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Resistance Forms as Trump Takes Power
346 Plays1 month ago
In our following episode, we speak with folks around the country about this unfolding reality. First, we catch up with Mia Wong, a journalist at It Could Happen Here, a daily podcast on Cool Zone Media about everyday resistance and the current crisis, then we speak with a participant in the publishing collective CrimethInc, about the emerging cracks in the current crisis and what this means about how we can respond, and finally we speak to folks in Olympia, WA and North Carolina about recent "Festival of Resistance" events that were organized in the lead up to Trump's inauguration.
Thanks for listening, let's get into it.
Music:
Intros: Breakaway and Seaside Tryst
Transition: Filastine, Soundswarm Compostion and E.T., Sword That’s Bending
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Listener Engagement
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis. Follow us on Mastodon and at the beautiful idea.show. Thanks for listening.
Upcoming Episode and Resistance Movements
00:00:44
Speaker
In our following episode, first we catch up with Mia Wong, a journalist at It Could Happen Here, a daily podcast on cool zone media about everyday resistance and the current crisis. Then we speak with a participant in the publishing collective CrimeThink about the emerging cracks in the current crisis and what this means about how we can respond. And finally, we speak to folks in Olympia, Washington and North Carolina about recent festival of resistance events that were organized in the lead up to Trump's inauguration. But first,
Constitutional Crisis and Nationwide Protests
00:01:11
Speaker
here's the roundup.
00:01:16
Speaker
Welcome to Behind the Barricades, a roundup of current events and action news across so-called North America. We are currently in the midst of a constitutional crisis. As we speak, the Trump administration is less than a month into its second term, and already the courts are running into roadblocks in their meager attempts to contain Trump's blatant calls to disregard basic constitutional guardrails.
00:01:39
Speaker
As this is being recorded, multiple rulings by judges to stop the Trump administration freezing federal funds to basic government programs continues to be ignored. We are in the middle of the Rubicon being crossed. The executive branch is defying the orders of its own courts.
00:01:54
Speaker
What happens now is both determined by what people do and how the state responds to its own internal contradictions. Will the Supreme Court step in and side with Trump? Or will the administration simply ignore any and all rulings, turning the state into a mechanism to carry out any and all of Trump's dictatorial demands, as the U.S. slips into an all-out dictatorship with billionaires at the helm, but resistance is building and developing at various points of contestation?
00:02:20
Speaker
Across the country, as ICE ramps up deportations and is pushing to begin again deporting entire families, setting up camps at Guantanamo Bay, organizers are stepping up their organizing, from forming rapid response networks, organizing protests, and educating people about their rights.
00:02:37
Speaker
Border czar Tom Homan even went on CNN recently to complain about people in Chicago being too educated about their rights, throwing a wrench into the gears of the deportation machine as Trump demands increased numbers of removals. Communities in Colorado mobilized when ICE went door to door in an apartment complex at the center of far-right conspiracies about Venezuelan gangs taking over Aurora, Colorado, working to support working-class people targeted and documenting ICE abuses.
00:03:06
Speaker
Meanwhile, thousands of people are taking to the streets against ICE, demanding an end to the raids, a strengthening of sanctuary city laws, and calling for solidarity with those targeted by the deportation machine. Most
Community Resistance and Far-right Clashes
00:03:18
Speaker
impressively, we've also seen weeks of student walkouts, most notably in Los Angeles.
00:03:22
Speaker
where hundreds of students across multiple schools have continued to carry out walkouts and rallies, writing anti-ice slogans throughout the city. Mass protests have also led to clashes with police in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and beyond. In multiple cities, thousands have also taken to the streets against Trump's attacks on trans people in an effort to call on hospitals to protect access to gender-affirming care and resist the administration's draconian executive orders.
00:03:48
Speaker
Mass mobilizations have already taken place in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlottesville, New York, and beyond. Communities have also been pushing back against attempts by the far right to test these new waters. This past week, we saw folks in the historically black neighborhood in Logan Heights, Ohio.
00:04:04
Speaker
armed themselves and pushed through a line of police to attack neo-Nazis who were being protected by law enforcement on a freeway overpass, holding automatic weapons and swastika flags. Community members burned one of their flags, wrecked one of their cars, and even left behind bullets spelling out the letters L-H for Logan Heights.
00:04:22
Speaker
Protests have also been taking place non-stop in Washington D.C. against Elon Musk and his team of far-right minions, leading to some early attempts to blockade them from entering buildings and near-constant rallies and protests by workers and their supporters. Finally, demonstrations and acts of vandalism have also broken out at Tesla dealerships.
00:04:40
Speaker
with people calling for boycotts, following Musk's Nazi salute, and moved to dismantle and privatize social safety net programs. Several Tesla dealerships have been hit with graffiti and other forms of sabotage, and there is currently a call for continued protests against Tesla on Saturday, February 15. We're in scary territory, but also fertile grounds to organize in.
00:05:02
Speaker
People everywhere can see how the Democrats helped us get here and how their refusal to respond to demands from social movements and instead doubling down on expanding and militarizing the repressive functions of the state who is now coming for everyone. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it.
00:05:21
Speaker
Hi,
Project 2025 and Authoritarianism
00:05:22
Speaker
I'm Mia Wong. I am a organizer, I guess technically a journalist, through some value of journalist, and I'm one of the hosts of the podcast that could happen here. Right. And I just want to encourage people, if you're not listening to, it could happen here. You need to, they are doing amazing work over there in terms of just interviewing guests, but also just breaking down what's happening with Trump. And I just want to get your reaction. I mean, when we're recording this, uh, Russell Vaught, one of the architects of project 2025 has just been confirmed.
00:05:51
Speaker
I know it's been a wild couple of weeks. I feel like people have gone back and forth between, oh, this is, you know, just like Trump number one, it just a bunch of dumb culture war stuff to then, you know, no, this is an authoritarian push. They're trying to amass executive power. This is project 2025 on steroids. You know, this is very serious and very dangerous. What are you thinking right now as Vought comes in? Yeah. I mean, i I think, I think the thing that everyone missed and you look I miss this too, right is is the role of Elon Musk in this because this is not just sort of they're implementing project 2025, right? Right. The the way that Elon has come in and just straight up taken over and started destroying like the parts of the state that do important things is is staggering. I don't think and this this is something that is is genuinely very different from anything that's ever happened in in American in in American history.
00:06:47
Speaker
we've We've never
Elon Musk's Influence on Governance
00:06:48
Speaker
we've never had this kind of just straight up a billionaire walks in and his guys walk into a bunch of offices and start taking all of the data and start just like, you know, and one of the things that they've, they they're kind of being forced off of it. But I mean, they directly like took control of the Treasury's payment system, right? What what what they've been able to do is just directly to seize control of like of the financial levers of the state and just start turning them off. Right. Yeah, it's incredible. And there's been lawsuits now that have supposedly barred them from doing this. But I mean, in theory, they still have access, right? I don't know where we're at with that. Yeah. And I mean, this this goes into sort of what's weird about this specific coup and why it it doesn't look like anything I've ever really seen before. Because if you look at the actual structure of the coup, what are they doing?
00:07:40
Speaker
right It's just the SS Youth Division like showing up to government offices with laptops and demanding to be let in. And the bureaucrats just let them in. But who the fuck are these people? right like Why do they have the authority to do this? they obviously like um you know if if if you're If you're following the logic of the state, like they obviously don't. These are just some random guys that Elon Musk hired. right and you know And this brings us to this question of what the law is for.
00:08:06
Speaker
Because, you know, states don't technically need laws, right? All all the state needs is is a is a monopoly on legitimate use of force. And, you know, everything else like that we think of as typically parts of the state, right? Law, citizenship, etc, etc. That's all just sort of stuff that's been tacked on as like a legitimation process and and something to make the state work more efficiently. You could just run a state by literally pure fiat and having a bunch of armed guys like go do whatever you say you want to do. But states don't run like this, right? Even, you know, even even the sort of like the the the most like, I don't know, quote, unquote, illegitimate, even the most sort of horrific states in history, and this is going from, you know, like, pure, like, royalist, absolute monarchies to the Nazis, they have laws. And this, you know, begs the question, like, what are they for? And the answer is that laws are there for the legitimation of armed force. In a society like the US, s right? The law is what gives you access to the men with guns.
