Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 129
Episode Date: May 4, 2024All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available ...exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzoneSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to to our friends at PK Gaz Gaza, Ahmed and Abdullah.
You might remember them from an episode we did last October, and I've interviewed them
before for Men's Health magazine in the UK.
PK Gaza is a group that teaches parkour and free running to young people in the Gaza Strip.
They've been doing this for a long time, and they have some great videos you can find
all over social media and YouTube.
Both Ahmed and Abdullah had the opportunity to leave Gaza.
Ahmed now lives in Sweden, Abdullah lives in Italy.
We spoke a couple of weeks ago but very little has changed since then and I just wanted to
note that Abdullah's audio is a little bit rough but we thought what he had to say was
really important so we hope that you'll take the time to listen to it.
My name is Ahmad Matar. I am 28 years old at the moment. I'm Palestinian from Gaza.
Currently, I live in Sweden since eight years ago. And yeah, I live in Sweden. I work with
parkour and I live from parkour and that's what I do here. And last summer was my first time visiting Gaza
since eight years and yeah, but I'm back in Sweden. I was back in Sweden one month before
the war started again. And yeah, a lot of things to say, a lot of things to say a lot of things to express and
but yeah that's me ahmed matar 20 years old from gaza hello guys nice to meet you all i'm
27 years old i'm also palestinian i'm proud of that. I'm from Gaza City originally and
I live in Italy right now for almost three years.
We wanted to talk to them about how it feels to be outside of Gaza and wake up every day
wondering if a bomb has killed your family or if your family is getting enough to eat.
How have you been coping with, like dealing with, it's bad enough for those of us who don't have
family watching the horrible things that happen every day and like every morning you look on your
phone and it's something worse. How has it been for you guys just to give people an insight into
how you're coping? From my side I can say yeah life is a stop since the day that the war started.
Six months since this war and every day just watching the news.
I go to work and then I come back.
While I'm at work I'm just watching the news, I'm listening to the news and that was my
life since six months at the moment and I don't feel to do
anything else I cannot feel like to train I cannot feel like to enjoy or to
forget what's going on there because it's my family there my friends my
people if I feel like I want to forget about it, it feels like I'm betraying my people,
my family. So I prefer to just watch the news, feel the same as them, and just do my best to help them with what I can, but it's actually like I just feel helpless at
the moment that I cannot do anything to them in a situation like this at the moment.
Abdullah said that when he chose to leave Gaza, it was one of the most difficult moments
of his entire life. He knew that if he stayed, there wasn't much hope for his future and he'd have to give
up on so many of his dreams that would be achievable if he hadn't been born in an open
air prison.
Now that he's left, he can pursue his dreams in Italy, but he struggles to express how
difficult he has been finding being so isolated and distant from his friends and family.
I mean, one of the most important things in our life, if it's not really the most important,
is family. Since I really left Italy, it was not really easy for me because I knew that
I would be alone and I would be away from my family. But I took that decision because
I knew that somehow I had to, let's say, somehow to sacrifice. And because, you know, I was focusing somehow
on my future, my goals, which was not really almost impossible. It's impossible to do it
where I was, which is considered, it was the hardest decision I've made ever in my life.
That's even before anything really started. I'm going to explain how I feel since my back. I'm sure
that everybody knows right now if he's going to put himself in my place that he wouldn't
have the right words to express his feeling. And I'm sure I'm someone right now who doesn't
really have the right words to express it and to tell you what I feel and how I feel because
it's not something that easy for anyone to experience in his life. So that's how I feel.
We wanted to ask them how they were able to keep in touch with their families.
I remember I was talking to Ahmed in October and like we were talking about how hard it was just
to find out if your families
were okay every day, right? Just to contact them and check. Is that still the case? How has it been
just trying to contact your families over the last six months? It is actually still the same that they
have to try calling and calling and calling the whole day until they catch up. Like the connection is cut off or it's almost like impossible to get connected with them.
So I have to try the whole day until like I get someone answering me because it's like,
I guess it's because it's a small place where they are like in Rafa and there is more than
one and a half million people and everyone is trying to call
to Gaza and to check with everybody in there so it's make it hard to get connected easily with
them so I try like every day and for sure I in the, it's better than before at the moment. When they were
in Can Younis, it was like that I had to ask my friends who live close to my area and then
they tell me if my family are okay or not. And sometimes I'm having no information about
them for a whole week and just worried too if everything is okay with them.
At the moment I just wish for the best. That's what I am at home wishing everything is okay with them,
but without knowing if it's them or another family who got bombed.
Because the TV is not showing a name or a family anymore because
it's, you know, you're talking about more than 35,000 people got killed. And to mention
the names of every person getting killed, it's something impossible in the media, I
guess.
I just want to mention how does it feel for anyone who's really listening right now?
How does it feel if you know that someone who's really the most important in your life
and you know that he's in danger somehow and you're trying to call one day, two days, three
days or even for a week sometimes.
Sometimes even it happens two weeks and three weeks.
And you know that people they are dying every day and it might be someone from your family
that you know might something you know happen and you cannot reach them because of the signal
or because of the connection or whatever it is.
How would you feel?
Ahmed said he hadn't actually seen his family for nearly a month,
because they hadn't had good enough signal for a call. Abdullah, on the other hand, hasn't even
seen a picture of his family since bombs began to fall on the place where he grew up six months ago.
Like I have not seen my family like face to face on on a camera for more than three weeks at the moment.
The moment I saw them, they have to go somewhere really high building so they can have internet.
That's if they get this internet and at the same time it's very dangerous for them to go on high buildings.
it's very dangerous for them to go on high buildings.
So, yeah, you know, sometimes when my father sent me a picture of him
on messenger more than a month ago,
and then I was like just shocked how to see
his white hair, like gray hair everywhere,
and he just changed in these six months totally.
Like I would not recognize
the same person like he was before the war because I was there seven months ago in Gaza
and he was totally young like you know he's he's just 50 years but it's not that he had
gray hair everywhere like how I saw in his picture and
then I see how suffering they are facing, how tough life they are having at the moment
just through his face, his picture that he sent to me, which is really just for sure hard to see how they are growing too fast because of this genocide.
To be honest, I just want to add that I'm happy that you, Ahmed, got the chance to
see your father. I Still for the last six months. I didn't see a picture
I didn't talk to me till oh my father
Just just understand
I
They really risk their life to to go and
Talk to me and then I always I also tell them to not do that when I when I see them
Going to that building
Where is where they go to get the internet I was just telling them go home
Be at a safer area, but still like they tell me there is no safe area
there is no safe area and there is it's the same anywhere but then it's still like
yeah it's uh it gave more fear that when you're on a high building any any high building getting
targeted in Gaza I have been having an extremely hard time looking at what's happening through my phone,
witnessing the suffering of people who might as well be my family. They all look and
sound like my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my parents, my siblings. I can't even imagine
experiencing this if it was my actual family. I genuinely do not know how I could cope with
not being able to reach them for months or not even knowing if they're okay. I wanted to know
if Ahmad and Abdullah have found ways to cope,
or at least ways to get through each day.
Do you guys have a community that you can reach out to?
Do you guys talk to each other a lot?
How do you guys stay sane?
Like, how do you not lose your mind,
as everyone else goes about their life?
We talk to each other, me and Abdullah, almost every day in the evening. We spend
like more than four hours at least in a call. And besides that, yeah, while we are sitting
calling each other, we are watching the news and yeah, we have to be informed about everything
is happening. That's how it makes us feel better at least to know what's going on and to follow the news.
Thing else can help it.
I think I would not feel happy to go and enjoy while my family is not enjoying and I don't
feel good about it.
It's not that I should enjoy it's I feel like I'm not gonna enjoy until my family is safe until my family
is enjoying and it's gonna take years I guess you know the Taroma Taromaomas that affected them from this genocide is gonna take a while to heal, to recover.
They will take a long time to recover from this.
I don't know if I am affected by it or not, but my life, as I told you, has been just
watching news for six months and nothing else. I don't know how is that affecting me in the long
run like after the war ends. But for me, parkour has always been a way to recover and I'm sure
parkour will help me later.
I'm always trying to stay to talk to myself because I guess it's really important. Everybody
has to talk to himself because it's the most important thing. Yeah, I'm not like a mind
of a person. I just try to keep my beliefs, try not to lose your mind, try just to be
normal because at the end anyway, you don't have anything that you can do in your hands,
that you cannot change something. Like I already have a friend
of mine that already told her, I'm really proud of myself, that at least I'm trying to stay normal.
I'm trying to keep myself and act as a normal person. But the main question is, I don't know when I would be able to.
I'm afraid that once it's going to happen that I'm going to lose everything and I'm
going to destroy everything.
And of course, you know, sometimes I'm trying to get out.
I'm not trying to be alone.
I'm just trying to keep my mind and my life a little bit more busy as much as I can.
I've known Abdullah and Ahmed and several other members of PK Gaza since 2020.
I worked on a story about them in 2021, which was about the last time I could sell stories
on Gaza, because for the most part, you only get to write about people in Gaza when they're
dying.
I asked him about the well-being of some of the other members of the team. Said, yeah, he's in our thoughts all the time and we will never forget him for sure.
Said was like the last person I saw in Gaza when I left Gaza and he was with me, helping me with everything so I can leave from Gaza to Egypt.
So he was helping me with all the process I need in the crossing area because it's very
busy and you need to know people in the crossing area so they can fix you and help you and
to carry my stuff with me. And I know Said since I was born, I can say.
Said's father and my father are very close friends.
And since I grew up, like since I start to be aware
on this life, I met Said. And we were friends, neighbors, we were always playing together
and then we decided to go for a Kung Fu club and we started to train Kung Fu and martial
arts together and at the age of nine years, me and Said also met Abdullah and met the other guys who does
also martial arts.
So we started to do martial arts together and then we met the parkour guys, Mohamed
Al-Jakbir and Abdullah Nshasi, which made us turn into parkour after.
And everything I was doing in like in my sports life and outside of my sports
life I was always meeting Said as a friend, as a brother, and we were at each other's houses and
eating together. And yeah Said was really meaning a lot to me because I have always known him as the
good guy who helps everyone who needs help.
And lately Said was the manager of the Barkour Academy that we created there and he was taking
care and teaching kids for free and volunteering and putting from his time so
more kids can go there and learn parkour and my brother was one of them and he
was helping him and during this war Said was the only one that informs me about
my family in Gaza about how they are because he was the only one who was connected
to the internet at that time.
So I was going through him about my family,
and we were talking every day during this war.
And suddenly I just saw news about him,
that he got killed together with his brothers while trying to rescue some people from under the rubble and then another rocket bombed them and killed them all.
I could not understand it and still cannot believe that Said is gone.
and still cannot believe that Said is gone. It's something that I would not believe
that they go to Gaza and Said is not there.
I cannot imagine how it feels to his father, to his mother,
and that they lost the three of their sons at once.
Yeah, but Said will always be in our memory,
in our heart that we will never forget.
Palestinians, they are really different than anybody else.
When the bomb is really happening, everybody is just trying to escape, everybody is just
trying to run away.
What Said and his brothers did, they just went after that building was bombed, they
just went to help others, to take others from under the rubble, you know, to help them,
to see if they are injured, if they are, you know, they can help others. And that was their
fault, that they were trying just to help others and then they could fall, three of
them. That's what happened to them. And that's what most of the plasticine does. But they will really pray and yeah, it's such a loss that nobody can imagine.
It's hard enough losing a friend so suddenly.
It's even harder when you haven't been able to see them for months and never got to say
goodbye.
We asked about the last time they spoke to their friend
and we asked them to share some of their memories of him. So he was, I said, was telling me listen
to this sound and then while listening I was just hearing shooting and then he was telling me this is
a quadcaptor. The quadcaptor is like a drone that is developed to shoot at the same time so it can film and
see everything moving and shooting it at the same time.
So it can kill people which is moving and he tells me that everything is moving in this
area, everything is moving around us is getting shot.
And he was at his home and together with his family and I was telling him just say leave the area
go somewhere that is better and safer or something that you don't have to hear this sound that
you maybe can get killed inside your home because you know this quadcopors is a drone that can go inside windows, anything, that it can go from the roof and enter your home.
And yeah, that's what he told me, what he told me was like yeah, but if I live home I will get killed and if I,
If I leave another place I will also get killed because it's not safe anywhere, it's the same. So if I die at our home or outside our home it's the same.
And in the end I go to the heaven directly, it's better for me and that's what he was saying and
that's what he received. He wanted the heaven I guess. But we wanted him back in our life. We did not
want him to go. But yeah, that's life. It takes the good people from us always.
That's the end of part one, but we'll be back tomorrow with the second part of our interview with Ahmed and Abdullah from Gaza Parkour.
What up? I am Drammo's host of the Life as a Gringo podcast. Now, this is a show for
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in the gray area. If you ever felt like you were always too much this while also never being enough that
this is the podcast for you.
Every Tuesday I'll be bringing you conversations around personal growth, issues affecting the
Latin community and much more via my own personal stories along with interviews with inspiring
thought leaders from our community.
Then every Thursday I'll be tackling trending stories and current events from our community that you need to know.
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left without a voice or just forgotten about. On this show, I celebrate the uniqueness of
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Since October 7th, Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, many of them children. All over the world, people have taken to the streets to call for an end to
the killing, to show solidarity with the people of Palestine amidst their genocide.
This is an unprecedented act of solidarity, but it's also been a long time coming, and
we wanted to know how it made Ahmad and Abdullah feel.
I walk in the streets here in Sweden and I see the people wearing the kofiya, the Palestinian
kofiya, and it's something that makes me feel for sure happy and to see that the people start
to be aware of what's going on in Palestine and Gaza, start to understand that we have
occupation, that we... that finally you need to look in our cause and solve it.
This is Palestine, this is Palestinians that they need their freedom, they
need to live as any other person on this earth and to see this support of the people it's
the most important for us to to live. It gives us a sense of freedom while we are not free yet.
