It Could Happen Here Weekly 256

0:03 Hey, everybody.

0:04 Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

0:28 Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dadal Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today, I wanted to talk about the Israeli elections that are coming up. International Crisis Group published a Q & A on the topic, which I found useful, and we'll link in the show notes.

0:45 At the top of that.

0:45 Q & A, there's a photo of a Palestinian farmer in Rantis, a village outside of Raballah, walking past his olive groves. And hanging over him are two giant campaign banners. One is Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other is for Gaddy Eisenkant, the former army chief who wants Netanyahu's job. That Palestinian farmer can't vote for either of them. He can't vote in this election at all. But whoever wins will help decide whether settlers come for his olive groves this harvest, whether the army stands there and watches, and whether there's a road outside of his village next year. That's the Israeli election in one picture. It's coming up on October 27th, and for Palestinians, the options range from bad to catastrophic.

1:30 Now let me explain why without burying the lead. Every serious contender in the Israeli election supports the occupation, and nobody is promising to end the war on Gaza. Jewish Currents also published an explainer on the Israeli elections that I'll link in the show notes. And the news editor at Jewish Currents writes in that piece that he almost ran the election guide under the headline, the vote doesn't matter.

1:55 But he says when he talked to Palestinians, he changed his mind. Although the Israeli political landscape is abysmal, Palestinians will suffer different impacts based on who wins. And so obviously they're watching this closely. It comes down to two names. Itzman Ben-Kavir and Bezabit Asmotrich. Ben-Kavir runs the national security right now, which means the police and the prisons. and he's responsible for a lot of the abuses that have happened.

2:21 And Bezalel Smotrich, which is the head of the religious Zionist party, he's the finance minister, and he has enormous sway over the West Bank. Netanyahu losing doesn't end the occupation, but it almost certainly takes those two out of their ministries. If you're a political prisoner or a farmer in some of the rural areas in the West Bank, that isn't abstract.

2:42 An organizer in Jaffa, Abdel Meshada, told Jewish Currents, that nobody is talking about change anymore. People are just asking, how do we just survive this point in history? That's very bleak, and it's also realistic. Crisis Group frames this as a contest between different right-wing ways of running a country that already controls everything from the river to the sea.

3:05 The occupation isn't on the ballot, but I think its intensity is. The next government that will take over in Israel starts from a very different baseline than four years ago. Israel has taken more land Gaza and the West Bank have been squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. Cities and refugee camps have been razed. And at least 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by crisis groups count, but we know that this is an undercount. The settler movement will stay active no matter who wins. So the question isn't whether things get better, but the question is how much worse and how fast. Now, let me explain some basics for those of us who don't follow Israeli politics closely.

3:45 The Knesset, the Israeli legislature, has 120 seats, and you need 61 to govern. A party basically needs 3.25% of the vote to get into the Knesset, which is about four seats. Fall short of that, and your votes are essentially burned. They simply vanish. And about a dozen political lists are expected to clear that bar. And there are basically two teams, or two-ish. Team one is Netanyahu's bloc, Likud, and Ben-Kavir's party. which is openly Qohonist, and Smotrich's religious side of the party, running this time with another one.

4:21 Moshe Feiglin has said on camera, the head of the HUT, that he wants Gaza emptied of Palestinians. And that's who the religious side of the party is running with. And then the two Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. So that's the coalition that has governed since December 2022, one that Crisis Group says is widely seen as the most extreme in Israel's history. Their shared agenda, as the past few years have made clear, I think, is to expand settlements, push towards formal annexation of the West Bank, stay in southern Lebanon, and push the Palestinians entirely out of Gaza. Likud's slogan this year translates to the right or Palestine. Basically that either you're voting for the right

5:02 wing or you're voting for Palestinians. The message is that any other government would hand Palestinians a state. This brings us to team two. And maybe you'll see why this slogan is funny. The second team, so to speak, the opposition, is led by Gadi Eizenkot and his new party, Yashar. Eizenkot is a former army chief. In 2006, he formulated the Lahya Doctrine, basically the idea that Israel wins by using overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure. After October 7th, he sat as an observer in the war cabinet. And he lost a son in Gaza, which earned him real public sympathy.