00:09:04
Speaker
And obviously, like you know, you've you all of you listening to this, like you you're you're smart people. you You know that the state will just violate its own laws in order to carry out repression. But the difference is that when they're doing that, those are states where the ruling class has consolidated their control over the state's repressive apparatus. And you look at what Trump's doing right now, right? like He's purging the FBI right now. like he's Yeah, literally today they announced that the FBI will hand over the list of agents that investigated J6, which is, ah it seems like a the FBI counting down to the state. Yeah, but like you know but but like that that that's not the sign of a ah they state. like The fact that he's picking fights with the FBI, the fact that he's picking fights with like the Capitol Police, that that is not
00:09:54
Speaker
a state that has, you know, a very firm control over its oppressive apparatus in a way that it can just sort of use it to do whatever it wants. And there's there's a second difference here, too, between like, you know, the state, like beating us up and doing and must doing the coup is doing right now, which is that this is an attack on the state itself. And
Strategies Against Coup Efforts
00:10:12
Speaker
that requires different levels of legitimacy and different levels of it requires a different standard of sort of authority to actually get men with guns to do things. And right now they've just been able to bowl over everyone by claiming that Elon Musk's authority like gives them the ability to send these like 19 year old grippers and like and that's not a just sort of like me saying that right like one of these guys was forced to resign after a bunch of tweets came out where he was just straight up talking about how like interracial marriage is evil and like
00:10:45
Speaker
stuff like that right these these are these are these are these are just these are just straight up like twitter nazis and i also like worth remembering that like elon musk started this coup on like day one of the regime by doing two nazi sluts right but you know they've been able to just bowl over all of these bureaucrats and get access to all of these critical systems by just saying like well we're we're doing this on the third of elon musk but like again who the fuck is elon musk right right Well, I want to ask you, you skidded out something really interesting that speaks to this, but I want to just ask you one other thing about the Musk thing real quick. you know The journalist, Clint Kleperstein, he was saying basically like you know the Democrats pushed like label this a coup is silly. like This is more about Musk getting in there to turn off the payment system so they can
00:11:30
Speaker
do the budget and slash a bunch of stuff and also enrich themselves. It's not about like taking over control of the government, like sort of branding this like Russiagate 2.0 is silly. I don't know, what what do you think about that? I mean, it' it seems like a mix of all of it, right? It's not just about them having access to your data, but it's also about the threat of them, like you said, you know turning off the payment systems to like the bare bones, social safety nets that still do exist in the United States you know for veterans, elderly people, Medicare. what i think this is like i think I think that's ridiculous. like i mean if if If you look at the first thing that like Trump did on like on taking office, right if you look at those executive orders, like he literally tried to rewrite the Constitution.
00:12:14
Speaker
In like one of the first executive orders, right? he He tried to get rid of birthright citizenship, right? Like this is not just, you know, you like you can't just hand wave this away and be like, this is not a coup. This is just like a corporate takeover or whatever. It's like, no, no.
00:12:26
Speaker
he's He is trying to just straight up consolidate the entire power of the state into his hands so that he has sole control over it. It's like, I don't know what else you call that, right? He's trying he's trying to turn the US into a system that has but one single unitary branch of power, which is him making like, you know, him just issuing executive orders. like That is that is it a coup.
00:12:50
Speaker
And you know and and the the other thing that I think, you know it's not just a social safety net that's at risk here, although obviously it is. The entire, they're they're already you and this is one of the problems of sort of like bourgeois society, is that there are a lot of very critical functions that are are are run by the state that are, you know I mean, things like keeping airplanes from falling out of the sky.
00:13:14
Speaker
Right. That's the state's job. That is like so that is like that like the FAA is the next target of these people. Right. We've we've already seen plane crashes that are the result of. of the these these sort these sort of freezes, right? And, you know, i mean like the the entire structure of, you know, the American scientific apparatus is things like developing vaccines, right? We've we've already seen them, you know, like, um um unfortunately, USAID was one of the things that was like funding research into an HIV vaccine. And that's just like gone now, because they just shut down the entire agency. It's like, yeah, these like, you know, obviously, the USAID is like,
00:13:47
Speaker
also does a bunch of spook shit, but also there's a bunch of just people like there are a bunch of people right now dying in hospitals all over the world because their ventilators got shut down because they don't have this money anymore. Right. So this is this is this is a a consolidation of power in the hands of one billionaire and the the just the pure center of the executive branch that we've legitimately never seen before. This is this is significantly different than Trump one. Yeah, but but I but I think this also gets to the weakness of this coup which is that the difference between this takeover and you know if you look at like the rise of fascism in India right and I think India has the most I don't know you call it quote unquote classically fascist like party in the world right those guys you know or even if you look at Trump 2017 those guys had
00:14:37
Speaker
massive cores of street fighters that allowed them to just, you know, enforce whatever their sort of political will was without meeting the state to sort of fall in line, right?
00:14:48
Speaker
And but you know like the Nazis have this too, right? And this is this is the same thing with Mussolini. They have these sort of paramilitary like street fighting groups. And obviously the BJP's street fighting group is much stronger than like Trump's was in 2017. But you know they they they all have these groups of people. But like Trump doesn't have that this time. He's just relying on these kids with laptops walking into buildings and everyone complying in advance. I was just going to say that kind of speaks to what you said on Blue Sky. You said, we can stop the coup in its tracks by finding the bureaucrats who are complying and protesting them until they stop and supporting the ones who fight. I mean, it play that out for us a little bit. Like, you know, these mid-level people that are basically just being like, oh yeah, come on in, you know, 19-year-old gripper with a laptop. Like, sure, you can have access to everybody's medical information or whatever.
00:15:35
Speaker
I mean, how would people put pressure on folks? Because I mean, it seems like the pressure is working to some extent on the Democrats. They are sort of getting the spine and pushing back. I mean, they're getting the message. So what about all of these other mid-level bureaucrats that are sort of bending the knee? i I think there's a couple of different layers to this. One is that some of these people have actually legitimately like some some of the first effective resistance to this was from people from like the Office of Personnel Management, right where just a bunch of pissed off government workers just said no, and like locked the doge people out of the building. Right. And that work, it was extremely effective. And this is this is the sort of, this is the sort of skeleton key to this entire thing, which is that like, if you just physically show up with people, and stop them from doing this, what are they going to do about it, right? You if if you make them try to find men with guns,
00:16:25
Speaker
Right. That's that's when the system actually sort of goes into crisis right now. They've been able to just sort of roll this through without without, you know, without actually having to get into a complication over the fact that they don't have the authority to do any of this. Right. You know, I've got an email basically, literally. Yeah. Yeah. and And you know, and so and so people people to to to greater and lesser extent, people have already sort of been doing this. you You know, you can you can just physically show up to these buildings where these people are supposed to be. And some of this requires coordination with people yeah who are inside these offices. But those people are pissed.
00:16:55
Speaker
Right, they are unbelievably deeply angry because they're you know Like their livelihood is being threatened and it's not just that like, you know for better or for worse a lot of these people genuinely believe in the things that they're doing right like there are a lot of people who work for the FAA who you know, they work for the FAA because they don't want planes to crash and they're watching these people come in and try to just make the planes crash and this this This gets to this thing right again, like we're coming back to this issue of all of this stuff relies on bureaucrats complying in advance. right And you could just find the bureaucrats and make them not comply. And even if you're not in D.C. at the sort of center of the struggle, you can find them and force them to make a stand. We saw this with the hospital protests for trans health care in New York, where a bunch a bunch of protesters like showed up to hospitals in New York who'd stopped like ah providing health care for trans youth.
00:17:52
Speaker
and just protested them and like the day after the democrats like caved and you know and part of this is also that the democrats don't operate as you know like a quote-unquote resistance mechanism or whatever the only way you can get them to do that is if they think they need to co-opt a movement so unfortunately or fortunately if you i don't know whatever way you want to look at that if you want the democrats to do something you have to force them to try to co-opt a movement But it's not that hard. And these these bureaucrats, you know the ease with which they've been walked over by the right is also evidence that you can also just sort of walk over them by it by applying a modicum of pressure. And that means that you can find the people who are responsible for enforcing these executive orders.
00:18:39
Speaker
And you can, you know, you can you can go put pressure on them to be like, wait, fuck this. And that stuff works. And you can do things like make sure hospitals keep providing health care for trans youth. Yeah, I mean, I think this kind of like brings up the point. I mean,
Public Resistance to Authoritarian Policies
00:18:54
Speaker
you know, some so some polls just came out yesterday that showed like Elon Musk is surprised, surprised, deeply unpopular. And trump Trump is already underwater in the polling. I mean,
00:19:05
Speaker
I remember they did some polls on Project 2025, literally it was like 90% disapproval ratings. So, you know, we all know that the the sliver that Trump won by was was very small and largely that was caused by people being, you know, disgusted by the Democrats. I mean, this idea of a mandate really isn't there.
00:19:25
Speaker
And there's already signs that people are not happy about what's going on and are not excited. And of course, what we've seen hasn't been anything that of course has addressed sort of the material needs of the population. So I mean, where does that leave us? That we have this authoritarian buildup and power grab and yet, you know, it's largely unpopular. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is, this puts a timer on everything that they're doing.
00:19:53
Speaker
Like they they, you know, what they've been able to do right now in the first three weeks is do it as a simply astounding amount of damage to, you know, I mean, like, I'm trans, right? Like they they've managed to do a simply astounding amount of damage to the lives of like me and everyone like me. But the thing is, they are on a clock and they know that, right? If if if you listen to the stuff that they were saying, like, as they were coming into office, they were talking about, yeah, we only have two years to do this. And I don't think they have two years anymore. I think they have as as as long as public pressure continues to build. This stuff is building from a lot of different angles. There's been very little coverage of it, but there are massive, ah particularly in California, but in a lot of places, there have been these massive like anti-ice, anti-deportation protests that are starting, right? And these are these are from and these are these are not in sort of like the traditional sort of heartlands of what we think of as protest movements. These are places that almost never have these things. And you have people walking off the job, you have like students refusing to show up to schools, right? You have
00:20:49
Speaker
You know, you you have these mats and massive sort of build up coming. And I think what what, you know, part of what we have to do right now is because the stuff is so unpopular, the more that people figure out what they're doing. Right. The more that people figure out that, like, you know, Trump is trying to like shut down by one of the agency that like finds like missing children.
