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It's autumn time to get cozy and nothing is cozier than one of Casper's award-winning mattresses. Of course, they've got their most popular mattress. The original hybrid, it's engineered for cool, comfortable sleep. You can get a more restful and more soothing night sleep if it's a little warm in your August with the wave hybrid mattress, which provides more support than foam alone. Or upgrade to the wave hybrid snow mattress with snow technology to give you a full night of cooler sleep if you need to try it to believe it, Casper offers free contactless delivery and a risk. Free Hundred night trial. Discover the Casper difference today at casper.com and use code here 100 for $100 off select mattresses that's code HERE 100. Thatcasper.com for $100 off. Hey there. I'm Scott rank, host of the podcast history unplugged. Now, it really is a dream come true to get paid to talk about history without all the stress while still being able to make a living. And I did it with Spreaker from iheart. Not only did they make it super easy to monetize my podcast, but ad revenue is 3 to four times higher with spreaker than with any other host I've worked with. So if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try, visitspreaker.com, that's SPREAKER. Dot com get paid to talk about the things you love. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hi, welcome to. It could happen here, the show where we just spent a few minutes not recording by accident and also trying to shoot my cat away so they would stop throwing old grenades off my desk. So that's the vibe that we're going for today. OK? And oh, do you know what today is? Today is May Day, famed, famed, one of the best holidays. So in the Mayday tradition, I'm not doing my job today, so we're not doing a real episode. But, but don't don't worry, we still have other content for you to listen to. Uh, Speaking of content. Friend of friend of the pod. Margaret. Killjoy. Hi. Do you have anything that we can listen to today? No. Was I supposed to prepare something? Oh, oh, wait. What if I released the very first episode of my new podcast today? And what if it was a Mayday themed episode? Would that sound good? That would sound, as the kids say, very based of you. That would be so cool. Because if if you like Mayday and only working 8 hours a week, which is still too many hours but if you enjoy that as opposed to more hours, you should probably think the anarchists. And you can learn more about those people at Marquitz new show cool people who did cool stuff here on cool Zone Media featuring also featuring friend of the pod Robert Evans. Yes, Robert Evans is a guest on that episode. So if you're familiar with that guy then you could also listen. So yeah episodes dropping every Monday and. Wednesday Until the world burns. Yay. So like 3 months? Three months? Well, actually they they said like what? Like 46 weeks? Oh yeah, I math it out. It was nine. It's nine months that the UN says we have to turn everything around. But as as my friend pointed out, we're going to waste a month of that just trying to do the math of calculating the weeks into months. I do love optimism. Well, yeah, that does it for us today. Go enjoy your mayday by not working, or at least just kind of ******* around and that's what I'll be doing. And cool people who did cool stuff is out now, so check it out wherever you get your podcast. Oh my God, I just realized it wasn't recording. We are not doing this again. We used to zoom audio. Be fine, OK? Football is back, and better GM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to bed. Mgm.com and enter a bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1000. The bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem call 1888. 532-3500 for my small bookstore to thrive. I can't just sell books, so I created a radio ad@iheartadbuilder.com to tell everyone about our author events, our story, hours for kids and our amazing lattes. Now we're busier than ever. I call that a success story. A custom radio ad from iheart AD builder is the fast, affordable way to drive customers to your business. Put the power of radio to work for you. Get started now at iheart. Badbuilder.com piece of the planet. I go by the name with charlamagne the God, and this summer I'm bringing my show back to Comedy Central with a new title and a new podcast. It's called hell of a week, but don't worry, every Friday I'll be keeping that same, calling out the BS energy. So if the news is terrorizing your timeline and causing your anxiety to rise high in gas prices, don't worry, we got you. You could chase down all the crazy stories of the week with some laughs and thought provoking conversation that the Supreme Court want to abort the Constitution. We'll talk about it. Does Congress want to replace the bald eagle with an AR15? We'll talk about it with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the OJ trial for white people? We'll talk about it, and I'm bringing on some of the biggest names in comedy, politics and entertainment to talk about it with me. Plus, catch all the extended interviews, bonus scenes, and filthy language that has to get bleeped out for TV because I hear that Doctor Fauci has a bit of a potty mouth. So be sure to listen to hell of a week with charlamagne the God on the iHeartRadio app, the Black Effect podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It's like a bunch of different illustrations of of dictators all done as like little anime chicks, so they're all hot. So like pull pots, this like sexy girl and a throat of skulls. But Tito, they made into a **** like she's got all of her kids around her. It's the only, it's the only one with kids. I don't know why they picked Tito for that, but it does kind of work. This is it could happen. Here, a podcast about which anime? War criminals are hottest, and it's Indiamen. Actually, the idea amine in that book is pretty, pretty pretty smoking pot depicted as a like wearing black lingerie on a throne of skulls. OK, nice. Just kissing Jamaican in. No, no Kissinger. All all like, like world leaders. Be doing some things. I would. I would argue that. But he does not make the book. No, it's sad. Tragic. Anyway, this is it could happen here, podcast, things falling apart and other stuff. I'm here again with my buddy James. James, hi. Hi. Hi everyone. Which dictator do you think would be hottest? They were like Ginder, Ben. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I'd have to go for like, one of the old timey ones, perhaps one of the one of the one of the one of the cars. Yeah, I think Caesar Nikki had nothing to do but, like, look hot. Yeah. And he was a big workout guy. Yeah. Big workout guy. Nice to rip. Nice. Nice outfit. Tight trousers. Yeah. I think I'd probably go with him. Yeah, that that scans now. Which was hottest, as they were. Like, which is the most ******** war criminal? That's a tough one. I probably have to think about that. I know none are coming to mind, actually. Oddly at Stalin pictures of fake people, he's yeah, yeah, not not not nearly. Actually. That sexy Joseph stallion. I gotta go. I gotta go with Saddam Hussein. Yeah, that's true. He has a sort of lustful moustache. And it's good that mustache ***** James. We should probably talk about something that's not which dictators are most ********. Today we're going to chat about he fat courses and about emergency and particularly like combat medicine which is a a more relevant topic for a lot of people. In the wake of a couple there was a mass shooting at a protest in Portland. There's been a whole lot of threats made against LGBT people. Jack Posobiec launched AT shirt that was basically threatening a mass shooting at Disney World. All sorts of fun ***** been happening. Yeah, it does seem like we are spiraling towards the end of times. Yeah, it certainly seems if you wanna be less, you know, apocalyptic than that, it certainly seems credible to say that there's a pretty good chance people, there are people listening to this who have not been present at a shooting who will be present at a shooting at some point in their lives. Yeah. And I think given that, it doesn't make sense to like, I I'm joking about the end of times. Right? Like we shouldn't panic and things we should think about ways we can protect each other and keep each other safe. Yeah. So what is a he fat course because you recently went through one. Yeah. So he. Fat is an acronym, right? A hostile environment, first aid training. It's a British thing. I think this, the syllabus, I believe, is standardized by the government in the UK. So most of the courses you'll find her in the UK clustered around Hereford for pretty obvious reasons, but that there are, there are a couple in the United States and there are some in other countries too. And it's for journalists, aid workers, NGO staff, and anyone else who's working in an environment that would be considered like high risk or hostile. And to your point, that includes most of the United States. At the minute, right? Yeah, well, I mean, we are in this fun place where literally any moment could turn into. A. See a situation with the intensity of a of a low density war zone. Yeah. I mean we have more weapons and than most war zones and also people who think it's OK to kill other people because they like Mickey Mouse. So it does seem like it. Like you said, it is more likely that we will see more shootings, even bombings and that kind of thing. Like we can't say for sure, but yeah, now you, you have done some of the same kind of work that that I and some other colleagues of ours have done, you know, in, in hostile environments difficult. Phases prior to going through this course, obviously, when we're talking about like, what sort of first aid skills should people have, the most basic stuff is like how to apply a tourniquet, which we'll talk about a bit more later. How to, if it's not because tourniquets are really only for extremities, you know, you can't really tourniquet a gut wound or whatever. And so for that, it's more like packing it but outside. So I'm, I'm going to assume you had your more than your share of experience with that kind of stuff. What did you learn new going through this course? Was the stuff they emphasized. That's kind of beyond the basics. Yeah. So the stuff I've done before has been some of that basic stop the bleed stuff and then a fair amount of wilderness medicine stuff. So some of the improvised stretches and stuff I was familiar with, I enjoyed some of the releases they did. Like a I'm not talking about like necessarily like a hand to hand combat or open hand combat, but like ways to release yourself in a non violent fashion. I thought that was very good ways to move through crowds. I found that very interesting and we did a lot of around how to move under fire, how to react around explosives, how to react around indirect fire, and most of that had already covered. And then some of the stuff around hostage situations to include a simulated hostage situation where you're blindfolded or hooded and sort of asked questions and poked with a blank firing weapon and such. A I think it's really good. You can't really have enough, but you can't have too much experience with that. But to simulate that in as realistic as setting as possible I found was. Super helpful. So I think, yeah I think that was probably the most interesting thing for me now when it comes to what kind of training people can get because he thought courses a couple of 1000 bucks, which is beyond, I know we have some colleagues listening and I think it's a good thing for people who are going to do this kind of journalism to consider. Or if you're in you know an aid worker or someone who is going to be going into these situations for a living, that's. But for a normal person listening it's probably more than it you're likely to want to get or have the the resources to get So what? What people? Because because I we, especially in the wake of shootings, pretty much anytime there's a mass shooting or violence at a protest, I will tweet about ifax again. And IFAC is an individual first aid kit. It's what like every soldier is supposed to have on their belt or on their plate carrier and it generally consists of what are called and this is when people ask, like, what should I get to be ready for a shooting? Generally it consists of consists of two chest seals. These are called occlusive dressings. They're basically like kind of sheets of adhesive. Plastic I would say that you like put over. If you get shot in like the lungs you your lungs kind of depressurize. And that's bad. I'm not a I'm not a biology expert, but you're not supposed to have a hole through your lungs. And one of the things that you do to treat that immediately is you put this kind of addressing over it, which stops the lung from collapsing, basically. So that's one thing you'll find in an ifak. You'll also find what's called a combat tourniquet. There's a bunch of kinds of tourniquets. I was doing a stop the bleed course. We'll talk more about that in a bit, but that's the thing everyone should do. Like in terms of, you know, he fat is kind of more advanced and for people who are going to professionally. Put themselves in ****** situations. Stop. The bleed is for everybody. And one of the things I was having a chat with people who were teaching them, we were doing a little meeting. And one of the things that was brought up, people always talk about, well, I wear a belt in case I need to make a tourniquet or this or that, and virtually never works. Like close to 0% success rate, even when it's someone who's trained and experienced providing tourniquets, like random **** does not make a good tourniquet. Tourniquets make good tourniquets. Yeah. They're small. They're easy to carry. They they aren't cheap, right? But on the same, you shouldn't cheap out on them either, right. Like, we've, I know we've talked about this on Twitter, and I know, like, Amazon sells them. They have also had a problem with selling fakes. So, like North American rescue, I think it's called emergency rescue. I'll give you some links so we can tweet out. Yeah. North American Rescue is really good. One of the. So, yeah, rescue essentials. So what a combat tourniquet is because there's different. Some tourniquets are just like a plastic band almost. Almost like if you go to a gym. Those things that people like. Wrap around their legs to do squats or something or lifts. It's kinda like it looks a little like that. And those yeah, obviously like those can work, but they're not nearly a combat tourniquet is basically, it's a little like kind of nylon Y fabric belt thing that you strap around and you tighten it and Velcro it tight. And then there's something called a windless, which is basically a metal or plastic stick that you then twist around and that twisting action when you twist it, that's going to tighten it and that's going to stop the artery. From bleeding. And then you lock it into place. There's a little place to lock it. And so when you get a cheap tourniquet, it generally means the windless is made out of something flimsy or the fabric adhering the windless to the belt thing is not very good and it will break when being tightened. Yeah. And you don't want what you don't want to do is not have enough pressure or have sort of weird pressure because what you're going to do to me, I'm not that kind of doctor, right, is you can cut off the venous return and not the arterial flow and that's you can give yourself compartment syndrome. Right. I just wanted to backtrack quickly and we were talking about how. Facts are if people are listening and they are in that kind of line of work, uh, the international Women's Media Foundation is is doing free he fact courses for women, gender nonconforming, nonbinary people. And I got a I got a grant from the Roy Peck Trust to go and do mine. So for journalists, both of those are really only for journalists and media. I would really encourage people to apply. Yeah. And that's that's great information because if you can, even if, like, your journalism has been sort of like citizen journalism where you're showing up at a protest. You know, taking pictures or whatever. Give it a shot, like if you like the more people who have this kind of training. As a general rule, the better. When it comes to stop the bleed courses are generally going to be much more available. Some of them are operated as charities and we'll give out an ifak or something at the end. Some of them have a nominal fee. It kind of depends on where you are. I've seen both. Portland has a lot of stop the bleed courses, which is why when we had our most recent mass shooting at a protest, more people didn't die because folks had equipment and were ready. You you should expect to spend about 30 bucks generally on a combat tourniquet. Sometimes 20, but like the good ones are all about 30. I would shoot for something with a metal winless that's generally assigned. Again, there's like rescue essentials and. A couple of other brands that are reliable but, uh, it's called the Tactical Committee on Combat Care, which is a government funded thing. So, like, if you let them do the research so you don't have to. Yeah. They provide a list of of tourniquets. Tourniquets. The one that most people have is called cat. Right. Complete application. Tourniquet. If you get that, even if it's not the best one or the smallest or lights or whatever, that's all most people train with and know how to use. And I think you've said this before, like, even if you don't know how to use it, if you're in a situation where it's needed. You just say I have this, I have a tourniquet. Someone might take it and use it. So yeah. And it's it's like, it's OK if you panic as long as you get that into the hands of somebody who can use it. But it's also important if you're gonna carry it to train with it. I heard when I posted about this recently, someone said that they and their friends have a game where when they're like, hanging out, somebody will toss a tourniquet at someone else and say, like, you know, right arm or something like that, right arm above elbow or something like that. And they'll have to apply the tourniquet. And get it on as quickly as they can in that place. Uh, which is a good game. You're not going to like in 20 or 30 seconds. Like, you know, you know, you don't have to, like, injure yourself doing it, but you can. You can get it on and get familiar with emotions and build, like, a competence with it. Yeah. Work out when you're gonna lassie the limb, when you're gonna take it off and go all the way around. But I think standardizing one thing, certainly among you and your affinity group or your friends is, is probably a good move. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's one of those things that kind of injuries that tourniquets. Are most needed for our like, arterial bleeding, which is the kind of thing that if you don't get a tourniquet on that, you're dead very quickly. Like people will bleed out in seconds sometimes from like a femoral. Yeah, you've seen an arterial bleed and I'm sure that I know I have. I'm sure you have. You know that that person has an arterial beat that is a pressurized gushing of blood. It's like bright, the blood arterial bleeding. It comes out in spurts and it is like bright. It is not it. Does not look like when you cut your finger, the blood tends to. Unless you're really cutting the **** out of that finger. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you. One of the things we did at this course, which is called actually, was they had like a simulated arterial bleed. So the person was wearing bullet like a camelback. And then they had like a hose pipe and it was just gushing out. And then you could actually cinch down on it, right, with the strap. And that actually stopped it now. I mean, when it comes to like more advanced bleeding care because there's some wounds where #1, if it's like, for example, too high up in your, like crotch or something, you know, you're not necessarily going to be able to get a cat. Up there, sometimes people will literally hold the artery closed. Like that is a thing that and that is more advanced, certainly, but it is it is also like, the physics of this are very basic. If you can figure out where blood is coming from and close it, blood will stop coming out, right. Like that's the principle of all immediate wound. Care for that kind of thing. Yeah. There's an acronym that you use, right, Doctor March, which we can go over and danger, right. So, and I think this is the thing that often gets forgotten, actually. Especially if you're doing like somebody's starting to bleed, which is focused on first aid rather than specifically in kind of combat care. But if you get hurt, not only are you useless of that person, not only are you hurt if someone comes to help, now they have to think about which person they're going to help, right? How much harder to carry two people than one person? So don't ******* do that. And then response, right. Yeah. So Rob, but I see you've been shot. Doesn't look great. You OK? And then massive bleed, airway, respiration. Yeah, check head to toe and then hypothermia and you know one of the things that is so like a combat tourniquet, you just generally you can keep it in like a kit. It's also fine to keep it loose in your pocket. You are not worried about stability when you are applying a tourniquet. It does not matter if you get **** in the wound like because they will dot. They'll be dead in a minute. If you don't get the tourniquet on UM side anyway, right. Yeah. Yeah. You're not putting it in or whatever like it. So yeah. So that's that's one kind and that's, again, you're talking about extremities, right. You can't put a tourniquet on a neck because that would kill the person. You would use an exclusive a lot of times on the neck, especially if like the airway gets, again, this is stuff that you would you, you would get in to stop the bleed course. And I recommend people for that. So we're not going to go over treatment outside of like these basics, but we'll talk about like you should have. Occlusive dressings 2 is what most effects come with. People I know who have responded to shootings say you want more like 4 because they a lot wind up getting used. Yeah, I think about, I think those Betty chest seals and something that I've been told by people with a lot more experience than me. It's like when you're dealing with a military setting, most people will have their chest covered with plates, right, and plate carriers and a civilian setting. Most people won't. So you're gonna see a lot more of those like sucking chest wounds or penetration of the thoracic cavity. So yeah, and in that setting, and they are very small, right? You could put them in the back pocket of your skinny jeans and no one would notice. So another kind of thing that you'll find in an ifak that's useful is combat gauze. So there's two types of gauze that you'll get in kits. One is just gauze, which, you know what gauze is most wounds. If they are not life threatening, packing with gauze and wrapping is perfectly sufficient, at least for immediate care. But combat gauze is impregnated with a thing called cellox, which is our little granules. You can actually get them just as the powder. You shouldn't, because it's it's not gonna be useful to you as a random person. You should get it in God, like impregnated into gauze, but it's it's made from ground up crustacean shells, and it basically makes blood clot very quickly. Survivability of arterial wounds in combat, which was extremely low before Cellox jumped to something like 70% or so like it's it's pretty remarkable the degree to which it's made certain, particularly like femoral bleeds survivable. And it can be used if you've got like a a serious arterial bleed. It'll often be used in conjunction if it's on an extremity with a tourniquet, but you can just use it to pack a bleeding wound. And if you pack it and apply pressure, sometimes you'll pack the combat gauze into there and then add other gauze outside of it, like, but it's it's most wounds that are bleeding aren't going to require celox gauze, and it's pretty expensive, but it's another really useful thing to have if there is like an arterial bleed. Yeah, I think actually the. Where we first? I think I might be what the stuff is called. Believe it comes from indigenous practices using it to stop bleeding. But yeah, it comes in a small package. Quick clot is the normal brand. Yeah. And yeah, it's a lot of what we've learnt about stopping arterial bleed has come from 20 years of war, right. And and they're obviously a lot of downsides. But yeah, learning about how to stop those things is one of the things that has got a lot better in the last decade or so. So that's another thing. And you can always buy these kits pre made a lot of people make various pre-made kits. Yeah, you can Google it. Back and make sure it's, you know, rated well, do a little, do your research. We've mentioned some brands here, but like, it's not hard to find ifax they're they're made constantly. And it's one of those things we talk on this show about being armed and whether or not people should, should have firearms. And I'm broadly supportive of, of particularly threatened people having guns. But there's downsides to having a gun, a number of them. We don't need to get into the statistics, but there are a bunch of downsides to being armed. There's no downside to having an eye. Back and keeping one in your car, uh, keep one in your backpack, you know, Umm, there's absolutely no way you will have a negative experience as a result of the fact that you keep an eye fact on you and it might save somebody's life. Yeah, I have an ankle holster that I use when I'm working in places where we wouldn't look very, you know, it would look off to have it on my belt. And I don't want to carry a backpack. Maybe I need to wrapped around my ankle and it has a tiny a combat dressing which haven't really talked about, chest seal tourniquet and it doesn't have the quick clot. The the combat dressing has his own cause. Yeah, we can talk about that in a second. But like, I I just have, like, I have a couple of effects, but also just in all of my light jackets, because, you know, Oregon, usually you can wear some sort of jacket. I just have a bunch of cats and quick clot gauze packets just kind of scattered around. Like there's nearly always something just in my pocket or in the center console of my car in addition to the actual packed ifax. And yeah, it's handy. It's just good to have around it never hurt to have more of that stuff. You have the means or you know if you are in a situation where something horrible has happened, right? Like what happened in Portland, right. If you in your truck have three or four of those and you can just be like go, go, go. Does anyone know how to use these? Use these if they're in your backpack when you're at a protest, like you could potentially save several lives. So if you have the means and like we said, give them to strangers. Like it's not like it's not like a gun, right. Like you can't end your life with a with quick clot. Yeah. So yeah, I would. It's a thing that everyone should feel good about having starting up. We should note again, you wouldn't want to use quick clot on a wound that was not serious because it there's some like, it burns. It's it's kind of nasty stuff. In some ways it can cause some complications for for like when the EMT's get there, it's often recommended that you keep the packaging and give it to them. But if it's if someone is clearly going to bleed to death like that's then that, then that's when you use quick clot. And if you're questioning whether or not a wound is serious enough that someone might bleed to death from it, assume they will. Right? Like, err on the side of that. If you're wondering, is that a deadly bleed, you're probably should probably treat it as if it is. Yeah. I mean, you always better off keeping more blood inside the person. Yeah, right. Yeah, with that, yeah, I've I've been told to take that to the person. And the same with the tourniquet, right. We should say that there will be blood around. You can put a tea on their forehead with the blood. That's pretty normal and that works in almost any language. And then you want to write the time it was applied to. And again, you can do that with the blurb, but I have 1/2 size Sharpie that often comes in those kits. Yeah, right. Yeah. And it's one of those things like it assuming it kind of is dependent on your situation whether or not you're likely to have the time to mark that before the EMT's arrive. But it is one of those things, even if it's even if your first responding is a minute and 1/2 or two minutes with a serious bleed, that can be the difference between life and death for somebody. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's different what you do when care isn't coming to what you do when care is coming. But the first steps are not, right. Stop the blood coming out of the person. So we should probably talk about combat dressings a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. There are several types. The one I've had suggested that I prefer, I think. I don't know how it's pronounced. It's OLES Olais dressing has a little eye cup in it as well, which you can use for eye injuries, like find someone more qualified than me to teach you how to do that. Don't need to get into that. But yeah, but it's it's a pad with goes in it and then a sort of ace bandage, right? And what that does is provides compression and obviously like an absorbent goes, you can also pull the gores out. A fun thing to do is to find an expired one and pull all that goes out. And there is just an unfathomable amount of course there. So you can use that to, like, pack a wound. And practicing packing a wound is also something that you can do. There are like little bottles. Yeah, the the team I know who does stop the bleed courses will take foam rollers and cut holes in them and use that as like A to you. So you can and you can do different sizes, right? You can actually just like get a knife and like, jam it it, stab it a bunch and like, use those as different practice wounds. Yeah, it's a good idea, dude. Can you pack with two? Thing is, you know more than that. Even one finger people compact with one finger. So, like, what this dressing does is opposite. It's sometimes they called Israeli bandages, olaes bandages. They often come in like a tan package. The Israeli ones. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Again, like, I I would buy that from a reputable source. And they come in various sizes. Emergency dressing is another name. And yeah, those are great for things where you don't need to use quick clot where you may not need to. Yeah, significant bleeding, but not like immediately life. Threatening, yeah. And in some areas, well, like sometimes in in the forearm, right, like it it can be hard because of these bone structures to get the tourniquet to work. So, like, you might be able to use that and stop being, you might have to use quick clot, right? But like, having those options is important. And again, they're pretty small, probably the cheapest of the things we've suggested so far as well. And again, then they make giant ones from abdominal wounds to. And so, like, I actually have one of those in my truck, have a bunch more stuff in my truck. I wrote a piece about a first aid kit. Your vehicle, which may look slightly different, right? If you imagine, again, like, we've talked about shootings, but car accidents, I that's that's when I the only times I've had to use those dressings have been car accidents. And to help pull the ******* dude out of a truck that flipped on the way outside of Los Angeles during a rainstorm, and he's like whole ******* like, right here in his hand had been gouged open where like, the IT was quite a bit of blood. But yeah, like that. That's a bit it's not all just, like, action movie **** like it. It's something you should keep on you. Because there's a wide variety of things that can cause people to bleed a lot. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we we always underestimate the risk that is driving some of the most dangerous thing most people do. And, yeah, having that in your car, you have to worry so much about carrying it. It can just always be there. Don't leave it where it's going to bake in the sun if you're in a hot place. Yeah. But yeah, again, the potential for you saving a stranger's life or a friend's life. Yeah. Is high. Yeah. Keep it in the center console. Keep it in a trunk, you know, keep it in a trunk alongside a machete and a Golf Club. You know, you're always ready for anything with that. Yeah. I'm never ready for golf. But aside from that, I'd be, oh, I wasn't saying for golfing. OK just for. Yeah. For crying. Yeah, exactly. For crime. Yeah. Medical actually make a real yes. Yeah. They make a lovely vehicle, first aid kit and are very nice people, too. So yeah, that that's one to look into. And they also do the bags. I have a mystery ranch bag that also clips onto it, replaces the hood on my backpack, and I have that in my truck. And then if I'm going out, especially when I'm going out climbing. I'll just click that on his slightly different kit that I take just for climbing, but that's one of those scenarios where like. You could hurt yourself climbing. And even if people are coming very quickly, it's going to take you a while, right? Yeah. And and thinking another thing I'd be prepared to self rescue. That's part of why you brings that kind of stuff. Self Rescue is a massive part of climbing. Learn learning then. Not saying the transfer of learning. The ways that you can get yourself off of all of you hurt yourself on a wall. And the American Alpine Club actually publishes a thing called accidents in North American climbing where climbers. Oh, OK, this person ****** ** like this and they did this and this and this and they were OK. They weren't OK. So I think that's a very good practice, learning from other people. And with that, a big thing that you focus on in wilderness medicine is rather than what can I bring with me, what do I have to already have with me and how can I use that, right. So for instance, you need to splint the leg where you have a broken leg using a sleeping pad or something which already has its rigid sleeves to do that. And that's something that like, I don't wanna obviously advise people too much. Yeah, I don't wanna like because again so the difference this is useful. People should be thinking about this when it comes to emergency first. Aid like somebody was a broken leg. If you're not like there's no real response that you should like that's not what stopped the bleed is for, right? Like one one of the nice things about emergency medicine like this, like when you're talking about someone is bleeding to death, is that one of the ways, I guess, that you can you, you can you can separate the the two kinds of like first responding because there's the first responding where you can make it worse and if you like somebody like breaks a bone or something and you you can make that worse. Many turn arterial, yes. But if somebody has an arterial bleeding, you can't make that worse. They're good. It's the same thing with like, chest compressions, right? When you get trained as an EMT, one of the things they'll point out is that, like, you shouldn't use an AED on an infant, but you do because if they need it, they're dead. Yeah. And in that case, yeah, I think it's important also in the thing I didn't mention that I found very helpful about this course. Some of the sort of psychological aspects of this is to remember that if you do find yourself in this situation. And you try and help and that person dies anyway, then you did your best, right? And and that is of of value. Like I've been in situations where I've tried to help someone and they've died anyway. And and I think just remembering that, like that person had something terrible happened to them and that your help didn't, you know, like you tried your best to give that person another chance. It is not. If you are responding to somebody who has this kind of injury, there is a pretty good chance what you do won't matter. Like, it's the same thing if you are giving someone chest compressions. That's very unlikely to save their life like a fraction of the time. When that happens, does it save anybody? But it can't make it worse if they're not breathing. If they're not breathing, yeah. They're going to die. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, it's not like the movies or television, like. And sometimes it doesn't work. But it's important to talk about that in the context. Yes. Achieve much, probably. Much more likely the person will survive. If you're doing this stuff right. You're slapping on torn again. You do it right, you will stop that person. Yes, yes. And and. But, you know, again, it is a lot of times what you might be doing is keeping them alive long enough to get to the hospital. And you can't guarantee anything other than that they don't bleed out right there. Right. And there may be other issues you haven't seen as we do the check head to toe. Right. And stuff like that. Like, especially in blast injuries, you might not notice injuries to the back. Yeah, shrapnel as a whole, I mean. But all you can do is try to treat what you can see. Yes, exactly. And to make sure that you don't miss anything by going through that doctor March procedure. Right. Which you're learning, of course. But yeah, you're having a procedure that you do where you make checks so that you don't miss something that you could have stopped because then I imagine you will feel bad. Yeah. None of what we've said we should probably bring this to a close should be seen as like, the end all be all. Or our attempt to give you comprehensive training on this is in no way training. This is advice on #1, the equipment that's necessary for stopping someone from bleeding to death and #2. The kinds of training you should get in order to use it and you should seek training. You should find a stop the bleed course. You should take a wilderness medicine course if you can. If you if you are someone who is in a field that it's relevant for, you should try to get a he fat course. Don't, don't just like be OK. I listen to a 30 minute podcast. I'm ready to stop a bleed. Go go get some training, but definitely get a tourniquet and practice with it. You can do some training yourself. You can find videos online by reputable. People who are affiliated with different rescue organizations, talking about and showing how to apply tourniquets, how to apply dressings like that, that's available. And you can provide yourself with a useful amount of education in some of the basics that way. Yeah. I think just to give out some resources on how you can get the education, right. Stopthebleed.org should be free almost anywhere you are. If you'd like to get more training, most community colleges have an EMT course that is very affordable. Yeah. Fat course can run you a couple grand if it's not subsidized. The last time when I took my empty training was $1000. Yeah, I think there's less than that now. I know people who don't have many students who are going through training, and it's pretty affordable. Free often. So if you're in California, it's often free. Uh, the other things you can do are, yeah, wilderness medicine that is expensive. The American Alpine Club has grunts like more, more diverse group of people should apply because all of the outdoors could do with a lot more diversity and encourage people to apply. Yes, so for all of these training there are grants and I would encourage more people to apply to them. But you yeah, you can learn a lot for free or online. You can and should try and educate your friends. Like we're saying, it's some of this stuff is hard to **** **. And even if you don't feel confident using stuff rescue essential with North American rescue, Chinook medical, those are places where you can buy a premade ifak carry that around and someone else can use it. And again, for talking about like the benefits of this versus the cool looking tactical gear. And guns and stuff. It's entirely possible to have a bunch of military equipment that is worse than useless if you don't know how to use it is actively a danger to other people. If you have a bunch of medical gear and you don't know how to use it, but you have it on you, you can always shout like, I have a tourniquet, I have like a combat dressing or something like, does anyone know how to use it? No one is going to make fun of you in the wake of a mass shooting for trying to hand off your gear to someone who knows how to use it. Yeah, exactly. And, like, you have to carry around a little green multicam. Out. Just something. You can get a bum bag, put it in a ******* purse, like, whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter too. They're very small, they're very compact. And like, a bum bag or ***** pack is very handy because you can switch it from the back to the front. Get to all your stuff. So, yeah, you don't have to be all, like, tactical ******* Sammy savior. Just be sensible and safe. Yeah, even if you don't, even if you panic or whatever and can't be the one to use it, you can still help save somebody's life by ******* having the **** because it's it's irreplaceable when it's not there. Yeah. I would just encourage people to not use the elastic concrete. Yes, don't go and buy milsurp stuff because you know, you can probably pay the same price to get some that's not expired. And so yeah, just be conscious buying from those reputable people. They often have sales, especially around holidays. You can you can hold out and wait for those. They were pretty good resources on Reddit as well. Actually. There's a tactical medicine subreddit where people will sort of list their kits and often posted there's a sale, so something's worth cruising. If this is something interesting to you, yeah. Do some research you may find right now, especially in places like rescue essentials, it is harder to get combat tourniquets because the war in Ukraine has caused a shortage of the the good ones. But you can still find them. You just may need to search around a little bit. Yeah, what I found was that because you'd posted about this after New York shooting was that they were out of the straight tourniquet, that they were not out. They wanted to go with the pouch. Pouch cost like 6 or $8.00. And I know that that's more of an expense. And if you can, if you can afford that, then getting that's not a bad idea anyway because you can put on your belt but have one of my backpack belt when I'm hiking, right. So that's definitely something that. Yeah. To know to look for. All right. Well, that's gonna do it for this episode. James, you wanna plug anything? Anarchism. Good. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Go find a hierarchy and like throw a rock at it. Yeah. Just look after other people and and don't resort to the state to do it. Be kind to each other and. Get get EMP training if you can. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter a bonus code champion and place your first wager. Risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem call 1-888-532-3500 for my small bookstore. Thrive I can't just sell books, so I created a radio ad@iheartadbuilder.com to tell everyone about our author events, our story hours for kids, and our amazing lattes. Now we're busier than ever. I'd call that a success story. A custom radio ad from iheart AD builder is the fast, affordable way to drive customers to your business. Put the power of radio to work for you. Get started now at iheart adbuilder.com. Piece of the planet I go by the name of Charlemagne the God. And this summer I'm bringing my show back to Comedy Central with a new title and a new podcast. It's called hell of a week. But don't worry, every Friday I'll be keeping that same, calling out the BS energy. So if the news is terrorizing your timeline and causing your anxiety to rise high in gas prices, don't worry, we got you. You could chase down all the crazy stories of the week with some laughs and thought provoking conversation that the Supreme Court want to abort the Constitution. We'll talk about it this Congress. Gonna replace the bald eagle with an AR15. We'll talk about it with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the OJ trial for white people. We'll talk about it and I'm bringing on some of the biggest names in comedy, politics and entertainment to talk about it with me. Plus, catch all the extended interviews, bonus scenes, and filthy language that has to get bleeped out for TV because I hear that Doctor Fauci has a bit of a potty mouth. So be sure to listen to hell of a week with charlamagne the God on the iHeartRadio app, the Black Effect podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Oh yeah. Oh, that's a beautiful sound. This is it could happen. Here a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. I'm Robert Evans. I'm here again with Doctor James Stout. James, say hello to hi people. We are in an undisclosed location. Is that gonna get you in trouble with your immigration stuff? Almost certainly, yes. Yeah. OK, well, let's just bleep out the rest of that. But keep the thing with me asking if it's gonna get him in trouble with this immigration officer. That'll be fine. This is a podcast that all too often as Garrison and I say, winds up us being like, here's a problem. Goodbye. And telling people about problems is important, but it's also important to talk about solutions. Now, there's been a discourse not just on the Twitter, but on the subreddit for it could happen here repeatedly over the last few months of people talking about, like, how would anarchists? Handle things like large scale distribution of food, an industrial base. You know, how would anarchists, how would an anarchist society handle infrastructure in any meaningful capacity? And I think there's kind of a widespread idea among some people that like you have to have intense centralization to do that. Now, James, you are. I wasn't joking about the doctor thing. You do have a PhD in your specific area of specialty is the Spanish Civil War. That's right, yeah, even more specific than that, actually. My. My very specific area of specialty is the 2nd. Republics are a period before the Civil war and really like the first week of the Spanish Civil War. But yes, Catalonia. Specifically like Revolutionary Catalonia and. I guess my thing is the anti Fascist Popular Olympics in 1936, but more broadly Catalonia and Catalonia before and in the Civil War. Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting about this. Is you did have one of the fairly rare times in history where a significant number of people were living in an industrialized ish nation with with anarchist under anarchist principles, and a number of things were done in an anarchist fashion, including the production of armored vehicles, the maintenance of large amounts of agriculture, you know, power and whatnot. So yeah, how, how, how do, how do James. Yeah, how do anarchism. Let me tell you, I should start by saying, like, I'm not like a big, big theory guy. I'm more of a sort of doing things guy person. But yeah, so if we look at what we had in Catalonia, right, in 1936. So the Spanish Civil War, if you're not familiar, starts on the 19th of July 1936 with a coup, right. Some of this will sound familiar. Maybe you should listen to our podcast about Myanmar. But we have a, a military uprising against a leftist, democratic government that has just been elected in 1936. After two years of a right wing, it's called the Biennio ***** like the black biennium that, you know, you've lived through the Trump ****. You understand? Yeah. So we have this coup that happens. And in cities across Spain, the coup is largely stopped. The the differentiating factor, as we talked about this in our podcast, is where the people are armed, the coup is stopped. Where the people are not armed, where the government says, no, we weren't really weapons to you, the the coup succeeds. Right now in Barcelona, the coup is stopped almost entirely by the anarchists with a little bit of help from the police, actually oddly right. The The One Classic allies and kiss and the police fighting together. I mean, it is also a very different kind of situation with the, I mean, yeah, culture, like how, how does that happen? How does that happen? Well, in Spain you have various police forces, right? And some of them are created by the Second Republic, so they are. Police said exist really to protect the Republic from things that would attack it. That does not mean that they do not attack workers, right? The Republic was often called the Republic of Order because they violently put down strikes and the anarchists killed them. But in this instance they remained loyal. The cops, yeah, yeah, that's that's a pretty steady thing. But in this instance, the Republic was under attack from the right, right from the military and in some towns the police. Split for the military, but in Barcelona they largely did not right. We have various police guards, police groups in Spain, federal and and local, but the assault guards and and the civil guards in Barcelona largely remained with the Republic, right? And it's important to maybe if we if we step back a second to explain the concept of a Popular Front, then we can understand that more easily, right? For more detail on this, we talk about a decent amount of this in our behind the insurrections episodes on the Spanish Civil War and the popular fronts, which aren't just a Spanish thing, they exist in France. They exist in a number of other countries. It's the thing that gets tried on several occasions, often successfully, at least from an electoral standpoint. Yeah, yeah, it's very successful at this time. Right. And it's important to understand that the RC, which translates as Catalan Republican left, had more or less been a Popular Front since 1931. Yeah. And a Popular Front is basically this thing we keep talking about. Or what if everybody on the left could get on the same page about stopping fascism? That's the basic idea, is like, you've got your libs, you've got your commies, you've got your anarchists, you've got other weird chunks of the left, and everybody agrees, let's all work together to deal with this specific right wing threat right now. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Like we can put our differences aside and move forward. So that's what you have in the Second Republic is explicitly called the Popular Front, right? And so that is why the police in Barcelona split with the anarchists. Now what happens in Barcelona? So the military March into town from outside of town and just pretty much get get the their ship push back in by the anarchist right? All around town. Gun fights break out. In one instance the anarchists are able to persuade the soldiers manning a machine gun that their class solidarity is more important than their obedience to their officers. And then they turn the machine gun on their offices and kill their officers instead. Unbelievably based, exceptionally ******* cool, right? The Spanish Civil war. These amazing stories like that, but that that's one of my favorites, right? Doesn't happen often. It's great when it does so. What we have by the end of the first week of the Spanish Civil War is a situation where in Catalonia, the cities in the hands of the anarchists says this meeting that happens between the President of Catalonia and the anarchists. It may or may not be apocryphal, or the exact words may not be apocryphal. Doesn't really matter. What happens is that the anarchists go to the President of Catalonia and they he says to them, you're in control of the city. The city's in your hands. I've been he actually the president. As liberal, but he'd been a lawyer for the anarchist. When they kept getting fired, he said, if you want me to be another foot soldier in the fire will quit my job, I'll just be another fighter. But if I can be useful to you as a politician, I will as well, right? So it's a submission admission from elected bourgeois politician that like the city belongs to you now, to the people. And it's up to you what we do next, right? What they did was they founded this. They didn't actually sort of go right. It's all anarchist, right? Two salient and anarchist groups of CNT. In fact I the Anarchist federation of Iberia and the National Confederation of Labour. He didn't, they didn't sort of be like, OK, we're under anarchist control. They they founded the People's Committee of Anti Fascist militias and they said this is an anti Fascist Catalonia, right. And then they began to control the industries according to the principles of Anarcho syndicalism, right. Which is the idea that the way to move towards a more libertarian. Society under moving from industrial capitalism is through industrial unions, right? And they were extremely effective. I see this discourse a lot on Twitter or on Reddit or in places where where? I don't want to just like dismiss people as tankies, but we're we're because like you know, maybe those people can can listen and we can talk and we can understand each other. But where people go on the Internet to talk about politics and say that, like, it's impossible for anarchists to do supply chain, it's impossible for anarchists to do logistics right. And sometimes I think they think of anarchism as like a like only able to work in groups of five people or something. There's this broad spread attitude in part because of like some social. Attitudes among a lot of American anarchists, certainly American anarchists were very online. That like anarchism is when you live on a farm with four of your friends, right, like that, that it's very pastoral, it's anti industrial and a decent amount of American anarchists are. It's not uncommon to find people who are like anarcho, primitivist or whatever. But it is important to note that there's a very long anarchist tradition as we're talking about now that's deeply industrial, yes. And like the anarchist, a right, the anarchist symbol that we all see that comes from America, right? The industrial workers of the world. Come from the United States, the raised fist popular salute comes from the IWW, goes to Spain, right? We have this long tradition, but yeah, I think a lot of American anarchists because it's easier to live and work cooperatively in a small group, somewhat detached. But what we have in Catalonia that we don't have here is the majority of the working class committed to anarcho syndicalism, right? So people return to work and work very effectively when they're not also volunteering, also fighting in something like Durutti column, right? These anarchist militias which we can also talk about, I think they're very interesting. And so, for instance, one example that electricity is the Hispaniola Swetha factory, right? Spain, Swiss, it's just an automobile manufacturer. It's like the GM factory within three days after the revolution. And bear in mind that most of them have been out shooting at soldiers for most of that time, right? And big thing they had to deal with was the soldiers often used churches. They would burn the churches. So like it was an extremely. A vicious urban battle. They worked. They had converted their facility to go from producing automobiles for rich people at time, right? 1936 on. Everyone had a car to producing technicals armored cars, right? And you can see them if you Google CNT technical CNM, can't you see some amazing, like a hodgepodge technicals that they welded these things on and they were able to turn those around and produce weapons for the front. Another good example. See as Castle pistols, right to Ask Castle is is a famous anarchist leader and ask Castle was killed in the first day of the revolution when they were fighting the coup, so there weren't there wasn't much weapons manufacturing in Catalonia, right? And we're very familiar with that from our work on Myanmar. And what they did was they set up a factory in Terrassa to make weapons. They made copies of Ruby pistols actually, but then they named them after us Casso. So you you can still buy them. Make sure you can Google them. You can find them. But these, they set up a weapons factory, right? And then under Anarcho syndicalist principles and the principles of sort of unions controlling this production system, unions controlling this supply chain system, which let's be honest, they do largely anyway, right? Like it's not Tim Apple who buys a circuit board for your phone, it's someone else. This is a slightly more globalized system with with Apple phones, but. The. The unions were able to set up and change their production rate, not just keep doing what they were doing, but also pivot without the need for people exercising authority over each other. This is important understanding because you ask, like, how would anarchists continue industrial production? It's like, well, have you ever had a job that had you work in a factory, on an assembly line, or in some sort of other industrial way? Have you ever been a contractor and had a boss who sucked? Would it have worked better if that boss hadn't been there? That's the basic. That's like the I like it. It's entirely possible for large groups of people to coordinate in a way that is not a capitalist system where you're all accountable to a shareholder, right? Like there's there's a number of different ways to do that, but there's a long tradition and in fact some corporations that are still around today and quite large. You can look up the Mondragon Corporation in Spain that have a lot of anarchist principles in their organizing. Not that like it's an anarchist company or whatever, but like there's significant degree, like significant amounts of anarchist theory in why that operates the way it does. And has been significantly successful. There's some other examples, and I think it's Brazil. There's a large, like steel corporation or whatnot. But yeah, like there's there's it's not. There's nothing about anarchism that means you can't have a factory producing armored cars. It just means you're not producing armored cars for the profit of the Lockheed Martin Corporation or whatever. Yeah, you're producing on the cars because you are fighting in a conflict that you hope will liberate other people. Right. And that is arguably a more important motivation than wage labour. And certainly they in some cases increased productivity. But they were able to sustain all the functions of an industrial society. And Catalonia was very industrialized, much more so than the rest of Spain. Right. And that's perhaps why anarchism was so, so important there. And and yeah, there, it doesn't require the arbitrary exercise of authority for that to happen. And like you said, there's plenty of examples of that. I think both of us really enjoyed David Graeber's book, but. This idea that we move from one phase of society to another and that necessitates a different form of political organization just isn't borne out by the historical record. And I think that Catalonia is a really good example of that. Yeah. And a further example of that is in a pretty similar time frame, you're talking an earlier but not, but maybe like less than 20 years earlier, you have Nestor Machno and Mock Novia and and in Ukraine, this kind of independent autonomous anarchist society that is extremely successful in war that the Soviet Union. Does not exist without mocno fighting the whites as as successfully as he did in stopping in advance on a on Moscow. And that's a rural that we're not industrialized. And in fact their anarchism was very much based in kind of the traditional methods of organizing rural societies in Ukraine. And you have that a lot in other like you have a lot and there are a lot of areas in which anarchism is common in rural areas and it's more of like a state socialism in industrialized areas, but you can have. You also have this deep history of industrialized anarchism, and there's, it shows that there's a capability for anarchist principles to function with infrastructure. Yeah, and if you want to look for rural anarchism, you can look in southern Spain right there. If you want to look at a small case study of the anarchists of Casas Viejas is is a great example of that, right? People can find. I'm sure it's free online. It's a PDF now. But yes, it it doesn't have to just exist in urban or rural society or between the two, right? Like when the Durutti column, uh, went S OK, the Druid column is an anarchist column. There are a number of other anarchist columns, but this one is the sort of the preeminent one, the one that was most successful because they tended not to get bogged down as much in fighting in rural environments where they were not skilled. But they were extremely skilled, much more so than the military and fighting in urban environments, right? So they were very successful. Went to Zaragoza and then fought there. While they were there, they were collectivizing the farms, right? And I'm sure some of that collectivization was forced. I don't want to be like everything was rainbows and unicorns. Yeah, but it's a war. There's no side in a war whose hands stay clean, right? Like, that's not minimizing or ignoring it. It's just stating that, like you you you have to sometimes talk about the broad strokes of what's going on with without pretending to whitewash the fact that I'm certain ugly things happen there as well. Yeah, yeah. And like, yeah, as you say, ugly things happen in war. I think if you if you want that not to happen, maybe, I don't know, you live on the Internet, but like the the route: then goes to to Madrid, right in the seat of Madrid, which was also the first conflict with international brigade. The first battle, the International Brigades 14. It was a very successful battle for the Republic. It was a battle that allowed the Republic. If we look at the two battles that allow the Republic to exist, right, it's conflict in Barcelona. The battle for Barcelona on the first days of the Civil War, and it's a battle in Madrid. Right now, Madrid is not as much of an anarchist city is a city with anarchism, but it's also more salient other socialism. So when the the Durutti column arrives, right, and takes part in the combat there, because they have been successful, because they're very good at urban warfare. And a lot of the people in the Durutti column didn't want Durruti to go, but he decided it was important to go as part of this Popular Front right to fight this, this huge push of Spain's most professional soldiers. Right? And that's where Durruti. You can read. I know somebody's working on it, unlike a graphic novel about him. Yeah. Who's that as well? Yeah. Yeah. And you should give them your money if you have some. But able path is book about Durutti is very good. And it's an amazing book because you turn over the line of notes and he's like, Oh yeah, this book has taken me a long time to write because I was involved in a resistance against Franco and spent 25 years in jail in solitary confinement. But we want to, Chad, but so you can read about Durutti there, right? And duty dies in the battle for Madrid, but it's also kind of important to look at. Spain is effective. Anarchist Spain is effective in fighting fascism. What stops it being effective, to my mind, is not. Anarchist principles, military organization. And the other thing that was that was impressive about Durutti Column is that they had embedded army loyal army officers and they listened to them and they learned from them and they said, OK, we don't. We're good at some stuff, not good other stuff. We will learn from you. Other anarchists didn't. It didn't tend to do as well. Yeah, this is a common misconception because anarchists are very much against hierarchy, which doesn't mean being against professionalism or competence, right, like it's the idea that like the hierarchy. For example, that led several million young boys to get machine gunned in World War One because the people who were in charge of them had not learned how machine guns functioned. Was was a problem. But if you've got someone who has been training their entire life as a soldier and understands very effectively how artillery functions and how machine guns function, and because they have professionalized in that it's not against anarchist principles to listen to that person in a gunfight. Yeah. Yeah. Expertise is not a. It's not. Yeah. It's there's not incompatible with liberty. Right. And so, yeah, they were very willing to listen to that. And in the same way they would be in a like, again, these people have worked in factories, right? They understand that if you don't know how to use a lathe. And you. Exert your liberty to use a lathe and your hands gonna end up in the lathe. Yeah. When I when I go to a doctor and say I'm am I, I have gotten this horrible infected wound. What do I do about it? I am not yielding to a hierarchy. I I am. I am accepting their expertise, you know? Yeah, yeah, I think sometimes people, I I think your listeners are much better informed than this generally. But people confuse anarchism with a predilection for chaos and violence, and it isn't that right. It it's just it's it's a desire to to to be more free and to not be controlled. And I have a boot on your neck. But to to wind up that thought, like the reason that Spain, that the Republican Spain starts to lose is not because there are anarchists and you will definitely see this discourse on the Internet. Many people will tell me that I'm mistaken about this. It's my ******* degree. But yeah, I would argue that it it's because the whole Western world that the quote UN quote democracy is abandoned them, right? Yeah. This is like there's there's this. We talked about this a bit in the episodes we did on it, but like there's this whole argument that I'm sure you'll get into more between like the Socialists, the Communists, you know, and the anarchists. But a huge part of it, probably most of it is that like the fascists are getting guns from other fascists and tanks and aircraft often flown by professional. Fascist pilots who are training for what's going to become World War Two, whereas Republican Spain has some old bolt action rifles that got smuggled in through France. Yeah, and some mosins that were sold by America to Russia, from Russia to Mexico and then from Mexico back to Spain, right. Like. And yes, these old mouses all well talks about that are rusted and they can't open the bolt after they fired them and they reload their ammunition and it's **** and but yeah, the and on the other side, right, like the coup doesn't work if how does the army of Africa get from Africa to Spain? It doesn't swim, right. It how did these generals get from Africa to Spain, airlifted by other fascist nations? Right, and we don't see that right. Actually, France wanted to sell planes to the Republic and the early days of the war, but Britain pretty much put the kibosh on it. And there's an interesting parallel with what you're seeing in Ukraine right now, because in Ukraine you have a Republican government. The military that has a fairly wide selection, Jake Hanrahan just posted like a vegan extremist who's fighting on the front lines of the cause. It's like, yeah, there's a whole bunch of different ideological tendencies fighting on behalf of the broadly Ukrainian side there, including some very nasty ones. But you're kind of seeing what happens when a fascist power invades a country like that to stop a Republic and Democratic powers send them the most advanced weapons on the planet, right? Which is all it would have taken to to rollback. As she's been in Spain and then pressed, you know, there were a lot of German Italian exiles fighting in Spain, right? Because the Second Republic had relatively liberal asylum policies and they knew the only way to stop fashion in Italy and Germany was to roll it back in Spain and keep going, right. I often have this and I've had this, as we've reported on Myanmar, this weird thought of, like, I'll be reading about the Spanish Civil War in my office and I'll look at my gun collection. Although if I took every, if I had, if I could go back in time with everything I have in my house, all of the ammo and guns, there are a couple of battles that might have been turned around by just. That because, well, for one thing, because modern semi-automatic arms are much more effective than bolt action rifles, but just like the level of armament that those people had was. Not there, there. There were 18th century armies better equipped for combat. Yeah. I mean, you see people with, with muzzle loaders and stuff in the Spanish Civil War, right? And and then the only place they can turn for arms is the Soviet Union, right. And they don't just get arms, they also get these generals, right, who are quote UN quote inviting. They're not. They're commanding units. There's a lot of Soviet politicking at play, right and and as much as anything. And you can read like like Peter Carroll's book on the. Braham Lincoln Brigades or something? Brigade? Battalion. Sorry, they weren't should brigade. That will give you a better idea of like exactly how this strict authoritarian Communist control really sapped the spirit out of the Republic. And you can see this in May of 1937, right? Which is what George Orwell writes about in his book right the Maydays 1937. When we see a conflict between the non Stalinist communist. They weren't Trotskyists poom right? Very often. Betrayed, his trust gets Trusky himself. Like you can see the letters that he wrote to them where he had thrown disagreements with them if you care to look. But yet we see this conflict, a shooting war right between the anarchists and the non Stalinist communist and the Stalinist communists. And what comes out of that is this idea among people on the libertarian left for its broad spectrum of libertarian leftism that we saw in Spain, that it's not really worth fighting for the Republic or for the fascists, because either way we're just going to have the boot on our neck, right? The secret. Please, I say, well, the secret police spent far, far, far more time going after anarchists in the Republican army than they did after spies. Ohh. No, really? The authoritarian left spent more of their time fighting anarchists than the fat wild. Yeah, crazy is. And it's never happened again. We learned from it. We moved on. We've become better people. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. We we're fine now. We fixed it for a lot of the people fighting for the Republic. Right. What are you fighting for? And I think that's important that, like, we remember that even when times when things are bad, right, you have to think about what things should be like. You have to try and model that in in what you're doing now. On an economic level, when you're talking about like they come in, they collectivize these farms. There's like anarchist, like the anarchists in large chunks and like in Catalonia in particular are kind of running what at the time is a fairly modern industrial economy. How does that, how does that work? Like do you have any kind of like overall state, like during the period of time where, you know, they had reasonable control and also weren't completely overwhelmed with the fighting? How did it function? Yeah, you kind of have a stage, right? You have this sort of People's Committee of anti Fascist militias, but. Not really, because things things are somewhat chaotic rates on state as we would maybe understand it now. So what we have instead is, is anarcho syndicalism, right? These unions going to other unions and organising among themselves, right? Like you know the steel workers need X from the miners, right? The the miners, then the the tube makers need extra steel workers and the gun company need X from the from the tube makers, right? And so organizing along industrial union. Levels allow things to continue, right? Allows the trains and trams to continue, allows them to continue manufacturing munitions, right. So it's it's it's anarcho syndicalism. It is a, it's a type of libertarian leftism. And then we see these collective or sort of cooperative, I should say, farm farming arrangements, right, where again people, people are farming, people are sort of joining together, they're industrial smallholdings and then delivering those, contributing those to, to the city, to the war effort and there's something. As you see in Ukraine, right, relatively special. That happens in these times of conflict where like people are, I think, more willing to. Just step aside from like, the the. And I think that's always been a that was a thing for the Spanish working class for a long time. But to step aside from the accumulation of stuff, right, from the accumulation of individual goods and wealth and to say, like, yeah, well, let's all get stuck in together. And I think that helped to allow that to happen, helped to allow it to continue. But yeah, these organizations between unions and collectives worked, right? They functioned. You can't argue that they didn't work. The Republican army didn't starve in a week or or ran out of fuel and things, right. These, these. Dennis Collins were able to to travel from Barcelona to Zaragoza and from there I gotta back to Madrid. Like that doesn't happen if you're incapable of organising, right? So yeah, in the factories these people had already been organizing together, right? They they were on strike often, right? They knew how to. They had an existing system for organizing things because they already organized to pay strike funds. They already organized to look after other other parts of the CNT when they were out, right? They organize to have policy statements on various things. So they had these. Existing means to organize. They just didn't have authorities that told people what to do. They knew how to work together to decide what to do. Yeah, I had this beautiful moment during the 2020 uprisings where I was in a city. And I was hanging out with members of a medical collective and the building that they were in, there was a couple of 1000 square feet of they were producing by assembly line kimwipes for clearing Mace out of your eyes. They were producing like ifax medical kits. They had racks of body armor that had been donated or purchased with donated funds. And it was all it was a substantial amount of of equipment that was being and and it and respirators and stuff that was being. Organized, assembled, put together, distributed, put in people's hands, put in the hands of people who are going out and utilizing it on a regular basis. And it was being done like within the principles of kind of like like a number of things can be organized that way. It's it is, it is handling the collection, the distribution of of of equipment and the collection and disbursement of funds. Like for potentially like thousands and thousands of people, that's perfectly doable. Under anarchist principles. And anarchists have done that kind of thing a number of times in the world. Yeah. Like, if you look at the example of the the soup kitchens, right, the pretorian diners or restaurants they called them. Right. So in in Barcelona and Madrid, they took over the Ritz. Right. And and sourced food from rural anarchists to to feed people rather than saying, like, oh, you know, you have to buy food, you have to buy food, you have to buy food. You come here and anyone can eat if you're hungry. Right. And yeah, you see people doing that. Look at the unit that we we spoke about. Am I right there? The Karenni Generation C Army, they those guys they they didn't have a like you know no one was wearing rank, right. No one was a general or captain or or a Sergeant, right. They they talked and and to our point before about expertise, some people we found out our the the person we were talking to Zaha who was who was killed was seen as a commander by people because of what they wrote about him after he died. But he never talked about himself that way. No in fact he told us right that if some people knew more. They've been in the fight for longer. They knew the terrain and we listened to them and they have a bit more weight in that conversation. But we all just decide together what we what we want to do and that works, right. Like, those guys were very well respected right among the the anti coup forces in Myanmar because of their willingness to fight in their effectiveness. And those guys have a good battlefield record against the government troops. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, it wasn't just, again, like it's not just five guys fighting, right? It's also they were. Table and and in Myanmar, we still see this with, like, the underground and they called the Development Committee or something. The people who are they were the people who fought it, did the shield walls and that kind of thing. And people will be familiar with the George Floyd Uprising. For them. They went underground and they're developing ways to make weapons now, right. So they're the people you'll see making 3D printed guns. So the people you'll see making improvised explosive devices, fertilizer bombs, working out how to make handmade 22 rifles we've seen, right, like, and again, they don't, they don't need someone in charge. For that right and and in times of difficulty we we revert to taking care of one another and getting things done we we don't contrary to I think what what we're led to believe sort of revert to we don't need like a strong leader, dear leader. We are capable of looking after one another outside of authority in the state. Yeah. And it also stands the point that, like accepting the authority of someone with expertise in certain situations, like the fundamental way in which effective militaries organized tends to involve the existence of an NCO corps, right. You every military that is good at fighting has an NCO core part of why Russia has acquitted itself so unbelievably poorly in the fighting in Ukraine is that that that does not functionally exist in the Russian military. It is, absolutely. And the basic idea of an NCO corps is that with among fighting units, there should be dudes. Whose job? And I say dudes in the non gendered sense, there should be people whose job is to make the functioning of that fighting unit be their whole life. And they stay at that job for a long time. They don't just like move up and ****. They're just, they're there to keep that unit functioning. And from the perspective of like someone who is an anarchist, I mean, I as an anarchist who's been shot at a number of times when I'm hanging out and there's like some grizzled *** ******* veteran in the unit I'm embedded with, I'm going to do whatever that ****** says. Right, absolutely. Because you're crazy not to cause that's just good sense. It's the same thing as like if you're in deep Bush or whatever with somebody who knows wilderness survival and they tell you don't eat that plant or they tell you, you know, this is a bad place to camp for this reason or whatever. You listen to them like that's again. And you know, factories function the same way, having been on building sites. They function the same way. Somebody tells you don't do that. It's a bad idea and they clearly have been doing it more than you. You listen to them. That's not accepting that you have a boss that's accepting. That you have people who are more experienced and competent in certain things. Yeah. And if you look at what ineffective army sometimes have, it's, it's it's the, it's in the office of core, right. It's people who are in charge of maybe ought not to be, but it's because of their status or their wealth or something else, right. And you see like very effective fighting in the anarchist units, right, with men and women and actually people who would were non binary as well, like or people who would call non binary didn't call themselves out then, but we. See that? Because they were willing to elect officers, right. But then listen to them. And it wasn't, it was listened to. Not a Bay. Right. But. But that was an extremely effective way of doing things. Yeah. I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine who was a marine and saw some very heavy combat in Iraq years ago about, like, the way in which certain anarchist units had worked overtime. And they talked about the fact that they elected their leaders. And he was like, well, we didn't do that, obviously, but there were people you knew you shouldn't listen to and people you did. And you understood who you wanted calling the shots when bullets. Flying, right. Like, regardless of what the actual hierarchy was, it's just like, you know, in the US military, you have a platoon leader who was an officer who's been to college, and you have a platoon Sergeant, and they do somewhat different things. But every reasonable person who has interfaced with those units will agree that, like any good platoon leader, even though they're an officer and a higher rank, it's going to listen to whatever the ******* platoon Sergeant says. They've been doing that job a long yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't. Right? And and that arrogance. Find you out if you're in difficult situation pretty quickly. So yeah, I think it's important to look to look at those anarchists militaries, right? And there are lots and lots of accounts of the of the anarchists and the Spanish Civil War. Julianne Casanova's book is is one of my favourites if people want to read 1. Murray Bookchin of course has written the Spanish anarchists as well. So there there are a lot of books you can read about and some of them micro case studies are really fun, right, if you want to look at like what is it like to live on an anarchist farm in 1936? In in rural Catalonia, Yale or something like that, like and I would encourage people to read them like with an open mind and understand like the world was different then than it is today but to to look at those historical examples and realize that like. What people were doing then was fundamentally the same, right? They were trying to take care of each other and make the world better for their children. And they they didn't want the boot on their neck, and they were all prepared to work together to do that. And and that was an extremely functional way. And what didn't work for them was being controlled by people from the Soviet Union who maybe didn't understand the struggle because they often felt it wasn't worth fighting anymore. And that's true for Communists too, actually, right? Like if you look at the American Communists who went and fought, and they were overwhelmingly communists. Went and fought for the for the International Brigade. The International Brigades were not the Republic's army per se. They were common turns army. And if there is one group of people who was hated more than anyone else, it was commissars, right? These people who were sort of there to enforce this very strict interpretation of what they saw as Marxist Leninism. So even those people right who were communists might have had a more slightly more libertarian understanding, didn't really take that well to being bossed around and lost a lot of their wills. What they were fighting for because of that, right. And Cecil Albies book is another really good book about that, if you want to read that. Well, I think that's going to bring us to an end here. Uh, James, you have a book about the Spanish Civil War that you should probably plug here? Yeah, yeah. It's called the Popular Front in the 1936 Barcelona Olympics. It's about the the anti for Olympics that were held as an alternative to the Barcelona Olympics. Explains how the Popular Front used sport to build 90 fascist identity in Catalonia and it used sport to bring together anti fascists from around the world. The popular lympics actually happened on the 19th of July, which is the same day the Civil War. Guided so they never they never occurred. But many of the people who went to take part in the Olympics decided to stay and fight. And so that's what my books about it it's quite expensive and it can, I understand. People can't afford it. That's fine. I keep saying I'm working on another book, but I'm I'm not working very hard or very fast. Yeah, yeah, look it up and someone probably bootlegged. Actually, the ebook is often free at universities and other libraries. So you just go to your library and ask them to get it, and where else can people find you on the Internet? James Stout on Twitter, same thing on Patreon. Those are my 2 main things. You can find my writing on Muck Rack. Just Google my name. Yeah, and again, help us. Daniel, please bleep that out for the sake of James immigration cases and yeah, yeah, that's good. That's that's an episode. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter. Bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 188853230. 500 for my small bookstore to thrive, I can't just sell books. So I created a radio ad@iheartadbuilder.com to tell everyone about our author events, our story, hours for kids, and our amazing lattes. Now we're busier than ever. I call that a success story. A custom radio ad from iheart AD builder is the fast, affordable way to drive customers to your business. But the power of radio to work for you get started now at iheart adbuilder.com. Piece of the planet I go by the name of Charlemagne the God. And this summer I'm bringing my show back to Comedy Central with a new title and a new podcast. It's called hell of a week. But don't worry, every Friday I'll be keeping that same, calling out the BS energy. So if the news is terrorizing your timeline and causing your anxiety to rise high in gas prices, don't worry, we got you. You could chase down all the crazy stories of the week with some laughs and thought provoking conversation that the Supreme Court want to abort the Constitution. We'll talk about it this Congress. Gonna replace the bald eagle with an AR15. We'll talk about it with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the OJ trial for white people. We'll talk about it and I'm bringing on some of the biggest names in comedy, politics and entertainment to talk about it with me. Plus, catch all the extended interviews, bonus scenes, and filthy language that has to get bleeped out for TV because I hear that Doctor Fauci has a bit of a potty mouth. So be sure to listen to hell of a week with charlamagne the God on the iHeartRadio app, the Black Effect podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Despite it being past midnight, you can still see through the dense forest. The moonlit sky combined with the urban light pollution make traversing the messy woods easier than you thought. You're relieved that you don't have to use your headlamp, which could have drawn unwanted attention. The company of a few of your queer friends makes the walk through the confusing woods less intimidating. Dressed in Gray and camo, you make your way through overgrown trails and hop over a small Creek. Save for the occasional train, all you can hear is the croaking of frogs and chirping of cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers. The night air you breathe through your mask is noticeably cleaner than the air from downtown that you spent months riding in during 2020, not even counting the tear gas in the air. As you and your pals slowly trek through the forest, your feet squish into the grassy, wet ground. You avoid the areas caked in clay and stick to the cover of trees, brush and the soft wetland. After a short walk and with only a few wrong turns, you reach an artificial break in the embrace of the forest. You look at your masked up friends and for a brief moment during the moonlit night, you can't quite tell who's who, which is a good thing, you suppose. Everyone exchanges glances, but no one says anything. Everyone already knows what to do. As you approach the barren mound of dirt, you get angry, a jarring crack in the beauty and mysterious allure of the forest. You're no longer in the woods. You're at the sight of destruction, a clear cut that seeks to expand its radius. Without the tree coverage, you can see the harsh blue light of LED's in the distance. There, among the mounds of dirt and fallen trees, are several unguarded machines of destruction. With no cell phones insight, you and your friends get to live in the moment. Your gender becomes the sound of shattering glass in the cold night. Hammers, meat windows and serrated knives cut the inner tubing of bulldozers and excavators. The undoing of the mechanical monsters that have violated the forest has begun. No tool of the evil doers goes unharmed. Rattling cans of spray paint leave antagonistic and proclamation messages with rebellious hiss for those who intend to continue destroying the forest, defend the forest, no cop city, no Hollywood dystopia. In little time, the light pollution, moonlight, and distant LED's are accompanied by a bright orange blaze emanating from the machines lighting up the area around the sad mound of dirt. A splash of gasoline acts as the extension of the blood that fuels the burning fire in your hearts that became a light with the rage felt at the sight of the decimated woods. By the time the fire department took notice, you've already disappeared into the night, like a spectre fading, like the curling black smoke that drifted into the midnight sky. As you exit the forest, you go about as if what happened tonight never did. You never tell a soul. You never talk about it with your masked up queer friends, since they were never there either. Details fade in your memory like a dream, but deep down you still remember the feeling, the peak moment of true freedom when the fire engulfed the machines. It was upon broken, unusable machines that the fires were extinguished, laying incinerated. The excavators and bulldozers were rendered immobile, worthless piles of trash. Fires are only temporary and can be undone, but the connection between those who live in a forest, who breathe its air and who drink its water filtered through its wetlands is not so easily broken. Any further attempts at destroying the forest will be met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us, and we'll be here long after you and your friends, among many other anonymous strangers. We'll see to that. Welcome to Japan here, a podcast about things falling apart and how we can put them back together. And today we'll be spending that entire spectrum. I'm Garrison Davis, and the story I just read isn't merely a fictional one. It was inspired by over a year's worth of communiques and report backs coming out of the defend the force movement in Atlanta, GA. So excuse the pretentious poetry of anarchist Asian speak. In early 2021, it was revealed to the public that mainly 4 entities, namely the city of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, de Kalb County and Blackhall Studios had dual plans to devastate 2 complementary sections of the South Atlanta Forest. The City of Atlanta and Police Foundation plans are to turn the area of the forest known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm into the largest police training facility in the country, complete with a mock city helipad and bomb range. Meanwhile, Entrenchment Creek of a public forest land will be traded by de Kalb County to Blackhall movie Studios to clear cut the land on which they plan to build America's largest soundstage. This project lies at a horrific intersection of police militarization, gentrification, copaganda and exasperating the local effects of worsening climate change by clear cutting hundreds of acres of forest. In the last year, activists, ghosts like saboteurs, and open source researchers have voltrons together into an anonymous and diverse movement that's brought the plans to destroy the forest out of the shadows of secretive backdoor corporate deals and into the public spotlight. Forming the defend the Atlanta Forest movement that's consistently been able to get ahead of police and media by breaking news about the forest destruction plans and setting the terms of engagement and what's deemed as acceptable direct action. All well. Being able to foster a relationship with the woods that they are defending. I've been really interested in this project since I heard about it last summer, along with the intersection of police militarization and climate change. On the flip side, there's this unique intersection of urban city protest and classic forest ecodefense. The mix of tactics have produced a movement unlike anything really seen before here in the states. Not to get ahead of myself, but ever since last fall when the Atlanta City Council approved the plan to build the largest police training facility in the country, dubbed a cop city by activists due to the. Plans to build a mini version of Atlanta within the facility to practice urban combat, but I I figured that I would eventually find myself inside the forest. So this last April, when an opportunity presented itself to travel to Atlanta, stay in the woods, and talk with some forced defenders, I could not pass it up. I packed a tent, sleeping bag and some microphones and made my way to Georgia. The first thing I noticed upon arriving in Atlanta is that when they say Atlanta is a city in a forest, they really do mean it. The amount of continuous tree coverage throughout the city was astonishing, and that's coming from someone who lives in Portland, OR. As it turns out, the city of Atlanta actually has the highest amount of tree canopy of any city in the United States. On top of the citywide tree coverage, there is the South River Forest, which makes up the largest continuous section of woods and serves as Atlanta's first line of defense in the face of rapidly accelerating climate change. The forest in southeast Atlanta is said to function as the lungs of the city. The canopy offers shade and traps carbon, with some of the more heavily forested areas acting as wetlands that filter rainwater and prevent flooding by collecting runoff. It's Marsh is one of the last breeding grounds for a lot of amphibians in the region, as well as an important migration site for wading birds and services to home to a lot of local wildlife. Nearly 500 acres of this forest is under threat by the Atlanta Police Foundation and Black Hall Studios. If plans succeed to develop this precious strip of forest into the massive police compound and adjacent movie soundstage, the entire metropolitan area will face much harsher effects of climate change, including worsening floods, higher temperatures and less clean tree filtered air. Not to mention the increased police militarization and gentrification. Speaking of, the second thing I noticed once I arrived in Atlanta is how much gentrification is currently underway. The amount of hideous 501 apartments that are being built was impossible to overlook. And as we'll see, the way police feed off gentrification, which feeds off the corporate and moviemaking sides of Atlanta, is not merely a coincidence. Last fall, I interviewed Jamal from the Atlanta chapter of the Community Movement Builders, a black lid collective of community residents and activists serving poor, working class black communities. They focus on responding to encroaching gentrification, displacement, and over policing. Here's what Jamal had to say on the intersection of issues orbiting around the cops city and defend the Forest project, just to piggyback off of that. I think it's extremely important for us to recognize the connections between all of these things, right? There's this, like, cop city is a perfect blend of environmental justice issues, just flat out racism, police brutality, and also gentrification, right? It's not a it's not a mistake that they're building this cop city right at this moment when? Atlanta is also becoming the first for the first time and I don't know how many decades non no longer majority Black City because neighborhoods like Pittsburgh or we're located out of and all across SW and West Atlanta have becoming more like the black people been being displaced from the from our communities right. So a perfect example is that with my organization community movement builders we purchased we've been doing work in the Pittsburgh neighborhood for a while, but we purchased a a Community house in the neighborhood about six years ago. Right at that point we purchased the House for $50,000, right? Pittsburgh has been historically a poor working class community. It was it was founded as a black community, which is different from a lot of other of other neighbors in the land. Was founded as a black community from freed Africans who were trying to escape some of the more rural areas of the South and found work in Haven in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta. And it's been a poor and working class black community ever since. But now. Because of the gentrification that's been going on, how a house just sold maybe about a month and 1/2 ago for $750,000. So we purchased house at $50,000. Six years ago, a house just sold just a few blocks away from that house for $750,000. Now it's not like every house is selling for that amount, but that just shows you the rate of gentrification that's happening. And then, and we know that cops are in this necessary part of being able to defer, to displace people from gentrifying communities. They play an integral role. With in gentrification. Yeah. I'm just wondering does any of you have any like even like anecdotal experience with like basically Marvel and tons of other industries like invading Atlanta. How is that like affected specifically? You already talked about how how you know increased the increase in the film industry and other things has, you know, has made more justification. But like how is that even affected just like like other types of stuff including like policing like has has this type of like growth affected people or people you know in, in other ways? Yeah, absolutely. So I think a lot of this kind of got, I won't say it got started, but a lot of it went even, you know, escalated when Tyler Perry Studio opened up in East Point and a lot of people, you know, were praising it's like, oh, look at this, you know, it's a black man that was able to move down and be able to start this thing within Hollywood. But no, it's all that is one of the things that also spurred the gentrification in East Point, which is you might not be familiar with Atlanta. East Point is like literally right next to Atlanta. So. It's a lot of it's it's it's really close proximity. And so that also spurs over to the gentrification here in the city as well. Property values have gone up since that point even more even my tax bill has gone up $1000 a year per a year for the past like three years, right. So it's yeah it's it's definitely we definitely see the effects and and you know and just talking to you know we do we do do a lot of work around gentrification. And I think this is in tandem with, you know, because we have COVID-19 out here now with the eviction moratorium which has now been, you know, denied by the Supreme Court. But even when there wasn't a vision moratorium, there were still people that were getting evicted from their homes. And I think all of this in tandem when Atlanta specifically has already been going through gentrification crisis and with COVID-19 where people have been losing jobs left and right or not been able to go to their jobs that they've had and look. And having a salaries cut, people have been hurting and the response from the city is not too been that has not been to provide more resources to people, it's been to fund. Cop city to be able to get more police out who are the ones that execute that, the actual infections themselves and I think it all it it all, it all is connected in that in that type of way. I arrived in Atlanta a few days before the Muskogee Summit, a weekend event where the original indigenous people from the area of the South River or for the native name of the Zetland the Mulani Forest, traveled back to their ancestral homeland to discuss indigenous environmental philosophy, what land back, and remediation means, and theory and practice. Several