It gives us a sense of freedom while we are not free yet. Just make us, give us hope that something will happen in the future.
It's because it's a story of oppressed people who have been suffering for years. And I guess these people need attention,
need more effort of the people
so they can get their freedom.
When they have done about the Black Lives Matters
and it should come from the people,
that's how the world gets affected.
If the people go against their governments, against the decisions of their leaders,
that's what's going to change the public opinion, the leaders' opinion also.
I wanted to ask about, like, people want to help now more than I think they ever have in this country.
People are aware, people who weren't aware
before. People who couldn't have told you like, where like
Palestine was in relation to the map maybe now want to help and
that's cool. That's great. Like, I think obviously people have a
lot of learning to do. Because this isn't an issue that's been
very well covered by the media in the US for decades, right?
The media in this country has also dedicated itself to dehumanizing Muslim people for a very long time,
but extensively over the last 20 years.
So like two things that come out of that. I want to ask, like, if people want to help,
and they have money, that tends to be the easiest way to make a difference, right?
But you've told me before that a lot of the NGOs, your parents, your families end up buying the food that gets donated.
So is there an NGO that is better?
And then like, what can people do to learn, I guess, like to learn more?
I mean, either from you guys or things or books or films that you think are good.
I mean, the all the companies or the organizations that works in
Gaza, for sure, they're trying their best. But yeah, as you have
seen that most of the trucks are standing outside Rafa crossing,
and they are just allowing 200 trucks a day for 2 million people who
are hungry or suffering. So yeah for sure like the food is not enough and when someone want to get
this food he have to or he or she they have to buy the food and it's more than 10 times more expensive than what it
was before and sometimes it reaches even more.
Even the vegetables are higher than the prices here in Europe.
Imagine a country under a war, no work, no jobs, everything is stopped and the prices are going higher and higher because
the stuff is very limited and the food is limited and everything is limited.
So for sure like people want to sell the stuff that they have so they can earn money so they
can buy another stuff and that's how the people are doing in Gaza so if they get something maybe for free which
is very rare that it happened because it's too many people and for example my
family are buying the food and I know how it is for them that it is hard for
them to get the stuff that they even need because
all what they have is food that is backed in cans, beans, mostly beans actually and that's what they
have. Everything they tell me we have been eating beans or a lot of these and pasta
or a lot of these and pasta. And they buy this stuff, it's not that it's for free.
Sometimes every other month, every other two months, they get a bag of flour so they can make bread.
And it's not just food aid that can be hard to get your hands on in Gaza. Even sending money is difficult.
Yeah, it is starvation for the people. People are really suffering from that and
cannot imagine how is my family living in that situation because I really find it hard this time
to even send my family money because of how most of the offices are closed that
like most of the offices are closed that can receive money from outside Gaza. So it's...
Most of the offices are very busy that they have to stand in a queue
for more than 10 hours, 5 hours sometimes, and in the end they tell them,
oh, we're sorry, we are out of cash.
And that's what happens.
Yeah, and imagine like the same money going
and coming back in the,
so it's sometimes there is nothing in the banks,
there is nothing in the offices that is exchanging
and receiving money from outside.
Like Western Union is not working anymore,
Moneygram is not working, and now the people are using something like a
crypto coin like USDT and you know to send a hundred dollar for example
they take like more than 15% of that and then in the same time you also have to pay another 10% or 5% for sending
because the USDT is not equal with the USD because it's in the crypto coin it's
more expensive so you need to pay more dollars to get USDT and then there they receive it as a donor. So yeah, to support I suggest if anyone
wants to support or have the money that wants to support a family or people in Gaza
the only thing is to actually contact the family that they want to support directly because
all the support that goes through the international organizations takes a very long time and
in the end it reaches Gaza and it's not enough for the people and then the people have to buy it.
It's not that it goes for free.
Although millions of people are trapped in Gaza right now, we also know that some Gazans
have been able to leave.
We've seen fundraisers pop up for people trying to get themselves or their families out of
Gaza.
We asked Ahmed and Abdullah if they had an idea how much it would cost to leave Gaza
right now.
But then imagine Egyptians government are charging $5,000 for each truck entering Gaza
and they're charging every person $5,000 to leave from Gaza. So it's something else to help with.
If you want to help someone to leave from Gaza is also help our families or something like that, I can say.
I mean, I'm trying to get my family out of there
because I don't see any better future in Gaza at the moment.
Imagine like this, what happened to Gaza
will need at least more than 10 years to recover.
All the schools are destroyed, all the houses,
our home is bombed.
You know, to rebuild a home is not just about rebuilding a home.
Even if the bombing stopped today, the crisis wouldn't.
Almost all of Gaza's infrastructure, its hospitals, universities, schools and streets, has been destroyed.
There's nothing left in Gaza. There's nowhere to go if you're sick.
There's nowhere to buy food or clothes for your children.
There's nowhere to buy the materials to fix your bombed house.
Given all of this, it's hard to see a future for people there, which isn't very difficult.
So we asked Abdullah and Ahmed about rebuilding.
You need to rebuild everything.
You know, where will the water go? Where will the water come from? The electricity, everything is bombed.
You know, you need to build a whole new city, which will take at least, at least, at least
ten years.
It's much, much more.
And the affection of it on the people themselves also, what they have suffered, what they have,
you know, it's gonna take them a long time
to heal.
So I think I did not want to take a step like this, but I will ask in the end my people
who follow me to if they want to support the people and if they want to support any member of my family to get out of Gaza because I
don't see it any better and I'm not ready to lose any of my family.
And yeah, imagine like I have a brother who's 12 years old at the moment. And I have a sister which turned 16 and another sister,
which has two kids and one of them was born in the war,
like four months old at the moment.
And what about these kids?
What will they do if they stay in Gaza?
And you can apply that on the rest of Gaza people, Abdullah's family
and his brother's sons, his brother's kids.
So yeah, that's the best.
I don't know, but most, many, many people want to really get out of there at the moment because to think about what happened
to Gaza, it will take years.
It's my family's future and I don't know for how long it will take to fix this future
if they stay in Gaza and if they still stay alive because if they enter Gaza at the moment, my family is in Rafa and close
to the borders area with Egypt and that's the only place where are most of the people
at the moment, like more than one and a half million are staying in a very small area and if Israeli enter
Rafa that would be just yeah the hugest disaster that would could ever happen on earth that
imagine 36,000 people killed and that's the one that is confirmed on the list that they found.
But you know thousands and thousands are like they cannot confirm like they are written
unknown, they don't know who they are and there is thousands under the rubble that they
cannot get out and many missing so it can be it could reach to
a hundred thousand with together with the injured people and that's not a
small number and imagine if they enter to a place like Rafah that will be just like double what have happened at least.
I hope that would not happen,
but I see that the Israelis have very decided
that they want to do that even if no one would be able
to stop them, they say,
and they would do it even without the support of anyone,
without the support of the USA or without and
That shows how
Criminals they are I can say that they want just to
Slaughter all the people in Gaza. They don't care about civilian or not civilian
yeah, I I
Want to do my best to help my family.
And I see, I have to take them to a safer place.
And I don't know if it's possible if they stay in Gaza.
Like anyone else, Ahmed and Abdullah
want their families to be safe.
But because they were born in Palestine, they don't have the privilege of not having to
constantly worry about their family's safety. They also don't get to be the ones making choices
that impact their safety. Instead, these choices are made by other people.
Those people don't know Ahmed and Abdullah or their families.
They might be IDF drone operators or US diplomats.
To those people, their families are just numbers. But to Ahmed and Abdullah, their families are their whole world.
How it works to get people out of Gaza is like you have to send someone in Egypt to pay for
the government in Egypt. So they put their names in the list of Rafah borders so they can travel.
That's how it works. So and they
charge every person at least five thousand. You pay more than you are able
to leave earlier. If you don't pay or you pay five thousand you stay and wait in
the queue. If you don't pay you die in Gaza. Yeah you worth nothing. That's how
it is. I don That's how it is.
I don't know how it is for Abdullah.
How does he feel about the future of Gaza at the moment?
How do you feel like for the next 10 years
watching your family?
I cannot imagine.
That's the thing.
That's why it lead me to steps like that
because I always never wanted to.
My family are very, you know, loving to the
country that they don't want to leave Gaza and my mother was like, no, we build home
first and I was trying to convince her by just explaining the situation and the next 10 years from now which is another disaster after the war which is
make her understand more yeah for so true to think about her children future and yeah
but in the same time I understand the love for the country. I always love Gaza and I even have Gaza in everything in my life.
I have it in my name even like I always, if I say my name, I say I'm Mata Gaza as my name.
I don't say I am Ahmed Mata in my social media, even it says Mata Gaza since always,
not during the war and it's because I'm proud to be from there
because it's the place that taught me the strength, it gave me the power, it gave me
like it taught me a lot of values that I use in my life at the moment that made me patient, it made me strong. And that's what is Gaza.
It made me the person I am that I always hope and I always dream.
I always have an extra dream because we always dream as a people from Gaza.
Abdullah told us that his family is similar to Ahmad's, not wanting to leave Gaza because of their love of the land.
Their priorities are to help their families.
He said that when people ask him, how can I help?
His view is that everyone has their own way of supporting.
It does not necessarily have to mean financial help if that is not a possibility for someone.
He stressed the importance of posting on social media to continue spreading awareness and how the Palestinian struggle is a struggle that concerns all of humanity.
You know, at the beginning I was thinking like, I want to go to Gaza directly after this or
during the war, but the worse I see it, the harder it makes it like that even if I go what will it help with my family like
home is destroyed everything is destroyed not just our home our whole area like our neighbors
everything or our hood is destroyed which is said, will take a long time to fix.
So going to Gaza, yeah, for sure it can help, but at the same time, in the long run, it's not
the thing that will make a change for my family's safety and future.
will make a change for my family's safety and future. And that's why, I don't know, I am stuck between two things,
like going to the place where I grow,
where I learned all of these values to be strong,
but at the same time living life where everything is destroyed, where you don't have a future.
Or decide to be in a safer place where you maybe fix a future but away from your country,
from your heart.
Because you know, for us, Gaza is our heart.
We really love Gaza. We care about everything in Gaza, but that's where I'm stuck between safety and future
and the heart, Gaza, the place where we love.
We really appreciate both of you guys sharing your feelings and your stories. And I think Abdullah made a great point about how even if you can't support
financially, there's a huge benefit of continuing to share posts about Palestine
and continuing to talk about it and not letting life just go as usual and making
people remember what's happening and not letting them forget.
So I think that's important to remember for all the listeners, just if you're able,
like the least we can do is talk about Palestine.
That's the very least, very least you can do.
Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you and share this story with you for sure.
And to tell you the situation of every person who's living outside Gaza away from their families, that's
I guess not just me, not just Abdullah, it's every Palestinian from Gaza who's living away
from their family, they are really suffering, I can say, because we are not living normal since this genocide started in Gaza and we
hope it will end soon so we can see our families and yeah stop the killing of
these people from these children because it has been a war and a genocide on the children, women, innocents.
More than 15,000 children have been killed and much more disappearing.
And yeah, women.
And so it's more than 70% of the people who have been killed are women and children and also
breast is L3 and men teenagers.
Guys, where can people if they want to follow along like to hear more from you guys just to see your stories where can they find you like on social media or online?
You can find me on my Instagram, Matar Gaza.
Abd al-Kasab23, that's my account on Instagram.
As Ahmad was saying, we appreciate everything.
We are here because we want as much as people to know about it.
And just to think and to know that Gazans andans and Palestinians they are not really numbers,
they are people. They are people that everybody has really heart and is beating all the time
and they have feelings. We have everything that any human being in this world has in this world,
as soon as everybody is really listening right now, and we are all equal, there's nobody's better than the other one.
At the end, we are all the same.
So we are not numbers, just I would like that everybody remember this.
There's so many and so much really bigger stories behind every, everyone, everyone that was really killed.
Everyone has a family and you have to think what if there is just, you know, a person that he
lost, everyone from his family, that's one story. The other person that he lost his kid, that's
another story. The other person lost his mom, that's another story, that other person lost his mom, that's another story, that other person lost his dad, that mother took to this
story.
So, everybody has this one story, that's why I'm just trying to show that we are not just
numbers, there are so many other things that we have and we would feel often. So even though the people they still alive
and they are alive, they are dead.
They're not alive because literally we have nothing,
even whether they lost someone from the family
or whether they can die even from hunger.
Thank you guys so much.
Yeah, thank you, Eamon. Thank you both. We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Hey everyone, it's me, James.
I hope you found those enlightening.
I know they're difficult to listen to, but I think they're important as well.
I just wanted to update the end of the episode to let you know that Ahmed has made a fundraising
page.
He's raising funds for his family who are still trapped in Gaza.
If you'd like to donate to that, we will include the link in the show notes, but I'm also going
to read it here just so you can remember it.
You're driving or what have you.
Hey everybody.
The URL has been updated actually. It is now GoFundMe, G-O-F-U-N-D dot M-E, GoFundMe dot me forward slash F-6-B-1-F-7-B-E.
So go to that GoFundMe and please donate what you can. It will also be in the description
of this episode. area. If you ever felt like you were always too much this while also never being enough that
this is the podcast for you. Every Tuesday I'll be bringing you conversations around personal growth,
issues affecting the Latin community and much more via my own personal stories along with
interviews with inspiring thought leaders from our community. Then every Thursday I'll be tackling
trending stories and current events from our community that you need to know.
So much of what makes our community so beautiful is our diversity yet too often those of us
who don't fit into this dumb stereotypical box of whatever it means to be Latino are
left without a voice or just forgotten about.
On this show I celebrate the uniqueness of our culture and invite you to walk in your
authenticity.
Listen to Life as a Gringo as a part
of the MyKultura podcast network,
available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey everybody, welcome to Across Generations
where the voices of black women unite
in powerful conversations.