00:21:11
Speaker
right, unless they refuse to talk about crew people at all, right? And like, okay, right, you know, the more people find out like this, or the fact that like, he's coming for like, things that benefit them directly, the more that they realize that Elon Musk has just used control of the government, the more unpopular this gets in the more resistance balance. And so, to some extent, time for once is on our side. And what we need to do, you know, obviously, we need to we need to roll the stuff back away to need to like run these people out of power.
00:21:37
Speaker
But also every second that we delay them, right, you know and and like the the the courts are not normally a particularly good political strategy Like they're just not right. The courts are on the are on the side of the ruling class We saw this in 2017 But right now if you can tie these people down for any length of time, right if you can tie them down for a few months There's a good chance that Elon just won't be here because he'll he'll have who has been run out by sort of mounting public pressure. and I think that's that's where we're sort of at right now. It's a situation where we need to be putting we need to be putting pressure to make sure that they can't actually execute this coup, and we need to slow it down as much as possible until it sort of collapses in on itself based on its own sort of contradictions. Yeah, I just want to thank you for taking the time to speak to us. I want to again encourage folks, if you're not listening, it could happen here. Amazing resource comes out a couple times a week.
00:22:32
Speaker
Anything else you want to say or or talk about or or encourage people? Yeah, this i I have one very important message for everyone who's considering going out in the streets right now. Don't get kettled on a bridge. It is the year 2025. We are a quarter of the century we're a quarter of a century into the 21st century. There is no excuse for getting for getting kettled on a bridge. Do not run your march over a bridge.
00:22:58
Speaker
The police will we'll stop we'll we'll take control of both sides of the bridge and all of you will get arrested. Simply do not do it. Do not go over bridges. Do not go under tunnels. You and only you can stop the dread scourge that inflicts every single protest movement in this country of everyone getting kettled on a bridge and getting arrested.
00:23:17
Speaker
All right. That is my message. ah Go listen to it could happen here where I will also talk about stop getting kettle dump riches. And we'll we'll be covering the rest of, you know, more of this coup as it unfolds. And yeah, we have we have some cool projects in the work on resistance to this stuff. And yeah, check it out.
Crimethink on Democrat's Role in Authoritarianism
00:23:57
Speaker
Hi, I'm speaking to you as a participant in the Crimethink Workers Collective, a anarchist project that's been around now for some three decades plus. And I'm glad to be with you sir today. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. We're speaking to folks about the incoming Trump administration. This comes at a pivotal time. It seems the Trump administration is sort of massaging the idea into breaking with any sort of judicial oversight whatsoever.
00:24:25
Speaker
uh you know this remains to be seen how this will play out but we wanted to talk to you sort of on a larger conversation about how the democrats sort of set up this scenario to play out again for the second time and why that is important especially as people are looking to forces that might be able to rein in or push back against what's happening so You all published an essay about this, but explain to us how have the Dems helped create the current situation. Well, the Democrats in the course of the election year in 2024 explicitly said Kamala Harris and other Democrats explicitly said that Trump did represent fascism.
00:25:09
Speaker
And what does it mean when you acknowledge that someone's a fascist, but you don't do anything other than urge people to vote for you against them, you know, and then you make a ah big deal about having a peaceful transition of power and how you were the only ones who follow the rules anymore, you know, and and and welcome a fascist into power in that way. Basically, if the Republicans are the party of fascism, that means that the Democrats are explicitly the party of complicity with fascism.
00:25:38
Speaker
And we we can we can look at many different ways that the Democrats put the pieces in place for ah for Trump to return to power like this. I'll go through a few of them here. For one thing, when Biden came into the presidency, he one of his main projects was to re-legitimize the police. There had been considerable criticism, not just of police conduct, but of the idea that the best way to deal with the the volatility that results from having resources so unevenly distributed in our society is is to just keep channeling more and more resources towards the police. you know and many people Many people of all walks of life were considering the idea that you know funding should be rooted towards towards other other ways of addressing the tremendous need that capitalism has has generated. But Biden immediately was like, no, we're going to increase money to the police. We're going to
00:26:34
Speaker
you know, give them all of these resources with which they can continue to do to do public relations campaigns to try to paint themselves in a more flattering light. And of course, those are exactly the same police that with those additional resources will be enforcing all of the now even more racist and, you know, agendas that that Trump and his allies bring into power. Another way in which the Democrats contributed to paving the way for for this is that, you know, all of their objections to Trump were based in this sort of argument that no one is above the law. And and even now, really the only thing that the Democrats have to offer is that some mid-level judges are still delaying the Trump agenda from taking full force. The problem is that the the Supreme Court already answers to Trump and the executive branch
00:27:32
Speaker
determines who the judges are. So what what happens when this law, that the Democrats have invested so much energy in and legitimizing and centering in discourse? What happens when this law is is just an instrument of the the ruling fascist party? the Then they they will have no way to argue that that the violence of the state is illegitimate.
00:28:02
Speaker
which is not surprising really because they are also a ah party that is invested in the violence of the state. But it it creates a ah but creates a situation in which everybody who has participated in this democratic discourse about the problem with Trump being that that he is a law breaker rather than that he represents a fundamentally oppressive proposal for what our lives should be, is is going to be completely hamstrung by their own discourse and rhetoric as we get deeper into fascism. A couple other ways that the the Democrats contributed to this, you know
00:28:39
Speaker
i I believe that the ah the people who owned Twitter before were were Democrats. And in selling Twitter to Elon Musk, they set up the situation in which the, you know, the chief discourse in this country could be dominated by people who are explicitly in favor of ah white supremacy and fascism.
00:29:00
Speaker
And that that being the case for two years leading up to the election, we have no idea how the election would have gone if not for that. Now, that's not just a problem with an individual democratic voter's decision. it's ah It's a problem fundamentally with what happens when the venues, when the platforms through which we communicate are for sale on the market. That means that those platforms will inevitably answer above all to the you know the most reactionary and and elitist politics.
00:29:30
Speaker
Finally, the the Biden administration had spent but more than a year before the election, just desensitizing the public to ethnic cleansing and genocide with their policies, for example, in Gaza, but also elsewhere in the world, just getting people used to the idea that that human life has no intrinsic value and that it's okay to support ethnic cleansing as a way to open up real estate markets, you know, just creating the situation in which no one could imagine that that there was any substantive difference, really, between the white supremacist, Islamophobic rule represented by the Democrats or the white supremacist, Islamophobic, and also patriarchal and arguably fascist rule represented by by Trump. So this is
00:30:24
Speaker
How we ended up in the situation and the best I can figure it thinking about it is just that after the unrest of 2020. The Democrats took their. short period of ascendancy, which which had resulted actually from us, from anarchists and other angry ordinary people in the streets driving the public discourse. you know they They took their brief period of ascendancy that resulted from that and used that time to consolidate not their own power, it turned out, but the power of the state over the the people and in general. you know and
00:30:59
Speaker
The implication of this is that they prefer fascism to a situation in which social movements and popular unrest is able to decentralize and destabilize the current current balance of power, the current distribution of resources. So the Democrats would rather have fascism than equality, basically. Yeah, I mean, David Graber pointed that out before he passed away. He said, you know, the neoliberals love the choice between outright fascists and neoliberalism because that's the only way people will look at them as you know some sort of viable alternative. Yeah, I wanted to say to your point, I mean, yeah, and in a lot of ways, Trump, I mean, represents sort of the ascendancy of the nihilism that this period produced. you know A lot of people are saying like, well, if this is what's up for grabs, then why wouldn't I go with this buffoon and idiot and horrible person because he's at least saying that he's going to make my life better.
00:31:55
Speaker
even if I don't necessarily believe him. But I mean, yeah, to your point, I mean, it's interesting that all this discourse around legality is happening while they were carrying out a genocide, while you know Amnesty International and saying, look, this is a genocide, the UN n is saying this is bad, you know people are dying, children are dying, you're helping facilitate this.
00:32:16
Speaker
And the Biden administration was just waving that away. And then now they want to come out and say like, oh, well, this is actually legally really bad. He's a felon, all this stuff. Well, of course, but I mean, where were you when this was happening in Palestine where billions of US dollars are paying for that? But I think to go back to your point about One of the things they could have done, I think one of the most glaring realities to this is now with Guantanamo Bay, Obama said that he was going to close that. And now we're seeing actually people put there. Just today, I was seeing people in the Trump administration were saying that it wasn't off the table that even shoplifters would get sent there. That's up to Trump, basically. Or to El Salvador. Yeah, go on. Yeah, totally. And again, had the Democrats actually acquiesced and
00:32:59
Speaker
you know, been this sort of democratic force in society that would have responded to people's needs and demands to close something like Guantanamo Bay, we wouldn't be in this situation right now. But again, because they foreclosed on those possibilities, and that's their role, is to basically be the stopgap against any sort of social change through the state. Instead, I mean, they helped, like you said, create this situation. We shouldn't be naive about the Democrats. Generations now have have shown us that there's there's no justification for people being shocked when they behave this way. This this represents their actual agenda, their their class interests. They are,
Community Self-reliance and Grassroots Action
00:33:41
Speaker
is invested as the Republicans in centering power in the hands of you know the billionaires and and the state apparatus. So when when we were chanting who keeps us safe, we keep us safe, you know and and saying no one is coming to save us,
00:33:59
Speaker
That was true. You know, people were saying that five years ago and, and that is the case. That is the situation that we face. And my, my hope is that, that millions of other people will now come to see that, but we have to demonstrate for them that there is something that we can do together that we'll get to that. Go on with. For sure. Well, I guess the next question is that, you know, how is the left tying itself so strongly to the Democrats aided to this unfolding crisis?