indigenous authors were present and lead workshops, including indigenous feminist scholar and community planner Laura Harjo from the University of Oklahoma, author of Spiral to the Stars Muskogee. Tools of Futurity and Doctor Daniel Wildcat of the Haskell Indian Nations University, who wrote the book Red Alert, Saving the planet with Indigenous knowledge. In the less academic portions, there were forest walks, community meals, and singing of old Muskogee songs, including ones that were performed 2 centuries ago during the Trail of Tears. Muscogee Creek attendees also gathered around a sacred fire to perform a stomp dance, recreating rhythms heard and sensed in the forest long ago to rekindle their relationship with the Earth and connect back to the ancestral presences. This was the 2nd concessional migration the Muskogee Creek tribal members have done since being forcibly removed 2 centuries ago and displaced to Oklahoma. The first one took place just this last November, and both times the particular section of land they gathered on Entrenchment Creek Park is one of the areas under threat of being ecologically destroyed and clear cut over the course of a few days. During my weeklong stay, I sat down in the woods to record with two groups of forest defenders, one group sitting around a campfire at night. Next to our high security child prison and the other group during the Sunny, Bird Chirping day outside the Black Hole Studios movie plot. So if you hear campfires or bird sounds in the background, just embrace our forest punk aesthetic up front. I think it's really important to first talk about the history of the land that is under threat because on top of issues regarding gentrification and the plans of this police training facility as a response to the George Floyd Uprising and the false manufactured crime wave media. Narrative intended to re justify American policing in the wake of the uprising that the fact that the Atlanta Police Foundation chose this plot of land in particular is particularly gross. The history of this small section of land in the South River watershed is deeply scarred and desperately needs time to heal. There are centuries of oppression and state violence tied to this particular spot of land, and now we're seeing that trying to be continued with this cop city plan. Local tribes were expelled from millions of acres in the southwest. Region of what is now known as the United States during the early decades of the 1800s. Forced removal and displacement of the Muscogee Creek people began in the region in 1821 through a series of treaties, which then eventually led to a quote melee of removal. More on that from one of the forced defenders I spoke to, and I'll note we'll be using a mix of voice distortion and voice actors combined with other audio distortion to help protect the identities of the force defenders that I spoke to against possible state repression. So enjoy our our our cool voice, distorted audio. Yeah, I think it's important to let the land heal, because a lot of our comrades. Muskogee comrades an extended relatives are identified as Muskogee that were pushed off as lands in the early 1800s. They 11 did not go quietly in the night. I think that's important to remember because I feel like a lot of people are just like the Trail of Tears or like they were pushed out but they're they fought against being pushed out and then when a lot of them are pushed out or killed off then it was used to incarcerate and house mostly black people. So we're taking it back because most of the. People that I have seen involved, it is a diverse group of people. It's not just like white anarchists in the woods. That is a misconception. There's all kinds of folks, which really I think is interesting and makes the struggle unique and important. But there is also a lot of white, white anarchists that are using their privilege to help take the land back for our comrades that want to see it back and it feels things feel like they're in a good way and there's good relations that are existing between like the anarchist and indigenous alliance down here. I feel like obviously no one person speaks or represents any one group, but the alliances that we do have are very informed of the variety of activities that have happened down here, including the persons of machinery, and we were. Positively told you quote UN quote, keep on going so that feels. Empowering and it feels beautiful. And it feels important to know that. Some of the cameras that happens historical ties to this area. It's such a dark history and they're still here. There's something that they're mentioning and they're excited. The people that were close to, obviously we were close to all of them. They're excited. There are people are choosing to use their privilege to help make sure these facilities don't get built. Continuing with the scarred history of this land, shortly after the lands at the South River Forest were stolen from Muskogee Creek people plots were distributed to White. Settlers in the fourth Georgia land lottery of 1821, which made available land lots of 202.5 acres. Many of these white settlers established slave plantations on which cotton and other crops were produced through slave labor. Through archival records, we know of at least 12 plantations that were on this land that existed from the 1840s up until 1865. And then in the early 1900s, the very same land started being used as a prison farm, now known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. The Old Atlanta prison farm was originally bought in 1917 to incarcerate prisoners of war, but this plan was abandoned within two years and the land was converted into a prison farm where inmates, including moonshiners, public drinkers and just loiterers and really anybody we're sent to and forced to perform unpaid agricultural labor this shift. From plantations to prison farm marks the rebranding of slavery into for profit prison labor. This labor included washing cows and arsenic laden water which led to the early deaths of countless prisoners. The facility ran up until 1998 in which it was shut down and then two child prison facilities were put on the adjacent land and the Atlanta Police Department already currently uses sections of this hallowed ground as a firing range, tear gas canisters and bullet casings. We found throughout the forest. For more on that, here is some other parts of my sit down with the force defenders and then I guess like. Fast forwarding a little bit from this land where indigenous people lived to the prison farm and then how this has like a long and carceral history and history of being tied to policing with the child prison that's still here, the prison farm, and then now trying to build this militarized training facility. Just like continuing on this legacy of state violence. Which is like just another massive aspect in terms of like they're trying to take this very, like land that needs to heal from the centuries of violence and just tear it all down and build more of that. I know there's like. Does the firing range that we've been hearing shots from or there's it's like just this never ending thing, it just like they just keep just keeps happening. It's a pretty weird, surreal experience. Makes me feel like we're all like an endangered species living in like the last part of the forest and ******* South Atlanta. I remember when I was explaining it to one of my relatives, they're like I was reading the Internet about the family Atlanta Forest and not sure quite what's all going on, but sounds like you're living in hell. You're between two different child. 1020 High security when the worst security a large massive power line kit for an old prison environment, two sides of the road, at least three different police firing ranges, and always water treatment plant that double s as a firing range and super training facility for a police. Another interesting facet is this particular piece of land where they're trying to build. The top city is like a really important turning point in the history of slavery in the US and like, this is Blair. A lot of things went from like shadow slavery and transitioned into what we now have as prison slavery. And. As we're sitting here on what was literally a prison farm. Even people retired detention for here and used for unpaid labor, even people who had not been convicted of any crime. And so it's kind of like. It's like a like very like visible, like stain on the like history of. Of like, what is racist policing? But it's like harder to cover up and harder to like pink wash and so like. Even has there is like a place where children are locked in cages over if not 300 yards from me. So to is this the place where people were brought for being used as slaves and like? Died and were buried in unmarked graves. Yeah, today I'll talk a little bit more about that. This was the transition. This is like the intermediary intermediate transition between child slavery and Marion Bay prison slavery. And it was hurt, like especially horrific. Like there is 2 lakes on the property that were at one point said to be filled with arsenic where. Beyond. States where. Not only watching battle with our selection, remove them like bugs, but also in those. In those lakes and I'm like suffering horrible diseases and like dying from this. The reason we're present by actually got closed down was because of the amount of people going in and out of. Like the reason why this city pushed to close it down was because of the amount of people being sent to the hospital week after week and day after day. Like the fish. Like actually overloading the medical system in the area. That's a publicly recorded information they closed down, like the 1980s or 1990s. And right during the Civil war, escaped prisoners from here would be. Sorry, escaped slaves away from here would be. Like going across battle lines and feeding information to the Union side in order to like serve their own forms of liberation. I mean, we like this land also exists right next to a major like major Rd that serves as a carceral center. It has both like the metro. Metro reentry facility at the Metro Youth Detention Centre and make a couple of other buildings. Umm. And like, it's not just like. The 80 rounds of a planned to clear cut here. It's also the like 300 that they plan to continue with the carceral legacy of like terror and horror. From going from like chattel slavery and indigenous displacement to. The information intermediary. Horror that the prison farm was to this new legacy of like cover up of it all and. Then. And it. Yeah, yeah, they can. The continuation of. This land being used by the state by police by. All these like oppressive groups to further their causes of really interesting aspect of this and for going to prison farm and then police trying to now turn it into a militarized police training facility. Yeah, yeah. So first, I think, you know, this is Scotty land and it's during the Muscovy summer. It's cool. You know, Muscovy people have been displaced for the most part and they're trying to participate in this migration back until they're on the land right now. It's been really special to have them here and to be able to express solidarity and like work together with them has been really amazing and learned a lot. It's yeah, it's cool to understand that. And you know what you're saying that interaction of like cellular cloning wasn't displacing people like early slavery. Prison slavery and this, this specific land has always been a place that I feel like has been almost like the vanguard of how like policing has been, and like such a settler colonialism. Has experimented with how to reproduce itself and sustainable ways with like, just in general, like domestication of humans and the domestication of animals. And that's like what a PD is trying to do on this land. And it's a direct reaction to the George Floyd Uprising, which caused a crisis in policing, is actually a bit backward, like serious power. And so they're trying to figure out and experiment with ways of reproducing policing for the future. In the exact same way that when slavery took a serious owl, they said, how can we recuperate and how can we reproduce this in a way that's sustainable? And that's why we have a modern the prison system that lives on to this day. And that's why they're realizing as we're gaining and threatening it, oh, we have to do something good. And this land has always been a sight for doing that. It's they're going to keep trying. Atlanta is a heavily corporate city. It's been dubbed the Silicon Valley of the South by people who surely must be insufferable to be around. But it is true that Atlanta and Georgia's economic policies have attached a swath of corporations to either start to grow or migrate to the city. It's home to Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, UPS, Home Depot, Chick-fil-A and multiple media conglomerates, as well as having headquarters for like Google and other tech companies as well. The city serves as a massive transportation hub. In fact, Atlanta. The city started off as a train hub and now it boasts the world's busiest airport. Recent tax credits for the film industry have made Atlanta and Georgia the new Hot Place to shoot high budget Hollywood movies. There's a whole effort to make the city effectively the new Hollywood, but like all economic growth, this comes with some heavy consequences, most often affecting those at the bottom. Elena is also the most surveilled city in the United States and the city with the most wealth inequality. All the corporations and film industries stuff moving to Atlanta has indeed created jobs, but many of those jobs go to workers from out of state. On average, less than 1/3 of new film industry jobs have gone to people who were already living in Atlanta. The result of this out of state economic migration boosts cost of housing, cost of living, and pushes lower and middle class residents of Atlanta out of their neighborhoods, disproportionately pushing out to black people. And this is all while the increasing corporatization and gentrification. Is actually pitched as quote UN quote providing opportunities to the city's black population. Which is certainly something because the state of Georgia has the 4th largest incarceration rate in the entire world. If you put a U.S. states on the same level as like every single other country, the other top three states or countries with the highest incarceration rates are Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma. So yeah, but Georgia's number 4, those in Atlanta's top income bracket make nearly 20 times. Those who are at the bottom. And if you map the wealth disparity onto the layout of the city, it's a one to one match for the city's old segregation lines. The entire city runs on these like Reaganite neoliberal policies, but under this mask of woke identity politics and who enforces that wealth inequality and gentrification? That's right, police. Which leads us to the origin of this plan for so-called COP city. I'm going to quote a crime think article that came out. Last month it called the city in the Forest, reinventing resistance for an age of climate crisis and police militarization, which I recommend you guys read. I'll have it in the have it in the source notes. But yeah, here's the quote from crime thing quote. The government of Atlanta has developed a few tentative solutions to the dilemmas they face to follow through on their commitments to their backers. City politicians need to continue sacrificing public assets on the altar of the economy in order to attract more major investors to the region, especially the film industry. And technology companies to maintain control in a period of rapid displacement and rising cost of living. With chronic tension between the conservative state government and the Liberal City administration, they need to funnel more resources towards law enforcement throughout the region. Finally, to appease the increasingly rebellious lower classes, they need to frame this process of restructuring and repression in the language of black empowerment, social justice, and progressivism. The bureaucrats are not in a good position to handle this. Decades of tax cuts and deregulation have created infrastructural failures and breakdowns of all kinds. Among other concerns, Atlanta lost the bid for the second Amazon headquarters because the public transit, one of the least funded in the United States, was not even operable when the corporate scouts came to visit. At the same time, it's precisely the low taxes and absence of regulation that attract capital to the state of Georgia. So cultivating a Social Democratic governing strategy may now be impossible without creating a flight of wealth to other parts of the country. It seems that the current plan is to give over as many public contracts and resources to private developers as possible, to allow them to incur the costs of social disintegration and anger, and to use police to control the blowback and to use images of Martin Luther King Junior to preempt any meaningful resistance. Thus, the plan to transform a wild space into a police training compound is dubbed the Institute for Social Justice. That's right, the the the plan to make the country's biggest militarized police training facility. They're planning to call it the Institute for Social Justice, ignore the bomb range and urban combat Mock city section. Anyway, here is Jamal again from the community movement builders. I think one thing that's also really significant is that. So. My City Council person for his District 12, Joyce Shepherd. District 12 is where Pittsburgh live is where Summerhill is, where several of poor and black working class neighborhoods of Atlanta are located. They're also the areas where they're the most gentrifying areas of the city as well, and it's and and and City Council District 12, Joyce Shepherd. She is the person who brought this proposal. Forward, right. She is over the quote UN quote public safety. You know they are keeping it safe quote UN quote public safety you know Commission and she brought this forward and she has been since she's been in office she has been a. Even, uh, she's been a champion of gentrification, right. She's been a champion of over policing as well and I think it's it's it's it's a tie between even what our City Council are gonna representation has in their interests of being able of of gentrifying the city because that gives them more tax dollars. It gives them a way to be able to say that they are decreasing their crime rates etcetera and all those all these different types of things when it's really just displacing poor folks. And so I think that's an important about talking about how this kind of. Was established. That's an important topic to be able to address. Is that even? And she's a black woman, right? So even, you know, even how, like when people when when people might you think they might be representing your interests, when they get to be in these positions, we have to recognize that they are not necessarily for the people. In the aftermath of the George Floyd Uprising against police violence, the city responded by striking down any police reform measures and restricting opportunities for public input while increasing the police budget. And upping citizens surveillance on a national level. A media manufactured crime wave narrative has been used to re justify American policing in the wake of the 2020 uprising. And the city of Atlanta is using that narrative while wrapping their increased militarization plans in a nice woke social justice package, IE a militarized police training compound being dubbed the Institute for Social Justice. Heading up this effort is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a nonprofit police advocacy organization that claims to have, quote United, the business and philanthropic community with the Atlanta Police Department. It's uh. It's backed by an array of Atlanta area corporate donors, including Delta Airlines, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, which owns the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which is like the city's biggest newspaper, and they were formally, formally backed by Coca-Cola. They Coca-Cola dropped out this last November. A leaked promo video for the Institute for Social Justice details some of the features of the Atlanta Police Foundation's quote, world class trading campus, with an estimated cost of $90 million. The space will provide a place for recruiting, training, mid career education and practice with new technology and equipment for police and fire department personnel. The renderings show the campus will house a quote mock city for real world training, a canine training center and 40 horse stalls for police horses. 12 acres of forest land are slated to be converted into an emergency vehicle operations course. And the whole compound will be located across 380 acres of the old Atlanta prison farm, which is a city owned but technically outside of city limits, located just east of the city in unincorporated DeKalb County. The police Foundation has proposed funding the training center through a public private partnership, which will leave taxpayers to pay an estimated $30 million for this out of city police training facility one, which is 1/3 of the early estimated cost. According to the Land use ordinance, the property will be leased to the police foundation by the city for $10 a year. For 50 years, it's almost 400 acres of forest land. For $10 a year. The ground lease will quote provide that the city will be able to have input or approval on the stages of construction along with the development of the property and will allow waiving of certain code requirements. Such a facility would be three times the size of the New York Police Department's training facility and four times the size of the LAPD. And it's worth noting that the NYPD and LAPD are the two largest police departments in the country, while Atlanta is the only the 19th largest. Yet they'll have a facility that's like three times the size of New York's, according to the mayor of Atlanta during the time of the facilities announcement. The massive training complex would, quote raise morale. When officers and hopefully bring more recruits to the department and importantly the the whole project was initially supposed to be totally under wraps approved through backdoor deal making the social justice something for social justice I believe is what it's called and in the promo video specifically which was not like really even a public release and this was like very much designed to be under the table pushed to as fast as possible the public. There's some really supposed to know about it. The videos that existed were only meant to be known by the sponsors, board members, founders of the Atlanta Police Foundation. Error. Like the lamp please Foundation unlike most like police unions as a foundation that get that is made to funnel corporate money into the hands of police. The cops City side of things is just one part of the defend the forest project. The other big aspect of this is pushing back on the movie studio Blackhall from being able to clear cut more force to expand their sound stage. Projects shot on their current lot include Godzilla, King of Monsters, Venom, Dear Evan Hansen. HBO's Lovecraft Country and Amazon primes the Tomorrow War on the east side of the forested land. The part that's referred to as Entrenchment Creek Park was bought by Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank in the early 2000s with a plan to combine that section of land with 300 acres of the prison farm to create a 500 acre park, a project that never came to fruition. And now the park is currently under control of de Kalb County. On top of the heat, insulation and air filtering that the tree canopy provides, Entrenchment Creek plays a crucial role in maintaining these. South River watershed being a partial wetland and marsh that mitigates flooding in South Atlanta. According that Crimethink article, again quote, the plundering of public assets for the benefit of a movie company and real estate mogul is described as an opportunity to create, quote, good jobs for local Atlantans, not as a criminal expropriation of infrastructure. The clear cut that Blackwell Studios plan to trade in exchange for a section of forest is to be renamed Michelle Obama Park, UN quote. So yeah, that also clearly demonstrates the type of gentrification. Wrapped in this nice woke package by. Doing this really sketchy land swap and then building a park on it and calling it Michelle Obama Park. Cool stuff guys. Blackhall Studios is currently 150 acre complex about 10 minutes South of downtown and they seek to add over half a million square feet of soundstage. 200,000 square feet of offices, 420,000 square feet for warehousing, and 20,000 square feet of catering space, according to a filing made through the states development of Regional Impact program. The DRI S are filed when the project size is large enough that it's likely to impact the infrastructure of neighboring communities. The De Kalb County Board of Commissioners in October 2020 voted to approve the land swap deal with Blackwell Studios as a part of the planned expansion the county. Would give approximately 40 acres, mostly wooded land around the South River Forest and then return back to studios. Would give the county around 50 acres of nearby land as well. The project has faced some legal and construction issues ever since then, and we'll discuss the details of those shortly. Also worth noting that Black Hall Studios was sold to a private equity firm in LA just last year and this last February announced that they purchased another 1500 acres in Newton County, Georgia, which is about 40 miles east of downtown Atlanta, and they plan to shoot productions there for an upcoming quote action oriented streaming service dubbed Blackhall Americana, which sounds horrible. Here's a here's a quote from a black hole CEO Ryan Millsap quote. This is the kind of space we need to fly in Blackhawk helicopters and drive Humvees at speed. We have lakes. We have swamps and rivers and forests and fields and hills and Dales. That's the nice thing about 1500 acres. Huh? Yep. So look forward to Black Hall Americana, the new hit streaming service coming out of Georgia. Destroying the forest for Black hall Americana. Oh boy. But yeah, if if if if this project succeeds, it would cement Atlanta as the new Hollywood along with like Tyler Perry Studios and all of the other movie studios moving to Atlanta. And it would continue the skyrocketing cost of living in Atlanta and accelerate gentrification at a even more horrifying rate. So actually the black hole side that's in is like being defended as well. Is that also in the that we learned? First, which is like what the masculine name for the South Atlanta forces and it's actually right across the road from where we currently are. So the. And it's like I want to believe 3 or 400 acres by itself and that is actually under imminent threat as well. They are waiting on the land destruction permit to pass. I'm not going to happen any day or any week on on what you were saying about the gentrification issue. That's something that's been really noticeable to anyone that lives in Atlanta and has for any amount of time, just looking around them like they're filming that is just. Regularly happening here and all. All these kind of new companies popping up around it. Black Hole was sold maybe a little over a year ago now to a hedge fund out in California. They're getting funding for all of these projects and. Right here in Atlanta, I'm sure across the country, I'm not sure what the trends are elsewhere has been skyrocketing like you. You'll see homes that sold during the financial crisis for like $80,000 a $120,000 selling for like half $1,000,000 today. And you know, I'm not like a ******* economist, but the way that the film industry has been exploding and other industries like Google and Microsoft have been building these massive, expensive new headquarters while people literally. Go out on the street because they can no longer afford to pay rent here and people just get displaced. It's like the opposite of white flight back into suburbs when, you know, folks are moving into the city for economic opportunities that only very wealthy people can get. I mean, it's difficult not to see black hole as ushering in just another huge wave of gentrification. Yeah. Became released to support the American Way of Life. Black Hole explicitly says they're making movies to support the American way of life. We hear gunshots from the police firing range all the time, and we hear almost as many gunshots from the black hole filming sites and yet very much about creating propaganda that makes people think they need police. And that's like a huge part of, of kind of what they're doing while they're filming and all the gentrification thing, like even just driving to the city the past few days, I've noticed so many places that used to be. Wooded, totally torn down. And they're putting up these horrible, quote UN quote luxury condos, which are like, you know, $2000 rent per month for a tiny studio. And I've even seen things that were used to be Section 8 housing turned into luxury condos. Like, it's it's been absurd driving through the city and watching so many places that used to be wooded just turned like so much like active construction sites building these exact same, like these identical apartment complexes that are the most. These things you ever looked at and completely unaffordable for any for anyone who's not like someone who's working for a tech company? Yeah, so I'm like currently they are like destroying our section of Atlanta called Chosewood Park. And it was like a large green space that was largely like. On marriage and in Lakewood and creating quote affordable housing which is really just the like legal term for they have a certain amount of like. Available housing that like like like tricking units and like a like a 100 unit thing is affordable housing. Affordable just means market value like like the median market value, low income. There's things that people that aren't like average money makers can forward right and I want to like I think it's has kind of gotten lost while the struggle but the actual defending the Atlanta force struggles like not specific to just hop city or black hole is actually the entire forest as a city and that like. Part of the reason why it has been so focused is because of like how pressing these prints. Things are and how like stretched thin people trying to bother working on this. And like, yeah, Joseph Parkinson example, there's also an area that's like near Grant Park and like the Zone 3 old 73 precinct. And there's like the zoo. They were like actually the same property area. They kept the pigs near the zoo. And like it was an entire forest land. Like absolutely massive, every absolutely clear cut, married, didn't disgusting condos all on their Rd. And it's it's a continuation again of a distinctive political pattern in Atlanta. Back when Mayor Jackson was elected as the mayor, he at first tried to build like affordable, not affordable, like low income housing and do community projects and stuff. But the business end of Atlanta fought back against those efforts, and that is what saw projects like the 1996 Olympic Games which destroyed. An entire community in Atlanta? You should look up. Peoples Town here in Atlanta was just and Summerhill, completely razed to build arenas and all of this **** and it feels like a continuation of the power aware. Politicians decide what is best for the city. The Olympics, a new police training facility. Or whatever business measure is on the table today. Not to mention that way during the 96 Olympics they like specifically built on land city detention Center for the for a place to put houseless people who have been sweeped off their streets and like criminalize them. And and during the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 that was refused to as detainment and overnight stays for protesters who are like going to get low bail. Necessary form of repression is regularly used to get by. That jails regularly use specifically against protesters and isn't used for anything else is an absolute scar on the face of humanity. Adams said during her term she's going to turn that into a a social justice side or right, it's still a jail. It probably already. It probably always will be until we ******* destroy it. And like now, the Fulton County sheriff wants to take over the jail and use all of those beds because the jails here are so overcrowded with ******** charges that they are just expanding and expanding, expanding, and there's no sign of stopping for every one time. They promise that they're going to be closing jails, repurposing shape, doing all this liberal reform ********. There's a new training facility, they're selling jails to people that are using them, or the system just continues to expand and expand and expand until we. Fight back and destroy it. Black hole, yeah. Police need black hole just as much as black hole needs the police, you know, and these are the symbiotic relationship between the two of them. Police are instrumental in gentrification, and also police need gentrification to capture poor black and brown people and lock them in cages. And so these are two things that that feed each other in a relationship. So