I'm your host, Tiffany Cross.
Tiffany Cross.
I want you all to join me and be a part of sisterhood,
friendship, wisdom, and laughter.
In every episode, we gather a seasoned elder.
But even with a child, there's no such thing
as the wrong thing if you love them.
Myself, as the middle generation.
I don't feel like I have to get married
at this big age in life, but it is a desire I have
and something that I've navigated in dating.
And a vibrant young soul for engaging intergenerational conversations.
I'm very jealous of your generation that didn't have to deal with Instagram and Tinder.
This is Across Generations where Black women's voices unite and together, you know how we
do, we create magic.
Listen to Across Generations podcast
on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bring a little optimism into your life
with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast
from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay.
And me, Simone Boyce.
Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations
about culture, the latest trends, inspiration,
and so much more.
Thank you for taking the light,
and you're gonna shine it all over the world,
and it makes me really happy.
I never imagined that I would get the chance
to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy.
Listen to The Bright Side
on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.
Welcome to a special May Day episode of Vickadap'n here.
I'm your host, Mia Wong.
It wasn't too long ago that unions were finished.
The percentage of American workers in unions plunged towards the single digits.
The unions that survived battered in broken shells of the mighty behemoths that shook
the world for a hundred years, embraced so-called business unionism, which set out not to conquer
the world in the name of labor like its great predecessors, or even, really, to bargain
for higher wages, but to make companies profitable in order to keep their jobs.
They took pay cuts and job losses
without a fight, forcing their membership into line and effortlessly crushing the endless slates
of reform caucuses that sought to put the fight back into the working class.
Even the cutting edge of Marxist theory held the time of unions was over.
Workers were too atomized, too divided, too far from the immediate processes
of production, from the discipline of the factory, and from the massification of the
city to assemble the working class in its old fighting form. There would be riots, to
be sure. Barricades. Blockades. Occ occupations, but not strikes.
Whatever the working class did next, the age of the union was over.
For much of the 2010s, that prediction was a smart bet.
The bold proclamation of Wisconsin trade unionists that organized labor would turn back the tide
if the Tea Party fell to ruin under the failure of
their attempt to recall Wisconsin's hated union-busting Governor Scott Walker. The Tea
Party's march continued unimpeded, radicalizing even further in the wake of the 2014-2015
uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore to produce not the victory of the working class, but Donald Trump.
Even success stories like the rejuvenation of the mighty Chicago Teachers Union, AFT
Local 1, by a bold reform caucus called the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, or CORE,
who waged a pair of unexpectedly wildly popular strikes, was tainted by the reality of limited wins and labor conditions
in Chicago schools that remained appalling. Even as the Left returned in the wake of Occupy,
Ferguson, and the election of Trump, union membership continued to plunge,
and capitalists and Marxists alike continued to herald the Union's demise. They were wrong.
History, it seems, delights in irony. It was the dead-enders fighting hopeless battles and Reform caucuses losing Union election after Union election.
It was the Wobblies fighting losing campaign after losing campaign, desperately trying to organize the unorganizable fast
food and retail workers.
It was rank and file Marxist trade unionists waiting 60 long years, their comrades dead
and gone, for somebody, anybody, to hear their plans for shutting down capital's logistics
networks.
It was labor notes, 16 staffers compiling endless analyses of labor struggles for a crowd that couldn't have filled a baseball stadium. Who was right?
Unions are back.
While still small compared to the height of union power in the 1950s, saw a wave of massively popular strikes waged by unions from the massive behemoths like
the UAW and the Writers Guild, to tiny independent coffee unions whose members larger existing
unions would rather spit on than spend a single cent attempting to organize.
Only the direct intervention of the president to break a rail worker strike before it could
start and the last second portrayal of Teamsters leadership stopped 2023 from being the largest strike wave of the modern era.
Basking in his triumphs and conspiring to win more was LaborNotes.
LaborNotes is a curious beast.
It is simultaneously a journal that publishes news about labor struggles, a network that
brings together
a group of disparate rank-and-file union reform movements, largely but not exclusively from the U.S., maintaining a strong emphasis on solidarity and organizing with workers in Mexico,
and a labor conference that runs every two years. It is a relic of another time, whose time, it seems, has come again.
Labor Notes was founded in 1979 as a way to coordinate and expand the inter-union connections
formed between the United Mine Workers of America's 1979 bituminous coal strike.
It's one of the last direct connections to the era where labor was strong.
Unwittingly tasked with keeping the flame of labor alive during the neoliberal downpour.
Two weeks ago, they held their largest conference ever.
Four thousand five hundred people crammed into the Wyatt Regency next to Chicago's
O'Hare International Airport.
At least a thousand people who tried to register were turned down.
I personally watched interested workers turn away at the door because the venue's conference
halls had already reached the max capacity for fire safety.
Labor, we can safely say, is back.
It is returning to the South.
The great rock unions have shattered upon for a hundred
years. It's moving in new directions, towards service workers previously thought impossible
to organize. Most of all, it's moving towards something we'd almost forgotten was possible.
It's moving towards victory. The first thing you notice about labor
notes is its staggering diversity.
Young punks in battle jackets sat on
benches next to old anti-war
protesters from the 60s.
Independent trade unionists and
feminist activists in Mexico rubbed
shoulders with battle-hardened
American union nurses.
White middle-aged longshore men and
women plotted with young
queer Amazon warehouse workers to maximize the power of logistics strikes.
You saw old industrial organizers from the 60s passing down lessons and tactics and stories
of strikes that otherwise would have vanished into the mists of history. Media workers fighting
for their first contract. The lowliest rank-and-file workers chatting in breakout groups with union presidents.
For all the talk I've done in this show about how many union organizers are trans,
even I didn't expect to see this many trans people.
It's a cross-section of the American working class come to fight.
And that, above all, is what this Labor Notes Conference was about. It's a cross-section of the American working class come to fight.
And that, above all, is what this labor notes conference was about.
Fighting.
The most direct conflict came on the first day of the conference when Palestinian union activists called for a pro-Palestine demonstration
outside the hotel.
The cops arrested three people in an attempt to clear the street.
This, rather predictably, was a terrible idea. Instead of backing down, the crowd of several
hundred union activists almost immediately surrounded the lone car and demanded they
let their prisoner go. What happened next, to use a technical term, fucking ripped. A bunch of kids
had a rave to the changing police sirens. A 50-year-old
white dude from the electrical workers stood next to me, a Chinese trans woman from a podcast union,
a bunch of longshoremen, teamsters, staffers from unions you wouldn't believe even if I told you,
Palestinian trade union activists, nurses, punks from independent unions no one else in the crowd could have named. An entire mass of unionists stood their ground and refused to let the cops take one
of ours. A tradeswoman with drums marched around the police car and we all sang, which
side are you on? After two hours, the police gave up to a crowd screaming union power at
the top of our lungs.
It was an incredible display of solidarity that set the tone for the rest of the event.
We were going to fight the bosses together, and fuck them if they came for us.
This is not to say there weren't divisions.
A group of protesters broke away from the cop car to demand that Chicago Mayor
Brandon Johnson, the darling of the Chicago Teachers Union, come tell the cops to let
our people go. Now, whether or not this would have worked is up to some debate. These cops
were not Chicago police departments. They were the cops of Rosemont, which is technically
a separate entity from the city of Chicago.
However, Labor Note staffers and securities tried to stop the protesters from reaching
Brandon Johnson and ended up throwing punches at the protesters as, to quote one observer,
Union Brother fought Union Brother.
This fight reveals one of the important tensions in the movement.
Should unions continue to back imperfect center-left politicians in exchange for some political
benefits?
Or should they take a hard line against politicians who betray their fundamental political principles?
Brandon Johnson is a microcosm of the debate.
On the one hand, he was elected with enormous resource expenditure
from the Chicago teachers unions. On the other hand, he's been locking immigrants in tuberculosis
ridden camps as the city lurches from crisis to crisis. Even many of Chicago's other unionists
were never happy with him in the first place, as he failed to use his previous position to come to the aid of striking nurses.
When the two points of view collide, there is a fight.
On a national level, the conflict is the question of Joe Biden and Palestine.
At LaborNotes itself, there's strong support for Palestine.
Palestinian solidarity panels were packed to the rafters with workers from every sector
imaginable and activists from across the world.
I saw UAW workers deeply unhappy with their union leadership's decision to endorse Biden,
a decision made by maybe five members of an executive committee without a vote from the
union.
But therein lies the issue.
As much as Labor Notes represents the bleeding edge of the labor movement, UAW President
Sean Fain, fresh off the UAW's astounding 73% victory at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga,
gave the conference's closing address, there remains massive bastions of conservatism in
the labor movement who have actively fought against even statements on Palestine, much less concrete actions.
Unions are still weak and the positions of activists within them are still tenuous.
Even more favorable shops have yet to turn broader popular support among rank and file
workers for Palestine into substantive strike actions,
and it's deeply unclear to me if any such action is possible at all.
My pessimism on labor's willingness and ability to stop the genocide in Palestine, a pessimism
reinforced by watching the rapid spread of student campus occupations while labor remains
silent or, perhaps more precisely, dormant, is broadly in tension with my optimism at
effectively everything else that I saw there.
There is incredible organizing
going on at LaborNotes. People are coordinating rank and file links between unions whose staffers
and leaderships hate each other for grudges whose origins have passed into the mists of
time. There was quite serious talk about plans to line up contracts to expire in 2028 to effectively create a miniature
general strike, or perhaps more precisely to create a version of what's called the
Spring Offensive in Japan.
Spring and offensive are the same word in Japanese.
And so labor unions decided to have their contracts expire in the spring, thus maximizing
the power of their strikes.
This effort to have contracts aligned in 2028 is, broadly speaking, a larger version of
the spring offensive.
We will cover this more in a later episode.
For now, I think it's enough to say that discussions and organization were quite serious, and there
was significant enthusiasm as well
as discussions of the potential difficulties of getting people's contracts to actually
align. People are organizing to bring their unions together on a sectoral base to share
resources, coordinate, set standards for contracts, and generally help each other more effectively
oppose the bosses and unions that rule them all.
LaborNotes has also, from the beginning, been an incubator for reform movements inside of unions attempting to wrest control from corporate administrative caucuses.
These reform movements almost always lose.
The last 50 years is littered with defeats in union election after union election with
sub 10% turnout.
And yet, little by little, these groups are starting to win.
We heard from a number of smaller rank and file efforts that had successfully taken control
of their unions.
The first major victory was a rank and file slate taking over the management of notoriously
corrupt clickish teamsters.
Now I have my issues with the new teamsters leadership too.
There are something like two entire hours of this show dedicated to how angry rank and
file teamsters were over the fact that UPS
workers didn't go on strike last year due to their leadership cutting a deal with management.
But on a broader level, the victory of the Teamsters reformed Slates and the defeat of
one of the oldest union…
I don't know if administrative caucus is really a that that's a bit of a euphemism
for the UPS sort of corrupt leadership, dictatorship.
But their victory on a broader level was a sea change in American unionism.
Their victory was followed by the victory of Sean Fain in the UAW.
A man who, as much as he's angered members by endorsing Joe Biden, walked into Labor
Notes and gave a speech about the class war and the authoritarianism of corporate greed.
Certainly, there was much to annoy trade activists concerned with Palestine in the sense that
his central metaphor, labor is the arsenal of democracy, was in bad taste
as he described the unions that he leads as the successors
of Liberator B 52 bombers, which not, you know,
not precisely the metaphor I'd choose as your own members are protesting
the bombs falling over Gaza.
But on the other hand, if a giant speech about the class war
and the need to organize across borders is now the conservative wing
of progressive trade unionism.
The future is bright.
The kind of militant union actions we've seen over the past year
have coalesced into a sort of strategy of fight as you build.
It is based on a very basic strategy
that you would think unions would have already been doing.
However, comma, see everything I've ever said about administration,
administrative caucuses and business unionism and corporate unionism.
The strategy is if you win things for people, more of them will join unions. This strategy is already bearing fruit in Chattanooga and has
international implications as well. We heard from organizers that workers in
Mexico and China were keenly watching the UAW
strikes and for good reason. These strikes are ultimately their fight too
and slowly but surely workers across the world are starting to realize it. The
degree of internationalism at this labor house was remarkable. I came into an
early China panel fully expecting the same kinds of praise
for the CCP that I've seen in other leftist events held in the city of Chicago.
Most recently, the sort of fiasco China panel held
at Socialism Conference, degraded into an argument about whether or not Brazil,
Russia, India, China and South Africa are
socialist. Here, there was none of that.
For sure, there were some slightly weird German Maoist defending the Cultural
Revolution, but on the other hand, there wasn't any defense of Chinese capitalism
or their failed bankrupt model of corporate unionism.
On top of cross-border organizing, sectorally, the conference has a
deep and ingrained pro-immigrant position.
Sean Fain is probably the most high profile political figure I've seen
actually discussing the horrific treatment of migrants at the border
right now and taking time to remind everyone that immigrants are just
workers trying to find a better life.
This, however, makes his support for Joe Biden, the butcher of Yakumba, even more questionable.
Still, you can see the wheels of history turning.
You can see it there, in the muffled buzz of conversations drifting through hallways, and the roar of the cheering
crowd, and the bright laughs of co-conspirators who moments before were strangers, and the
drowsy chatter of abortion workers who let a trans woman sleep on their floor to hide
from the police, and the chants of a hundred workers refusing to let the cops take one
of their own.
You can see the outline of the great Leviathan the ruling class thought buried stone dead
in the 1980s.
You can see the working class waking from its day's slumber, shaking the sleep from
its eyes and the dirt from its back.
You can, for the first time in decades, hear the clatter and the roar as it tests its chains.
The great behemoth is beginning, just beginning, to assemble the iron will and terrible power
necessary to turn its dreams into reality, to break its chains and shatter its cage and
reclaim the world it built with its blood and sweat and tears.