00:34:27
Speaker
I mean, it's been sort of sad to watch. I mean, like the AFL-CIO, which is the largest labor federation in the United States, responded to Doge by setting up something they called like the Institute for People that Work for a Living, which is essentially just like a media Twitter account or something like that. It's like yeah you should be calling for protests. You should be calling for strikes that coin on your members to go out and do stuff. But again, like this sort of tying yourself to this one party and tying everything into this election cycle thing that's produced these results. This is what it gets you. It gets people totally demobilized.
00:35:03
Speaker
And even some folks within the working class seen Trump as you know an alternative to the neoliberalism of the Democrats. Well, to the extent to which participants in left organizations are still answerable to or influenced by ah Democratic politicians or or funding from Democratic projects, that that means that at every step of the way, you know those those undertakings are are are going to be co-opted, are going to be channeled away from effective action. But on ah on a larger scale, I think the the real issue here is is that capitalism is actually making life worse for the vast majority of people. The quality of life has been diminishing for for decades now in in ways that can't all be measured by economic criteria. Some people are still doing fairly well economically, but but they're you know having to take
00:35:58
Speaker
antidepressants and all these other things just to just to manage their lives. you know Even before we get to the sort of alienation wrought by a continuously mediated like culture in which we don't encounter each other directly but through you know TikTok videos or something. Now, this this situation where many people are poorer and poorer, where power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,
00:36:25
Speaker
where where life is more and more challenging, the situation generates rage. and It generates as a sort of inchoate rage on you know that is widespread throughout the population. Under Trump, the Republicans have become masters of channeling that rage towards scapegoats. That's the the real source of their power, is that they recognize that people are unhappy they and they see the the anger and the the discontent of of this part of the population as as a force, as maybe the most powerful, the most determinant force in the population right now. And they have successfully channeled that you know towards, not towards the people who deserve it, not towards the people who are most responsible for the the suffering that's going on, but but towards the most vulnerable people. you know I mean, if you if you look at the ah the economic analyses,
00:37:24
Speaker
Serious economists do not argue that the the presence of undocumented people in the United States is making life worse for the sort of comfortable white middle-class people who are really enthusiastic about ethnic cleansing. you know the the The reason for targeting those people is is actually to have something to do with all of the surplus hatred that is generated by by capitalism. And you can see this You know, for example, in the way that the Trump and and Vance invited Daniel Penny to join them at the Army Navy football game at last December, you know, that actually and then that Mark Andreessen's firm.
00:38:09
Speaker
Andreessen Horowitz, he's he's a like ah one of these tech billionaire people, they offered Daniel Penney employment you know with their firm. Daniel Penney is the person who just randomly, senselessly, pointlessly murdered Jordan Neely in and the subway in New York City, just ah just for information there. But the you can look at these things and you can see that There is a tremendous amount of hate swirling around anger and that it would be directed against these billionaires if if people had any sense. But the reason that the Republicans are are succeeding right now is that they they recognize this hatred is a force. They recognize that capitalism has destabilized society and they are channeling, they are directing that hatred.
00:38:55
Speaker
Whereas the
Tech and Government Power Merger
00:38:56
Speaker
Democrats framed themselves in the in the election as the defenders of what is as the defenders of the existing order, which is increasingly unpopular with people and and for years they suppressed.
00:39:08
Speaker
every every movement from anarchists and and other autonomous social movements, and and even the stuff from Bernie Sanders. they They've suppressed all of these efforts so to point to ways that life could be improved somewhat. yeah And this is why they lost. They lost because they associated themselves with an order that and everyone hates. As we said when we first started recording, we are currently in a crisis right now. How do you see the current order fracturing And how do you see it just continue to unfold me not just here in the United States but everywhere. The worst thing that could happen right now is if there isn't a crisis. We're in a crisis in the sense that we're at a. Historical turning point you know the end and we can look at symptoms of this turning point we can look at side effects like. ah
00:39:56
Speaker
you know, like Trump basically making Denmark and Panama out to be our enemy's Canada, making Canada out to be more our enemy than than than Russia is. but But if you get stuck on on these seemingly irrational details, it'll make it more difficult to to see the the big picture. The first part of the big picture is is state capture, what ah what economists sometimes call state capture where private interests, specific private interests get control of the state and you know direct it for their own purposes. I think this sir term was originally coined in South Africa, which you know Elon Musk is from, to describe the the power that corporations there were able to exert by you you know by buying up politicians within
00:40:48
Speaker
the within the government, but we're seeing it now on a much more profound basis in the United States where we actually have you know the the world's richest man just getting to personally overhaul the the structures of the government. Handing back from that though, what we can see is the transition to a new form of capitalism in which human life will be held to have no intrinsic value.
00:41:16
Speaker
that's the That's the implication, that's the meta-narrative of the cuts to medical research, to public health, to US aid, is that it's no longer possible to, you know, loop well, and they want it to, they want to create a situation in which human life is viewed as completely expendable, not just in Gaza, but everywhere that it doesn't serve the profit imperative. You know, we're seeing whatever pre-capitalist value was still invested in in human life and and social relations, stripped away for the purposes of pure economic competition. And this is this is the real substance of the crisis. And what this means is
00:41:59
Speaker
really that tremendous suffering will be ahead of us if we're not able to change the course of events. you know As you mentioned, we're not just in a new period of governance, but also we're seeing this coming together of state and capital and on and you know on a new level. you know What does that mean, especially like we're seeing tech in the state merging together in a real way? This is interesting, right? Because you know in 2020, the thesis was you know Trump's sort of nationalism. And the antithesis was the elements of Silicon Valley that weren't sure that they wanted to sign off on what he was trying to do. And you know that culminated in Trump being kicked off of Twitter at the very beginning of 2021. As we wrote when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the implication of Musk taking over Twitter was that
00:42:55
Speaker
was the the synthesis of Trump's nationalism and the power of the tech elite in Silicon Valley. And unfortunately, that hypothesis proved very prescient. That's exactly what we see now. And this is a classic element of fascism, the coordination between corporations and the government, between industry and government, but it's also a risk for them. It's a ah risk because, as I said, there's there's so much resentment against those who hold disproportionate power in our society. And yeah Trump and his cronies campaigned on this sort of anti-elitist discourse, which is now visibly undermined by the fact that the the chief power players in the in the new in the in Trump 2.0 in the new order are our tech elites, actually. This tells us something about the changes
00:43:51
Speaker
in the tech sector, in the tech industry, you know, where 15 years ago, they needed what they needed most of all was talented programmers. And so they would they would hire the most skilled programmers. And and some of them ah were people who came from working class backgrounds and had, you know, had fairly decent politics. Right. Whereas today in the tech sector, the billionaire investors have considerably more power than those programmers do in in that.
00:44:20
Speaker
in the era of blockchain and AI computing is more more important than programming, if you follow what I'm saying. ah So this this means that inside of the the tech sector, that power has consolidated in the hands of the most reactionary elements, the the billionaires. And at the same time, the state has become more and more, ah yeah under under capitalism, neoliberalism, neoliberal austerity programs, the state has become more and more ah an instrument of violence. So now these two elements in society, the increasingly reactionary
00:44:57
Speaker
tech industry that that shapes all of our interactions with each other on the one side. And then this the state, which exists to repress social movements, control people, ensure that the tech billionaires can continue accumulating money at everybody else's expense. Those are are coming together to form this sort of unified project.
00:45:19
Speaker
At the same time, like I said, this this creates a vulnerability for them because it makes it very hard for for Trump and his cronies to present themselves as being anything other than the yeah the the bullies who represent the elite stomping, you know having the mercenaries stomp their boots on our faces, basically. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And it seems inevitable that there will be anger, that there will be pushback. And the and the question is simply,
00:45:48
Speaker
Can we mobilize the social structures and create the narratives and and offer the opportunities to
Trump's Admiration for Far-right Policies
00:45:55
Speaker
bring people together in such a way that ordinary people can stand up for their own interests, for their own survival, really, against this anti-human, almost post-human regime that is taking shape before our eyes?
00:46:09
Speaker
know I wanted to ask you you all have published a lot of reports and analysis about what's going on in argentina and my understanding is that trump and people associated with him are very taken by the far right libertarian ah president there.
00:46:25
Speaker
ah Talk a little bit about that because i mean you mentioned this is a gamble for them. One of the things they want to do is go in and gut these government programs that they you know consider the deep state. Remove people there because often there are people that aren't excited about the new regime.
00:46:41
Speaker
and They want to install loyalists, but also they want to privatize this stuff and really you know roll back any vestiges that remain of the labor and civil rights movement that that are still there. Any sort of checks and balances on capital, even if we're critical of how they don't really do that much in our society.
00:46:57
Speaker
yeah so looking at argentina then how does that square up with what they're doing and what can we expect because like you said, even though that's really bad and I think that's obviously going to lead to people dying and i mean it could lead to another pandemic. you know We're seeing the bird flu thing play out right now. It could lead to just people not having access to basic safety nets. I mean, what happens when Medicare and Medicaid is really attacked? you know We're already seeing things like clinics being closed down.
