warriors tend to at least come from like a background of I'm speaking for God or Christ is King or whatever it is. Like how many times have you and I encountered that in extremist context, but also like the sort of more mainstream me, what the fuck the mainstream is. I don't know. It's full of piss, but like the more mainstream me, like Christian grifter, right. They come from this, this I'm speaking from my faith. These are my religious beliefs.

principles but like it is worth noting again and just to just to rewind in our conversation but like full concept of religious liberty and religious freedom absolutely was like an ad slogan coined in the 70s around segregation right religious freedom to do what i mean it's like states right states rights to do what

Right, yeah. Answer the question. Yeah, it's religious freedom to have segregated schools is the answer to that. And you still see echoes of that with either still religious schools that can't accept federal grant money because they don't let students be gay, right? Like it's not...

racial segregation anymore but they are you know refusing to admit gay students and that is a violation of of federal civil rights law yeah but that's where i mean that's where that slogan started and then it's blossomed to include basically like a gay person came into my shop except they didn't right i know there's no standing right like that whole case was built on a lie whatever that's yeah it's like like and the standing in the supreme court is so ridiculous this

I mean, in many ways, this Supreme Court is the culmination and embodiment and apotheosis of, like, Christian right theocracy, because you have these, like,

Absolutely batshit religious zealots. I mean, Amy Coney Barrett is like from a cult and in this unaccountable body, they're passing unpopular theocratic principles that the majority of the American public disagrees with. But like specifically what they are trying to enact and what they are, what they are enacting is this theocratic principle.

agenda where like the government is in your bedroom the government is in your doctor's office like the government is sniffing your panties and it's it's gross and it's upsetting and fundamentally like theocracies are just very famously all up in your junk like they're obsessed with like controlling and censoring sexuality of all kinds but particularly female sexuality and queer sexuality

like snuff those out and so that's part of the reason why so many abortion arguments like first of all you have the like the you're murdering this cluster of cells which is a full human baby like do you remember that article in the guardian a couple years ago that like showed the actual size of like fetuses at various stages of development and it was like they were just like

so little like these little like little fingernails yeah and it doesn't look like a tiny baby doll that's just very small yeah exactly it's not like a mini baby like in like tides of gore it's like literally like a tiny cluster of of cells so anti-abortion propaganda like you are not immune to propaganda it has like wormed its way into the popular consciousness just by virtue of its ubiquity and constant repetition being the key to successful propaganda

But so many of these arguments, in addition to this abortion is murder stuff, is also just like you should have kept your legs closed. Right. This is a consequence. God did this to you. Yeah. Like sex is a mortal sin and sex should be punished. They must be doing it wrong. I'm like, why do you want sex to have consequences and be punished? The intensity of the misogyny around purity culture was so intense. Yeah.

I wanted to ask you, you know, about the experience of writing the book, right? So, you know, your first book, Culture Warlords, was traumatizing for you to craft, right? Because you had to spend so much time in these digital spaces, in some cases, physical spaces with, you know, neo-Nazis, 4chan guys, you know, aspiring terrorists. And so that's traumatic to experience, you know,

But largely that experience was alone, like at your computer screen, sort of consuming this content that was eroding your soul. But the second half of this book is about child abuse, right? And you interviewed people who grew up in this movement about their lives, about their husbands raping them and their parents beating them as children. And how do those experiences compare? And what was that? I mean, how did you prepare to do that? I don't even know how it began.

to do that with care. I mean, I think my goal going in is like, I'm not going to betray you. Like that was my guiding ethos of just like, I view like your trust in me as a sacred thing, not like sacred in any formal religious sense, but just like, you know, I view your trust in me as something that I hold very dearly. It's very important. I'm going to treat your pain with as much,

gentleness and respect as I can. And like I interviewed over a hundred people largely about their experiences with experiencing child abuse in an evangelical milieu as is laid out with painstaking instructions and like all of these parenting manuals. Actually, like I think reading the parenting manuals was even more disturbing than talking to people because like

people were like, this fucked me up and it was wrong. And then these books are like, no, you must be your toddler because Jesus says so. And like,

Here's exactly how to beat your toddler. And here's what you should use to beat your toddler. And here's the supremely fucked up weird ritual that we prescribe. And then reading those in tandem with the accounts of people who were like, this specific thing fucked me up for life and really messed up my ability to have intimacy or self-confidence or whatever. All of that stuff. I mean, it was tough.