That day is not today.
It's not tomorrow.
But for the first time in my life, it could be the day after that.
This has been It Could Happen Here.
Happy May Day, everyone. What up?
I am Drammo's host of the Life as a Gringo podcast.
Now this is a show for the no sable kids, the 200 percenters.
Here we celebrate your otherness and embrace living in the gray area.
If you ever felt like you were always too much this while also never being enough that,
this is the podcast for
you.
Every Tuesday I'll be bringing you conversations around personal growth, issues affecting the
Latin community, and much more via my own personal stories along with interviews with
inspiring thought leaders from our community.
Then every Thursday I'll be tackling trending stories and current events from our community
that you need to know.
So much of what makes our community so beautiful is our diversity yet too often those of us
who don't fit into this dumb stereotypical box of whatever it means to be Latino are
left without a voice or just forgotten about.
On this show I celebrate the uniqueness of our culture and invite you to walk in your
authenticity.
Listen to Life as a Gringo as a part of the MyKotura podcast network,
available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey everybody, welcome to Across Generations,
where the voices of black women unite
in powerful conversations.
I'm your host, Tiffany Cross.
Tiffany Cross.
I want you all to join me and be a part of sisterhood,
friendship, wisdom, and laughter.
In every episode, we gather a seasoned elder.
But even with a child, there's no such thing
as the wrong thing if you love them.
Myself, as the middle generation.
I don't feel like I have to get married
at this big age in life, but it is a desire I have
and something that I've navigated in dating.
And a vibrant young soul for engaging intergenerational conversations.
I'm very jealous of your generation that didn't have to deal with Instagram and Tinder.
This is Across Generations, where Black women's voices unite.
And together, you know how we do.
We create magic.
Listen to Across Generations podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bring a little optimism into your life
with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast
from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay.
And me, Simone Boyce.
Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations
about culture, the latest trends, inspiration,
and so much more.
Thank you for taking the light, and you going to shine it all over the world and it
makes me really happy.
I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of
this legacy.
Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.
Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things
falling apart and sometimes putting them back together.
I'm writing this after flying back from Texas where my dad died to Portland, waking up and
basically immediately interviewing a group of protesters in Arcata, California at the Cal Poly occupation in Humboldt,
and then driving to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where there has also been a
campus occupation. And both of these occupations have some stuff in common. And I wanted to talk
about what was happening with both of them, because I think it's relevant, and obviously,
it's relevant to what is currently one of the larger stories going on in the country right now, which is that a series of occupations
on campuses protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza have spread to more than 100 schools in the
United States. You will have heard of this. Now we have covered some of this in recent episodes,
particularly what was going on in Colombia, at least at the initial stages of that.
And today again I'm here to talk about two occupations.
One of them is at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California, and another is at Portland State
University in, you know, Portland, Oregon.
As an ot aside, I have lived in both of these cities, which is peculiar.
It doesn't really mean anything, but I thought it was weird and obviously I still live in Portland.
Protests started in Arcata first. On October 22, 2024, students on the Cal Poly Humboldt,
also called CPH, campus occupied Siemens Hall. These students were not members of any specific
group, but were all acting in solidarity with Gaza and were inspired at least partly by the solidarity encampment at Columbia University.
It started with a small number of people, about 45 or so. These are a mix of students,
some alumni, and a few random Arcadians. Arcada is a pretty progressive town. You might call
it hippie. That's generally the reputation that it has.
Campus police showed up, there was a series of negotiations, which here means they told everybody
to leave, and at that point the police began escalating things. Because the Arcata police
force is pretty small, cops were called in from the surrounding area, quite a few of them, there
were helicopters. It's much more of a to-do than this fairly sleepy community in the Redwoods is used to
having.
Community members started to show up as well because hey, something was happening.
A write-up from CrimeThinks website describes what happened next.
Quote,
Police from every department in the county showed up, including a helicopter, canine
units and off-duty police.
Students responded by swarming them. The cops' initial plan to carry out a mass arrest was thwarted by
a series of clashes both inside and outside of the building. The occupiers beat back police
advances despite facing brutality unlike anything we have seen over the last decade of struggle in
Humboldt County. Again, it's a pretty sleepy place. There were two arrests and a number of injuries
– the arrests were apparently quite ugly – but police were unable to clear out the
occupation. Barricades were thrown into place as the fighting continued off and on until
a crowd of people from the surrounding community, including other students and faculty, showed
up outside and effectively surrounded the police. After six hours, the police retreated.
The university declared a lockdown
and the students were able to spend the next few days
extending their defenses as well as setting up infrastructure,
including a kitchen.
Early on the morning of the 29th,
a team from It Could Happen Here
sat down with two of these students
to discuss the occupation.
I go by Stinger online and I have been part of the occupation since I think
the morning of day two. I think it was the night after the pops tried to
enter the barricaded building and got pushed back. I think I've been here since the morning after that.
Yeah.
Blue.
And what's been your history with this?
I came here on Tuesday morning.
I just attended a meeting with everyone and I've just been here helping at the
Mac mainly because I feel like that's where I'm the most useful.
What's the Mac?
The Mac is the mutual aid kitchen.
Gotcha.
I've been handing out food and I've just been helping prepare food for people and trying to let other people involved do more things because I know I'm the most useful in the MEC personally
rather than being anywhere else doing anything else.
By the time we talked to them, the rumor mill widely expected the police to carry out a
major attempt to clear the occupation that night.
As I write this, 10.13 p.m. PST on the 29th of April, local police have just given Siemens Hall a dispersal order.
So we'll see how that goes.
Hey everyone, Robert here.
We saw how it goes.
Police cracked down, arrested a bunch of people, and ended the occupation.
We will talk more about that a little at the end of the episode.
But because their initial efforts to clear out the occupation failed, police have had
to spend nearly a week watching and waiting as students dig in.
Yeah, police have not tried to like actively push us out
like we've seen on other campuses where like
they've totally like raided and like torn down tents
and everything.
And I think we also, I think a big part of it
is like logistically, we're in a small like city and we don't really
have the police force necessary.
Yeah.
Which is why they've been trying to call, you know, unfortunately, they've been trying
to call officers from other places, because especially like I feel like in the evenings,
especially we have a lot of people both from
the community and students on campus who have been occupying the quad but what's so funny is that
our main intention was not like the original intention was not to barricade that building
it was just going to be occupied not barric But because of police actions, I feel like we've actually
stepped up more. So they kind of shot themselves in the foot with that one.
This is a pattern we've seen a few times in recent years. In late 2020, Garrison and I
reported from an eviction defense at the famous Red House in Portland. The basic idea is that
local protesters were trying to stop police from serving an eviction during the pandemic. There was a clash outside the house and some arrests, but police pulled
back when protesters were still on the ground and in numbers. Said protesters began to fortify
the area around the house and eventually the entire neighborhood. By the time the police
realized what was going on, they had a nightmare on their hands, an occupation that would have
been impossible to clear without significant violence.
The end result of the situation was that the city government essentially negotiated an end to what was happening, rather than just sending the police back in to evict residents. There is much more to
the whole situation than that. This is something people still get angry about, because the patriarch
of the family at Red House was a weirdo sovereign citizen type, but the goal at the time was to stop evictions during the pandemic, and the tactics of the day worked. The cops backed
off, the city came to the negotiating table, it was a successful action, whatever you think
about the individuals involved in it. After the call that Garrison, Mia, and myself
had with those Humboldt students, and we will hear more from them later, I got a message
from a source that an occupation was also brewing on the Portland State University
campus, or rather that it was going on and folks were worried things were about to escalate.
But don't you escalate until you've listened to these ads?
Anyway, here they are.
We're back.
Actions at Portland State University started on Thursday the 25th, and it was initially
pretty simple.
One tent and one banner strung between trees in front of the Branford Price Miller Library
steps. Social media did its thing once this first tent was up and the encampment slowly grew,
to maybe half a dozen tents by midnight.
At around 1.20 a.m., the police swept the encampment.
Only a few people were awake and less than 20 people were present,
against maybe 40 riot officers.
The police pushed people out of the encampment, they went straight for the supply tent and
took everything, loading medical equipment, food, etc. into City of Portland trucks and
hauling it away.
It was a bad night for a lot of people.
But what I gleaned from interviewing some of those folks was that they had learned one
crucial lesson, which was that Portland police weren't willing to fuck with people or property
that was sitting on the PSU steps
This is probably a jurisdictional thing school property is the responsibility of the PSU campus police
PPB could police the park outside
But either couldn't or just didn't want to be arsed in dealing with the complications that might be caused by going into school property
arsed in dealing with the complications that might be caused by going into school property themselves.
So, the school had to deal with the unenviable complication of the fact that these were their
students protesting at a famously progressive school and having their cops clear them out,
especially if it caused violence or somebody got seriously hurt, would be a real PR headache.
The administration at Humboldt University, in progressive Arcata ran into a similar problem.
In the days after the police backed away from their initial confrontation, students developed a list of demands by consensus.
Here's one of our sources from the Humboldt occupation again.
And their description of the demands have been cut together from a longer interview.
Some crosstalk has been edited out to make things flow a bit more clearly.
Anyway, here's those demands.
Okay, so the students with the mediation faculty
have reached out to administration
in hopes of re-engaging negotiations.
So we would like administration
to agree to the following three demands.
One, de-escalate. We demand the immediate removal
of police from university campus.
We also demand the immediate re-enrollment
of students who have been suspended
and a promise to not suspend,
resuspend or expel any student protesters
as a result of these accusations
because they were claiming, you know,
that we had committed property damage and
trespassing and things like that. And that was a lot of the reasons that they gave for
suspending us, like in the email we received about interim suspension.
Two was divest. We demand that the Cal Poly Humboldt Foundation commits to an audit and
subsequent divestment from any funds related to Israel,
Israeli products, or Israeli companies.
And this includes those that own factories on stolen Palestinian land in Israel.
There are four specific funds that at the minimum we demand the divestment from within
the next six months. These were TILCX, DFSTX, FEUPX, and DODFX.
And we did research into these holdings that these funds have and how the companies that
they may have holdings in are connected to Israel.
For example, TILCX, their top three holdings are in Qualcomm, Wells Fargo, and Chubb. Qualcomm is an information technology company that does the majority of its technology development in Israel.
They have factories there and that's where they develop their smartphone chips and tracking
intelligence, which is two of the main things that they work on and sell.
Wells Fargo was part of a $500 million loan deal with multiple other lenders that support that was supporting Elbit Systems, which is an Israeli military weapons
manufacturer. So those are like two of the big ones just from the first fund that we had looked
into. And our third demand was declare in solidarity with universities across the globe and for all
Palestinian people, including their martyrs and refugees, we demand a ceasefire statement from Cal Poly Humble calling for an immediate and permanent
ceasefire in Palestine. And we encourage all other California state universities and universities of
California to do the same. As we were writing this, it was, we found out that the faculty administration had released a ceasefire statement,
I believe, but the actual like, university, like, admin had it like the whole university
admin but like the faculty had released a ceasefire statement. Faculty specifically,
I know there's, there's definitely faculty that have, there's some faculty who
have been with us since day one, like camping out with everyone since day one. And it's
like a lot of the faculty we like, we are totally comfortable putting our trust in.
Like some of these faculty, like if there was an emergency, like I would call them,
you know, like if there was an emergency on campus where like I was about to be arrested, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to call up this like professor.
Right.
And they have been like trying to, you know, update us with whatever they hear from admin.
But just in like the past few days, we've actually kind of discerned that upper admin
has sort of cut off contact with lower admin and faculty.
And this is something that we talked about with faculty members as well,
because of the significant faculty support that we've been receiving.
Administration is literally just not telling faculty anything anymore.
Yeah, it really seems like it's turned into just this pure conflict between everyone who is part of the process of an
education fighting against the admin who are not part of that process, who are trying to
stop everyone with cops.
Back in Portland, that first failed encampment brought more people out the next day, Friday
the 26th, and by noon more tents and a few banners had been set up.
Student organizations had put together lists of demands.
These demands have varied and have been edited a few times after long, democratic consensus
sessions by people present.
The list I was presented with when I showed up on Monday included three demands.
1.
PSU should release a statement condemning the genocide of Palestinian people with weapons
provided by the US.
2. statement condemning the genocide of Palestinian people with weapons provided by the US.
The university should end the sale of Israeli products on campus and any programs that would
involve sending students, employees, or faculty to Israel.
The board of trustees should terminate all relationships with Boeing and other companies
complicit in the ongoing genocide.
Their list included Leopold, an Oregon-based company who makes rifle scopes,
but also companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.
Boeing was the company I heard referenced most by protesters. The aerospace company,
which is involved in the manufacture and design of just so many weapons, has a partnership
with Portland State University. Later on Friday, the same day that these lists of demands started coming together, the school
president Ann Cudd announced a pause to the school's relationship with Boeing to address
these protestor demands.
Precisely what pausing this relationship means is unclear and a lot of the people I
talked to felt like it essentially meant nothing.
But Cudd wrote, quote, PSU will host a forum
at which these concerns can be carefully framed and debated.
We will organize a two-hour moderated debate in May to include faculty and student voices.
So you know, whatever that means.
By late in the day Friday, media had started showing up in numbers to report on the occupation,
which was still quite small, but bigger ones were happening all over the country and if
your local news you want to do anything you can to tie your area into whatever
the big story is nationwide so you know good excuse to show up there was also
some conflict between local student groups at this point and unaffiliated
groups of activists some of whom were also students, over whether or not to
keep occupying over the weekend and keep attempting to keep an occupation in place despite police
crackdowns or to save their strength for a new concerted push on Monday.
At any rate, some people stayed, and by 7pm that night, Friday night, the Portland Police
Bureau showed back up
in full riot gear. Park rangers told protesters to exit the park area, and a standoff ensued.
While some protesters confronted police head on, a smaller group of activists used this
as a distraction to move a number of tents onto the library steps, having noticed that
PPB didn't seem to be willing to go directly onto campus property.