00:47:27
Speaker
I think it's also an opportunity for people to mobilize and organize and and to say, like look, as you said, like the state is not protecting us. They're not even doing these basic things that that we pay for. Well, we correspond with people in Argentina because yeah because we think that if we're in dialogue with people in different parts of the world, we'll get a better perspective on what's happening and that you know that that can inform us as as we respond to things here. So yeah, I think it's very important to be in in dialogue with people in different parts of the world. In Argentina, there has been pushback against Millet taking over the government and waving a chainsaw around, you know feeding everything into the fire, which of course is not improving life for ordinary Argentines. Millet still has a fair bit of support. And and some of that I think is for the reason that I mentioned earlier, that
00:48:22
Speaker
in a situation where where people understand that their lives are held to be worthless until you know unless they're able to get their hands on a lot of money if they can't.
00:48:33
Speaker
make a lot of money in the market, they will simply look to compensate themselves emotionally for that by you know by supporting people who offer to get revenge in their name by doing violence to others. you know that's That is really the the backbone of this whole project, you know is the is the channeling of anger into scapegoating. If that process were to break down or to prove insufficient for the amount of anger out there, a tremendous amount of unrest would burst out. you know the The situation right now is the yeah it in Argentina and the United States, people are atomized, people are nihilistic, people are sort of hopeless. And at the same time, thus far, proponents of capitalism have been able to sort of sell people on this
00:49:20
Speaker
really unsophisticated sort of Anran argument that if only the market were free to to just consume everything, that would fix all the problems, which is, it has, you know, economists from a wide range of backgrounds all agree that this is actually not correct, you know, even before you get to the anarchist critique of of property and profit as driving forces, creating hierarchies and inequalities.
00:49:46
Speaker
But the gamble that our oppressors are making in this situation is that there is that these concessions that previous generations of capitalists and politicians made to us are no longer necessary. you know the The aid programs, the the welfare programs, the healthcare, all of these education, access to to universities, all of these things were made as concessions to pacify the general public.
00:50:15
Speaker
and they are gambling that there will be no consequences to abolishing these concessions. you know that Basically they they are hoping that in contrast to the 19th century when you know, capitalists and politicians regularly got stabbed or shot because of the inequalities they created. Today, the you know, the killer robots can keep them safe from us. They literally, they're obsessed with the idea of the Gilded Age. Yeah. And this this is, yeah, they're they're trying to to take us back in some ways to to that period. But actually, we're not you know in a world in which unrest is impossible, you know? I mean, maybe in in Russia, where Putin has
00:50:56
Speaker
systematically undermine all the forces that would resist him, but not in the United States. The United States is actually a a a pretty volatile social situation because you have tremendous wealth and tremendous poverty right next to each other in a place where people are not used to being completely oppressed, you know, where people are used to having some rights or imagining themselves as being the descendants of revolutionaries in some way.
00:51:22
Speaker
So this is a a gamble for them and and they will create a a volatile situation in which it is possible that tens or hundreds of millions of people will come together and and realize that that our lives are all at risk if we do not take action in in ways that most people never have before.
00:51:45
Speaker
You know i wanted to also ask you like what do you make of this whole shift like towards like do i mean it seems to be sort of like a neil mccarthy i move like this is the way to sort of weed out anybody that's like you know somewhat liberal or whatever that,
00:52:02
Speaker
thinks workers should have basic protections and you know like you said, society should be improved somewhat to some incremental degree. That seems to be a way. I mean, it's just like how a lot of these executive orders around attacking trans people, like obviously they want to attack trans people, but they also want to use that as a yardstick in order to go after you know more things, attack unions, dismantle public education.
00:52:26
Speaker
you know, use it to privatize stuff and so on. But I mean, how do you see that playing out? Because I mean, I do think there is a critique of like neoliberal wokeism, so to speak, and how that sort of elite capture as, you know, one author has described it, and this sort of soft counterinsurgency is a way to sort of, you know, hey, you know, we put more interracial couples into commercials, like, you know, we live in a post-racial society, society now. But again, like it just seems like when Trump came out and said, like oh, hey, a bunch of planes just crashed after we like fired a bunch of people, like you know maybe the pilot was black. you know That just seems like, again, to create a situation in which tensions around that are even more inflamed, not you know walking it back. Exactly. And this is what I was saying about them channeling hatred towards scapegoats. you know the The way to do this historically is to have
00:53:18
Speaker
you know, an in-group or an in-coalition and an out-group or an out, you know, or out-groups. And the in-group coalition channels all of the anger and resentment of the less upwardly mobile people within that coalition against the out-groups, right? Now, the challenge here is that, you know, in today's demographics, the the Trump administration cannot maintain a critical mass of support without the support of of some people from outside the the you know the population of people who have a stake in white nationalism, right? So the way they've done that thus far has been by sort of cobbling together a coalition of, you know for for example, Latino men who are invested in in patriarchy or you know or people from the Indian subcontinent who
00:54:15
Speaker
who don't want to have high taxes, right? But if if they really double down on this, this sort of, I mean, really abolishing DEI is a is a dog whistle for just outright racism. And if they really double down on a lot of the most capable, most intelligent Latino latino folks, people from the Indian subcontinent or the Pacific Rim, we'll understand that they are actually next on the chopping block because The way that capitalism works, it concentrates power in fewer and fewer hands. So you have to have you have to have more and more out groups actually as time proceeds in order to to continue to hold together ah your your coalition. what's What's interesting so far is that because of the Democrats doubling down on capitalism, on supporting it, the Republicans have been able to to make this innovation. but
00:55:03
Speaker
But it it will be clear to people that not everybody is going to benefit from this. And and so ultimately, everything that you know that the fascists from Trump's generation do to to double down on making this a racial conflict is not going to pay off for them. They they can try to conduct ethnic cleansing on a massive scale in the United States. but you know But that is going to mobilize large numbers of people against them. it's Like I said, it's ah it's a it's a dangerous gamble. And although it should be terrifying for us that things have come to such a pass that they are prepared to do this, ah we can also start looking for the opportunities that it will open up for us to create.
00:55:46
Speaker
solidarity between new groups of people and and to go on the offensive against them. Yeah, I mean, it also speaks to their forces that, you know, the the army that they've assembled is like five kids that made racist tweets about how eugenics is awesome and based or something. Right. The idea that the U.S. military, which has a lot of poor people from communities of color in it, is going to be so subservient to those five 19 year old white boys is ah well, like I said, it's a gamble for them.
00:56:14
Speaker
So you know to end on a positive note, the there was recently a call for festivals of resistance that happened. Thousands of people across the US mobilized and had different assemblies and different events bringing people together to talk about how people could organize and mobilize. And it showed that autonomous forces can bring folks out beyond just established political scenes.
00:56:36
Speaker
So now the question is, you know now what? We've seen lots of ICE protests, walkouts by students. ah We've seen the 50-51 protests happen at US capitals across the US. We're seeing rallies in DC against Doge. There is basically a new wave of of things happening. So I guess the question a lot of people are asking now is, you know what do we do now? What what is the move?
00:57:04
Speaker
Well, the first thing that we need to do is build up more connections between people because we're in an you know an increasingly atomized society in which people don't have the relationships or the formats that they need with which to take action collectively. The the good news is that as a consequence of people being so atomized, every time that people create some kind of community, other people will want in on that. you know that The Trump Supporters have have been able to succeed at channeling people into these new churches you know as a as a consequence of that. but But not everybody wants to be some bootlicker. A lot of people actually want to be in legitimate communities where they have relationships with their their peers as equals. Anywhere that we can create a community that is able to meaningfully improve the lives of the participants, people will want in on it.
Community-driven Actions Against Oppression
00:57:56
Speaker
That's the first thing we need to do, but we should not just be seeking to manage the details of our oppression in a non-hierarchical way. We also have to you know not just offend each other, but find ways to go on the offensive and to show that our oppressors are weak. If we spent you know the rest of our lives just trying to protect people from ice raids, just trying to help people go underground. We you know we could put a tremendous amount of energy into into defensive protective efforts and still lose more and more ground. We actually have to show that the order that they're trying to impose on us is vulnerable.
00:58:36
Speaker
And the way that things work in 2025 is that that will have to happen on a large scale. We're not talking about something that one person can do by themselves in the middle of the night. We're talking about a ah movement that will have to involve a large number of people. But people can experiment with small scale actions that are reproducible in the meantime. And I would say do that You know, on the scale of 100 people find a ways to take action in your community to demonstrate that ice can't do everything they want to do, or that there are consequences for profiteering to, you know, concentrate power in the hands of a seed, highling racist billionaire. You know, these these are things that people can do.
00:59:17
Speaker
locally And if you are listening to this and you're feeling impatience or or desperation or fear, know that tens of millions of other people are feeling exactly those same things around you. The but challenge for us is to to to identify ways that that we can act that can be con contagious, right? That can become contagious and spread to communities that we can't talk to on ah on a person-to-person basis. Although their their order is triumphant right now. It depends on the submissiveness of the vast majority of the population. And the majority of that majority has has no reason to be submissive, actually, is going to benefit in no way from from being submissive. So that's as much as I'll say for now. But with our project, we will continue to publish news of people's interventions, people's experiments. And and I believe that there will be moments ahead of us where
01:00:15
Speaker
If we can act in concert, if we can act effectively, we can change the course of history for it for the better. We have to be ready for those moments. They are coming.