I definitely took more time. Like, I wrote Culture Warlords in nine months, so I was, like, totally immersed. Constantly. You just, like, didn't come up for air. Yeah, I don't... And this one, I was like, I need a little more time, guys. Like, I wrote it over, you know, almost three years. I also...

pretentiously started calling this philosophy guarding your heart. Because I really got lost in the sauce with Culture Warlords. I was in a dark place while I was writing it. And afterwards, it came out in mid-COVID, so that didn't help either. But it was a really rough experience. With this, I was like, I'm going to keep writing. I'm going to write about sandwiches all the way through. I'm going to make sure I have friendships and stuff that's grounding me. I think...

consciously having that at the forefront of my mind really helped. That being said, like what was really encouraging was all of these people who had experienced this sort of child abuse industrial complex in the evangelical community were like, we really value that someone, um,

to hear what we have to say. And also that it's someone from outside the community is like paying attention and thinks this is important, which is not to denigrate like ex-evangelical voices, but more to say that like, I guess there's a certain validation when someone who's like not, didn't grow up in your corner of religiosity, dark corner. And sort of bringing it to an outside audience too. I think a lot of ex-evangelicals, their, their audiences largely their fellow ex-evangelicals. Exactly.

Exactly. And I'm someone who, like, I grew up as a Jew. And I'm like, yeah, this sucked. This is terrible. I'm, like, appalled reading, like, To Train Up a Child by the Pearls or The Strong-Willed Child by James Dobson. Which, like, to be clear, The Strong-Willed Child is...

is a bad thing. It's a bad thing to have a child with us. You have to beat it out of them. Sure. Literally. And I ran into this in the wild recently. I don't know if you have come across this guy online. Do you know the 90s movie, The Little Rascals? Oh my God. Alf from The Little Rascals turns out to be... Alfalfa. The guy who played Alfalfa. His name is Bug Hall. He like...

Really, like, I don't know, got into a sort of main character situation over some posts about how he beats his infants. He beats infants because that's, I guess, a good way to raise a baby. Yeah. Also, I think he's homeless? No, he's a serf. Oh. He's in a voluntary serfdom arrangement. Oh my god. Oh my god.

Okay, well, he sounds like a big rascal. Yeah, he's a big rascal. He's continued that trajectory of rascaldom. But don't be your kids. I mean, I will also say the reason why this book focuses so much on child abuse, which, like, I encountered some haters and losers and doubters along the way who were like, why are you focused so much on child abuse? And I was like, there are a lot of different theories about, like, how authoritarianism develops. But one of the big ones is

is focusing on the pedagogy in authoritarian societies, like societies that become authoritarian, you know, evolve from democracy to authoritarianism and beating the shit out of people from when they're in infancy to

And particularly when they display disobedience or ask why, or, you know, just deviate from expectation. It's a great way to make an obedient Brown shirt. Yeah, exactly. Like this is a recipe for future authoritarians. Like,

The people I spoke to had sort of broken away largely from this culture, but many of the sort of most obedient soldiers in the army of God are that way because, again, I can't overemphasize how much these parenting manuals, which spanned from like 1970 to 2015, these texts,

you know, the dates that they were published, emphasize having an obedient child. What you want is not like a child who's kind or curious or thoughtful or smart. It's obedient, instantly obedient.

don't make me count to three is the title of one of the books. And like what you're creating is a culture of people who, A, like empathize with the aggressor at all times. So hence this admiration for strength and even admiration for cruelty. People who are trained to obey and obey without question. And people who are very acclimated to the use of violence. I mean, you're doing fascism in the home. Yeah.