it's very important to do our best to attack both. Is is Atlanta, was it the Atlanta police who had like the point system for arrest? Yes. Atlanta police had, I'm sorry, yes, Atlanta police has actually a point system where among the highest points is capturing a child for capturing a child and arresting them or alongside felony charges, felony warrants and other things. How long this point system? They use it as a rubric to measure how well an officers doing. Umm yeah. Yeah, I mean in terms of like needing gentrification to continue your job, yeah that's that's the exact same thing is let's have this point system so we can get races and arrest all the people who are on the street and it's a mask off moment as they say. And I also think it's this funny thing, like, I don't know, I write they're building this fake city to train in and I wouldn't be surprised if black hole ends up renting it out from time to time to shoot films. Absolutely. But also at the end of the day, even if they don't, it's literally the same exact thing, right? One is training people to actually do it and the other is performing it to people think it's cool they want to do exactly. Yeah, yeah. So I just pulled up the actually, my friend just pulled up the like chart which they use. It's a wonderful five scale. It's five scale. It's 5 for juvenile arrest, five points for felonies, 4 for a misdemeanor charge, 3 for City Charge, 4 for DUI, and it goes on. And like the fact that juvenile arrest is the top one is ******* monstrous. No, I expected. That they are the monster like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like if it's not it's not shocking, but it it shows the extent of like the the the horribleness of of what of like what their job is like. That is their job. Yeah, that's what that's what they do. That is the entire thing. One thing that's given the Atlanta defend the force movement in Edge is being able to consistently set the terms of engagement and establish a media framework regarding the instruction of the forest and the development of COP City to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Like we've mentioned, the COP studio project was never actually initially announced by the city or the Police Foundation. It was brought to light by activists digging through open source data and public records. In April of 2021, when activists discovered the proposal to destroy the South River Forest First, news spread via word of mouth for several weeks about a large information sharing session at Entrenchment Creek Park, one of the areas under threat. On May 15th, over 200 people gathered for a BBQ and info presentation night on the threat of the forest and the broader campaign to defend it. The city government had yet to announce its plans publicly, so the activists enforced defenders were able to craft the the public narrative first and laid the media groundwork at the information session. Presenters were able to accurately contextualize the development within the cross section of racist and authoritarian backlash against the George Floyd protests, the increasing gentrification and urban displacement, and the devastating climate effects such a project will inflict upon the region. Having activists and forced defenders break the news such a development denies the city and the police. Opportunity to introduce the development to the public with a distorted narrative, assuming that they were going to announce their plans and make them public at all. And then on May 17th, less than 48 hours after the info sharing BBQ 7 unguarded machines at the Forest Destruction site, including excavators, tractors and other pieces of heavy machinery, were targeted by sabotage, with smashed windows and severed inner tubing scorched by fire, the destruction equipment was left in operable. An anonymous statement appeared online. Detailing their motivations and methods of attack while tying the actions to the struggle against colonialism, authoritarianism, and the history of this particular land as the site of horrific abuses. Of the site of displacement, chattel slavery, and prison slavery they communicate ended with quote to the developers, governments, contractors, corporations and politicians that perpetrated the heinous deforestation. Any further attempts at destroying the Atlanta Forest will be met with similar response. The forest was here long before us and will be here long after. We'll see to that. Defend the Atlanta forest. To date, no one has been arrested for these actions. The presence of such a targeted direct action campaign this early on in the movement is important for a few reasons, one of which being it's meant in sabotage as a part of this movement from the very beginning, like it was woven into the genetic fabric from the conception. So any debate around the validity of these tactics was virtually nonexistent because they were there from the beginning. That's what this movement is, and that's been super interesting to watch because usually this type of sabotage or direct action happens later on in these movements. To escalate to that point, but in this case it's been happening since the first week. People knew that this thing was existing. Over the following weeks, there was meetings, posters and Flyers that spread throughout the city. People organized public forest walks through areas of the woods that were under threat. Even a few candidates for City Council adopted the struggle as a component of their electoral campaigns. The movement's consistent ability to break the news on the development and the destruction of the forest has been crucial in the efforts to gain public trust and setting the terms of engagement and the ground rules for the conflict. The type of public discourse regarding the forest was successfully established by anonymous activists, not by politicians and not by police. I think something that's been really cool about this movement is that from the earliest days of what this was going on, it was extremely radical. Like it wasn't. It wasn't three or four months after the first initial meeting. It was like a BBQ at the park where people were lighting bulldozers on fire to prevent construction from happening. The Atlanta Police Foundation has had its offices. It's office windows smashed like people are not afraid to fight back physically, and this was occurring at the same time as the more. Electoral tactics as hell. Phrase it. And I think that, you know, we've seen neither of these. Being able to successfully stop the movement, but when it comes to like being able to measure. That the police have been their allies have slowed down the electoral tactics have been a complete, utter failure and physically harming the property of the police and the the the black hole and all of the ******* forces that would destroy the forest that's been shown far away to be a tactic that's not only acceptable. In this movement, but it's something that's seen as like one of the go to strategies. It's we haven't had to work our way through that. People were there from the get go. Yeah, it was like a day or two after the Emperor night, but the very first like public facing event that like bulldozers were set on fire and like Michelle Obama Park, which is funny enough, another like recuperation tactic or like destruction of the environment and like ongoing gentrification where that's actually. Black Hole Studios old plan site for their new studio and. The idea of the landscapers they take this ****** land where they? Destroyed for us to replace it with an Earth round. And in and as long as they turn into a park, they're allowed to. Building construct on public forest land. Which is like a bonkers idea. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's actually like a new president right there that has not been done before. I think that like one of the other things, you know along with like the fiery start kind of kick off is that the folks who, you know, like in my experience most like kind of big broader campaign type things that people who are doing jail support, the people who have a broad reach, the people who you know. Have access to resources, etcetera, kind of the like backbone life sustaining things of a movement tend to be folks who have really rigid moralizing ideas of like what is acceptable, et cetera. And you know people in Atlanta have been, there's a lot of credit due to folks who have been putting in a lot of work and are a little wiser than to have such a limited view. So most of the folks that control and are not controlled. As the folks who like backline and are working really hard to do the more like. Reproductive things and jail support and get food and things like that are also people who have a really like creative and accepting view of, you know, like what kind of things are OK and really don't want this movement to fail and aren't going to limit themselves based on abstract ideas. And so that's something that is really special and. Then no one gets excluded for for doing things that are effective. When talking with the forced defenders, the other thing that was really emphasized is that instead of waiting for this new politicians to save the environment, and instead of dedicating tons of effort into petitioning companies with moralizing rhetoric to make them feel bad in hopes of them dropping out of the project, you can instead have immediate material attacks that hit them where it counts and where it counts as their pockets. Because you can't expect companies to be swayed by moral decisions around harmful policing or the environment, but you can attack their physical and social capital. If it's framed as, hey, this is something that is not a good look fam, and this is going to hurt your bank accounts, that is the type of general language that these corporations do understand. I feel like this is the most intersectional thing I've been a part of in a long time. There's just like so many different ways to oppose the facility and there's so many different people involved, and I'm really grateful for all of the comrades, especially the anarchist comrades who've been holding it down for years, have helped push the struggle in a certain direction. I think other people are touching on this. We want to keep bringing it up because it's important. And other struggles we've been a part of, like the Liberals control a lot of the money for jail support or bail funds or food district. And a lot of those mutual aid aspects of the struggle that help maintain an occupation which has really turned this place up or in the hands of mostly anarchist folks. And that has also really set the scene for what we're able to do and not able to do. Like no one's getting thrown under the bus for alleged behavior like when I was reading about this before I came down here. Almost exactly a year ago, there were like, machines are on fire. And I was like, holy ****. It's like, usually that's like way later in the struggle. And that was like, right out the gate. People, whoever they are, were attacking the machinery. And I think, to be honest with you, that was drawing a lot of people here because people are tired of the NDA or nonviolent direct action. It's not about like, let's criticize something to death that makes us feel bad. It's like people are tired because they're losing a lot of comrades for long prison sentences. They're giving three different. Buildings that are like the same amount of time or more than if you would allegedly arson something. So these are things that are coming up for people and people are realizing that old tactics aren't working anymore. A lot of the comrades that were burned into a weird shape from the green scare are aging out where the things that they're afraid of are very valid. But we're living in two dire of a time to neglect those tactics on a larger level, and people are just are seeing how terrible things are and it seems like more people are down or just don't care anymore. Ever since the George Floyd uprisings, they've just seen an uptick in a lot of this. Behavior there's a campaign that launched publicly that mentions all of the subcontractors that Reeves Young, one of the construction companies on the project, has to employ to make the Atlanta Police Foundations project here possible. And a lot of that could be home visits. It could be going to where they don't know what to do is obviously, but I'm just saying. Long story short, everybody knows this, but you find where they store the evil equipment. That's the best way to stop the project. Long story short, they usually don't listen to what we have to say, but actions speak louder than words. And if you really want to hurt them, you hurt them in the pockets. And if you cross them enough money damage, they may pull out of the project, they shut down. And even if there is other subcontractors that they could get to run machinery from to cut trees, whatever the **** it is they're going to do. We want them to be afraid. If you look at their romanticized struggles that have largely been successful in their own ways throughout the world, I'm just going to mention a couple because people talk about them constantly, like the sod in France or the Hambach in Germany or no tab in Italy. A lot of the revolves around property destruction and defending your area. Another strong point of the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest is that it's not simply coalesced around a single coherent strategy, whether that be sabotage or above ground organizing. For over a year now, forced defenders and movement participants have employed several parallel strategies in tandem. The strategies of 1 approach could fill in for the shortcomings of another. Often, these differing strategies can be mutually beneficial, as sabotage was happening. Opponents of COPS City also organized a continuous stream of educational events on the land, as well as pressure campaigns aimed at pushing city and county officials, investors, and contractors to drop out of the project. As summer began, more traditional political activist organizations like once connected to nationwide socialist organizations, abolitionist networks, and ecological advocacy groups began doing more direct community outreach by knocking on the doors and talking with people in the neighborhoods next to where the forest was being slated for destruction. Forming connections and ally ships with the local community in the vicinity of the South River Forest is crucial, especially since that they would be among the first of those impacted by deforestation and the. Close proximity to such a militarized police hub with, you know, explosive testing and helicopter pads. Plus, you know local community outreach is useful for learning what might help mobilize more regular folks. Other tactics and strategies emerging during early summer included getting those involved in the planning of Cup City to realize that they don't get to operate in some safe politics only realm. Their political decisions have real world consequences and real world effects for those people that they allegedly represent. So perhaps they too should be forced to feel real world consequences. On June 16th there was a City Council meeting which was supposed to vote on the police foundation's land lease ordinance sponsored by then Councilwoman Joyce Shepherd. At this point, back in 2021, the meetings were all virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the City Council members hosted their conversations from inside their homes. With just a little bit of work, activists and researchers were able to locate the home address of Councilwoman Shepherd. A group went to her home and displayed a banner during the City Council meeting. Most protesters just chanted from the public sidewalk and one individual approached their house, knocked on the door and ring the doorbell before returning to the street. Turns out Councilman Shepard did not like this very much and went into a bit of a panic. Or the movements that have been like kind of effective in terms of like City Council or other targets has been like we never the first time they were going to vote on this. Institute for Sexual actually consider when they were going to vote on cops City. Someone went up to Jewish shepherd's house and knocked on her door there. Said handful of protesters outside and someone just knocked on her door and she went to a frenzy. Freaked out, called off the vote, left the meeting, ran to the precinct. And public comment during the public comment section and then gave a rake long speech to like a bunch of police and press which like called out. Which effectively called off the vote for another like 3 months or so just because someone visited the House of a politician because they have names and addresses and like that also happened with Brian Millsap. What happened with? That's Dean Reeves, the CEO and chairman of Reeves Young. There's this whole idea of politics as existing within this political astral space, right? It's it's it's the same thing with like, corporations, right? Everything exists in the corporate space that's removed from people's actual lives, right? It's it's removed from actual personal consequences. People in positions of power assume that their actions occur in this political or corporate astral plane, and that means that consequences of their decisions won't directly impact them. But we don't need to play by those rules. After a friendly knock on her door, Joyce Shepard called off the vote and left the meeting early to call the police, who arrived after the protesters had already dispersed. Immediately after, Joyce Shepherd held a press conference from the newly constructed zone 3 police precinct. There, Shepherd stood surrounded by police officers and news media and described in detail the aims of her land lease ordinance, the nature of the cop city project, as well as the efforts of protesters. To stop her by doing this short public statement, she catapulted the movement and the story into the mainstream out of the political back doors that it was existing in previously. And Atlanta City Councilwoman says protesters came onto her private property to speak out against a piece of legislation. Joyce Shepherd says while she supports the right to protest, this time it went too far. People have a right to come out and say whether they four or against it. I have no problem with that. I've been doing this for years and know that people have their right. But what they don't have a right to do is come up on my private property, knock on my doors, protest on my lawn, on my porch. They don't have that right. So I'm saying tonight that I'm still supporting the Academy. I'm not scared. However, there will be no rights for people to come on my property and protest. The next day she made another statement, which you just heard a little bit of, where she also claimed that she would be pushing through the ordinance no matter what the city residents that she sensibly represented. Had to say, and her and her fellow city officials took a stand against the protesters and rejected their tactics, falsely implying that the methods, like going on a sidewalk, were illegal. But by showing up outside of politician's house and knocking on her door, just a few people were able to achieve in early goal of the movement to transform the cops city and Black Hall developments from back to our agreements into big public scandals. It got out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As a bonus, the vote was delayed, buying more time to develop further strategies in defense of the forest. It was an effective demonstration of the potential of direct confrontation with people in power. And it led to the emergence of another strategy that's become a big part of the genetic fabric of this movement, pressuring decision makers directly and dissolving their notion of a safe political or corporate astral space. During this time of showing up at politicians doors, more sabotage and direct action were also taking place. Signs appeared in the forest warning that trees in the area had been spiked, making a possibly dangerous to attempt to cut down trees, with the risk of saws being damaged and possibly injuring unlucky workers. On June 10th three more excavators were burned at the Black Hole Studios site. Neither action appeared much in the local news media, but anonymous communiques and photographs of the incidents and damage circulated online among the radical anarchist milieus. In late June, there was the first planned week of action. There's been another one since then, and there's another one upcoming from May 8th through May 15th. We'll talk more about the upcoming week of action in the next episode, but I strongly encourage people to travel to Atlanta as soon as possible. If you can make it for any of this upcoming week long event again, that's from May 8th through May 15th. If you can make it for any of that, please go to Atlanta. It will be it will be fun, I assure you. The June 2021 week of Action featured a guided walk through the forest by day and by moonlight discussion and conversations on ecology, abolitionism, colonialism, and queerness. There was a nightly bonfires and safe, open sections of the woods at a nearby radical venue. There was a ********. Show during which hundreds of concert goers repelled the buzzkill police who were trying to shut it down. And there was a night rave deep into the woods where 500 people were dancing with glow sticks late into the night and early into the morning. In all, throughout the week of action, thousands of Atlantans got to gather under the banner of defend the forest. They were able to learn about the project and get plugged into taking action. During the week, people under the cover of night visited the home of Black Hole Studios. Yo, Ryan Millsap in the Atlanta suburb of Social Creek. They also visited his second home in Tuxedo Park and EU PS: he frequents in Edgewood. According to an anonymous online statement quote Flyers were distributed to all his neighbors mailboxes as well as plastered on his front gate and the streets that he frequents. The Flyers let fellow concerned Community members know about the harm he is responsible for and nicely provided the address to his 100 acre farm so that grievances could be addressed. There they Flyers placed all throughout his neighborhood, and investment properties were also distributed in hopes that it would, quote, inspire others to research and take the fight to those directly responsible for the destruction of the forest. Two days later, on the final day of the week of Action. Around 50 protesters marched to the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Foundation, quoting crime thing again quote as the crowd emerged from the five Points metro station, a small contingent of officers attempted to arrest somebody. The crowd engaged hand to hand, fighting with police and successfully repelled them. Advancing past security, they marched straight to the Atlanta Police Foundation's office and smashed the glass doors and windows before overturning tables in the towers lobby. According to police, on Friday around 4:00 PM, multiple protesters stopped the flow of traffic. On Peachtree Street and Andrew Young International Blvd, photos taken by a local freelance photographer showing the group called Defend Atlanta Forest, shattering glass doors and also holding signs that say our woods not hollywoods. CBS46 reached out to the group but have yet to hear back. Atlanta police believe the protesting ignited over the building of the new public Safety Training Center. When officers arrived, protesters quickly fled the scene, but the damage? Still remains at this time, we know no arrests have been made and the investigation continues in Atlanta. I'm Barb mallyon, CBS46 news momentum was growing throughout the summer. Police and corporate press had failed in crafting a counter media strategy. Meanwhile, the defendant Force project brought together police and prison abolitionist organizations, environmental justice and preservation organizations, civil and human rights nonprofits, and even neighborhood associations near the proposed site, including the East Atlanta Community. Association the Grant Park Neighborhood Association S Atlantans for neighborhood development and the Kirkwood neighbors Organization, each of which passed resolutions opposing the proposal. Grassroots organizations that mobilized against the proposal included defend Atlanta Police Department's refusal communities, the Atlanta Sunrise Movement, Community Movement builders, the South River Forest Coalition, a world without police, and the autonomous organizers working under the banner of Defend the Forest. Organizers spread informational Flyers and online graphics, conducted interviews, knocked on doors and organized phone in campaigns during subsequent City Council meetings that were still held on zoom because of coronavirus related restrictions. 3rd August and September, the Stop Cup City Coalition and others worked to introduce tension and clog up the City Council process. Taking cues from the protest outside the home of George Shepherd, which resulted in the vote being delayed for over 2 months, protesters gathered outside the homes of possible yes voters on the nights that the vote was slated to take place, causing further delays in the entire process. It got pushed back from August into September, so again another another delay. Briefly, it seemed like there was a possibility that the stop Cops city campaign might be victorious before the end of summer, though it's on the ground lease ordinance were repeatedly delayed because of these objections. And demonstrations at the homes of Atlanta Chief Operations Officer John Keane and City Councilwoman Natalyn Archibong. Eventually September 7th was set as the final vote. Today, 17 hours of pre recorded comments from over 1000 Atlanta residents delayed the discussion due to the sheer number of public comments. The vote got pushed back another day as City Council members spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday listening to the playback. After months of organizing, community outreach and public education efforts from these top cap city organizers, approximately 70% of the callers fiercely opposed the proposal, explaining in great detail why they're quote UN quote representatives should vote it down. The minority of callers who supported the Cop city project either self identified as residents of the disproportionately white and wealthy Buckhead and NE Atlanta area, or we're just like actual cops. At least 30 officers called in to say that they support the destruction of the forest to end the building of COP city. So big, big shocker, the cops what Cop City Pro cop city collars invoked the false crime wave narrative propagated after the George Floyd Uprising and used the language of so-called. Flight flight by threatening to leave the city if something wasn't done to stop the growing crime wave. And yet, when the 17 hours of public comments ended and the Council's discussion began, council members largely failed to acknowledge the hours of public comments that they had just spent two days listening to, much less acknowledge the far ranging movement that produced such overwhelming public discontent coding crime. Think again quote as those who study revolutionary movements. No, the police perform an essential function in class society, without which many other hierarchies and exploitative relations cannot exist for very long. This is not simply an economic or civic issue that can be worked around with some clever ideas and a bit of pressure. UN quote. Despite the efforts of organizers, which culminated in 17 hours of primarily oppositional public comment. The ordinance was passed on September 8th, while the police arrested protesters outside the home of Councilwoman Natalyn Archibong about an hour before the final vote took place. During the Council's final session on September 8th, the City Council voted by a margin of 3:50 for the creation of the $90 million facility, handing over almost 400 acres of forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Obviously, many folks were pretty disappointed and kind of demoralized about this. Some turned their frustrated energy into the upcoming local elections, hoping that the city government may be stacked with abolitionist or progressive candidates that might strike down the project. Mayor Bottoms did not end up running for reelection, and the former mayor of Mayor Reed lost to the now current mayor Andre Dickens. I do think it's really funny that the old mayor of Atlanta was mayor bottoms in the new. The new mayor is Mayor Dickens. Anyway. City Councilwoman Joyce Shepard, who introduced the city plan, also lost her campaign for reelection. But since the elections in November, nothing has actually changed regarding the black hole and cop city developments, or nothing has changed on the electoral front. There's there's no indication of electoral strategies being impactful. And thankfully, not everyone focused their efforts on electoral reform. I'll leave you today with this sentiment that I kept hearing during my stay in the forest. When you criminalize nonviolent direct action, the end goes away. On the final day of the vote, people went and protested outside a City Council member's house, and 11 of them got arrested despite the fact that they were already dispersing and following orders. During the Stop Line 3 movement, people were receiving felony theft charges for using lock boxes to attach themselves onto construction equipment, which of recent hasn't even really been an effective strategy resulting in any material winds? But if they're gonna arrest you for standing outside of a politician's house and give you charges, you may as well consider doing something a bit more spicy. If you're going to get felonies for basic, nonviolent direct action, like locking yourself onto machinery, you may as well like that machinery on fire when nonviolent direct action results in felony charges. If they're going to criminalize standing outside of a politician's house and holding a sign, then going into the forest and doing monkey wrenching suddenly becomes a very similar consequence level, and the action that can be done in secret turns out to be. Actually a bit easier to get away with. The funny thing is, is that this is the state's fault, not anyone else's fault when state repression against public non destructive tactics increases. Then what happens is the less public and more fiery tactics which in this movement were already present. We'll just end up becoming more and more prominent and even more integral to keep the movement going. In the next episode, we'll hear about how the more radical folks continue to defend the forest after the vote, and you'll hear a lot more from the forest defenders that I interviewed. And finally, if you can, please head to Atlanta if you're able to, for the upcoming week of action from May 8th through 15th. More boots on the ground are crucial as the large scale destruction of the forest is becoming more and more imminent. You can go to defendtheatlantaforest.com and a scenes.noblogs.org For more information. See you on the other side. Football is back and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter a bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1000. The bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering. Live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions. Must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only. New customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit. Free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem call 1-888-532-3500 for my small bookstore to thrive. I can't just sell books so I created a radio ad at iheart AD Builder. Com to tell everyone about our author events, our story, hours for kids, and our amazing lattes. Now we're busier than ever. I'd call that a success story. A custom radio ad from iheart AD builder is the fast, affordable way to drive customers to your business. Put the power of radio to work for you. Get started now at iheart adbuilder.com piece of the planet. I go by the name of Charlemagne the God. And this summer I'm bringing my show back to Comedy Central with a new title and a new podcast. Called hell of a week. But don't worry, every Friday I'll be keeping that same, calling out the BS energy. So if the news is terrorizing your timeline and causing your anxiety to rise high in gas prices, don't worry, we got you. You could chase down all the crazy stories of the week with some laughs and thought provoking conversation that the Supreme Court want to abort the Constitution. We'll talk about it. Does Congress want to replace the bald eagle with an AR15? We'll talk about it with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the OJ trial for white people? We'll talk about it. And I'm bringing on some of the biggest names in comedy, politics and entertainment to talk about it with me. Plus catch all the extended interviews, bonus scenes, and filthy language that has to get bleeped out for TV because I hear that Doctor Fauci has a bit of a potty mouth. So be sure to listen to hell of a week with charlamagne the God on the iHeartRadio app, the Black Effect podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this is Part 2 of the two-part miniseries on the defending force movement in Atlanta, GA. Last month I traveled to Atlanta to stay a week in the woods and talk with some of the forest