01:01:05
Speaker
We're joined today with a friend out of Olympia, Washington, who took part in the People's March and Festival of Resistance on January 18th. And we're here to ask some insight about those events. Would you mind introducing yourself for the folks at home? Hi, yeah, I am a participant and organizer in Olympia. I've been there for well over a decade at this point.
01:01:30
Speaker
So I guess the first question is what was the People's March and Festival of Resistance? You know, what were like kind of the attentions going in? What was like the makeup of the people involved? Yeah, how did that pan out? Yeah, the original organizing group was a coalition of Activists and people have just been around for a while. It was multi-generational. It was a combination of various local organizations, all at a grassroots level, wanting to organize a march leading up to the inauguration, but also to kind of carry some of the momentum from organizing in the past year. There's been a lot of pro-Palestinian organizing, and so a lot there's a lot of carryover from that.
01:02:15
Speaker
Hmm. What did like the outreach process look like for that? Like on the flyer, it's like, there's a union and there's also like, you know, an illegal list, you know, insurrection or anarchist distro people of like, kind of a diverse ideological background, but sort of maybe having shared sentiments in the contemporary. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this relations comes down of the relationships that people have in Olympia over the past so many years. it's It's that people actually know each other so it's a pretty small town and so there's it that creates certain affordances and maybe in the past there would have been more like.
01:02:53
Speaker
hostile relationships between these kinds of groups, but that's just not really how it is right now. um And since there's more personal relationships involved, when people reach out to other people, it is it feels like comradely and and people are much more amenable to it. Does it feel like sort of like the fruits of sort of longer efforts of friendship building comradely relationships?
01:03:18
Speaker
Like coming to fruition or is it just more like just an informal cultural thing or is it both? Yeah, maybe both. It's it's sort of hard to tell. I mean, since 2020 and since COVID fall out the way that a lot of social spaces and groups like really thin down or have their sort of like public life gutted. People are really kind of coming at coming at it differently. They're not coming at at it from I don't know the way that I see it.
01:03:50
Speaker
is that each like ideological tendency is less its own like silo because they don't really exist as cohesively as they used to and so people are like much more capable I think of just like seeing each other as like different actors within the same town who can collaborate.
01:04:10
Speaker
Yeah, was the march beyond just like kind of a demonstration of people's you know feelings about a situation? Did it feel like a space of encounter where people were getting together and talking about it? And like I guess also the festival too. Maybe to clarify, these seem like two slightly distinct events that happened simultaneously or one after the other.
01:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, the um the the march was going to have a certain kind of like forum attached to it, but when once the the the meetings for the march, once invitations were so were sent out and it got a little bit more broad, the idea came in of attaching the Festival of Resistance to it instead. And that had a largely separate organizing group, though somewhat overlapping in a way that that was good because people were already spread Thin and weren't really coming at this with a lot of energy You know, it's still a lot of like burnout that was still being like shaken off in this moment so having that sort of like division was really helpful and so and yeah, they they really got to be the people who cared a lot about the March got to organize that and the people who cared a lot about having like a space of Meeting and talking people they they got to focus on that
01:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's cool. I think it it brings to mind the idea of like sort of cohesive action where people are doing their own things, but they're like sort of mutually beneficial. And I'm wondering like coming out of these events, is there a feeling of increased like capacity or energy? I think a lot of the times people feel like after organizing something, they're going to feel burnt out because of like the exertion. But oftentimes, I think that's kind of like a misunderstanding of like where energy comes from. And it can actually increase the energy that people feel they have after a successful event. Totally. I think it's both in this, like in one sense, people are really excited about future. They want to do this again. You know, that's like ah a lot of feedback was like, when do we do this next? And we're like, okay, can we do it quarterly or, or something like that? Um, but it is a higher efforts thing where, you know, people who put a lot of effort into it coming out of it are like, Oh shit, we gotta do this again.
01:06:15
Speaker
So yeah, maybe that can happen but it is the more in between things seems to be like what are lower effort but more frequent things that we can do and that might be like twice a month or something like that really depends on the pacing.
01:06:31
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know it previously it seemed like nothing like this was possible. So I think this event sort of acted as a litmus test and I don't even think people who can't who organized it were like sure how much they have like in the tank for something like this or the people who show it who showed up to it, but I think the ultimate result is that the dust has been shaken off.
01:06:54
Speaker
there's more activity there's more interest also the conditions are have been constantly changing over the past month and so there's a lot of this is there's a lot of phone questions being asked about what's next yeah. Even before you know covid there was like an issue of trying to have nodes for people to plug in i think in the past maydays kind of service that and then also social centers.
01:07:17
Speaker
reflecting on what you're saying, like, it does make sense to have sort of low effort places people can have, you know, spaces of encounter, spaces to meet each other, spaces that are not ideologically necessarily as rigid, but can like sort of make a sort of counter positional thing that has a lot of the dispositions we like, like anti capitalism, anti imperialism against the state, and then also about really grounded social issues that people are facing now.
01:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, is there anything else you feel like you accomplished that I'm not touching on here? I don't know. I guess I would say that part of the goal with the festival of resistance was so that people could actually meet each other like that I guess something that I do want to touch on is like part of the motivation for this is this really kind of bird's eye view of like struggles coming and going and people flooding in and out of them and not really knowing like where those people go or if if it's even possible for us to like have any sort of retention there um or any forms of like organizing that that allow relationships to continue to be built through those like waves. yeah
01:08:26
Speaker
And so part of this was like, OK, there's going to be a march and it's going to be a pretty like family friendly go to the capital march, which sometimes people like, like there's a whole contingent in Olympia that really isn't interested in that sort of tactic. But when it's combined with a social gathering like this,
01:08:46
Speaker
with all the mutual aid groups and breakout discussions and workshops and ways to plug in all of a sudden something like that can make a lot more sense and we had like maybe a thousand people show up for the rally in the march and that's you know a lot for olympia especially in recent history and um it was amazing how much of that flooded into the festival of resistance and so if either of them had existed without the other then One it would have been like what was this for on the marches side and then for the festival side we probably would have been stuck with some of the same like kind of sub cultural limits in terms of who would show up so coming out of it I feel just like seeing that that model words. Is and I think that's something that we're taking from. that
01:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there like 1000 people for Olympia is bigger than what some major cities got in terms of the People's March or whatever, or other various resist Trump marches and per capita, that's really impressive. Yeah, I think I mean, there's a lot of questions that can be leveled that like about these impasses. And I guess you were just talking about like, people feeling that a lot of stuff feels ephemeral ephemeral and like, where do people go and oftentimes the critique of like maybe having a more long-term formal organization or something like that is ah you know an accurate one that a lot of organizations and bureaucracies ossify and they become like just trying to perpetuate themselves and lose goal like lose the sight of the goal.
01:10:17
Speaker
um And then obviously there's a critique of bureaucracy and like a lot of like stuff like that. But does it seem like now there's a moment where people are kind of readdressing the question of like an above the above ground organization. That's like a social organization that maybe is like logistically light like are people revisiting that in like I guess with this sort of more staying power kind of or orientation.
01:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think so I think a lot of people are thinking about will one defining what our limits have been in the past and to what we can do about it. Yeah, yeah, I mean it all those pitfalls and critiques still apply to to these questions and such as pendulum swinging to the other end isn't exactly the answer I don't think but.
01:11:03
Speaker
In some ways, the people who have historically been the most critical of it are in maybe the best position to try to think of what are versions of organization that that scale up, what could they look like that that really do include those critiques or kind of safeguard against them without avoiding the question altogether. Yeah, and there's just so there's so many ways they can look like can be super.
01:11:27
Speaker
decentralized and there it could be mostly, you know, even just like various technology communication technologies can act as like a minimal form of like connecting people and that and that's a piece of infrastructure. But that's just to say like you can think about this very broadly in terms of how what what is like the connective tissue between people across time and space and how can we build that.
01:11:51
Speaker
I'm thinking of like there's reading groups, there's, you know, social centers and stuff that probably would still serve us in the present. But also, you know, there's so much lamentation of like, there's no third spaces and stuff like this, then it has become like a broader societal launching point also that that it seems like almost pessimistic or like cynical to say this but even so like social connection is kind of radical and the contemporary with so much atomization so much really kind of like actually like critically cultivated social distancing that happened because of the pandemic where people are maybe doing the right thing and like out of a position of caring for other people not going out as much but then you know as conditions shift as
01:12:31
Speaker
we realize there is like actually like social stuff is vital. Yeah, I don't know. It's it it's I think this is hitting on a lot of kind of the key like the zeitgeist problems of our times and not just even for like anarchist specifically, but for everybody, right? I think one other impasse people talk about is kind of the limits of popular frontism, you know, in the Trump era specifically, but even going back to like,
01:12:52
Speaker
You know, there's previous critiques of anti-fascism where if you have kind of a really broad anti-fascism, you're basically saying that liberalism or like the dominant like liberal liberal capitalist democratic order is preferable to fascism, which is probably true. But at the same time, it kind of gives them an out to be the good guys, right? We're like, we're not Trump. We're not like that excessive.