Right. So the author, like Alice Miller, the author of the book For Your Own Good, lays out a pretty... She was also a Holocaust survivor. She lays out a pretty strong case for early 20th century Germany having this poisonous pedagogy that also involved beating the shit out of your kids until you... Yeah, it was illegal to love your children. Yeah, to obey you. And...

basically this is how you make a torture and the book is called for your own good and yeah I mean I really think it is like under valued in politics like how much this culture of corporal punishment which is yeah I

Americans have like moved away from universal approval of corporal punishment. We're still like a lot higher than other Western democracies in that regard. And like on a national level, we're the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the UN conventions on the rights of a child, which include like

having a name and like not being beaten and not being thrown into like juvie solitary. Oh, well that's why America can't touch that. We need to incarcerate the children. Yeah. The children yearn for the cells. Um, but it's also just like a lot of it actually was like worries that like evangelicals like would sort of object to the, the, the interference in there. It's an infringement on their religious freedom to beat the shit out of babies. Yeah.

Yeah. And their parental rights, which is another buzzword of this movement. Parental rights is a red flag for me. Oh, yeah. No, I hear parental rights and I think you want to beat the shit out of your kids. You don't want your children to learn science. Yeah. You want to homeschool and under-educate your kids or mis-educate. You want to cause a measles outbreak. Exactly. But that's like for us because we're weirdos. We're like obsessively clued into this stuff.

If you're not, parental rights is like religious freedom. It sounds good. Yeah, it's an effective marketing slogan. But what it means is we're going to show up at the school board and yell about how

I mean, and Trump is like bought into this, obviously, because he knows where his bread is buttered. He has savvy like he's like, you guys do the policy. But like his current parental rights based, his biggest policy that he's advocating is like denying federal funding to any school with any vaccine mandate, which is basically just like make measles great again, like bring back diphtheria.

I think like, yes, the MAGA movement is sort of the, the efflorescence, the apotheosis of this steadily building power. But like, there's also just like 50 years of, of, of power building behind it. And like, even if Trump was defeated at the federal level, which like, I profoundly hope he is sorry to come out as like a, you know, partisan voter, like a hashtag, a voter. But like, I think it would be just a,

A nauseatingly, it's a horrifying thought that he, I mean, first of all, he would absolutely enact every item in this theocratic agenda, starting with a national abortion ban. Like that would happen in the first hundred days, I think, which would just functionally plunge American women into like a very, very dark place.

septicemic nightmare. Yeah, the dark place that we're going is a coffin. Yeah. Yeah. But even should he lose, which, you know, hope, there's still 22 states where abortion is outlawed or severely restricted. And these places are becoming...

care deserts, like medical residents. My extremely sexy partner is a medical resident. So I know more about the state of medicine than I otherwise would. But like residents don't want to do their residencies in states with abortion restrictions. They're like, right. Given a choice, gynecological providers just aren't practicing there anymore. Like even if, you know, even your primary focus is not gynecology,

or even if your primary focus is not pregnancy care,

They just don't want to work there. Well, it's also, first of all, that, but second of all, it's like, if you're in the ER, you're going to experience pregnancy loss because it happens in one in five pregnancies. Right, so they're choosing to work in states where they're not going to go to jail for doing medicine. Yeah, like they don't want to incur the moral injury of not being able to apply the standard of care to patients in extremely common situations, such as incomplete miscarriage and, you know, pregnancy loss, whether, you know, self-induced or

Or just like miscarriage is super common and nobody talks about it. It's more common than we've... And ectopic pregnancy is so much more common than people realize. Like there are so many things that your body could do to betray you that you need a doctor's help with. Just ordinary pregnancy. When then after the baby's born, then your lustrous hair all falls out. Yeah, like...