defenders. In the previous episode, I covered the movement from its inception to where the City Council approved the Cop City project near the end of last summer. I went over a lot of historical background between the lend itself and the history there, the increasing gentrification of Atlanta, how the movement pulled the veil off the secretive plans for Cop city and pushed it into the public spotlight. We talked about the early days of sabotage and the targeting of individuals in positions of power. Uh, basically. I did a lot of a lot of talking. Maybe, maybe too much talking. This episode will be more led by the discussions with forest defenders that I had during my weeklong excursion to the woods. We'll learn about how the movement evolved in the wake of the City Council vote up until the current state of affairs. One thing that makes the defend the Atlanta Forest movement very different from previous ecodefense projects in recent memory is that it's right in the middle of a sprawling metropolitan area. Right outside the forest is an Amazon facility. Downtown Atlanta is just a 10 minute drive away. We'll be talking tactics a bit later on in the episode, but just the simple nature of doing a forest ecodefense project while still inside the city gives a lot of pretty interesting tactical opportunities. You have to selectively use some of the older more. Rural eco defensive strategies well having the backing of a city based mutual aid network. There's the option of rapid response, popular mobilization that city based protests can have but are more challenging for ecodefense stuff that's like 3 hours into the middle of nowhere. For the people camping in the forest, they can easily get supplies or switch out who's staying in the woods and who's living in the city. The combination of forest and urban prompts and necessitates the crucial experimentation and innovation that's been badly needed in ecodefense projects and protests for the past decade. There's a lot of trains that go by here. It's generally pretty noisy, so it's definitely the most urban forest defense thing I've ever been a part of. But it's really beautiful and unique to see a lot of urban folks building the city, be able to be involved and, like urban tactics, kind of mixing with, you know, more traditional, whatever how that means. More earth thirsty forest tactics. It's kind of like the rule book, and a lot of people say this, but I like it, so I'll repeat it. They're quote UN quote rule book for how to engage with the. Multiple enemies in this area has been like chewed up, spit out, shadowed and burnt over because they were kind of doing something that doesn't really happen a lot. Something similar I can think of is the Sacred Oak Grove that was being protected in Minneapolis in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, and it was another kind of anarchist indigenous alliance with the Big Earth first presence. But that's kind of one of the more urban in this part of Turtle Island. Struggles I can think of right this, but this is unlike anything I've ever done. I think another interesting part is like. A lot of force defense stuff is focused on like old growth, being like, we should defend it because it's old growth. Yeah, this is not an old growth horse. This is like a messy, dirty, confusing. I've gotten lost so many times. It's just tires this barrels, right? It was built on the prison farm. You'll find like old portions of the prison, which is incredibly ****** ** in haunted, right? Like in terms of like, haunting is like, there's the specter of what used to be there. Police are trying to build over it with their more like a bomb. That's right. It's like, that's very much like they're just building over the thing, but it doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending. And that's an idea that I think. People need to understand more is like it has value even if it's not like 500 years old. Like it has value despite. Naughty. Despite being a 100 year old forest, and it's because it is in 100 year old forest, like, it has value because it is a forest in a city. And that's something that's worth like emphasizing. Yeah. I also think that's cool and like, people talk a lot about like invasive plants and there's like, I think the Bradford pairs in this forest are really interesting example, there are these trees that are like feral. They used to be like planted here when it was a farm plantation or whatever, and those trees are ******* spiky hair. Fine. Trees, they're spiking the **** well, but, you know, the good news is they're awful. And the bad news is they're awful. Like, I know where they're are. When I haul *** in the forest, I usually don't get bad preparing my eyeballs and put someone chasing me up. Well, yeah, and and so it's just it's cool to kind of interact with all these things and get to choose how you want to interact. And like, yeah, it is a. You know, I think it's interesting. It's not, yeah, like a traditional forest or like, whatever forest that people would value in that way, but for me. I connect to it, I think even more than that, because it's not this, like, held up as this thing of like purity, like they ******* bulldoze. And like a month later that she was overgrown, you couldn't see it again. And that was all, quote UN quote invasive plants, like whatever the **** that means, which is often. That's the whole thing. They're often racialized plans, you know, it's it's almost like a punk forest. We're surrounded by enemies, and there is the problem is. Do you see this as a cesspool and something I talked to Laura liberals about, like, when they're telling them about defend the floors, like, always at a pristine wilderness with large old growth trees and like, you know what? That would be cool. But problem is this force needs to be allowed to return to that because there's been so much abuse and part of, like, whether, I don't know what it means to quote, UN quote, win or lose. But there's a lot of, like, little wins and losses all along the way, and we've had a lot of wins. There is some big trees that are left in the forest. They're legally supposed to. All the big trees by the Creek. But from what historical president do we trust the cops to quote, UN quote be accountable to anyone? I don't know where we're thinking that'll happen. I've heard a lot of people be like, oh, some of these tree houses are strategic and the spots they can't cut and like, you know, friends, I've looked at the map and it looks like this whole ****** ******* place is slated for clear cutting exactly one month after the City Council voted to approve the land lease ordinance for Cop City the defend the four slogan. Was put to the test. On October 8th, 2021, contractors and land survey workers showed up around the forest and appeared to be clearing land to take reference photos and collect soil samples. Two dozen force defenders emerged from the woods and confronted the workers. The people hired to destroy the forest fled the work site and after they left, a police surveillance tower in the area was toppled and the forced defenders were able to disperse with no arrests. 10 days later, a similar turn of events took place. A group of survey. Workers and construction teams were on site again. A small group of rapid response force defenders disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at the old Atlanta prison farm. Simply the mere threat of an on-site protest shut down construction for the whole day. Key access points for machinery were blocked using available materials like piles of nearby tires, preventing vehicular machinery from moving freely through the destruction site. No construction occurred, despite the attempts of the DeKalb County police and the Atlanta. Police Department who mobilized 20 vehicles in the vicinity of the forest in an effort to prevent the protest or punish the participants. By the end of the day, no one was arrested and yet again, select monitoring systems and police surveillance towers were toppled and dismantled. A statement released online from anonymous Force Defenders read quote this war will be won one battle at a time. Pressure must continue in a variety of ways to halt all construction. It became clear that for the next phase of the struggle to defend the force, people would have to directly target and oppose the contracting companies hired to decimate the woods and build the facilities. To date, we know of at least three companies that have been contracted by the Atlanta Police Foundation to do work on the old prison farmland. Some of the surveying work appears to be done by long engineering, and two companies, Reeves Young Construction and Brassfield and Gory, were hired to do grounds clearing and early construction. It is not yet clear who will be contracted to clear the land in Entrenchment Creek Park, where Blackhall Studios hopes to expand their sound stage, again quoting the Crimethink article the city in the forest. Reinventing resistance for an age of climate crisis and police militarization, quote the information that is known to date was hard won by diligent activists on the ground. Shortly after the City Council voted in September, surveyors and small work crews began entering the site near 2 key roads. The trucks and uniforms revealed the names of the contractors, which once again gave opponents of the cops city project a chance to initiate a struggle on their own terms. Had the force defenders utilized only virtual or bureaucratic channels to collect information, they might not have learned that Reeves Young were being called in to do the actual destruction until it was publicly announced much later. The ability to break news to the public before the city government has been a consistent advantage in trying to keep the momentum of the movement going. Post the City Council vote, a second week of action was planned for November, albeit with some new twists. From November 10th through 14th, various groups organized. A wide range of cultural events, info, nights, bonfires, and meetings. For this week of action, many of these events occurred in or near a publicly advertised and campement on the Entrenchment Creek Park side of the forest. Days after the second week of action, 30 people converged on the Reeves Young construction headquarters in Sugar Hill, GA, 40 miles outside of Atlanta. Holding banners and demanding that the company sever their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the group was able to walk right into the offices, disrupting a board meeting involving company president Dean Reeves and CEO Eric Young. Initially the executive has tried to keep their cool but in short time the businessmen started getting more annoyed and eventually violent towards the protest. There was a protest that, like it was at the Reeves Young office, went into the office just and disrupted a board member meeting that happened to have a lot of the people who were like CEO's and Chairmen Bair and. From what I gather as a brawl. Yeah, I know. There was reports of the the the the Reeves CEO Guy. Like punching, punching protesters. Joke title worker put someone in a guillotine and I love the notion of these workers doing like WWE. The brawl is what it's generally. Would love for more cop fights, fights with cops to just be WWE style. He's got a chance. The latter. Don't match disrupting the board meeting was another successful step in the goal of applying direct, confrontational pressure to the Atlanta Police Foundation's contracted construction service providers. Days later, two more bulldozers were lit on fire. Pirate 2058 votes with roads and in those names for Struction site. It depends on saying we got two construction vehicles bowl involved in the tunnel. Behind this things are radio button, send PDF my location as well. This equipment was located on the land swap parcel by Blackhall Studios, the planned future location of quote, Michelle Obama Park, UN quote. These were the 11th and 12th pieces of heavy machinery to be sabotaged, and I think now we're at like around 25, which is a lot. Anonymous communique this time was short and to the point. Quote we burnt 2 bulldozers in the South Atlanta Forest. No capsity, no Hollywood dystopia. Defend the Atlanta forest. On top of the more publicly advertised encampment at Entrenchment Creek Park, around the second week of action, a small cluster forced defenders set up a secondary, more secretive encampment on a stretch of woods in the old Atlanta prison farm. Again quoting the Crimethink article quote, a few dozen people pitched tents, erected tarps and makeshift kitchens, hung banners, and constructed a bonafide protest camp in the woods. Establishing a semi permanent presence in the forest was a way to gather information on an ongoing basis and to provide an immediate deterrent to developers so. I was involved in the original occupation of the forest. There was a group of autonomous individuals who many of whom were housing insecure and were like, we need ******* housing and like, there's this struggle and we believe in it and we want to fight in it. And so we moved to the ******* woods and we lived in these woods and lived the six. The official time is 6 weeks that we were in the woods and. We have higher quality of life than like many people who, like lived in houses and apartments, we have the nicest kitchen of anyone we knew we had, you know? They had. Armchairs and couches and fire pits and we, you know, we had more food than we knew what to do with. And so we've just started feeding people and like. We created a social space that, like, allowed the movement to grow simply because we're like, well, we need these needs math and our lives. I don't. We go do that. And that, like, evolved over time. Little over a month after the more secretive encampment was established, about a dozen protesters, some bearing witch hats, marched to the gate of Black Hole Studios on Constitution Road and blocked the main entrance. A communique posted online read quote iconic spells for destruction where loudly chanted at black holes general direction as the witch block held hands, cackled and skipped any sunwise direction blocking Black Hole Studios main entrance. Smoke torches were lit. Approximately one hour post which block antics, de Kalb County police responded to a call made by Black Hole Studios saying that they quote followed the protesters into the woods and deduced an encampment they came upon must belong to the apparent witches UN quote, which is quite the sentence. Shortly after, a large contingent of police raided the forest, evicting the protest camp established there. At one point I drew. And held a demonstration outside of black holes. Outside of Black Hole site near the woods, and they expressed their discontent at the. Yeah, it's an entirely peaceful, yeah, entirely peaceful protest at Blackhall Studios that was like just kind of standing in like the front gate where employees leave and enter. And generally doing stuff like burning American flags, holding signs like and just like taking up space and making those like actual entrance and leaving the facility like less doable. And their response was for black hole to lie and say like the camp and camp and was trespassing on their property which was actually in place in the like a public park and orchestrated with the police to evict. And they orchestrated with the police, too. Do you like a pretty, like, intense eviction for like what it was essentially we were what amounted to? A homeless camp living there and they had two helicopters circling more police than I could count. They were throwing our **** into dump trucks and like. Really like pursuing people through the woods. It was like an absolute. I mean, it was like. I like very like visible show of force against us quoting the crime think article again quote at the urging of Blackhall de Kalb County police entered the forest on mass mobilizing police cruisers in the parking lot, officers on foot, helicopters and drones overhead, and unmarked vehicles in the streets. The officers were likely intimidated by the low visibility to rein in any event. All of the forced defenders based in the encampment escaped without being detained. This was the first time a concerted effort. Was made by law enforcement to engage protesters in the South River Forest. And I'll be honest, it was a ******* pain in the *** and it was a traumatizing event. And like. That is all true, but it's also an event we learn from and like. We got a pretty good idea of like a PD and like the counties, like capabilities and like how they are like surveilling protests and how they're surveilling camps and like how they figured out where we were and like what triggered them to act against us and like that's allowed us to move and far more confident ways that are also far more subversive. It's really interesting that, you know, just like when they make it, you know, illegal to do NVDA, whenever they attack like that and do these really violent raids that put people in like awful positions and might traumatize a share of people. They are teaching us how to fight back, they are showing us their weaknesses and they are really ironic way the next time they come in and they **** it up because. People know to expect it will be a monster of their own making because like for every one step of aggression that they take, that's two steps further we can take towards them with everything that we learned from the struggle. Yeah. And obviously this forest is really beautiful. And the more time I spend here, the more I feel connected to it and driven to like, protect it. But also a big part of it for a lot of us is for me is like. You know they are doing this for their own morale, and so my goal is to make sure they are unhappy and so yet, even if I. Yeah, even if they win, as long as we come back and we'll learn from that, we keep pushing back. You know, it is a war of attrition and. It's about their morale and like. It doesn't matter if they built the police facility, what matters is that every single time the police moved to recuperate. That their losses, which they just took a big one, they are faced with just unyielding hostility. And I think that, like, that's something that's really important is like, we don't expect to not take a lot of hills, like in the forest occupation. We understand the nature of this thing. We're in a static position moving around those, but like, it's a it's about making them fight for every inch the best we can. The encampment was just one part of a large ongoing fight. Over the course of those six weeks, hundreds of people were able to circulate through this camp, enjoying meals and performances, making arts together and spending time around campfires building and sharing a life in the woods. After the camp was attacked and structures were destroyed by the Cab County police, land defenders and Atlanta residents mobilized quickly to recover camp supplies and belongings and continued on with efforts to defend the forest. The great thing about these types of free autonomous zones is that they can directly demonstrate to people what a free life outside the confines of regular society can look like and what it can feel like. It's not just like we want to save this words and we want to go back to our regular lives. A lot of us are realizing that we're living. In the Apocalypse and we're just going to we want to keep living like this. It's not just this words, it's not just this police facility and we want them to not have anymore space or platform to organize this police. But we want, a lot of us want to be free and we want other people to like join that idea of like whatever the **** it is, hitchhiking, train hopping, living in the woods. The fact that it's a ******* crime or considered crazy to be the people living in the woods is insane. And that's kind of survival yet from the Muskogee. Yesterday they're like our whole world. We're here trying to reclaim our culture because there's a lot of hope for saving the land. From like an indigenous perspective, if people would respect them. And the whole point is the US government doesn't actually want them and doesn't actually respect them. And reservations are literally have prisoner of war numbers because they're hoping by blood clot and if they kill these people, if they can take their land back, so the whole land back idea ******* freaks them out anyway. We want to save this for us, but it's not just about this for us. We're kind of endangered species. We've talked about ourselves feeling like deer, like our dear, like they'll be cheering. They're like, alright, I'm being a deer, making food and like, I was on guard, you know, to. Do something else. If there's an enemy around, it kind of feels that way. Like it will be chilling. Nothing's going on. Also there's gaps, but the whole point is, if it can happen here, haha, we can happen somewhere else and we have to spread the virus to people. Not like Occupy would have variable name for a movement, but it's cool that happened at the time. That would make sense. We all nobody knew any better. We know better now. That's great, but. Get there by getting this right till they continue this kind of stuff. And obviously there's people in all kinds of places that squat buildings and do all sorts of **** but the more territory that we occupy and control and can help remain true. Back to indigenous grassroots comrades. Not IRA, Indian Reorganization Act, government sanctioned. Indigenous groups, right at the camp, not everyone's our allies, have to be our ships that make sense. The Muscogee comments that were close to you, obviously not all of them, but some romanticized, generalized ********. They said the same **** that when we talked to them, never given our own people betrayed sometimes because we're not all the same with some homogeneous culture. And I've seen that play out poorly in other places. The legality of the long back to the neighbors and like which meters break people were all on the spectrum of colonization. Would be conversation. And sadly some of us are further along the lines of others, and it's very. Much on the colonizers fault for doing that, but where we're at is the people. The people that feel the crowd, the energy of the people that feel the crowd to the some kind of radical left orientation that can find it in their hearts and in their patients to tolerate each other. We need to band together to come up with better plans because we're all we got. It doesn't get better. It's getting worse, so hopefully this can be an inspiration for people to do other show. I'm inspired, I'm not from anywhere for can do here, but I've been here for a year now and I don't wanna leave because I'm tired of the same old tactics and I have been a part of staff. That has been successful before. It had nothing to do with that direct action and I have to do time for it and I know people that have done time for it also. If there's any message I can give to the young generation is there's no future and it's worth it. And like, if your future is as like working A9 to five and like watching the Earth so they like shrivel into nothingness, I would argue that's not really a life. Might as all will. Might as well be good. So I'm happy. I'm happy you choose to live. I think it's a really like interesting thing, the psychological aspects of this because. The first time you do play were surprised in a society is to be obedient and fearful. And the first time you do something, illegals, the first time you do something that you know is against the rope. First time you steal some food. The first time you smash your window. At the first time you do any of that, you're scared. But then. You get away with it. You realize that this is a thing you can do. I think the state can't stop you from doing. And you realize, oh, I can do so much more. And once you get over that initial fear, once you smash that window and you've gotten home and you're like, oh, I didn't go to jail for this, but when when you, like, get home, you're like, I have all this food now, but I didn't have to pay for it, you start to realize. Maybe you don't need to work with. Maybe I don't need to work 9:00 to 5:00 or you know. Five to midnight every day to, you know, get a job and pay rent. You realize, wait, maybe I can just steal the food I need. Yeah, I've been wanting to talk about that for a while for. I want to make another hyper object episode and talk about the anarchist properties of Klein bottles and I I described this type of freedom as like, it's like how a Klein bottle works or like a fourth dimensional object. It's like you need in order for there's like this extra degree or extra dimension of movement that we usually don't think is possible, but it is actually there if you know how to interact with it. And yeah, it's like we're domesticated in so many ways to view here's what's possible, here's what isn't possible. I have to exist within this framework and only doing these things which are seen as correct. And there's actually more degrees of freedom than that. We just don't often like acknowledge them. But you can totally face through things and you can totally find that extra degree of freedom. And once you do, that's a super interesting feeling, as opposed to like, waiting for gay luxury space communism, you can instead do like. With dimensional like hyper anarchism which gives you so much more freedom right now instead of just waiting for the communism that will never come. And the relationship you build. The relationships you build that are based on a trust that is. I trust you to have my back. I trust you to work with me and do this thing is so much deeper than the trust of. I guess I trust my coworker, but like, I really trust them not to such my boss, like the trust that comes from a relationship where you're like, hey, yeah, it's like, we need food, let's go steal it together. That kind of trust is not something that can be recuperated. That kind of like relationship, where it's like our relationship is built on the fundamental. We will do it. We have to to survive. It creates an intimacy that you can't. Find anywhere else. And. From the legitimacy, you might say. Yeah, and that that was the point as somebody else taking me here. Yeah, just to double down on that too. Like, I think it's it's cool too because. When you also come to a space like this, like, you can live like that on your own or with your friends. And then there's something wild when you come to this space. And then all of a sudden it's like. When you start attacking something that a lot of other people want to see attacked, all of a sudden all you have to do is attack that thing and foods there, you know, like, you know, like and and like. Yeah, and like you have all these resources and you can focus on that. And so like, it's like, yes, I'm like, it's like a joke. It's a some degree, but like. If you want to be a lifestyle practice, if you want to actually be an anarchist right now and do anarchist **** you can come to Atlanta and do and like, it's not easy, it's ******* scary, it's sketchy, it's hard. There's freaky *** bugs. But like, yeah, you don't have to wait and like. Yeah, I think that that's something that like for me is really magic. Is that like actually the more you attack and the more you like, position yourself to be antagonistic towards the world, the more the slight 4th dimensional like Winfrey shared on, you know, like, which I understand like starts to kind of like self actualize and yeah, I think it's cool. And then like, it freaks me out to think that there's many people who are probably probably pretty cool, like. Waiting for some opportunity. Like waiting, just teachers waiting. And we don't have that much time. Yeah, you can live anarchy now. You don't need to wait for the collapse TM, because turns out that already it's already happening. That already happened. We're just waiting in the liminal space until the climate change catches up with the the emissions are already there, we're already living in it. We just don't realize it yet. Or some of us are in denial of it yet. But the collapse is like now we it's already the thing. We don't need to wait for the one big collapse. That's a myth. But you can. Live anarchy and do stuff you don't need to wait for the next Communist president who's going to run and fail. There is no coming social welfare and there's no coming collapse. There is nothing to wait for to keep on waiting this madness. They decide, I think, a really interesting aspect of this movement about like how we are attacking a popular target and how like in attacking a popular target we've built this, like, thing is, we are. We're not just here, but attacking this thing that doesn't exist in isolation or here. And we've built a movement and we've built a. We've through attack we've built a built this like popular idea that like. Actually. You know, like. If you want something to not be there instead of like. Trying to a politician you can send it on. Vote harder, vote harder. Just just just one more vote. I swear I'm. This means different. I'll save us. Now I like to talk more about tactics. Since the City Council vote on the ground, tactics have gained a much more integral role and grown past the basic sabotage and house visits, although both of those still are crucial aspects in keeping the movement going. Different ways of preventing physical construction, surveying of land and destruction of the forest made-up most of the on the ground direct action efforts inside the forest. I think a really interesting aspect of the way that the struggle has happened here is that because it's so decentralized. There are people and no one really knows who, but there are people who will just show up and like. You know, it's like there were people who were, like, getting the cops called on them in the woods and **** and then, like, a bunch of ******* anonymous people showed up and, like, toppled all the camera towers and people stopped getting the cops called on them in the woods for a really long time. And like. That kind of decentralized thing, especially birds like. You know, regardless of even like if the people in the woods were like. Yeah, like. Into doing ****. It's like it's really useful when people who have more skills and people have more knowledge and more ability to do things and more ability to take risks. It's really awesome when those kinds of people become and make things safe for a larger mass of people. And I feel like that is like a strategy and like the insurrectionary space that can be truly, like expanded on, where people who know their ship can make things safe. For large groups of people to generalize, revolt. Yeah I I look at like a lot of like how this struggle and struggle has been framed from the very beginning as. Like there was no call to action do XYZ. There was a bunch of people pursuing their own individual desires and what they saw as they forward facing like they were projection of their own ideas into the future and made that happen. And it was underneath this framework where there was no limit, there were no boundaries and and there was no idea of like. Us all having to be on the same page about. Yeah, you don't need to like. Attend a March to be to, like, do effective things. In fact, it turns out doing things that are not attending a March can often be way more materially effective. Yeah. And to double down on that, like, so many times, there's just like a script that people follow. This is how we do it. And then there's there's like, this action that's applied to, like, everything that people don't like. And holy **** that's crazy public. That was a wildfire. Think about that. But yeah, there's these like things that apply to everything, and this struggle very much has no script, which is really exciting. And but but what's even cooler about that is that it's not. It's also not reinventing the wheel. And so there's people who are taking from, you know, like kind of like classic insurrectionary anarchist, like approaches. There's people looking at ecodefense stuff from all over the world, thinking about. There's people looking at some successful, like nonviolent direct action, and there's people looking at Alf struggles and like, how like those campaigns, targeted campaigns, secondary targeting, how things like that work. The contracting and subcontracting companies hired by the Atlanta Police Foundation made-up the new targets of the pressure campaigns and direct confrontation methods that threatened physical and social capital. Bringing back the House visits mentioned in the previous episode, in late December, banners that read Reeves Young out of the Atlanta Forest were hung in the backyard of the private residence of Dean Reeves in Suwanee, GA Dean Reeves serves as the chairman of Reeves Young Construction and was among the board members present at the November action, and he personally allegedly shoved and assaulted protesters inside the brawl. After the backyard banners were hung, an anonymous online statement read quote we hope this action gives, but a minuscule dose of what the creatures in the South Atlanta Forest you want to bulldoze might feel unsafe in the place they call home. A month later, on January 18th, Reeves Young Construction and representatives of the Atlanta Police Foundation entered the forest with a bulldozer. They started knocking down trees to complete more surveying work and determined the construction supplies needed for a laying of building