01:13:14
Speaker
and you look at that, you know, the numbers, you're like, oh, in the, you know, global south, they're just as deadly, you know, they're deporting 2000 people a day, still, abortion is still getting attacked, gender rights are still getting attacked by, like, you know, a Supreme Court or whatever. And also, you know, there's still environmental devastation, capitalism still exists, there's still more fundamental problems in the state. And I'm wondering how you like thread that needle of trying to have contagion across difference with other people that, you know, maybe are implicitly liberal not explicitly liberal because um explicit liberals tend to be just actually reactionaries but implicitly liberal or you know kind of vague left and that could be friends and allies against capital in the state and have you know I'm thinking also of like people who are more directly marginalized who have you know more radical politics than like the mainstream like
01:14:02
Speaker
ah middle-class white liberal, but also doing that and not just critiquing the excesses. And maybe that's not something we can answer now, but, and maybe it's just a dispositional thing, like always having that in the back of your head. And like, I think a lot of this is actually just critical thinking, right? Where a lot of people want to have like a, a ward against it. We're like, if we just say this one thing, our problems go away. Or like, if we do just like the maximal opposite position,
01:14:26
Speaker
we're gonna never have that problem again. And they just end up having stagnation and like siloing themselves off, right? And having, you know, similar like operational problems, but from like the opposite end. Anyway, that's a lot. But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about this like critique of like liberal popular frontism or like how we critique Trump, but also capital and imperialism.
01:14:48
Speaker
And I don't think it's like totally hopeless in the contemporary because people saw through like Kamala, right? Like that's kind of an indication that it's not always hopeless. But anyway, if you have thoughts on that, I would love to hear them. Yeah, I mean that that is a lot and I don't know if we'll sufficiently like respond to it.
01:15:03
Speaker
but I think there there have been some like experiments in recent history with like building coalitions between these like more radical or anarchist contingents and or at least anti-state or whatever and like more like liberal organizer types sometimes even like NGO types and And in some ways we've experienced some of the limits of that and so I don't think that's necessarily like we should just maximize in that direction if anything like sometimes I think about my participation in this. Types of coalition spaces as as a way to like safeguard them from being some like the worst version of what they could be and.
01:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, just like having having a role and kind of like injecting a sense of like, yeah, like leaving space for escalation to be able to happen and creating like or like having a voice for that sort of escalation within like these broader strategies and and making sure that those move those like movements or those spaces or whatever aren't being repressive to escalation either. If that makes sense.
01:16:07
Speaker
And I don't know, and none of this presupposes like the need for like more exclusively anarchist spaces or exclusively radical anti-state spaces and underground direct action and all of these things. I don't know.
01:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, to me, that sounds really interesting in that on one level, there's like the the really critical move of doing sort of terrain analysis and social analysis, based on what is and not how it ought to be. And then instead of like, taking the sort of like moral position you have before into a situation, looking at what it is and how can we better the situation. And I think that's where a lot of power lies in terms of you know insurrectionary potential but then the second thing you're talking about is like even a higher order operation where you're changing the social terrain to be more beneficial and like i don't want to instrumentalize like our relationships but social at like social things are like the the bedrock of an insurrection right it's not military power it's not specialization like
01:17:09
Speaker
you know, there is limits to it, but we can shift social terrain. And if we don't like pick up the tools that are thrown to us, then we're just like letting those opportunities float by us. And yeah, I think being proactive in that way is really inspiring. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I i think the the thing is that it's not really about instrumentalizing relationships as much as it is. And like acknowledging that we are part of Like an ecology of other people, yeah you know and that and that like we're not actually outsiders to a situation coming in and like
01:17:40
Speaker
trying to change things. We just have, we're just part of it and have an influence on how things turn out. And so we can either not show up and not have that influence or we can in various ways. Yeah. I mean, to my to to me, it kind of also reminds me of Occupy, right? Where Occupy, everyone who's there was like, oh, there's a lot of liberal bullshit going on, but also it was a massive networking event for so many anarchists, right?
01:18:07
Speaker
where it's like, yeah, we can sit there and shit talk some of the limits of it too, but like not showing up to occupy would have been a huge mistake, right? I don't know. Not for everybody, but for ah certainly for me. Yeah. And when you enter into spaces, like various organizing spaces, or when you just kind of see your town as a place where people exist, you are ideologically all over the place. And each individual has is like a mix of things. They probably have one foot in one thing and one foot in another. And there's you step into situations where you find out that you have a lot more there's a lot more affinity than you might think even when someone has their foot in like some other kind of organizing that you don't care about and when you have that recognition with people those are like those are your people those are the people that you then get to have a relationship with and then when things come in the future when when certain opportunities emerge or or struggles emerge then like those are the people that you get to like
01:19:02
Speaker
check in with and organize with and like, I don't know, then the the the reach kind of expands when you when you think of it that way. Well, yeah, we are all in relation constantly, right? That's kind of a fact of life. And I think people ignore that. Is there anything else you want to talk about that we covered a lot, but Yeah. I don't know. I think I just, uh, no, I think that's good. I encourage people to not just replicate forms, ah but really try to innovate them and think about what your space needs, what your place needs. Try to sort of, yeah, just innovate. I don't know. Well, thank you for your time. I guess we'll just leave it at that. Cool.
01:20:06
Speaker
I go by P. I use they them pronouns and I am currently based in Durham, North Carolina. um ah Hi, I'm C. I use they and them pronouns. I am also ah calling in from Durham, North Carolina. Awesome. Well, we're going to be talking about the festivals of resistance that happened in North Carolina. We're excited to talk about those events that happened that brought people together in this moment.
01:20:32
Speaker
Lots of people are wondering sort of what the next steps are. So just tell us broadly like what happened. There were several events that took place in North Carolina. Tell us what sort of transpired.
01:20:43
Speaker
Yeah so a few different groups of folks came together to do different events from ah for a whole weekend from Friday to Sunday and the first night there was a show at a local venue that was a fundraiser for the Tortuguita Healing Center because on Saturday marked the year anniversary of Tortuguito's murder. And so then on Saturday there was a whole day of workshops in Durham, North Carolina, and the workshops ranged from things like building solidarity networks, anti-repression training, security culture. There's also a workshop
01:21:23
Speaker
It was focused specifically like in this context in North Carolina, how we can increase abortion access by helping people have one less abortion appointment. So some healthcare care workers gathered and talked about how to do that. And then on Sunday, there also was a whole day of events in Chapel Hill.
01:21:43
Speaker
And more skill shares there is a fun game called entangled that was people are all tied together trying to build a fort so it was ah it was a really interesting mix of.
01:21:55
Speaker
you know some like heavy serious stuff that we need to be thinking about and also some light play and getting to know each other. There was tabling at both events. There was also food and and then on Sunday evening there also was a film screening. So it was a weekend of a bunch of different things. The the workshops had on In Durham, there is probably about 300 people at one time and about 100 in Chapel Hill on Sunday. Yeah, and so this event is emerged as part of a national call for resistance festivals across the country on the weekend before the inauguration.
01:22:39
Speaker
and and on the and anniversary of Verdigita's assassination. And so ultimately there were, I think, like 33 different events, a lot of which were in smaller cities, which was really awesome to see. And there was a lot of variety, like some folks did demos. I think there was an occupation, film screenings. You had ones that were more of this like skill share.
01:23:07
Speaker
type by like we did locally, assemblies, yeah, lots of different stuff. So we kind of position ourselves as like, yeah, we did something really cool locally, but like there, there was a lot happening and it was great to understand what we were doing kind of in that context. And I think like, I mean, ah this was ah an idea that was brainstormed like before we knew what the results of the election were. And I think,
01:23:34
Speaker
a kind of is a is a message. we We thought about doing it as a message to each other during like a major power shift, like no matter who won. It was gonna be significant and to like demonstrate with each other how much power we actually have together and strengthen the infrastructure that we built together.
01:24:01
Speaker
I'm curious, ah you know, what was it like having two cities do events sort of back to back? Did that sort of like build momentum or was there sort of cross pollination on that? or Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some crossovers of, you know, there is actually even and some similar workshops. There was some similar tabling.
01:24:22
Speaker
in a way that it was, you know, people from Chapel Hill were in Durham and people in Durham were like, oh, what is this project? Never heard of it. So it was cool to kind of allow folks the opportunity to move between cities. And yeah, it would it was great to have folks from all over the triangle get to be in different cities and share their projects. For example, for one project, they gained like 60 plus people interested in what they were doing. So it it was really, I think, useful to have folks cross pollinate and be moving between different cities in the triangle.
01:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it was possible because I i do think that there's like a growing level of coordination. So triangles is broader than just Chapel Hill and Durham, but we also like there's radical events stuff happening in Raleigh as well. And so I think this was one way of like building on those relationship networks and ties. It was possible because there is like a high level of coordination between the cities and In the region and it was also really cool to see like we had folks come out from bo which is three hours away some people that actually some folks connected with around like mutual aid and hurricane response.