Ordinary pregnancy is so fraught with weird body horror. But anyway, that's besides the point. Whatever. The point is, someone presents with abdominal pain in the ER, and it turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy. And you can't do standard of care, like dilation and cure-touch procedures, without checking with the hospital lawyer. That is...

a really bad position for a care provider to be in. So when you have these fundamentally unscientific laws, right, that are produced by people who don't know anything about pregnancy and are like,

Very intentionally ambiguous so that cautious institutions will sort of interpret them, maximally interpret them like the life of the mother. How dead does she have to be first? Yeah, she has to be almost dead. Right. And then sometimes she winds up dying because she's

almost dead is tough to judge. Like it's just winds up this grotesque sort of farce of medicine and very directly, like residents don't want to train. Doctors don't want to practice in these places. And so, you know, right. So this ends up killing more people than just the ones hemorrhaging in the parking lot. There are people who have completely unrelated problems who are now unable to access unrelated kinds of care.

because the doctors just aren't there. Yeah. Or people who have ordinary wanted pregnancies who can't access neonatal care, who have to drive hours and hours and hours to like get checkups. Like, you know, I mean, human reproduction is like a pretty major part of like life. And a lot of people are doing it. Yeah. Like it's sort of how, you know, it's just people do it all the time. And

Not being able to access medical care around the entire spectrum of reproduction is pretty catastrophic. But yeah, it also impacts all the people not engaging in reproduction at this moment in time. Doctors who are just like, fuck this, I'm not working at an ER in Tennessee.

You know, because I want to be able to treat patients without a lawyer in the room. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and then there are doctors who are bigots and doctors who are happily on board with abortion bans. But like, do you want that to be the only doctor in your county? I don't think so. You know, it's just, it's a really grim situation.

And I just like, I'm such an absolutist about bodily autonomy. It's like, if you don't own your body, you are not a full citizen, period. End of story. Like if, if a major organ in your body is, is treated as a controlled substance, like you are not a full and equal citizen with rights, which I would like to be. I aspire to it. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you one, one more question about your book and then I will let you go. I told you that I wouldn't keep you very long and I lied. Um,

But it's like, it's just because I like talking to you. So it's, I think I've done the majority of the talk. So you can't, you can't be like, oh, it's about your book, which you should buy listeners. Um,

You can pre-order it now, wherever you buy your books. And if you like the dulcet tones of my voice, which are... I should have gotten you to narrate my audiobooks. You brushed that passage. I'm a professional talker now. Yeah, yeah. Well, I narrated the audiobook and then was like, why did I write such complicated sentences afterwards? So now that I read my own writing on a regular basis out loud, which is new for me, right? So I have my podcast and I'm writing my little scripts and then I'm reading them into a little microphone.

Now that I struggle with that, I noticed while I was reading your book that, oh, I wouldn't be able to read this out loud.

Where would I breathe? I know it was because I write like that too. And it's something I'm like really grappling with right now. She's like, call me 10 clubs, Talia. I'm like, Oh fuck. This sentence is this paragraph. This sentence is a paragraph. Stop it. Like I really, really lost, really lost momentum on that one. Yeah, I know. But like I managed to get through it. And if you, if you enjoy the dulcet sounds of my voice, you can hear it for like, I don't know, eight hours or whatever. Yeah.

I feel weird being like, listen to my voice, but you know, invite me into your mind. Yeah. But I do think it's nice as an author to read your audio book because I can like get mad and like, you know, emphasize stuff that I think is important. And, and, and also I'm a theater kid, like, like I don't have many opportunities to perform and it is a performance and it's, it's fun, but yeah. And that comes out the same time as the physical book.