Once this was done, the folks confronting the riot line gradually pulled back to the
steps.
The police seemed confused or at least put out by this.
They left for a while, then returned briefly to cut down the banners hung on the trees.
I was told a number of people mentioned this kind of laughingly when I was around that
the way in which the police justified this was that a recent anti-camping public camping measure
meant to target the homeless specified that the kind of thing that a banner hung again,
like basically the fact that the banner touched trees in two different areas or like touched
two different trees meant that it would count it as a tent. And so they were allowed to
take it down. It all sounded pretty
silly to me. But students and others on campus property in the library were left to barricade
the area around the library at will. They started with pallets brought by an anonymous benefactor.
Both sides of the staircases into the library were initially blocked. This only lasted until
Saturday morning when Ann Cudd, president of the university since August of 2023, visited the encampment.
Different protesters I have talked to related this event in different ways. Some described her visit as essentially chill, others described Ann as quite angry and even threatening them. not there. The end result was an agreement, though. If protesters allowed students to
continue to have access to the doorway into the library so students could still use the
library, PSU wouldn't send in their cops or call in the city cops to clear out the
occupation. After what one source described as much-heated discussion, protesters agreed
to this arrangement.
Variations of stuff like this are common in occupations at schools that get this far.
School faculty are often sympathetic to student actions, or at least to the students taking
part in them, and supporting crackdowns is dicey for the administration.
At Humboldt State University, the administration attempted to de-escalate and eventually euthanize
the movement by trying to provide a safety valve, a way for students who'd had enough to leave along with the
suggestion but not the actual legally binding promise that they wouldn't be punished if
they did.
And here's another clip from that interview.
I understand that the school even set up basically a booth where you could come and officially
like de-register yourself from the protests in order to
not get expelled or something like that? Is that a like I think you're it was unclear to me from
what I read like exactly how that system was supposed to function but it seemed kind of shady.
No, so they wanted us to so they set up a table by one of the exits and they wanted us to like
So they wanted us to, so they set up a table by one of the exits and they wanted us to like give them like our information.
And they were like, if you do this, you won't get immediately arrested, but keep in mind
they said not immediately arrested.
And they were, and they even clarified like in their alert about this, they were like,
by the way, this doesn't protect you from any future consequences so it's like why would we do that then what is that doing for any of us i don't
think a single person took that opportunity back in portland after the detente with the school
administration things continued awkwardly but smoothly for the next day or so protesters
continued to fortify the library defenses while students entered and exited and used it at will,
although the school did shut it down early on Monday.
In the meantime, protesters used the small space available to them to set up minimal infrastructure.
As an humble, a small kitchen tent was put up along with a larger medical tent,
a designated smoking area tent, and an art station for people to make signs to hang from the barricades.
Donations began coming in on Saturday night and flooded in on Sunday, to the point that
by Monday protesters had stopped accepting donations of a lot of stuff like food and
water but also things like batteries and generators because they just didn't have room to take
any more of them.
During these weekend days and nights, those at the encampment discussed demands, their plans, and strategy for the future.
One topic of discussion involved the houseless. Would local houseless people be welcome inside the encampment and would they be welcome to some of the donated resources?
The ultimate decision, and I hear that this was not a particularly controversial one,, yes. Now I should also note here that the Humboldt students we talked with claimed that their school's treatment of houseless
residents earlier, like a couple of years ago, was one of the inciting incidents
of this occupation. Obviously the genocide in Gaza was the spark and
purpose for why the occupation at Humboldt happened and why this occupation
at PSU happened, but nothing happens in a vacuum. And I wanted to include this bit from the interview because I think it's interesting.
We're joking that this is like the third strike for administration because in 2022, the LA
Times released an article about how administration was kicking homeless students off campus for
living in their vehicles.
Jesus.
And I believe our university out of all
the Cal States has the highest rate of homeless students.
Yeah.
And so this kind of this outraged a lot of people, including people on campus.
We actually had a few days encampment on campus for that, too, I believe.
And I feel like that never really got, it got partially resolved, but admin was
like really fighting against all the possible options because there was like
a couple of people arguing that like, keep in mind, I don't even think these
people were from campus, but apparently the two people like filed complaints about how the people living in their cars were like messy or something.
And so one of our requests was like, okay, maybe like we could get a few more dumpsters
or trash cans in the area where people are living.
Yeah.
And admin just totally fought back against that.
And so that was like what we, what we're jokingly calling like,
oh, that was like strike one.
And then strike two, we were saying is the faculty strike that happened earlier.
I think this semester that was, I think all over the state, but it really only
lasted like one day, despite the momentum for possibly lasting longer than that.
And admin wanted like sent out an email saying like, if your faculty isn't holding classes,
put their names here. And obviously all of us were like, what are you talking like you want us to like,
you're asking us to snitch on our like professors and faculty right now so that's what
we're joking is like strike two because we're like uh we're not doing that and then this is what we're
calling strike three and i was like joking earlier to everyone i was like strike three and we're out
strike three and they're out i never was like yeah i freaking hope so campus occupations like
this are always complex things not just in the different motivating
factors that come together to make situations like this possible, but in the ways in which
extant student groups and organizations that arise spontaneously due to the pressures of
the moment, interface and interact.
When I arrived at the encampment at about 1 p.m., I was introduced to several media
liaisons for the occupation. They were extremely
careful with what they said. A lot of it was just kind of repeating the list of agreed upon demands
that the protesters had come up with. I did ask about a few other things. I wanted to know how
protests in 2020 and protests on other campuses had impacted the tactics being seen here.
The most common response I got to my questions were variations of, that's not something we'd like to talk about.
But they did go into detail in a couple of things.
And one of those was what it would take to actually conclude this occupation.
They noted that if representatives of the campus administration, including
the president were to come to them and make concrete steps to divest from
Boeing and other
military contractors that the school currently has a direct financial relationship with,
that that could be the basis for moving forward in some way to start reducing the extent of the
encampment, possibly. That seemed to be kind of their line. If we actually see some real evidence
that the school is divesting from these military
investments that they have, you know, we'll be willing to negotiate further.
But what the school has done thus far, basically just announcing a pause and saying, we'll
meet about the Boeing thing later.
That's not enough.
The liaisons I talked to also made it clear that they found the wide wave of campus actions
around the country inspiring and that that had had an impact on how things were being carried out at PSU.
I was pretty impressed by their message discipline, to be honest.
As a journalist, you want people to talk to you, but actions like this are dangerous,
and cops aren't the only danger.
Anytime your movement gets press, the attention that it attracts will also attract grifters,
particularly of the right-wing variety.
People who want to find someone they can catch saying something aggressive or dumb or that
just sounds bad out of context.
You as organizers and activists want to keep attention on your goals and message and away
from that kind of bullshit.
I should also note that there were some mentions of their desire that the campus essentially
carry out an amnesty policy for people who had already been involved in the occupation
so that nobody would get kicked out of the school as a result of their participation
in this movement.
I've heard similar things from the protesters in Humboldt.
It was an interesting conversation.
And what's also interesting are these ads.
And we're back.
As my time at the protest on Monday wore on, individuals from the occupation would occasionally
march through the crowd and around the encampment, which grew at its height of the day to around 500 or so people in the late afternoon.
This was a mix of protesters, including people from a march that had formed elsewhere and ended
up at PSU, and some bystanders, a lot of whom were students at nearby dorms.
People who were members of the Occupation would ask passersby and media not to film
protesters and encourage folks to get involved and help with the occupation. Pamphlets on
their goals were handed out, and pamphlets on radical political action were passed around.
There were also some people tabling for different causes. There was one group of people who
were taking down folks' information in order to support essentially a ballot measure that would increase the tax on corporations worth more than $25 million that were based in the city of Portland, which
sounded nice to me. And in addition to that, there were people who were working to organize a, you know, one of those, sorry, it is very late, but essentially how people are,
those, sorry, it is very late, but essentially how people are,
a lot of people are attempting to get people to organize to like register as
unaffiliated and the primaries, especially in order to like, you know,
make a statement to the Biden administration about their support of Israel.
There were folks who were trying to raise and get people involved in that as well. So again, you know, it was like many protests of this size,
involved a lot of people. Sometimes in the past well. So again, you know, it was like many protests of this size involved a lot of people.
Sometimes in the past, especially in Portland,
I have seen kind of more extreme and yeah,
let's say extreme activists get angry at stuff like this,
particularly when it's asking folks to like fill out
or sign petitions.
There's some concern obviously that like that could
effectively dox people who were there. I've always found that concern a little silly. out or sign petitions. There's some concern, obviously, that like that could effectively
dox people who were there. I've always found that concern a little silly. I think people
can be trusted to kind of measure their own threat matrix and decide, am I going to be
doing anything at this protest? That means I shouldn't put down on a piece of paper that
I was around here. That issue I didn't notice at this protest. Everyone seemed pretty copacetic, and as a general rule,
it was quite peaceful. Folks seemed more or less on the same page.
The mostly masked protesters that I met were a pretty diverse lot, and this included a number
of Muslim students, at least one of whom I watched pray before taking their place on the barricade.
I also noticed numbers of students in hijabs, watching from nearby
windows and eventually from the park out in front of the occupation. From conversations
I had on the ground, I became aware of the fact that several student organizations were
hesitant to support particularly the weakened occupations as they had had concerns for the
safety of their Palestinian members. One particularly salient fear was that foreign students who participated and were arrested
might risk not just their academic status but their ability to stay
in country. And I know that a number of the protesters I met there
who were particularly you know white folks felt like one reason they needed
to participate was that they could participate without taking
that kind of risk on.
For the largest portion of the day, Monday, I watched as activists reinforced the barricades
on one side of the library and the crowd grew quite large in the park. Some signs I saw among
the crowd and on the barricade included, mass college protests are always on the right side
of history and fuck your homework, people are dying.
There were speeches, but not much in the way of action until very late in the day when
all but maybe 150 or so of the crowd had filtered away.
My notes at the time say the big change happened at around 6.55pm.
By this point in the early evening, I had seen very little of the police.
Every now and then a few PSU cruisers would come by circling the area, and small groups
of four or five hecklers carrying makeshift fishing poles with donuts on them would run
beside the squad cars, basically trying to tempt the police officers to go grab the donuts.
This seemed to demoralize the campus officers enough that they mostly stayed away.
I believe that at this point, the city's plan and the administration's plan was to
avoid doing anything fucked up and violent in front of such a large crowd because that
would be to risk restarting the whole 2020 Portland protest cycle again. Remember, it's
not just as simple as can we crush this protest, but if we go kick all these
people out now and a bunch of them get seen in broad daylight getting beaten and gassed,
does that mean we have to deal with thousands of people in the street tomorrow?
Honestly, staying away was the smart play on behalf of the police, and as a result of them making the
smart play, protesters in the encampment were themselves confronted with a choice.
The space that they had been allowed by the school to occupy in the sort of weird détente
situation had been filled, both with donations and just the number of people who were inside
the occupation.
There was no room to make it any bigger.
So their next options were either, number one, expand the occupation to the park and the Portland
Police Bureau has the ability, the legal ability and obviously the gear to clear
out the park. In addition, just from a tactical level, it's difficult to defend
an encampment in that park the way that it's set up. You really don't have, you
know, you're kind of surrounded on all sides, the police can really mess with
you.
I've been gassed in that park a few times, I'm quite aware.
The other option they had was take the entire library building and force a response from
both PSU and the city government.
This would obviously give them more room to maneuver, give them more room to take in more
people, and it would force an escalation with the city government and with the school,
which is, you know, what they were looking for.
Again, this is overall about particularly their school, not divesting from companies
that they see as complicit in the genocide in Gaza and about, you know, wanting to
force a response from that school's leadership.
You know, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's what they were trying to
do and that's what they chose to do.
A little before 7 PM, someone on a bullhorn came out and began asking all of
the people who were still there, who was willing to engage in real militant action
and for those people to come help occupy the library.
Those who were less willing to risk charges, but still down for the cause,
should form ranks out in front of the property. There were people with shields, et cetera. library. Those who were less willing to risk charges but still down for the cause should
form ranks out in front of the property. There were people with shields, etc. They looked
like little bitty phalanxes. People had a mix of umbrellas and shields and usually two
lines thick or so of people linking arms. I thought at first they were just getting
ready for the police to come in to sort of resist the charge as they occupied
More of the library, but that's not what happened for a few minutes different organizers kind of put these groups of people together
And and drilled them walk them through basic tactics talked about what they should expect and not long after this two different PSU
Police cruisers began to approach from two different streets
Both of these different groups of people these these little platoons, split up
and one would confront each vehicle.
The officers were badly outnumbered in both cases
and they pulled back and essentially left the library
without anyone really watching over it.
The activists who were inside the library
used this as an excuse to occupy the rest of the building.
Once the police cruisers had been forced back, the protesters from these platoons
started grabbing heavy objects that were just around them on the campus and dragging them back
to fortify the entrances and exits to the structure. Much of this took the form of black-clad
activists swarming onto a sports field behind the library and grabbing soccer goals, football
training, sleds, and other heavy pieces of equipment and using them to wall off exits and entrances to the
ground floor of the building. I watched one group of protesters cut through locks to liberate
a pair of dumpsters, which quickly found their way into the barricades in the front of the
structure. I did not enter the library, fairly certain that would have been illegal, but
I did see numerous people running around on floors above ground level, setting up the space for a proper occupation.
I was told by at least one person that activists were purposely keeping the interior space
accessible to those with wheelchairs, and there were a number of folks with wheelchairs
who I saw outside at the occupation.
I did not see any specific people inside.
I left after 9pm, having been on the ground and wearing my armor for about 8 hours the
day after landing back in Portland.
That was all I had in me.
But quite a few people were still present both outside and inside the library when I
left.