01:25:35
Speaker
And people from Greensboro come, so it was like strengthening local networks within the like triangle region, but also like relationships kind of across the state almost. That was really awesome to see. You know, just as one follow-up to that, you know, you mentioned hurricane response like,
01:25:57
Speaker
Having this come after that, do you think that impacted either in terms of just where people are at in their heads or? sort of the the networks that were created out of that, the autonomous disaster response, did that sort of impact this? Yeah, I would say 100%. I think that like one of the lessons that we learned hosting this is that like one, a really small people group of people can pull something like this off and it
01:26:29
Speaker
depends on pulling something like this off at like a larger scale relies on broader community infrastructure that anyone can build. So we, I see this as like that it was made possible because of some of the existing projects that exist including the mutual aid network that really bloomed in response to what happened in western North Carolina but also some other like long-standing community projects like the really really
Autonomous Groups and Post-Hurricane Projects
01:27:03
Speaker
free market. we We have a bunch of different like autonomous open groups here and then I think we also
01:27:12
Speaker
like we're really able to tap into energy, not only like kind of post hurricane, but also folks had held some community assemblies in different cities. And we had a lot of like new projects emerge out of those assemblies. And so so these assemblies were hosted after the election. So there were a lot of like newly activated people looking to get in connection and some really cool stuff has come out of that in terms of like immigration like rapid response networks, some like really dope zine and community information projects like some trans support networks and those like this event was kind of an opportunity for a lot of those
01:28:05
Speaker
groups to reconnect with each other, to like check in after like a couple of months of organizing. For some of them it was the first event that they like, public facing event that they did and like so it was a coalescing point for them.
01:28:21
Speaker
And then I think we also relied on like, I think the region has really made an investment in like radical autonomous communications infrastructure. So like that some of which is like on signal, we actually have like a, like autonomous events calendar and like an event.
01:28:40
Speaker
Instagram and so like trying to diversify those communications networks, especially like as social media is increasingly precarious and unreliable for organizing like trying to get some of that in place. And I think all of that, I mean to answer your question like Yes, 100% the organizing here is so much stronger because of the mutual aid work and I think the mutual aid work is is one part of like a larger ecosystem that is building of like a lot of smaller projects, some of which are open facing and and some of which are not. And it's it's been really cool to see that
01:29:19
Speaker
work grow and kind of like the sequencing of the assemblies and then this like resistance festival like as a way of kind of tracking the growth of those projects and like giving support to sustain them like all the new people that were brought in after the assemblies and after the festival has really like yeah just like increased our ability to to do things together in really cool ways.
01:29:46
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like just to add a little onto that, I think specifically, the hurricane was such a big reminder to people that you know, the government is is not going to save us. And also, like who showed up, who was like the first people on the ground out there were Just regular people a part of like mutually networks or just people that lives in the community, right? So I think it was a really big moment for people to see for like ah autonomous type organizing to have Like people becoming more familiar with that and also like relying on it in a really big way for you know in those instances like literally surviving through this winter and I think that has that has like spread rapidly
01:30:30
Speaker
I think the hurricane really showed people who to rely on in crisis and it's not going to be the government it's not even going to be you know organizations whatever the first people on the ground out there were folks just a part of mutual aid networks showing up to take care of each other and I think that has had a really big impact on people's familiarity and also Kind of legitimacy for autonomous organizing and beyond the hurricane there has been as he mentioned a lot of work into making autonomous organizing more public facing so people are familiar with it in a way that feels exciting and good so i think for this event things we saw were.
01:31:13
Speaker
significantly less people being like, what organization is putting this on? Which is, you know, a question that people have gotten often in the beginnings of introducing more autonomous things in this area. And for example, we yeah, people just walked into the festival and started setting up their stuff. And i yeah, I think it was just really beautiful to see the way that like more autonomous organizing is becoming the norm here, which is really exciting.
Initiating Community Care and Resistance Projects
01:31:39
Speaker
Yeah that is exciting well with all that in mind like what are some of the lessons that you feel come out of this that speaks to the moment i mean cuz i mean so much what you can rely on the government i mean they're literally like you know slashing you know basic bear bones programs like i read online that you know because of what's going on with.
01:31:59
Speaker
What they're doing with the budget like rural health clinics in Virginia, which is not that far from where you all are at, ah you know, we're shutting down. I mean, this is, we're just going to see more of this. So I'm curious, you know, what do you, what do you think comes out of this that informs the moment that we're in right now?
01:32:16
Speaker
One of the big things is like don don't wait. Start forming something to take care of your community now, no matter like what the scale is, and start building up like whatever ecosystem, like building up an ecosystem where you live of different projects that allow us to take care of each other.
01:32:39
Speaker
And I think having at least some portion of those projects be more open facing so that more people can like come into doing that work we can build relationships and like strength and trust that can allow for like different things and different forms of resistance to be possible feels really critical for keeping each other safe in this moment. And I think just like also leaning into the trust around like you don't if you want to do something it doesn't have to be entirely alone like
01:33:15
Speaker
When we were first planning the event, we had initially talked about, like, okay, what do we want to see? Who can do this Skillshare? Who can do that? And I think, like, P made a really great intervention around, like, let's do an open call. Instead of us trying to hold all of this ourselves, like, let's invite other people to submit proposals to, like, lead some of their own Skillshares.
01:33:41
Speaker
And like the outcome of which like took a lot of burden off of all of us, like for holding everything, but also was that opportunity to build and strengthen connection so that when we did have an event like all the people that were facilitating also were bringing their people and there was ah across projects and create like collective infrastructure that supports all of the things that we're trying to do those are yeah those are some of my big takeaways I don't have like the silver bullet around how to respond to the moment but I know that like the energy of what we're doing here makes me feel like more is possible yeah I think
01:34:27
Speaker
There's a few things. One, I think, yeah, just like, again, the importance of more public facing autonomous actions and care. And I think anarchist spaces can get pretty siloed sometimes. And some of those reasons are about security and are really valid. And sometimes it's not all about that. And I think we need to, yeah, like step away from kind of ah political puritism and be open to connecting with folks who, you know, maybe are new to these ideas but are excited or um you it's just going to take
01:35:03
Speaker
it's gonna take all of us to survive and care for each other and I think also something like this event even for myself just it it was really shocking just to emphasize like a handful of people pulled this off and you know we are all also just trying to survive capitalism and so I think it was just really inspiring to be like wow look at what is possible together and And also you know not just the folks that did the logistics of this event, but but this event isn't possible without like a wider community infrastructure of all these smaller projects and
Empowering Local Action and Disrupting Violence
01:35:37
Speaker
things happening. And so I think my number one thing is just like don't don't let your you know your project, your idea live in your head. Just do it. If it doesn't have to be perfect, it can be really small, but it's going to take all of us doing
01:35:52
Speaker
so much to be able to do the bigger things together and so yeah I guess my advice is just start your thing with where you know if you live in a place where there isn't a lot going on like someone has to someone has to you know start something so I think just yeah like trying to connect with people and and not letting letting ideas live in your head and really just do do the thing. Well, I feel like you already kind of hit on it. But I mean, I think a lot of people are wondering like, how do we go forward right now? And there's, you know, there's a lot happening all over. But also, I feel like there's a lot of trepidation with the moment. I mean, it's, it's pretty scary what's going on. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that.
01:36:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think the way that I and, you know, I don't I don't know if this is like the answer or even right. But I think the way I'm handle this moment is, you know, to some degree staying plugged into what's happening on a more like national scale. And I think just like really paying attention to like, how is that actually impacting my community? Like,
01:36:57
Speaker
Right now what can i do to address that because i think you know the state you really uses fear as a tactic to i mean it's literally destroys our bodies and also just send us into submission making us feel like there is you know hopeless and i think I have stepped away from paying attention totally to every specific thing and trying to get, you know, like a general understanding of what's happening, but then looking more specifically, okay, well, what is happening in my community and what can I actually do? And look at the people around me to like face this rather than, yeah, just feeling completely overwhelmed because I mean, I think we just need to remind ourselves that like,
01:37:36
Speaker
Some of the things are for sure happening, and some of them actually might not. And the fear is a big part of that. I think with you know immigration stuff, they, I think for sure, are relying on people to also self-deport themselves because of the fear they're stirring up. And so I think we need to be really intentional. I think just, yeah, like taking a beat and and focusing on what is actually happening around us and like what we can do together and like kind of pulling back from, I guess, the national scale a little bit.
01:38:05
Speaker
Yeah. And I think there's lots of ways to think like do local and also think about what kind of impact and relationships we can form in a broader scale. Like I think one of the cool things that like this region is kind of known for is thinking about like these open facing projects that like can be replicated anywhere. Like some of that being like the really, really free markets.
01:38:31
Speaker
It's something like Food Not Bombs, different forms of mutual aid projects. We have something really cool that has started here that's like been strengthened through the disaster work. But I think actually it started before the hurricanes, but that's like a conference in the Commons. It's like a disaster resistance festival um and disaster in a like climate, but also just like the collapse that we're living under and like more places for Skillshare, like bring a skill, learn a skill, find people to learn a skill with, come back and and do it together. And so I think thinking about like, what are the types of actions and things that we can form that can also be models for places that are like getting started or for new people that are getting activated and or like, having serious material impacts right now and are looking to start strengthening ecosystems and where they live and I think so that's one thing but also like similarly like what are some possible replicable actions that we can take to like show to like clog up the system and like disrupt some of the violence that's happening so those are those are some things that like we're thinking about and like how do we
01:39:57
Speaker
have the communications networks and things like this podcast and projects like that so we can be learning about the types of resistance efforts that are happening across the country, even as we're trying to like also like stay grounded and fight back against the but fear and infam information like onslaught that is like social media right now in the news cycle. To say again like please don't let your ideas slip in your head just do the thing and yeah there's just so much room for it becoming something even more beautiful that's in your head and it probably will be when more people are involved in it and so yeah just like do the thing.
01:40:50
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchists and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.