Yes, it comes out audio, ebook, physical book with a cool snake on it. Oh, yeah. Oh, I guess this is an audio medium. The listener can't see that I'm showing the cool cover. Yeah, it's got a cool snake, a red and black snake on the cover. I've named him Rocco, but he has a cross for a tongue. If you're looking for a book to give to the metalhead in your life. Oh, yeah. It's pretty metal. Metalheads, atheists, degenerates,

Everyone is going to love this book. It's perfect for everyone. And if you're light on cashflow, one tip for supporting indie authors is ask your library to stock it or your local bookstore because library orders are really important and you can just like put in a request in your library system and

And that is super helpful. Oh yeah. Everybody go to your library's website right now and request that they purchase a copy of Wild Faith by Talia Lavin. Yeah. Talia, where else can people find you online?

So I have a newsletter. It's on button down. I left sub stack cause they were like, we're never going to censor Nazis, but we will censor porn. And I was like, I don't like your priorities. So I left for button down. So it's button down.com slash the sword in the sandwich. Or if you just Google the sword in the sandwich comes up most Tuesdays. I read about like the horrific state of politics, et cetera. And then Fridays I read,

write an essay about a different sandwich on Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches. And so far, I've written 111 sandwiches. The sandwich content alone is worth the price of admission. You need to find out about these sandwiches. I mean, it just... And I get really deep into the history and the provenance. I'm like...

ah the shifting of peoples led to this sandwich um but so i get really deep into it and then um you can also find me on blue sky where i most of the time now because twitter is just like robots and nazis and nazi robots where i'm at swords jew i'm still on vichy twitter as moby dick energy and um

You know, if you want to say hi or invite me to speak at your synagogue or bookstore, I'm at taliolivenwrites at gmail.com.

Or church, if you're like cool. Yeah, if it's like a cool church. Yeah. You show up and they pass you a snake. Yeah, exactly. Oh, God. I didn't do enough speaking in tongues for this book. Well, Talia, thank you so much for coming on today. Again, the book is Wild Faith by Talia Lavin. And you can pre-order it now wherever books are sold. And you should request it from your library.

Yeah, we stand civic services. And I'm a huge fan of public libraries and also of Molly Conger. So thanks for having me on and take care. Bye. Bye. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Thanks for listening.

High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits at HighFiveCasino.com. The hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account. Hundreds of exclusive games, free daily rewards, and come back to get free coins every four hours. Only at HighFiveCasino.com.

I-5 Casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Play responsibly. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details at highthenumber5casino.com. I-5 Casino. CBS This Friday. TV's hottest show is back. Fire Country returns with a new season where Max Terriot stars as Bodie Donovan, now stepping into a whole new world outside of prison. The challenges are more dangerous and the stakes have never been higher.

Battling fierce fires and his own personal demons, Bodhi's still fighting his journey towards redemption. Get ready for explosive action, shocking twists, and intense small-town drama. Don't miss an all-new Fire Country, CBS This Friday, and streaming on Paramount+, part of CBS Premiere Week.

Toyota has been building a legacy of excellence for years. From developing hybrid technology to upping the standards of safety and efficiency, Toyota is always innovating, always making progress. And with a superior lineup of in-stock SUVs, including the Adventure Ready RAV4 and capable, affordable Corolla Cross, you can experience the legacy of Toyota for yourself. Visit buyatoyota.com, the official website for deals, to find out more. Toyota, let's go places.

Wouldn't it be nice if nothing stood in your way? You're so close, yet so far.

TV should be easy. We do the hard work so you don't have to. With Xfinity, nothing stands between you and what you want to watch. Just say for you into your Xfinity voice remote to jump back into your favorites, like streaming the iHeartRadio Hot Top 40 playlist for all the hits. Or get a new recommendation based on what you've watched or saved, so you can get right to the good stuff effortlessly.

Zen nicotine pouches deliver nicotine satisfaction anywhere, anytime, which means Zen pairs well with you, your personality, your schedule, and your spontaneity. Zen fits easily into your bag, pocket, and into your life because it's smoke-free, hands-free, and hassle-free. So the only person who will know you have a Zen pouch in is you.

Visit Zinn.com or head to your local convenience store today to find your Zinn. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.