Roughly an hour after I got home and started writing this episode, at about 11pm PST, a
series of frantic late-night phone calls resulted in the president of PSU, Portland
Mayor Ted Wheeler, the chief of police for Portland, and the city DA Mike Schmidt holding
an emergency press conference.
Local KATU reporter Tanvi Varma summarized the conference message on Twitter,
quote, PSU president said the protesters have damaged property and are broken into the library.
She says she cannot entertain property damage or breaking and entering.
She asked them to choose to engage civilly.
She says they'll be asking PPB to remove the trespassers from the library.
PPB police chief says he'd like to resolve this with no force or arrests.
He has asked those who are breaking the law in the protest to stop.
It's unclear to me at present how any of this is going to shake out. As I type this, the occupation at Humboldt is under heavy attack, and it sounds like
it's going to be quite ugly.
Hey everyone.
So, you know, again, this is a little messy because I wrote this late last night.
I woke up in the morning to listen to the edit of it and some things that happened.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, about 25 people were arrested after more than
a hundred riot officers arrived at the Cal Poly Humboldt campus and cracked down on the
Gaza protest occupation. Riot police arrived around 2.30 a.m. Legal observers say no injuries.
It's kind of really unclear to me how bad it was, what actually happened. But quite
a few people have been arrested.
And at this point, it looks like they're being charged with some pretty gnarly crimes, conspiracy,
I think assault on a police officer. So this is one of those things that's going to be an
ongoing story. The university accused the occupiers of doing more than a million dollars
worth of damage to university property.
I'll actually just read a quote here from an MSN article. Those arrested faced a range of
different charges depending on individual circumstances, including unlawful assembly,
vandalism, conspiracy, assault of police officers, and others. In addition, students could face
discipline for conduct violations while any university employees arrested could face disciplinary action.
That's them quoting a university news release.
So that's kind of where we are with Cal Poly Humboldt.
I wanted to note that the folks that we talked to, who I hope are doing well, had requested
that we send people to donate to a bail fund if at all possible.
If you want to find that and support the Humboldt protesters, you can go to rally.org slash
ARC bail fund.
That's rally.org slash ARC bail fund.
So that would help out with those folks who currently need it.
There has also been a request to call the university and request the release of Humboldt
protesters for Palestine.
The CPH University Police phone number is 707-826-5555.
There is a suggested script, which I'm going to read here.
Hi, my name is blank and I demand the immediate release of the arrested Humboldt student and faculty protesters for Palestine.
They should not be charged, let alone raided and attacked, for being on the right side of history. They include but are not only Fern McBride, Olivia
Fox, Jared Cruz, Ruhollah, Aga Sela, Lana Word, Alison Merton, Isaiah Morales, and Adelmi
Ruiz.
So, that's where things are with Humboldt University. My thoughts are with the people
who are arrested, the people who are forced out of the
occupation. As of the recording and airing of this episode, the occupation at the PSU library is
still in progress and what will happen there is less clear. Throughout today, Tuesday,
the police and city government have made some pretty aggressive statements about clearing out
the occupation, about criminal behavior there're being unacceptable about their suspicion that there's been significant damage done to university property.
For their part, protesters have promised that they will not damage any books.
You know, we're going to see what's going to actually happen.
going to actually happen. What is clear to me at this point is that in the last day or so, the situation has gone
from managed, something where the police were every now and then clearing out tents and
it was relatively under control, to something so out of control that it necessitated a late
night press conference by the whole city government.
So we will see where everything concludes with the PSU occupation.
If the police come in and carry out a raid, as was done in Humboldt, or if the university
administration is willing to actually come to the table and make some of these solid
steps towards divesting the university from companies like Boeing, which is what the protesters
are demanding.
All really unclear, but yeah, we will continue to cover this.
And you all continue to, you know, be angry about bad things.
And yeah, I don't know.
I'm still very tired.
Good luck to everybody who is out there in the streets.
Robert Evans here, and I wanted to give an update on Wednesday night.
I'm recording this around 440 PM on Wednesday night. I'm, I'm, I'm recording this around 4 40 PM on Wednesday, but a day after I
recorded the original ending to this, some more stuff has happened.
Um, the occupation has continued, you know, on Monday night, only a small
number of people stayed behind.
I think there may be something like a dozen.
I was told, um, who actually slept in the library that night.
There was kind of an anticipation that the cops could come in any minute.
The next day word spread about the occupation and there were a lot more
people in the library on Tuesday night.
And as a result, it seems as if plans that had initially been down for the
police to raid on Tuesday night were canceled.
Uh, the government of Portland, uh, published, uh, an article today.
Uh, and I'm going to quote from it here.
The Portland Police Bureau places an emphasis on de-escalation and time is a key de-escalation
tactic that we use whenever possible.
That has not been my experience with them.
If police action can be delayed to a time when conditions are safer, we will do so.
An example of this occurred Tuesday evening.
A plan was in place to resolve the library incident.
However, conditions changed and the incident commander made the decision to delay for the well-being of all concerned.
My guess is that the conditions that changed largely were how many people were on the ground,
as well as the fact that they didn't feel comfortable with their understanding of how
much access students had gotten. They didn't have a full operational plan involved. The police
publication notes that there was a rumor circulated that the planned operation
was scuttled due to a decision made by the DA's office.
This is because the current district attorney, Mike Schmidt, is considered a progressive.
He made a decision not to prosecute all of the acts that he could have prosecuted in
2020 and has been kind of consistently attacked by the police and by conservatives in the city
for this decision ever since. Schmidt did prosecute quite a few people in 2020 and beyond,
and has from the beginning of all of this said that his office will prosecute students involved
and anyone else involved with the occupation. I think this is just election year messaging by
the police going after Schmidt because they want more of a hardliner in.
In either case, nothing was done Tuesday.
The occupation continued to spread.
On Tuesday night, students had a movie night.
On Wednesday night, as I basically as I record this, there's a barbecue.
And a lot of this is occurring kind of outside of the library and like the lawn area around
it.
The idea basically being to keep numbers up in and around the library and like the lawn area around it. The idea basically being to keep
numbers up in and around the library occupation to make it more politically costly and just harder
for the police to actually force everyone out. While all this has been going on, faculty and
student organizers have been meeting with the president of the university. Students refused
initially to come to a negotiating table
unless their demands for full amnesty were guaranteed
for students and non-students who were taking part
in the occupation.
This is something when I talked to folks on Monday night,
the focus was on, there was some talk of amnesty,
but a lot of the primary thing I was told about
was that the school needed to divest from Boeing
and other arms manufacturers.
The demand for amn told about was that the school needed to divest from Boeing and other arms manufacturers.
The demand for amnesty has grown as the occupation has become more of a real thing, which it
had started to be by the end of my time there on Monday.
There were some initial talk from the university president that she was willing to not press
charges if the students who were involved agreed not to violate the student code of
conduct for the rest of their time at the university and basically handed all of their names
over to the university.
That was not an agreement that wound up coming through.
It very similar to what we saw at Humboldt, right?
Where you've got this, the school being like, well,
we'll offer some sort of amnesty,
even though we can't really promise full amnesty because the DA can choose to
prosecute people still. Um,
but if you sign your name up on this list that you were here and
committing crimes, we'll kind of try to do something.
That did not wind up deescalating the situation.
And as I record this, the library at PSU is still occupied by students.
We'll see how all of this goes.
I've heard a number of things from inside the occupation. It's
kind of one of those things where the full details of what's happening will shake out.
It's been, as least things always are, a little bit messy the first night I was there and
up through a sizable chunk of Tuesday, you can find articles from media who showed up
saying that protesters wouldn't let them in. And then at some point, the people at the
gates, so to speak, changed and a number of
press got in and took some pictures of the occupation.
You can find those online.
There's a lot of local reporters, KYN and whatnot, who have published different things
about the occupation.
It's been interesting to see like the reactions of different reporters because they change
based on like the reporter who's there and kind of,
I think, how personable they are with people and the folks that they wind up meeting. So you'll
find some local reporters being like, everyone was really nice. And some local reporters being like,
everybody was really mean and they wouldn't let me in. And it's, you know, these are not uncommon
things to encounter when you're seeing press interact with a protest like this.
One of the things I do find interesting that has been emphasized to me by some of the older
protesters who have been taking part in aspects of this occupation is that the student protesters
who are organizing and leading this, who are of course younger and were too young to have
generally been involved in like 2020 stuff are really open-minded,
despite kind of political disagreements
that may exist between people,
there's this understanding that like,
folks are a lot less ossified
and their beliefs about what constitutes valid action
and what constitutes,
how people should proceed with things.
Like generally that has been impressed upon me
by some of the older activists is that
these younger student organizers seem much more
open-minded and optimistic about accomplishing things and trying new things and this is definitely a
different kind of
Occupation Portland has seen I noticed some of that on the first night earlier in the recording
I made that comment about how I noticed that people were out kind of taking petitions and whatnot for different bills,
taking advantage of the fact that there was a crowd who had gathered for the protest and that
in the past I had seen folks like that have issue with members of the crowd and I didn't really
notice that this time. And I guess maybe that comes down to some of what some of these older
activists have told me, which is that a lot of the student organizers here are kind of less set in
some of their ways. You know, we will see as this all continues to develop, there's a very good
chance that by the time you hear this episode, by Thursday morning, the police will have raided.
That's definitely been happening all around the country. You know, as we have researched and
recorded these episodes, there have been police crackdowns at Columbia University, at UC San Diego, at UCLA.
We've seen, you know, a lot of pretty hideous things on the news in regards to these student
occupations.
And there's a very good chance that Portland will have joined that parade of ugly videos
by the time this comes up.
But as I record this, there's a barbecue going on.
And I hope that will be the case tomorrow as well.
Bye. Now this is a show for the no sabo kids, the 200 percenters.
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This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. And once again, it does continue to be happening
here as a massive wave of police repression is levied against students protesting the ongoing Palestinian genocide.
Since it's been so busy and hectic, I thought to end this week on a bit of a lighter note.
Last week, I did an episode on a new movie titled The People's Joker, an unauthorized
Batman parody through the lens of a surprisingly genuine queer coming-of-age story
by transgender filmmaker Vera Drew. If you want to hear me geek out about that movie and gay Batman
stuff, you can listen to that episode from last week. But this episode is going to delve more into
the DIY nature of this movie, some behind the scenes and how you go from an idea to a piece of wacky queer art playing in a movie theater,
or a TV show on your local cable access TV station.
So I talked to two trans women who are currently making independent queer media,
the aforementioned Vera Drew, as well as Ella Yermen,
host of the late night comedy show Late Stage Live.
Transgender and a comedian, the two most
persecuted classes. So I've been keeping up with Ella's indie transgender Gen Z comedy project since
it first got announced earlier this year. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with the late
night comedy news format, and I myself have thrown around the idea of playing with
that format. So when I first heard about Ella's new show, Late Stage Live, my first thought
was, damn it, that's such a good title for a show, and now I can't use it. Just this
this immense sense of jealousy washed over me, and I've had to watch everything she's
put out since then. Hi, I'm Ella Yermin.
My pronouns are she, her.
I am a comedian, journalist, writer living in Brooklyn.
I host Late Stage Live,
which is a queer Gen Z public access late night show
on Brooklyn Public Access and YouTube.
And I also host T for T Comedy,
which is Brooklyn's premier all transtrans stand-up comedy show.
We film in a Brooklyn public access studio called BRIC, B-R-I-C, in front of a live studio
audience.
And the vaguest pitch I give to people who have no idea what the show is, is that it's
what if The Daily Show was hosted by a transgender woman?
And we draw a lot of comparisons to The Daily Show by virtue of sort of similar formats,
but myself and my writers are really interested in sort of,
for lack of a better term,
querying the late night format
and sort of exploring what late night can do
for a younger, more radical political audience.
The Daily Show was like a really big radicalizing force, I think,
for a certain generation of people. Really, Jon Stewart took that show and turned it into
a really powerful tool for getting people engaged and aware of things that they might
not have otherwise been aware of. But the culture has really shifted in terms of politics,
in terms of media consumption. Since Jon started The Daily Show in the 90s. We have shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
We have shows like My Coworkers and Bosses at Some More News.
And we have like all of the alternative media sphere ranging from like Tucker Carlson and
Alex Jones to The Young Turks to everybody and their mom on YouTube.
Now kids these days don't really watch the news.
I don't know anyone my age who's tuning into MSNBC.
A 2022 Statistica survey of Gen Z reported 60% of respondents
never go to local or national papers for news.
And only a respective 5% checked their local
or national papers for news daily, weekly,
or once a month.
But 50% of Gen Z check social media daily for news, with 75% reporting they check at
least once a week.
TikTok reigns supreme for information dissemination.
Over one third of adults under the age of 30 regularly scroll the app for news, often
treating it like a search engine, with the rest of the youths and young adults going
to YouTube as well as other social media apps to fill in the information gaps, as well as
podcasts such as this.
My writers and I, especially Reid Pope, my head writer and I talk a lot about just like
where our generation is getting its information
from and where it's consuming media and how ideas and political ideas are being disseminated,
especially in the age of short form content with TikTok and the democratization of information.
We did a whole episode about sort of misinformation and the democratization of information a
few months ago, where there's like obviously all of these benefits to the lack of centralization of media consumption.
We're seeing a lot of that with the Palestine stuff right now. People don't have to rely
on the New York Times. People don't have to rely on these big media institutions with
their obvious biases to get information. But it also sort of engenders this, I think, this very specific attitude towards intellectually
engaging with information.
The platforms and the systems that we use really encourage very quick opinions and fast
reactions and picking up your phone and talking immediately about something as quickly as
possible.
Hot take political environments.
And we were really interested in looking at a format
that has historically been more about a team of people
with multiple perspectives coming together
to create one piece of analysis
and taking longer to look at those pieces of analysis
and being able to really like dig into data
and then like what putting that
into a late night format means.
We have a live audience, which a lot of like stuff on YouTube doesn't have.
And we have a lot of the trappings of like OG late night.