foundation. Forced destruction was halted when approximately a dozen protesters approached the workers and Atlanta Police Foundation representative Alan Williams and demanded that they leave. Workers were safely escorted out of the woods and the bulldozer was left at the scene and was subsequently taken out of Commission. In my interviews with some forced defenders, I believe one of them referred to this as the bulldozer tripping and falling. So that's fun. The day after, autonomous groups of people finished construction of multiple well built tree houses up in the canopy near the site of the previous day's confrontation. People climbed up into treehouses and announced their intention to remain there in order to delay further construction, riffing off the old tree sit and bipod tactics. From October 2021 to this point in the struggle, which is like mid January 2022, work was consistently able to be stopped by small, dedicated groups of people without resorting to force throughout the next week. Attempts at land surveying in the area of the old Atlanta prison farm continued, but now with workers. Accompanied by the Atlanta Police Foundation, Atlanta police officers, and a cab county police. With the backing of cops, workers were able to accomplish more of their tasks, including tree felling and soil boring per crime thing quote. In some instances, only handful of activists were on the scene behind makeshift barricades. Reinforcements cannot arrive rapidly enough to assist those on the ground. UN quote. Reportedly, undercover cops surrounded the forest, intimidating those who would park nearby. As such, some outside support did show up, but not in mass. Meanwhile, in the forest, it was a game of cat and mouse between the workers forced defenders and cops. Police went so far as to start chasing people on forest trails while riding on ATV's. Barricades and the tactical removal of land survey markers did slow down work on some days, but ultimately efforts were unsuccessful in halting the destruction process entirely. This week of land destruction and cat and mouse culminated on January 28th. Around 60 people, the largest crowd in months, gathered to March into the South River Forest and onto the old Atlanta prison farm to directly confront construction workers who were boring holes in the ground doing soil sample collection. De Kalb County police attacked the protesters, tackling multiple people and arresting 4, the first arrests inside the forest, within the context of the movement and quoting crime. Think again quote police attacked the March, tackling several people. The other demonstrators did not mount a proportional response to this aggression, despite outnumbering the police. Perhaps some of the tactics popular during the 2020 rebellion, such as the mass use of umbrellas or makeshift Shields, could have equipped the participants to feel more capable of decisive. Action Ellen Williams of the Atlanta Police Foundation was filming protesters looking a little anxious as he did so. A statement on the defend theforestscenes.noblogs.org site concluded their report back with this sentiment quote. At this point we are in need of two main things more people to help support tree sets and defend the forest from destruction, and legal attempts to delay construction. More people to be on the ground in the woods. In the city you chaos. We need chaos. We like the right, the chaos that we like. That should be reason. You want to wear out the enemy and a lot of different ways. And the enemy is a lot of different people. The enemy is reassuring, the enemy is their subcontractors, the enemy is the police enemy is George Park. Georgia Power owns quote UN quote owns the power cut that divides both Entrenchment Creek and the opium side. There's a lot of different people, so if there's a lot of, and we also have a lot of different people involved in a lot of different ways. People living in the woods. Living in town. So in reality, people already know these things and it's already happening. We should be visiting the offices, we should be visiting these ******* at home, at their *** **** church. We should be visiting them in the forest. They should be. There should be no peace through me. And I believe that's how we can win, because we need to make it unpopular and unsavory and hopefully next to impossible for them to make these choices. Even though this is a small part of the forest they're just going to continue on to the next thing. I want to briefly go into some details about a method of protest that combines pressure to both physical and social capital in hopes of resulting material changes from businesses, corporations, or people in power. It features many of the actual tactics we've, in fact already discussed. Will refer to it as the Shaq method for reasons that will be shortly explained. House visits, targeted vandalism, phone calls, and hanging banners and backyards all have a place in this methodology. It's a focused drive to dissolve that safe political or corporate astral space that I talked about in the last episode. The Cryptic article contains a really good summary of the Shack method. So instead of just, like, regurgitating their explainer, I'm going to I'm just going to narrate certain sections of it, because that'll make my job easier, and I'm I'm a hack and a fraud, blah blah blah, quote. The goal is to hold those responsible for these projects personally liable for their decisions and the decisions of the companies they own. Because the entire system of rules and norms we live under dictates that. Exploiters, warlords, mass murderers. And those that destroy ecosystems must not face pressure at home as a consequence of the decisions that they make at work. This strategy is bound to be controversial. It rejects the entire logic of limited liability that forms the basis of corporate rule in our society. At the beginning of the 21st century, animal rights activists in the UK and the US set out to take down the biggest animal testing corporation on the Planet, Huntingdon Life Sciences. The campaign to stop Huntingdon Life Sciences was called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, or Shaq. It formally disbanded in 2014 and is best known for its period of ambitious international participation in the early 2000s. The methodology of this movement, which encompassed direct actions, symbolic. Protests, cultural events, sabotage, pranks and more included many features that had been since used in a wide range of campaigns. The overall strategy of Shaq involved mobilizing a few 100 people to maximize their effectiveness against a major enterprise by focusing only on their ability to function economically. The shack model is centered around tertiary targeting, IE isolating service providers from third party contracts in order to limit their ability to provide services to the client, which is the actual target. OK, now I'm just going to pause here because if that sounds confusing, let me let me briefly provide an example. So the actual target here would be the Atlanta Police Foundation, since they're the ones with plans to build a cop city. The police Foundation has contracted a few companies, brassfield and gory for one, and Reeves Young, so these companies are the service provider. The Shack model attempts to isolate the service provider so Reeves Young from all of their third party clients and contracts which will in the end go back to hurt the actual target which is the Atlanta Police Foundation. Back to crime, think the service provider. So in this case we was young, the service provider depends on many third parties. Third parties provide the service provider with insurance materials, equipment security, catering, cleaning, mail, service, data maintenance. And more. All of those third parties can be pressured to drop the service provider. Furthermore, the service provider is likely a company with more than one client, and those other clients can also be pressured to drop the provider. Any company or contractor that is able to move their money away from the service provider because they have other economic opportunities can be pressured to do so. Essentially, this strategy does not directly challenge the bottom line of any of the third party companies. It only isolates and demoralizes the service provider and therefore the end target. To date, it still remains unclear who is the service provider for the Blackhall Studios development, although that information will come out sooner than later. In considering the limits of the Shack strategy in actions outside of the forest, it might be more difficult for activists to maintain a sense of urgency. Targeting individuals at their offices and homes will chiefly bring out those who are excited about such confrontational methods, rather than those who prefer to maintain welcoming spaces of encounter to build treehouses to or to clean campsites. Cook for others to cultivate the kind of collective imagining that is needed to transform society. Also, if people fail to do proper research or mapping, activists could waste their time targeting minor institutions and companies that are unwilling or unable to drop their contracts. They could spend months facing down insignificant companies with many possible replacement subcontractors who, sorry, that was a lot. That was a big info dump, but I think it is useful information. So the goal isn't to sway companies with moralizing arguments, but to frame their association. With militarized policing or ecological destruction as a bad look that could hurt their reputation and ability to secure future clients. Combined with economic incentives inflicted on the service provider like access sabotage, the resulting targeted campaign attacking physical and social capital can lead to pressure on third parties to influence decision of the service provider on whether or not to stay on the project. Methodologies can be put to the test through practice and be judged by the outcome. The proposal to employ the Shaq strategy to defend the forest is just built on the simple hypothesis that if Reeves Young is forced to drop the contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The Atlanta Police Foundation investors will then lose the confidence that's required to find an adequate replacement and the project could stumble or fail. The same goes for the Blackhall project. If activists defeat Reeves Young by means of direct action and self organization. Even if the project finds a new contractor, sophistication and confidence that the movement will have developed in the process will likely help it evolve once again. Also like one thing that we stop people have figured out because like for the 1st 2. After the first two arsons, you could literally just walk up to during daylight up to the like area of Michelle Obama Park and like Taj, take pictures of like, have sex around, like make out with the construction equipment they've been burned and you could see the stickers of where they had rented these, like, construction equipment. Destruction equipment and like. After the first one it changed, there was no longer rented from the same company and after the second one it changed again. And there is reason to believe that with every arson or attack that they are changing construction of equipment companies because rental companies tend to not like it. Whenever they're equipment is destroyed, it cost them a lot of money and oftentimes they cannot afford. Hundreds of thousands of dollars going down the drain because of support, a plot project that is highly unpopular. Yeah. And the other thing that we're talking about with a modified, like our police and modifying itself is it's interesting because we're at this point, we're policing is highly unpopular. And so it's kind of hedging its bets and it's doing two things. First, it's calling itself like the social peace and justice cute Bunny Rabbit Center for your racist if you don't like us or whatever. And then it's also just like mask off, doubling down, buying that guns like, like, yeah, just becoming increasingly. Militarized, increasingly more violent and like moving mask off like an occupying force. So there's this split where there's no, and people are well aware of this. There's there's no, like, public chance of convincing. A lot of companies that this is wrong. Right. There's it's it's it's, well, it's very divided. So the people who are committed are very committed. There are ******* enemies and where they're enemies and that's it. But then there's other people who are doing this for economic reasons and kind of understand that policing is not cute, right, and that it's at least unpopular or going out of fashion to some degree and can make money in other ways. So yeah, it's this interesting thing where like being able to like. To fight battles for public opinion maybe doesn't super work, and all you have to do is kind of try to like, cut away the people who are supporting people who are ideologically committed to our destruction. And we are, you know, feel reciprocal. If you look at the photos of what was happening with Michelle Obama Park, the land swap site they were trying to build on, you can tell that heavy Yellow Equipment LLC of Marietta, GA stopped providing them equipment after like the first or the second time that their machines got lit on fire. And now it's alif, ALIF of I don't know where Georgia. So you know, these are photos that you can see like you can look at these communities. They just tell like like like if there's a photo attached like there is a traceable like trend of companies are dropping the **** out because they, for whatever reason, just cannot take the heat. No pun intended. On June 12th, 2020, while fully in the throes of nationwide revolt against police after the murder of George Floyd, 2 Atlanta police officers killed Raychard Brooks, a black man who had been sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a Wendy's. Not long after, the restaurant was burnt to the ground by determined crowds. In the time period between June 2020 to the end of the year, more than 200 Atlanta police officers left their jobs, including the chief of police, local sheriff's deputies, state patrolmen and transit cops also resigned during the year of the Uprising at a higher than average rate. As the entire system of policing and capitalism faced a crisis of legitimacy, corporations, business owners, landlords, business associations and international real estate companies demand a public pacification and a reassurance of a future with stable consumerism. Profit incentive and police need each other in a symbiote like relationship. I'll I'll do one of my last crimethink quotes here quote forces in local and federal government business associations, police departments, and armed militias have continuously worked to make sure a popular uprising does not reoccur. A large part of the institutional reaction to the 2020 popular uprising has focused on managing public perception, industrial interests and private investment. Companies have conducted influence campaigns using local news outlets, 40% of which are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group A right wing news organization. Between Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray, Taiga, and Tribune this coordinated reframing of events has damaged the way that many sectors of the television viewing public perceive the 2020 revolt and its consequences. In the wake of the uprising, a false narrative circulated to the effect that police, while demoralized and underfunded, cannot control the crime waves currently sweeping the country. This orchestrated narrative has shaped the imaginations of suburban whites, small business owners, and many urban progressives. The crime wave framework implied that police departments around the country had in fact been defunded or had their powers curtailed, and were consequently unable to assure social peace or free enterprise. In reality, the vast majority of police departments received an annual increase in their budgets, as they normally do. If anything, they accrued more power following the events of 2020. So it's no coincidence that the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Atlanta Police Department are pushing to build a militarized urban warfare training center in the wake of the 2020 uprisings. By leveraging that crime wave narrative and the fears of future social unrest, they want to have the tools to bring down the inevitable upcoming revolts for racial, environmental and economic justice. And now more than ever, including reproductive justice, Cop city is leading the charge as a part of a new effort. To adapt American policing strategies to our new era of societal decay and the ever crumbling that will define this century as we face the escalating consequences of industrialization and climate change. Another we like. Important thing to look at with this also is like when you look at the George Floyd Uprising and the prices it brought in policing, when they realized that, oh holy **** people are so angry about this that they will pose a threat to the sovereignty of the state, which is the first time that has happened in the extremely long time when that finally happened. The state. The morale of police departments around the country was broken. Cops everywhere. We're like it was a demoralizing thing. And when you think about cops as an occupying force, as an occupying military force. Thinking about the fact that people poke them around is really important, and then thinking about this place. As they intend to build. The training facility to increase morale, which is a classic military tactic of create cool and interesting ways to train your soldiers to do a murder, is like is a classic military tactic. And when you think you begin to think about this as social or when you begin to think about this as not just a struggle against Cop city, but like as a struggle for like. Disabling and destroying the police. When you think about this as a material struggle against the occupying forces that are the police, this becomes like way more contextual effect. I feel that is the best way to contextualize this movement. So 1 interesting thing is like after Richard Brooks is murdered and the two cops involved were subsequently charged. What was it, 600 tops went on sick out hundreds of hundreds. And their morale is broken. Our lamp, please, has always been understaffed for like as long as I've known. Not under staff. Like any media propaganda spin stand repaired standards. But like every single day, they are facing backlogs in every zone where they cannot answer calls. And that's a good thing. This is a war of attrition, where their current training facilities have broken totally tacky pipes, have unmanaged operable sinks. Yeah, probably have. Undeniably miserable conditions. Their cars are out, their cars are continually on their last legs. And we that's that is a path to abolitionism. Making it so. It is so undesirable to be a cop in this city, or any city, that no one would dare do it. It is crucial that police are not the only ones that seek to evolve their tactics for a new era. And moving beyond the kind of nonviolent action that's become so common during protests during the Trump era and the poked green scare and even like post occupy, there is this looking for a new form of anarchist or radical resistance. Really emphasize the learning things here is that this struggle like took all the different rulebooks, tore them up, set them on fire, and used the ashes for their ******* like. Everyone here is learning things. People who have been been doing things a long ******* time are here and learning new things. We're not just like tearing up and like destroying the robots where like. Really collages out of them we are, we are. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And like, put them like, they're like 12 and not make logical side of them. And Mike is trying to create this like weird paper machine match of an experimental path into the future. And like we wouldn't, we say we are experimenting with new forms of revolt, new new tactics, new strategies. We truly mean there aren't existing models to do what we're doing. We are writing. Has been. Yeah, we **** ** sometimes, but we've also got some really cool **** happening. **** that hasn't happened in 20 years is happening and should the hasn't happened offer is happening here. I think that's like a really. The really important thing to touch on is that like. Much of the. How much of the like Ecodefense ship that's happened in North America for? Quite a while has like not done, you know, or at least not released communiques about like. **** that happens here seemingly every couple weeks. Hey. The **** here is. Crazy and wild country dreams. It's also scary and hard and traumatizing. And it's beautiful and terrifying and like. Yeah, that sounds great. You should come. Yeah, this is a step away from us actually evolving out of the. I'll look at this as like a huge step in what? Land defense looks like. After we have. After we have faced greenscale repression and now we are moving past the post greenscale repression movements and figuring out how to move forward and regardless of whether the site plans and are really repressive like bootstrap throats like situation. I don't think anyone should ever stop experimenting. I don't think people should go back to the old ways. I don't think that we should be resigned to not experiment. I think that everyone's like we are in a situation where there is no future there, like the collapse is now. We're probably not going to avoid 1.5 degrees warming. Our police are only further militarizing. And the like reality of resistance is that we that we desperately need experimentation. Yeah, if if there was a winning strategy that was proven to be effective then. It would have, it would have been effective and there we would have a winning strategy. There's a popular name in the forest which is the are you winning son meme? Except instead of are you winning song that says are you experiencing the joy of attacks on? And I think that is an important one. The same way capacity is a part of the new evolution of American policing, defend the Atlanta Forest can be seen as kind of trailblazing for future movements, a look at how they might develop post the George Floyd protests. For my last and final Crimethink quote quote, This campaign represents a crucial effort to chart new paths forward in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion. Linking the defence of the land that sustains us with the struggle against police, the movement opposing these developments, mobilizing around the watchwords, defend the forest and stop cop city have passed through several phases of experimentation, using a wide array of tactics and strategies to keep pace with the current course of events. It represents an important effort to revitalize ecodefense and police abolition strategies in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion. So, considering the possible wide-ranging impacts of both the evolution of policing and the evolution of resistance tactics, the defend the Atlanta force movement is extremely relevant to all people who want to improve the world, whether or not they live in Atlanta. Atlanta has. For a very long time been a testing ground for new surveillance tech. And like in like experimenting with new forms of struggle here in Atlanta, there are things that. Not only are we in many ways on the front lines of experimenting with new tactics and integrating new strategies and how they work, but we're also on the front lines of like different kinds of both like. Like in person and digital forms of of repression that don't have to be worried about other places and like, it also provides a proving ground for ways to struggle specifically against those forms of surveillance and understanding the different ways that. Sometimes. The most effective thing in protecting yourself from repression isn't some super high tech ****. It's a ski mask, a pair of gloves, and not bringing your phone. And like, people don't seem to like, think about that, but that's yeah. So Speaking of surveillance, we actually have like, not we? I don't claim that the police here in the state here has, like, the. Video animation system, which I believe is like one of the like equations video integration center where they take where businesses and homeowners are like green cameras can volunteer their video surveillance equipment to be plugged into a network. That can be monitored and pulled up at anytime by the police in a downtown location. And. They. And that is like one of the largest surveillance network systems in the world, I believe. And it was actually leading the charge in like new forms of surveillance and other cities are looking at this as a model of how to how to better survive their own cities. With Child recently makes one police foundation trying to create their own little mini city a very interesting prospect in terms of like establishing new, you know, this means this mentioned before in terms of establishing new ideas and how to take policing forward into twenty 20s, twenty 30s after we've had these wave of of social justice like uprisings uprisings for Black Lives Matter. You know, I mean not many places actually got defunded, but the propaganda has to be different. And like the way the police optics work, it definitely needs to be changed. From their perspective, they're trying to have them be changed. One of the strongest things I feel like came out of this movement really, really close ahead was our ability to have the game on like the narrative and then never being able to recuperate that narrative is their plan was this Institute for Social Justice is a new way of training police to. Would be better or like not murder people as much and. Break more refined. And I don't want more refined like police that like. Partner quote the right people, or be it the right people or cage the right people. And that's not my desire. I want end to please him. Yeah. I think there's a lot of projects happening in the forest. And, you know, I also just want to emphasize, like, I'm not from Atlanta, but I feel like it's really important for me to be here. You know, I think a lot of people who felt inspired by the George Floyd uprising, like this is an attempt to recuperate. I've said this many times, this attempt for the police to recuperate from that, and I'm trying to finish what we started. I also think that we need to understand that this isn't just about it. You know, like one of the buildings that they're trying to build and like one of the points of this training facility is that it is like a hub in the same way of like with a with a movie theater, the same way they're trying to make it lighter as hub, right? It's there's an infrastructure for being a hub from shipping and stuff like that. And so now they're trying to make it this economic hotel more white collar way. And so they're trying to make it a hub for police in Atlanta, but also to train police to do **** **** and to mutate like nationally. And I know that the police from the, you know, whatever city I live in, are probably going to come here and go back and **** that up. So I'm trying to make sure that they can't come here and that, you know, police are demoralized in every city and they're having trouble in every city. And this isn't just about the LAPD. If you live pretty much anywhere on the East Coast, there's a high chance that your police are going to come here and then go back to your house and **** you up. So come here and make sure they can't. And the other thing I want to say is, like. Yeah, they want to make this a training facility for police right now. It is a training facility for anarchists. If you come here, I promise you, you will be alive with more courage and with more skills and knowing a lot of ******* people who are really ******* down all over the country. And I think it's worth it. I wanted to jump in and say like this is about you. An hour or two hours South of here is the school of the Americas. You might have heard of it. It's here in Georgia. It's where a lot of awful ******* dictators and their henchman learned how to do really awful ****. Bunch of war crimes. And here in the city of Atlanta. A local school, the largest, the largest university in the state, Georgia State University, hosts something called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, or Gilly, which is where they and the IDF get together to train local police forces here in Atlanta and around the country. And if you don't think that cops city is going to play a huge role in your Police Department, learning from the IDF how to beat you up. You have another thing coming. You should come here to Atlanta and you know what's going on because this is about everyone here like this, about the whole country. They are coming to Atlanta. To learn how to brutalize people, and it's going to take all of us to stop it. A funny thing about this project is that there's these sort of dual intersections and dual microcosms. On one side there is the intersection of policing, gentrification, racism, ecological destruction, and climate change, and on the other side there's the intersection between the tactics of urban city protest and rural ecodefense. But there's also this dual microcosm on the side of the state. They're trying to construct this police facility with a mock city to train in microcosm for protest suppression and practice urban combat against people who live in American cities. And on the people side, there's this microcosm not only for how resistance movements can evolve post 2020, but more importantly for the people involved in the struggle, a microcosm for how you can live a life free of the oppressive societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose. I think another really interesting thing about this being like such an ungovernable space is that because it's ungovernable, because it's impossible to control it allows us to create these like new ways of relating to travel there that can't happen. Other places like where else are like people in their everyday lives just can be a little walk around as gender, ****** as they want and like just. It's fine like. You know there is a clear basher comes into these ******* woods like. It's about time because literally everyone here is queer. Like we don't. That's The thing is like, when we exist in these spaces we this ungovernable way, we like our our like creating mini versions of the society we want to see at large. Yeah, this thing I want to talk to something I want to talk about in terms of like, the microcosm macrocosm idea of after 2020 uprising, looking for new paths forward. The depending on a forest thing can be viewed as this micro, like this microcosm of how we can approach. Different struggles going into the 2020 is going to twenty 30s and stuff because yeah, like it is like this small version of what we want. There's also the whole idea of like what I've seen here in the forest more closely resembles like an actual temporary autonomous zone than like the chase ever did in terms of like people actually like actually living free. Actually living like not relying on like city water, like like, not like not living in like the in the downtown metro area. It's like it's an actual free space. People can be queer and be all of the things and climb trees and talk with the deer and like, that's people are actually allowed to do that, like this. There's not all of the stigma that even a thing like Chaz had, like, so many problems, right? Like extremely, extremely #problematic in terms of how that resulted. And yeah, this is such a microcosm of like, like an autonomous area where people are able to do those things. Also kind of want to talk about like they're like. Our ideas of safety and security don't reside in like. The ideas of say a safety or security, for us it doesn't really resides in our trust in ourselves and each other. It resides in like we actually keep each other safe, we have each other's backs we like will fight for each other and any threat to any one of us is like taken seriously. We have this like intimacy, criminal intimacy that like, allows us to. Build more genuine relationships with high highs and low lows than anything ever could, and like the deadening that society puts on us this like. Chemically induced. Regulated median of Cray and terrible is that's not what we live. Yes, some days here it sucks to wake up and everything you own is wet and you gotta go **** in the hole, but it's flooded. But also some faith things here are ******* awesome and I get to wake up to the birds calling and go like have a party with my friends. I don't like exist here and away. They use like comprehensible or legible to like a wider like society. I don't exist in a way that people look at this and be like, ah, that's what you need. But I have never been happier than when I've been in the woods with people I trust and care about and know have my back people. You won't have to worry about working to pay their water bill because you can go just get the things you need from places you don't have to pay for it. And, like, you don't have to worry about all of these things, all of these societal pressures. There's not this constant threat of, oh, I lose my job, oh, all those things, all those things. All these mental constructs that control us aren't there anymore because we've built a world it doesn't. But I am not in the slightest and I think that's like a really powerful thing that like. We've already met our own needs and so we can fight back through these. Beautiful fiery ways planted that like, allow us to just. Experience things that like have been stolen from us. Operations, yeah, Ozma say we're not safe, but we're free. And I think that anyone who makes that decision is an active decision to not be safe, but to be free. I may not like, but by definition I'll ride for them because I think that decision here, we're now nearing the end of the episode, but before I finish, I need to go back to talking about tactics for a bit and end with some actual good news. From January 2022 to present time of recording, there's been an increase in solidarity attacks in cities. Across the country, some targeting Reeves, Young and long engineering equipment in other states, a third party service providers of contracted construction companies, or locations and offices of corporate sponsors of the Atlanta Police Foundation. This past March, 6 machines owned by Reeves Young, including two large excavators and a bulldozer, were destroyed in Flowery Branch, GA, the online communique reads. Quote so long as you continue to contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation for the destruction of the South. That to forest and the construction of a cop city in its place. Know that your equipment is not safe, your offices are not safe. Your homes are not safe. Unless your company chooses to pull out of the Atlanta Police Foundation's cop city project of its own volition, we will undermine your profits so severely that you'll have no choice but to drop the contract. UN quote. Subsequent solidarity attacks have happened in Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, and Highland. Chicken to name a few. Many of these attacks were targeted at Atlas Technical Consultants who own many smaller companies such as Lung Engineering, which has done work with Reeves Young and Brassfield and Gory for the Cops City project in the vein of Shaq style methods. This past April, on the 9th, a website calledstopreevesyoung.com launched onto the interwebs. The site listed some of the various third party clients and subcontractors under use, young construction and ways to contact them. The voice concern about their relation to the deforestation and this urban warfare construction project, as well as including the names and addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their affiliates. On the day I was set to leave Atlanta and say goodbye to the forest for the time being, activists got word that Reeves Young construction might be dropping out of the project. This would obviously be a big, big win and an indication of the possible effectiveness of the Shack method combined with sabotage and the forest encampment tactics. At a stakeholders meeting for the Kopsia project the next day, it was publicly confirmed that Reeves Young will not continue work on the new Police Training Center. In the public statement addressing Reeves Young's lack of future involvement, the Atlanta Police Foundation tried to frame the situation as Reeves Young simply have quote finished their role in the project. This is a laughable deception as Reeves Young is one of Atlanta's major construction firms and has even built massive quote UN quote public safety facilities in the past. They do not merely do preliminary subcontracting survey work, they work on projects from start to finish taking lead contracting roles. It was speculated that Reeves Young itself may have been the main subcontractor hired to do complete construction of Cobb City by Brassfield and Gory, who have more established ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting from the stop Reeves Young website quote, the Atlanta Police Foundation would have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do nothing more than hire A bulldozer and walk alongside long engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes and did some soil testing. Police and their corporate backers don't want to let it be known that a focused group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the cop city construction. While the Atlanta Police Foundation tries to save face, we are celebrating a major victory, pressuring a main contractor out of the project. We are pleased that the movement has built up so much momentum and that the COP city development continues to face setbacks because of the intelligent actions of regular people. However, the struggle continues. Brasfield and Gorrie, another large general contractor, remains with the project. A Georgia Open records request from April confirmed via paper trail that the Atlanta Police Foundation has been working on the Cop city project with Brassfield and Gory, another Major General contractor in the Southeast region of the United States. Brassfield and Gory is an LLC and a multibillion Dollar General contractor ranked as a top contractor in the Southeast by engineering news record. Based on recent Atlanta Police Foundation emails required through public records, we can now assume that brassfield and gory act as the sole contractor for COP City. Quoting again from the stop Reeves Young website quote, brassfield and gory are dependent on subcontractors to complete their projects. Now they must hire A new entire set of subcontractors in order to build a cop city. We believe it is in their best interests for Brasfield and Gorrie to follow the lead of Reeves Young and drop Atlanta Police Foundation. As a client, rather than remaining complicit in the destruction of the forest, it is up to all of us to make that clear to them. We can pressure, brassfield and gory out of custody by complicating their ability to do business. This does not have to be limited to the COP city project. There are various construction projects and 3rd party service providers are numerous. If Brasfield and Gorrie begin to feel like they must choose between all of their contracts and their cop city contract, we are confident that they will choose the former by working to convince the subcontractors, consulting firms, surveyors, architects, etcetera around the country that brass. Building glory are not a good business investment. We can make it easier for the construction company to do the right thing and dump the Atlanta Police Foundation for Good. This has been an incredible period of momentum and research, but nothing is over yet. Now that we have made a decisive victory, it is important to remain more focused than ever. In the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue pressuring all of the contractors associated with the project to create economic incentives for them to simply move their time and resources to other endeavors. The stop Reeves Young website will continue to serve as an educational hub for this ongoing campaign End Quote. On top of confirming that Reeves Young was dropping out of the project, a few other interesting pieces of information came out at the recent stakeholders meeting held on April 26th. Allegedly, there will be a bid for the next contractors or subcontractors in the coming weeks and that will be publicly announced. It was also announced during the meeting that the cops city planners will keep construction timelines secret and may surround the construction site and future facility with an unwanted fence in response to the quota law breaking protesters, Atlanta Assistant police chief and site security Chief Darren Schierbaum said quote. We are working with DeKalb County to address any criminal acts related to trespassing and vandalism, UN quote. He also stated that police were also concerned with protesters targeting those who work on the project at other locations. Here's an interesting note from our Forest Defender pals on how the Atlanta Police Department function and are allowed to operate while inside the old Atlanta prison farm and Entrenchment Creek Park. This is something that's true of city police departments in general, but as soon as a cop. Is. Out of like streets and things like that, that cop is uncomfortable and like cops here are carrying 2030 pounds of gear on them at all times. And not only are they carrying that much gear, but. They spend most all day sitting, running around in the sitting, in a car and like. You know, back up not only doesn't want to chase you through the woods, but they also probably aren't capable of it. And aside from the obvious, like, you know, their infrastructure issues, then being away from their cars, not being on the streets, having all of their gear. We're also not in the city of Atlanta in this forest. We're an unincorporated DeKalb County, which means Atlanta Police Department doesn't have legal jurisdiction as police here. They only have legal jurisdiction as agents of the City of Atlanta because the city of Atlanta owns this property, which is outside of the city. So in any time when they're conducting an arrest. They have to have the cab county Police Department officers present with them. They're there can be an Atlanta Police Department that has been major, like one of their huge, like high ranks who has no legal authority here except to represent the city. And that relationship is kind of like tenuous at best but very nature house. They hate each other. Yeah. And you know, so if you're, if you're headed in the town, like, bear in mind that is a huge place. Drive a wedge because they they ******* hate each other. Yeah, no, there's like there's like one thing one time where like a lamp. Police officers right inside the forest with like a specific goal in mind and Kalb County police cruisers. Not only did DeKalb police not want to gather cruisers and go into the forest because they have, they didn't care. They didn't want to do this. So be alert. Police were screaming into their radio saying, did this person, they're walking out of the forest, give this person The Walking out the forest? And it would just be like 5 or 10 minutes before the cab police light cruisers to just roll down the road. And like, you know, there were like, people like, ran into the woods and like, ran from the capabilities. Like, we're like, I'm not going into this world, these words, and I'm also not calling to let the alarm, please. To let them know that this person just ran from me into the woods, because then I'll have to actually go in after them. Also during the April 26th stakeholder meeting, security Chief Scheerbaum announced that the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agreed to an assistance request in mid-april from Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant and will be assigned to the site while attempting to work with neighborhood watch groups. He noted that quote. We look forward to working with those agencies to ensure that this is a safe project that is occurring here and addressing any criminal acts that may be occurring on site to try to stop the project from proceeding. UN quote. The Co chair of the Stakeholder Advisory committee, Sharon Williams, invoked the term eco terrorism as relating to the forest defense, marking the first time that word has been used by the government officials to refer to this batch of protests. She also thanked the cop city planners for quote transparency in explaining why they cannot be transparent on the construction timeline. Emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta, obtained via Public Records requests, do give a possible look into the future of the development. In a January 2022 e-mail, police foundation representative Alan Williams said that we quote plan on enabling work possibly in the May 2022 and June 2022 timeframe. Our project will last until the last quarter of 2023 and our contractors are currently working on an overall site logistics and safety plan, UN quote. Although at the time, their contractors still included Reeves Young, so there's no telling how accurate that timeline is now. Other emails detailed plans for Homeland Security to obtain ring camera subscriptions to monitor, quote criminal activity at the new Academy footprint, UN quote. In general, when involved in any level of protest, no matter of the alleged legality, security culture considerations should always be among people's top priorities, especially with more eyes being directed to the defend the Atlanta Forest project. Each person should be responsible for themselves, and like I think that that type of action you're interested in taking should severely inform the type of personal security precautions that that you're taking. I think that's that's been a recurring theme as the movement builds. There are folks that come in to movement not having heard the term security culture upset or whatever you want to call it. And so that can be really jarring for folks that are just first trying to get involved. But people pick it up surprisingly quick once you have built as a community like norms and customs around. Is this a phones on our phones off meeting? Are we talking about this on signal? Is the call for this action going out on social media? Are we just sharing this amongst friends where that hadn't really been a thing and where frankly a lot of people face significant repression here in Atlanta during the uprisings because of security culture decisions that were made? I think that any security culture is being built here that. Where it didn't really exist before, or at least wasn't widespread before, he's going to survive long past this movement. I think. One of the biggest aspects of these things is like. The social aspects of it and like like the generalizing of the norm of. If someone answers you vaguely. And seems uninterested in to me and continuing the conversation. Just understanding that they have your best interests in heart when they don't want you to know and like. Quite frankly, you just can't accidentally share information you don't have. And so like. You know, when we sit here in these woods and people say, you know, like you say, like, so you know, you know, where have you been, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, oh, you know, they are places or something like that. I just don't ask questions and I understand that. I don't. Just. Not only do I not need to know, but I probably don't want to know. I'm like. You know, when it comes to like more like material, technical things, those are important, but like. The social aspects of security culture are so, so much more important than the technical aspects. It's like. You know, everybody talks about security culture as like, take your phone out of the room, but like. You know, if you take the phone out of the room and talk about doing crazy **** with complete strangers, you don't, you know and have a reason to trust them and like. Coming here to Atlanta like. If you want to do crazy ****. Don't you know? If you want to do if you're coming to Atlanta. Let me rephrase that. If you're coming to Atlanta and you want to do crazy **** like. You have to think about like. How to do that in a Safeway or in Safeway as possible? You know, don't. Don't come to us and be like. Hey, I've met you before, but like, do you want to go do some federal felonies? Because no. I don't. I don't want to know that you're doing that either way. We have. You wanna do crazy ****? That's cool. Just like, I don't wanna know you did it. And like, if you're, like, coming here with the intention of creating, like. With the intention of, like, doing **** because it's like, cool and fun. If you're coming here with the intention of, like, I want to gain social capital because I did crazy things like. Give me a reason. Like? If you if you want to do crazy **** and you do want to get there, find your closest friends, plan a road trip, and don't tell anyone. In a recent interview, Atlanta Police Foundation President and CEO Dave Wilkinson estimates that defend the forest, quote UN quote group members have done hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to utility equipment and has brought up plans to add a fence around the entirety of the site as construction begins saying and anyone on the site will be arrested. And as we move forward the enforcement will become stricter and stricter. UN quote. Also stated in an interview is that quote the Police Foundation also hopes to build. Separate museums on site dedicated to police officers and the labor prison that was once located there. So. Ah, that's that's what the kids call mask off moment of building a dedicated museum to cops and the Labor Prison, AKA Slave Labor Prison. Anyway, the first phase of the project had the initial 90 million price tag attached, with taxpayers being forced to pay $30 million of that. And it's still unclear what the final cost of the facility is slated to be, or what the estimated operating costs are, or really how many phases of construction they really plan on doing. The past few weeks, the site of cops in the woods has become a more and more common occurrence, whether to do scouting or just apparently detonating explosives for funsies at their current makeshift shooting range like they did a few days ago. One morning when I was there I woke up to people yelling cops in the woods, which by the way is a very effective substitute for caffeine in terms of making you very awake and alert quite early in the morning. And then while running through the forest I saw a beautiful deer and a hopping rabbit. So nice clash of of feelings and sensations there. In terms of closing sentiments based on conversations and observations I had from my brief time in the woods, it's this play to your strengths. Don't play by the enemies rules. Utilize the intersection of urban city based tactics and resources while taking inspiration from classic Forest based ecodefense. Attacking from the cover of the woods and ensuring that the terrain is as unwelcoming as possible to vehicular machinery can help by time for rapid response popular mobilization from people living in the city if and when that time comes. Hey y'all, be careful coming down key Rd. They throwing bottles at the police and all their bottles and smoke bombs so be careful they in the woods. Throwing at the police cars and stuff like that, so. We appreciate it, yeah. And despite like the defensive nature of defending the forest, there still is a large amount of making sure that as often as possible you can do the prep work to set the terms of engagement so that they're fighting on your terms. You're not always complying to theirs, which is can be useful for defensive stuff. Obviously, the whole aspect of defending a force like this that you, I think. The offenders can have this almost like spectral quality of like, cops don't know where people are, what they've built, what's in the forest, what's in the woods. And it's like, spooky. Like, you like, you don't know who's who's up in a tree house, you don't know who's behind what tree, you don't know what things are in the woods. And that spectral quality of the forest defense is a really interesting. Aspect of it that you don't see and you don't see that and then like pipeline protests as much, you don't really see that for like protests in the city because the city very much is like a more of like a cops terrain. So I really do like that aspect of like. Cops are kind of scared to go in the woods because they're spooky. They have openly testified, like in court testimony that said that when this forest defender was arrested. The police officer that gave his statement to the judge was shaking, physically shaking because he was so afraid from being yelled at like that was all that happened was a bunch of protesters were yelling at them and he was shaking. The police are really dependent on their infrastructure. They are dependent on all of that kit that they carry around. They are not mobile. They are meant to be attached to that squad car and every further step they take away from that they are more and more uncomfortable and. When they look around and realize they're in the middle of the ******* woods. That's terrifying for them. And that needs to be, like, taken advantage of. And it is. What's that like they got their drones and their police helicopters have problem even with their thermal tracking of seeing through the canopy would start like, and I want to say like it it was really funny to me that in that like, it was said that the protesters were screaming, we know where you live. We know where you live. We're coming. We're coming. Yeah. Which is the whole the whole ghost thing because mean. I mean in terms of, in terms of thermal stuff, I brought a thermal camera of mine here and the woods are very hard to see through with my thermal camera. I cannot see more than like 20 feet away. I've, I've tested it on people. It's that's a super interesting aspect. And yeah like it's the whole like Ferngully Princess, Princess Mononoke thing of like when people come out of the woods wearing ski masks, like that's freaky. Like it's like we are you like you can be the thing that goes Boo in the night like that actually that is you. And that's something that should be taken advantage of. When there's people invading the forest and trying to destroy it, I think this is a really important thing to touch on. Is that? For a lot of us, even though like. Mayors have been like socialized to think of the dark and the night and the woods as this scary thing. This is where I feel the most safe this is. If you give me a bunch of camel and like send me off into the woods. There is no where I'm going to feel more safe and more capable both of safety and. When I'm out here, I feel like I can do anything you can. You give me a bunch of words, a bunch of hills like. There's so much we can do because we're not in this position of. You know, entering hostile territory to, you know, do things. This is territory that we control and this is territory that we are using to fight back. And we're weaponizing not just, you know, the cops fear, but we're what, like the monies and the terrain itself, we're weaponizing the trees were weaponizing, the hills were weaponizing the ruins and we're recognizing everything here as like. Literally a thing to use to attack the state. If you give me a rich line, I can hide from the cops better than any ******* you know, high tech thermal scattering Julie soup is ever going to give me, you know? Out here, you don't need a bunch of fancy **** to, like, engage in conflict with the state. You don't need thermal cameras and all that. You can walk into a military surplus store and buy, you know. For 50 bucks you can buy everything you need to like. To just about whatever you want out here. And that's like. That's like a really important and beautiful thing is it's not. It's not hard. To do what we're doing. You just have to breakdown the mental barriers and do it. Yeah, we we do our best to protect the trees, and the trees protect us too. It's it's cool living here. And it's like, obviously something everyone most people probably would think about is, yeah, how important wild spaces are. But it's cool to really ******* feel it. And it's like, like, yeah, this this place is super important because of how it interacts with the ecosystem and how it filters the water and that it's a safe haven for a lot of, like, really beautiful animals and plants. But also this place is important because wild spaces are ******* uncontrollable and I want to live in an uncontrollable way. And, like, you need those things, and it is. It's really cool that this is a wild space. It's also a forest in a city, which is cool. It's ******* weird. Like, there's there's city people who come here who are ******* weird and do weird **** and it's sick and, like, it is an uncontrolled space. And, like, sometimes that means that there's, like, ******* **** chemicals that are, like, ******* plants up, but also sometimes. That means there's people who like, are doing things that are free and doing things they couldn't do in the city and. It doesn't matter if I like it or not. It makes me, it makes me happy to just know that those people can act on their desires. And yeah, it's not always ******* convenient or good. And sometimes I end antagonistic relationships with that because it conflicts with my desire. But there's no mediation and there's, there's, there's no one getting in between. And yeah, it's just it's really important. And I think like. The the slogan that people say of not was it not one tree, not one blade of grass. Like, it's like an inspirational thing, but it's also like a strategy here. Like, it's like a tactical assertion that is important for us. Like, yeah, it's like this for us. And these wild spaces are essential not just for us to physically stop the police, but like essential to be an anarchist, like if there are not wild spaces, spaces that. They they can't put security cameras up here because there's no electricity and the trees are too dense for solar panels and they get smashed anyway. You know, like, it's important to have those things. If there's not places like that, there's not places where you even like and and so that for itself is cool. And the other thing is just living here with the ******* animals, like. It's cool, the deer. If you want to find a good hiding spot in the forest, pay attention to where the ******* deer sleep. They sleep in different places most nights. You won't **** them up as long as you don't get the exact same one. They're sleeping and they're really ******* hard to find. Same thing with the coyotes, like. Same thing with the snakes. And like, it's just very cool until I get to observe and live with all these animals. You know. There's an owl. There's barrel in search of ******* screaming 5:00 o'clock every day. It's like a nice little marker. And that's for me. That's better than you know, looking at my watch, it's pretty cool. This leads us up to our present day and the upcoming week of action in Atlanta, GA, happening from Sunday, May 8th to Sunday, May 15th. If you are anywhere near the Atlanta area, you have no reason to not check it out. It's a week's worth of events, spanning from early in the morning to late into the evening. Every day for seven days you can find the calendar of events on defend the Atlanta forest.com, and if you are not near Atlanta, I would still recommend you make your way there. Post haste if you are able to, whether that's during the week of action or later on down the line. More. Boots on the ground is almost always A+. Here's some more info on the upcoming week of action from May 8th through May 15th. So generally in the past, the past two weeks of actions have been like really above ground, really like. Getting people comfortable for is getting people into the forest, like community events like. And just like public gatherings and permits, skill shares, other stuff like that and I believe that this one like will likely have a lot of those events. They also believe that like due to the nature of what's going on. That it's much more urgent that people come in and. Creator bring down ideas from now on and science around desires and yeah. We can imagine it's all, it's going to be weird. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be all the things. I think there's going to be family friendly. We lack hugging trees, kind of shoot when excited for that and I think there's going to be some like, what the **** is going on? In the words kind of, here's a bunch of cops kind of shoot. Obviously we don't know what's really going to happen, but anyone that has been reading stuff without, man, I wanna go through down with the crazies. You should come and do that. And we have some stuff to share and hopefully there will be so many people in there that don't know how to deal with it. They're problem down here is the Atlanta police force. There is a lot of them, but honestly they're also they're stressed out and they are run. What's it called that run dry? Respect them. They really they don't know how to deal with all this would ship from ship away from them, talking about they don't know what to do. They're not totally prepared. I think it's going to be a really fun and crazy **** show, and we want you all to come to our show, show in a good way. I know you shouldn't use those words, but in reality, nobody actually knows what's going to happen. We know what we're going to do. We have plans that people can plug into some stuff you can bring your kids to you and some stuff you should not bring your kids to. And there will be more. To be honest with you really got to just be there in person because there's some, you can't put everything on Instagram. We're doing our best to like communicate to folks what's going on down here, but there's just some things you've got to come. To. Whatever we can action. It's always a legal action, but this is like we're helping people get really turned on. For this week of action from maybe we ought to become a roving nomadic war machine together. That would be the dream. So you have a thing in your hometown where the **** is going on or your territory, and we nomadic war machine over two years back and we just keep doing that would be cool. A few resources that some of the force defenders wanted people to know about is first, obviously defend the Atlanta forest.com, which has the week of action calendar to keep up on news regarding the movement. You can follow them on Twitter and Instagram at defend the Atlanta Forest or defend ATL Forest. There is the forest Justice Defense Fund at opencollective.com/forest- justice- defense- fund where people can donate to support the work of the broad coalition dedicated to saving the forest. There is of course a stop Reeves young.com which has information on subcontractors and 3rd party service providers relating to the cops city construction. Very useful even just for simple calling campaigns. The website. Scenes.noblogs.org hosts other news relating to the movement's anonymous communiques and stuff like maps of the area and random other useful information resources for info and guides relating to direct action. There's a website, titledwarriorup.noblogs.org, and people can go there, or to a warriorup.noblogs.org/guides for various interesting information, I'll say, and that last one is really best viewed. On tour with via the Tor Browser, just as a heads up. Also probably with like a VPN and I don't know anyway. Be be careful with that last one. But all all of these all of these sites will be LinkedIn, the show notes. The future lies in your hands. You have more freedom than you know. If you can find the unconventional ways of expressing it, see you on the other side. And I'll end with a word from our forest defender friend. There's no future. Dramatic. One machine together and that as well. Live. Yeah, hopefully we're gonna stop the police training facility. I think we really are looking forward to people, hopefully some people sticking around after the week of action because we are hoping that. It doesn't die down too much to the point where a smaller entity than that was here for week of action gets attacked. We would love it if some of you would stay stay away and exactly that if we can happen here. I wasn't even built there. That's funny and I'll fix it. Could happen where you live and maybe we can just keep. The idea is we share our skills, we make ourselves obsolete. No one should be integral enough to the movement that you can't that offer leave and can't continue. People should be reading manual, sharing skills, telling stories, howling at the moon to be doing all this stuff. To make each other. Just aware of the different things that are possible for us to win, because maybe we don't. Have all the guns and the steel and the gold, but if we have enough people like being creative and doing some guerrilla **** we can get a lot done. And at the end of the day, if you have, you can do you have to be careful about how many hats you rang if you don't know about the hand. See, that's a long time ago. Now look that up there where there are really great community organizers, but they were wearing too many hats. It was the first time. The Patriot Act. New laws after 911 was like utilized on people and a lot of it didn't stick. But if you what we really need is more faceless saboteurs, because honestly, if they. That's what we need many people would be. There's just in reality there's not enough people willing to do network. It looks like there's an uptick in that behavior, which is great, but be safe. Be smart. Back to monitor active little. And that's that's what we need by many find there's a lot of people that. Are willing to do above ground staff. There's a lot of people that like want to be known. And that's great, but we have enough for that. We need something else. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for. It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com/sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. Hey there. I'm Scott rank, host of the podcast history unplugged. Now, it really is a dream come true to get paid to talk about history without all the stress while still being able to make a living. And I did it with Spreaker from iheart. Not only did they make it super easy to monetize my podcast, but ad revenue is 3 to four times higher with spreaker than with any other host I've worked with. So if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try visitspreaker.com, that's spreaker.com get paid to talk about the things you love. 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