We have like sketches and we have correspondence and we have a theme song.
And a lot of that has sort of gone away as we've moved more into like a YouTube media sphere.
So it's been exciting to both bring that back
for like aesthetic and nostalgia sake
and then also to sort of see what,
and I think the show's in early stages,
so I am excited to keep playing with this,
but finding out like what exactly
the package does for the content.
We talk a lot about like form follows function
and vice versa,
but I think there's's intentionality behind presenting it
as a late night show.
It's not just for aesthetic value.
Speaking of late night televised comedy,
The People's Joker follows an aspiring comedian
who goes by Joker the Harlequin as she attempts to host
a Lauren Michaels TV show legally distinct from SNL.
Oh, and on her way, she transits her gender
and fights Batman. The project started a few years ago because a friend of filmmaker Vera
Drew jokingly commissioned her for $12 to make a re-edit of Todd Phillips' Joker movie.
Phillips had been in the news cycle complaining that quote unquote woke culture was making
it too hard to make comedy. Which is interesting coming from a
guy who's continually made some of the most successful comedies in the past 20 years,
but I digress. Here's Vera Drew talking about how The People's Joker ballooned from an ironic
re-edit of the in-sale Joker movie into a whole new piece of queer cinema. Yeah, I started doing it. In earnest, I started actually re-editing the movie. And I had worked
at Absolutely Productions for years as an editor and had come up as an alternative comedy
editor.
At that point, it was probably just going to be a lot of Bart sound effects and whoosh noises and slips and slide whistles.
But as I was working on it and kind of just making this like big piece of like found footage
video art, like a narrative kind of just like fell into place.
And I, it kind of just came in an instant and I was just like, oh, okay.
I think I actually want to make like a coming of age
film. But I want to make like a parody of the Joker like in that process and kind of
just like, tell like a really earnest and super personal autobiographical story about
my life and growing up in the Midwest and coming out as trans and comedy and, you know, my relationship
with my mom, toxic relationship I was in and stuff and, but kind of process and, uh, mythologize
all of that through Batman characters. So that's kind of the, the origin of the movie,
uh, I guess, um, I had also kind of been kicking around an idea for like a body horror, like a trans
body horror movie before that, that was basically like about a drag queen who was physically
addicted to irony and like couldn't like survive without it. But it was also like destroying
her from the inside out. And the two ideas kind of like merged together into this, sort of, I guess.
Like Veridrew, I watched a lot of Batman growing up.
But from a weirdly young age, I was also always weirdly fascinated by late night TV.
My parents never watched the news, but they watched late night.
They got their news from Stephen Colbert. They got their news from, at least at a certain point, Jimmy Fallon, although that fell off quite
quickly. But I've just always been incredibly fascinated by the whole late night format as a
cultural source for news. At a certain point around 2017, YouTube started pushing late night
clips into everyone's feeds and everyone just got so inundated with
this style of political comedy.
I also grew up on The Daily Show and Colbert. My parents are both journalists, so I probably
am a little biased towards being someone who did read the paper growing up, who did like
watch CNN growing up. But I recognize there's this huge chunk of America who gets their
news from Colbert's monologue,
from Letterman's monologue, from the Colbert report, which is such a crazy...
Very scary.
I had so many conservative family members who did not realize the Colbert report was
satire.
That's so frightening.
And they literally took it as a legitimate news source.
Well, I mean, when Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show, they tried to do like
their version of the Colbert report with Jordan Klepper's The Opposition.
And I think there were a number of reasons that didn't work out.
But one of them being that the like the Colbert report was parodying
the other Fox News guy.
Yeah, I was hearing that whole like realm of people.
And the opposition was parodying Infowars, which is almost an unparalleled thing.
So the right-wing media ecosystem has shifted so far
that you can't really get a Colbert report now,
it just doesn't work.
But yeah, there's so many people
who get their information directly from that.
And I think a lot about the creator responsibility,
which is a word that gets thrown around
in social media spaces.
But it's interesting to think that Colbert now and Stewart
and even Seth Meyers have this responsibility
as informants to their audience in some sort
of the sole source of news for those people.
When we were writing our misinformation piece,
we did talk about how in 2015 there was a poll
that came out that said that the majority of liberals, the highest percentage of liberals got their news from The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart. And I think a lot about the excuse Jon used to give to conservatives at the
time who would criticize him for not doing his due diligence on any given subject. He would often
say, well, we're a comedy show. The show that comes on after us is Puppets Making Prank Phone
Calls. And he would sort of like deflect that responsibility by saying, I'm an entertainer first. And I
think that one of the big things that has changed in the last 20 years or however long
is that the line between entertainer and journalist has totally blurred with the rise of video
essays on YouTube and just like, again, the democratization of information
and content creation. Everyone is sort of an entertainer. Everyone is sort of a journalist.
There is a responsibility that comes with having a platform. And so obviously, our show
takes a great deal of care to make sure that the information we're presenting is accurate
and correct and that the analysis we're doing is as empathetic and thoughtful as we can.
I do think there is real value in going after late night as a specific culturally impactful mode
that isn't just comedy, isn't adjusted to the news, and in its quest to be a little bit of both,
it becomes its own thing. I've always been interested to see what a late night show with
my politics would look like.
And I think to some degree you can look at Jon Stewart in the 2000s, and I've been watching
Stewart's news stuff on the Daily Show every Monday, mostly just to see how he's going
to handle this landscape which is very different from when he left in 2015.
Nowadays I think you can look to Jon Oliver as being probably slightly more radical, but
even still there's a decent
gap. Certainly some YouTube shows try to fill in that gap, but I've really enjoyed watching
the Late Stage team apply classic late night stylings to a more radical queer form of politics,
including like Ella mentioned, correspondence segments, as well as actual reporting.
Late Stage Live did a recent piece on the effects of Libs of TikTok.
It was a really good look at something that I oddly hadn't seen anyone else
really interrogate before.
Actually looking at the people that Libs of TikTok has targeted
and how that has literally affected their lives.
Obviously, we are still like growing and trying new things.
I was really proud of the Libs of Libs of TikTok piece. It was the first time we'd still like growing and trying new things. I was really proud of the lives of lives of Tiktok piece.
It was the first time we'd done like firsthand reporting on the show.
And it's something I want to keep exploring.
One of my favorite parts of the Daily Show is the like more serious
like field pieces they end up doing that obviously also have comedic games
applied to them, but also are like real journalism that maybe mainstream
news institutions don't cover.
And that's really exciting.
And obviously coming from a specifically queer perspective,
there's not a ton of specifically queer news.
There's a few magazines, but there's nothing huge.
It could happen here. We'll return after these messages.
We now return to It Could Happen Here. Something I noticed about both Late Stage Live and The People's Joker is that they're
not just made by queer people, but the work itself feels queer.
I think part of the reason why is that both carry this spirit of patchwork and collaboration,
proudly featuring a sense of punkish outsideness that's uninterested in being tamed for a cis
straight audience.
The end result is one wholly reflective of the community that has fostered the arts creation.
To extrapolate on this, let's return to my interview with Vera Drew.
I know for a while you were getting people
to send in stuff to get put in the film.
It was like a very collaborative start to this project.
And I am interested in that aspect
of how this is both a collage multimedia piece,
but also it's not the work work of like one singular artist.
It's like a very like queer community made thing. And it definitely feels that way,
especially with all of like all like the sets, all of like the art.
It's so many different styles mashed together into like this beautiful mosaic. And I'm interested in
like your decision to have it be that collaborative thing and how that kind of came together.
Thank you for asking. Because yeah, I don't really get to talk about that that much.
And it's definitely a part of this that really, I think, is why the movie just feels inherently
queer. We had just this incredible team of people working on it. Because like I said,
I did cash in every favor I had to cash in. But the movie started as this
video remix thing. And then I think as we were writing the script, and it became more
narrative driven, it was just like, we were always writing this script that was very impossible
to film.
Just a very... There's a Batmobile and like, yeah, you know, fuck you gonna do that.
But we weren't really thinking about that as much.
We were just like, let's just write this movie
and let's just write it as like a comic book movie.
Like let's have the tropes of a comic book movie
and a queer coming of age film
and just fully execute those.
And you know, I think the idea of it becoming
sort of this mixed media piece was very gradual, I think.
Like it was one of the many things about this.
This movie was made very intuitively.
Like I never had a budget really.
I would never make a movie like this again.
It was very like kind of figuring it out as you go in a lot of ways, especially just on
the like business side of things.
Yeah, it has that kind of Inland Empire uncanniness a little bit. Totally.
There's definitely that. It's definitely... I'm working backwards. This is my Inland Empire
and 20 years, I'll have my eraser head finally.
Yes. Yes.
It really just kind of followed that intuitive path. And I kind of announced what I was doing.
And I said, my friend and I are making this queer Joker parody and anybody who wants to
help us right here. And I kind of at that point, it still was in this kind of loose
space of what is this really. But just so many artists came forward and most of them artists who had never worked on film or TV
before. So it was a lot of just fine artists and painters and illustrators and visual artists.
And then a lot of people too, just that I had seen for years on trans Twitter or featured
in very fringe zines and shit like that.
So it's just like, holy shit,
we could really make this movie
that looks like nothing you've ever seen before.
And we can do it too in a way
that we're creating original art.
You know, all the art in it is original.
I mean, we recreate a lot of sets and stuff
from famous comic book movies,
but it was painstakingly
created and every character had its own character design, original character design.
We couldn't just take Mr. Mixoplick and put him in the movie. We had to go, okay, how
can we clear Mr. Mixoplick? Okay, we'll make a mix mixy and they'll be like a weird like floating like
Hanna Barbera cartoon type.
It's kind of more H.R.
Puff and stuff was the vibe we went for there.
Very sit in Marty Croft.
Even with a community of queer artists, how does one go from the idea stage of say,
hey, let's make a more queer and radically oriented late night comedy show to having it actually be filmed and then broadcast.
So I asked Ella what allowed her to get this project off the ground and what her process was like going from an idea to something that's now on air.
So, like I said, I've been writing for some more news for three years and I love that job and I love my coworkers there.
But they are doing one thing.
And I over the last year or so,
sort of started to realize that I also wanted
to be doing this other thing.
I wanted the live studio audience.
I wanted a very queer-focused show.
I wanted an in-person writer's room, ultimately,
or like a local writer's room,
because everyone else at Some More News is LA-based,
as far as I'm aware,
and I'm the only East Coaster out here.
And I just wanted a whole bunch of things
that Some More News wasn't doing.
So I was like, okay, I guess I have to do that myself because there's no one else doing it that will hire me.
But I'm grateful that I had my experience with Summer News and continue to have my experience with them because I structured our writer's room very similarly to them.
And I took a lot of inspiration from their early stages in terms of like the creative side of things. And then in terms of finding people and making it happen,
something I've learned my whole life as a creative
is that you just sort of have to fucking do it.
I've been self-producing work since I was 18.
When I was 18, my community theater in my hometown
had a big all-hands meeting where they were like,
hey, we're out of money, what do we do?
And I said, you should do a Shakespeare play
because you don't have to pay for the royalties for that. And they were like, well, we don't of money. What do we do? And I said, you should do a Shakespeare play, because you don't have to pay for the royalties for that.
And they were like, well, we don't
have anyone who wants to direct a Shakespeare play.
And I said, OK, then I'll do it.
And they were like, OK, then you do it.
And I sort of had to just do it.
And I did it, and it was messy and pretty amateurish.
And then I did it again the next year, and it got better.
And I did it again the next year,
and it got better after that.
And then after I graduated college,
I started doing stand-up again.
I just stand up a little bit pre-transition and it was terrible.
And so I stopped to become a girl.
And I started doing stand-up again and I realized there wasn't a ton of spaces in the stand-up scene for trans people.
And I said,
Okay, so let's host a trans show.
And I found a bar and I got in touch with the bar.
And then I just started DMing comics and I said,
Hey, I don't really know any of you because I'm not really integrated into
this comedy scene but please and the show slowly grew and I started to meet
more people and and then by the time I had the idea to do Late Stage I had been
doing my show for about a year and a half and I was pretty integrated into
the comedy scene so I was never worried about finding writers in terms of quantity.
I reached out to my head writer, Reid Pope, last April after seeing a similarly live show by my friend Kay Loggins called K-Night Live that she does every so often.
And I helped her with the production day on that. It was a 13-hour production day.
And I just remember having so much fun, realizing that you could find people in your
artistic community, like enough people who are willing to do it. So yeah, I reached out
to read in April and I said, Hey, I have this idea. And they said, cool, here's a list of
like people I think would be fun to work with. And we reached out to a small handful of writers
and some of them got back to us and some of them didn't. And we slowly found our team
of people who were able to commit to a first monthly and now weekly writers meeting.
After the writing team was assembled,
they still needed to find a place to record the show.
The director and executive producer Octavia
helped find the public access station in Brooklyn
that Late Stage now shoots at,
which is open to the public.
You have to take a five week course there
where you get certified in all of the equipment
and then you just get to sort of reserve their space and do whatever you want there. And
over the course of those five weeks, Reed, Octavia and I would take this bi-weekly class
and afterwards we'd go out and get food and we would just talk about what the show needed
and where it was. Every time a role popped up in discussion that we didn't have yet,
Octavia or Reed or I would say, oh, I know someone and we'd pick up the phone and call
them immediately. And so it was a very organic growth in terms
of production team at first. And that just comes from like working within your own community
and like finding an artistic community. I don't think I could be doing this two years
ago. Like I'm really grateful for having hosted a standup show for many years first to integrate
myself into that community and knowing a lot of like hardworking multifaceted artists.
Once again, the ability to make friends both in your local community and even online remains one of the best ways to get shit done. The collaborative multimedia collage aspect not only imbues a project
with a sense of DIY queerness, it also makes tackling a project as gargantuan as The People's Joker a bit
more feasible.
We'd have these artists with... Maddie Forrest makes beautiful puppets and just beautiful
art. So it's like, okay, obviously we're gonna ask Maddie to make the Mixelplit puppet and
it'll be like a Sid and Marty Croft puppet. And one of the other artists that came through was Salem Hughes, who makes these low poly
3D models.
And at that point, it was like, okay, well, that obviously has to be our Batcave.
We'll make it look like a Doom N64 video game or something and the Batmobile too.
So it's just breaking up everybody's role into these individual pieces and going
by both physical locations, reserving one artist for each physical location that we'd
see pop up and things.
Paul McBride did all of the Joker apartment shots. Then we recreated Joaquin Phoenix's
Joker apartment, but changed the color and the wallpaper and blah, blah, blah.
And Paul, again, another person who just... Paul just makes 3D models just to relax, I
guess. He just makes these beautiful interiors. It was like, okay, cool. We'll make a beautiful
hyper realistic interior.
I never really forced my aesthetic on anybody. I really just allowed people to just lean
into their aesthetic and just do what they wanted and just run wild and be like, okay,
so you make low poly art. We'll do that in this case.
And our amusement park set was made by this artist, A.T. Pratt. And he just makes beautiful DMT
psychedelic imagery.
So it's like, we got this hyper crazy, weird perspective amusement park from him and we
turned that into a 3D model, rather than going like, how are we going to make this work?
This is a flat painting. It's a location we keep seeing in the movie. How are we going to make it
work?
But it was just saying yes and to everything and really allowing everybody to just play
to their best strengths. And I knew that my voice and my vision were always going to be
there. My face was going to be on screen for most of the movie and it's my story. I was
never really worried about losing myself or disappearing in the art at
all.
Instinctually, I just knew it would make the movie feel very queer. And that's really just
what it was. It was really just this big DIY community art project. And it was a big task
for me to find the unified aesthetic. But thankfully, I've done VFX.
I had a lot of other VFX artists helping me work on the film. And we were able to find
a through line in the way like all filmmakers have to.
You just stick to a color scheme, you stick to a very certain type of pacing. And musically
too, I think we really were able to bridge a lot of the things together
just by having constant music playing.
I think I was really influenced by natural born killers and Pink Floyd's The Wall and
also Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I think we're the big three and also Return to Oz. Those
are the big four. And just to round it out to five, then Batman forever, of course.
But I think a movie's never really been made. I think plenty of movies are made like this
all the time, where these little communities of people get together. But this was an intercontinental
kind of community project.
And it was beautiful. I'm so glad we did it. And it was an opportunity to really, hopefully,
get a lot of artists' visibility in spaces that they normally wouldn't be visible.
And an opportunity to work with a lot of really talented people and make them feel valued.
I just worked on so many things where it's like, you get art back from somebody and then
you're like, we got to send this back or you're fired or whatever.
And this is like, I never wanted to be that. It was very much like this is all of our movie
in a way. And now that the movie's out there too, I really think of it. It's got its own
life. It's no longer mine and it never really was. It was always ours. It was always mine
and my friends and all the people that worked on it with
me. And I think that is just really cool. And thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk
about it because I think it's one of the things that gets lost about this project a lot just
because of how personal it is and because of our legal stuff. But I would have never been able to
make this if it wasn't for the team. We will return to It Could Happen Here after these messages.
We now return to It Could Happen Here. What I find most inspiring about projects like
The People's Joker and some of the other
indie no-budget trans films by filmmakers like Alice Mayo McKay and Mia Moore, as well
as projects like Late Stage Live, is that they demonstrate that we don't need to rely
on big studios or big production companies to greenlight things in order to make our
own stuff.
You can just make it.
Which is not to say that it's easy, but the biggest
drive to getting something done is literally just getting it done, is just doing it. And
if people see you doing a cool thing, oddly enough, some of them will want to help you,
which is kind of a bizarre notion, but it does end up being true.
The core thing I've learned about producing work over the last many years is people are willing to do
stuff if you do it first. If you prove to them that you're committed to something and
have a cool idea, people will jump on board. Yeah. And I think that's been proven by how
excited our audience has been for the show, how willing people have been to jump on and
our entire crew and writing staff
is volunteer right now.
We're making a little bit of money on Patreon,
but certainly not enough to pay the like 20 plus person team
that ends up working with us every month.
Although that is the goal down the line.
But yeah, people are willing to do a cool thing
and volunteer their time.
Artists want to be making stuff.
And so it's just about doing it
and then just doing it again.
When I first started hosting my standup show,
we did it the first time
and I spent months like thinking about it.
And after the first month I was like,
oh my God, that was so hard.
How am I gonna find enough trans comics
to do it a second time?
How am I gonna have the energy to do it a second time?
And my boyfriend at the time said,
if you want it to be a monthly show,
you just have to do it every month for a while,
even if it sucks.
And then eventually it will suck less.
And he's right.
He's still right.
And I'm still doing that show two years later.
And we did Late Stage the first time
and it was several months pushed
to get the first script out.
And we got the first episode out and we were like,
oh my God, okay, let's do this again in one month.
Can we do it?
And we did it a second time and it was also fun and good.
And then you just like figure out
how to make it easier each time.
And I will not deny that it is hard work.
We are all slowly killing ourselves to make this show.
I work a 40 hour food service day job
that I came directly from to do this interview.
Everyone else on my show is either working full time
on top of the show or unemployed and slowly losing money
at various stages.
People like to fire queer people.
So every few weeks, someone comes into a writers meeting
and is like, guys, I lost my job, ha ha.
So I will not deny that it's hard.
And I don't ever want someone to think me saying,
just do it, it's easy.
Because it's a lot of work.
And all of my team is like incredibly talented and
has years of experience doing things. Everyone in the comedy scene in Brooklyn talks about like
wanting to get staffed on a late night show, which is awesome. And I would love to get staffed on a
late night show. Like that, though, that's the coveted job at the end of the line for the stand
up community. But like, you don't have to wait for that. You can just make the work you're doing.
And I've had conversations with my writers where they've all been like, this
has been a really cool opportunity because at the very least, I've sort of found out
if I would actually want to write on a late night show. We talk about that as a coveted
job, but maybe I don't want to do that. It's a very different skill than stand up. And
that's been a fun learning curve as well as hiring a bunch of standups to write long form
political analysis. You sort of have to herd cats to some degree.
Even with a supportive community, the work can be really grueling, and the road from
a finished movie to being on the big screen can be a monumental challenge. The People's
Joker is slightly unique in this way because of its peculiar copyright status of being
a fair use superhero parody, using some of our culture's most recognizable
iconography to tell a very personal story. Right before the movie was set to premiere at TIFF,
the Toronto International Film Festival, back in 2022, Warner Bros. sent a vaguely worded but
threatening letter which resulted in the People's Joker being pulled from the festival, save for
one late night screening. Yet, throughout the legal chaos, Vera Drew remained steadfast to ensure the movie would be released the right way,
on the big screen where it belongs.
This film has had like a, I guess a troubled history, some might say.
And how are you able to like stick with this project
after encountering like hurdles and problems?
Because like at a certain point, it's like,
is this like a cost fallacyacy or something like how did you
decide to like actually stick with this and like really fight for this as a as a
piece of like expressive art gosh you know I mean I think I feel like I just
didn't have like a choice really like I think when with the movie done and with how well just our first screening at TIFF went, it
was just like, I was kind of at a point where I could shelve it.
Because that was really the other option.
Put it just away for a few years and come back and maybe like, you know, in public domain is a little bit
more, you know, it's it falls under public domain because it will and like, I mean, at
least Joker and Batman will be in public domain in 10 or 15 years. So like, that was like
an idea I guess that was floated to me a few times. I was just like, I don't I didn't want
to wait that long. And I just, I really put all I had into this movie.
I cashed in every favor I had ever accumulated in Hollywood. Financially, I took out a huge loan
to finish it. And it was just this big, deeply personal thing that I had made that originally
really was just for me and my friends. It was just a thing that I had made that originally really was just for me and my friends. It was just kind of a thing that I just made. Maybe I would have shown it to my Patreon or something.
But after a certain point, once we had that premiere, it was just like,
I can't just post this to YouTube. I can't just dump it somewhere, shelve it.
All my agents and stuff, I have way too many agents now and they all were telling me that
basically it's okay that it's not coming out.
We can basically just use this to get the next project going.
But I quickly realized in that process, this movie is like a fucking... You don't show
this movie to a studio executive. And then they immediately are like, yeah, let's let's hire this person.
They just want to like have lunch with this crazy bitch
who made the Joker movie, you know, like so it was like
it just quickly became clear, like where like kind of just
the people around me who had the best interest of the movie at heart
and also like just what felt bad
and what felt right. And what felt right really was taking the movie out just to festivals and
doing a secret screening tour, which is what we did. And that was really exciting and a
geogrified way of getting this movie out there. And that was really just on an emotional and
personal level really
what carried me through.
I was lucky enough to be in attendance at one of the secret festival screenings a few
years back and I was delighted to hear that nearly two years after it initially premiered
at TIFF, The People's Joker was able to secure a distribution partner to put the movie in
theaters nationwide.
So once again, I was fortunate enough to rewatch a piece of queer Batman art that otherwise
would have never been made under Warner Brothers thumb.
And I think this is also the case with Late Stage Live
and many of these new independent queer projects.
They most likely would not be produced
by one of the massive media conglomerates
that controls almost everything you see.
The small independent nature of these productions
actually gives them an opportunity and glamour that controls almost everything you see. The small independent nature of these productions
actually gives them an opportunity
to be much more queer and politically radical
than what would be allowed under
Disney Universal Sony Paramount Warner Media Incorporated.
We're obviously far more radical politically
than any other late night show on the air right now.
And it's something we've been thinking about
as we attempt to scale and try to find
people who are gonna fund us, is that there are certainly people who could give us a lot of
money who would also then really want to limit the kind of speech we can make and the kind
of opinions we can have.
And so there's obviously a balance as we look for funding and growth opportunities.
But BRIC, the public access network, their whole thing is free speech.
And so part of working with them is their commitment to free speech and radical programming.
I'm really interested in the choice to have it also be on cable access.
I find that to be oddly compelling in an interesting way.
And I wonder what led you to that decision?
So part of that is rules and regulations at Brick, the studio.
So you take a $100 five-week class with them to learn how to use their stuff.
And they offer a lot of other classes too. You can take a podcasting class to use their podcasting studio
or a field class to be able to rent out equipment and go do stuff in the field.
A lot of people make documentaries with their equipment. It's a very cool team. If you're in Brooklyn,
you should go work with Brick. They're awesome. But one of the contingencies of working
in their space is that when you film something with them, you do eventually owe them a product
that they air on their network. And that for us is the show. We're not doing a ton of other stuff
right now. Although with infinite money and time, we would love to be doing many other things.
But Brick is awesome and really values free speech and creator freedom.
And so even though we owe them a product, we get retained full ownership of our stuff.
And so the way it is in this zany internet landscape is that YouTube is the place to
get eyes on a project.
Like if I thought that public access TV was going to be the place to blow up. I maybe would be focusing much harder on promoting that end of distribution.
But I think for what we're making and what we're doing, YouTube and the internet is like
how to build an audience.
But it does lend an interesting credibility to be on public access.
And aesthetically, we really like leaning into sort of like the 90s public access
vibes. Part of that is the equipment
we're using. Our cameras are not the
most modern.
So you get a slightly grainy vibe.
You get the backdrop is is like string
and papers strung together.
We're filming in for three, which is
a really strong decision.
Well, actually, we film in 69.
We export in for three, whatever.
But it gives us a very distinct visual
look, I think. Next episode, we export in 4.3, whatever. But it gives us a very distinct visual look, I think.
Next episode, we'll talk more about how so much queer video art feels like it's forced to be on
YouTube and attempts to break out of that bubble. When the People's Joker was stuck in legal limbo,
there was a lot of pressure just to put the film up online for free. And as much as patience is
painful, resisting that urge and waiting for the right distribution partner to come along really paid off in the long run.
I was just surrounded by other filmmakers in the genre community and you know who would see the movie at this festival and be like, you need to just wait.
Like the person who's going to help you is going to come. And if that doesn't happen, like you can self-distribute, which I did not want to do. At a certain point, it was just like, I had spent so much money finishing it. I would
have ruined my life, I think, if I self-distributed it. I just couldn't. I didn't have the bandwidth.
And I want to make films. I don't want to distribute them at this point. Maybe someday.
But right now, I just want to tell as many stories as I can. I had a lot of support around
me. And I there was just so
much enthusiasm from, you know, people like you who saw it at festivals last year, who like,
were basically like, holy shit. And just all the kind of responses we're seeing now to it. Like
it was I got little like micro doses of that last year, which literally was, I mean, I, it's probably fucking tacky to say,
but it was just the darkest year of my life. I was really just an anxious mess the entire time. But
I, I really did make this movie to like, not only understand myself and sort of mythologize my life
and my friends lives and stuff like that, but like I made it and stuff like that. But I made it to get better.
I made it to heal not only my relationship with my gender, but my family and my art and
how I want to make stuff. And I think what's really beautiful, what happened in that dark
period and up until now, and even right now, this movie does really require me to take care of myself emotionally and
mentally in ways that are what I've always needed. So it's been a cool kind of just like
really expensive therapy, ultimately, even though a lot of it's been really grueling.
That does it for this week at It Could Happen here. In the next episode after the weekend,
I'll conclude my conversation
with Vera Drew and Ella Yermin talking about the pitfalls of representation moving beyond the
YouTube bubble and the future of queer filmmaking. You can go to thepeoplesjoker.com for information
on tickets and showtimes, and you can find Late Stage Live by that name on all platforms,
and to support the show, you can get behind-the-scenes content on Patreon at Late Stage Live.
Solidarity to everyone out there this week.
See you on the other side.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now
until the heat death of the universe.
It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,
coolzonedmedia.com,
or check us out on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for it could happen here,
updated monthly, at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.
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