5:38 On Palestine, Eisencott has called the two-state solution delusional. And he says he very much believes in settling the West Bank. But he has criticized settler violence and the E1 project, and says he'd clear outposts that are illegal under Israeli law. Now, to be clear, under international law, all of them are illegal.

5:55 But they like to split hairs, these Israeli politicians. Alongside him is Naftali Bennett. He's a former prime minister and former head of the Yerushalayim Settler Council. He's running on a slate with Yair Lapid. And Bennett openly supports annexing Area C of the West Bank. Then there's Abidur Lieberman, who's far right, but he's personally done with Netanyahu and has floated the idea of handing Palestinians in a shrunken territory over to Jordan. So again, not give them their own state, just hand them over to someone else. The Jordanians, I'm sure, have not been consulted on this. And then there's the quote-unquote central left, the Democrats, the Labour-Moritz merger led by Yair Golan. They're the only Jewish party that

6:40 even nominally backs two states. But it's two states with long-term Israeli security control over all of it. And they're not talking about now or in the medium-term future. They're basically saying maybe a Palestinian state someday policed by the Israeli army. Now look at what the opposition actually attacks Netanyahu on. They're attacking him on October 7th. And who's to blame? They're attacking him on the cost of living and the draft exemptions for Haredi Israeli citizens. When they criticize his wars, it's not because he's overseen war crimes or genocide, but because he's too soft. Lapid said, for example, that Israel should have bombed Iran's oil and gas facilities.

7:18 And Bennett wants Qatar listed as an enemy state.

7:21 Here's how I would put it.

7:23 The Palestinian question isn't contested in this election because it's been settled within Jewish-Israeli public opinion. There's near consensus on keeping security control over the Palestinians. The actual debate is about the style of control. Do we want something managed, quiet, out of sight, or do we want something extreme and turbocharged? Now, at this point, you might be asking, well, isn't 20% of the country Palestinian? These are Palestinian citizens of Israel.

7:49 Where do they fit?

7:51 Sami Abushada, who heads Balad, the Palestinian Nationalist Party, is running with two other parties on the joint list. But Sami Abushada himself is not on the ballot anymore. And I think what happened to him reflects the condition of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Right after October 7th, he wrote an article analyzing what had just happened, calling the attack a significant historical event. And Ben-Gavir's camp then moved to disqualify him. under a basic law amendment that bars candidates who support armed struggle, incite racism, or reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Now, Abushadza denied supporting armed struggle. He said he was analyzing the events and explaining their significance. He's a lawyer who works on human

8:33 rights and has decades of experience attempting to work within the system in Israel to represent Palestinian citizens of the state. I'll link in the show notes an interview he did with Peter Beinart for the podcast Occupied Thoughts. You can hear the outrage in his voice over the accusations he was faced with, And by Ben Kavir, no less. Someone with a criminal record with multiple convictions for offenses including incitement to terrorism and racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Well, as you might expect, the Attorney General backed the ban anyway.

9:02 And here's where it gets really bad. This wasn't just the far right instigating a campaign against one of the few Arab-Palestinian politicians and getting away with it. This was a situation where the whole Zionist spectrum got behind the ban, including the Yair Golan of the Democrats.

9:17 So the supposed left.

9:19 And of course, here's where the Israeli left and right agree, oppressing Palestinians. And I want to note here, apparently there is a law in Israel that bars incitement to racism, but apply that law evenly and half or maybe more of the current governing coalition would be in trouble. But of course, the difference between them and Abu Shahada is that he's Palestinian. And I'm not even saying he did incite to racism. I'm just saying this is their accusation of him. Now, the Supreme Court was clearly going to uphold the ban. Sami Abushada mentions how the judges felt threatened themselves. And then they also threatened him with more severe legal action if he tried to oppose this. So earlier this month, he withdrew and he was... trying to

10:00 avoid a precedent that would make it easier to knock out Palestinian candidates later. The far right has tried this for decades, and this is one of the times it's worked. Orly Noy, a candidate for the joint list and a Balad member, told Jewish Currents that many supporters wanted him to stay in and basically make the court own this decision.

10:20 Abed Abushada, the Palestinian organizer for Miafa that I mentioned earlier, he's Sami's relative. He described people waking up sad and humiliated on top of frightened. I moderated a panel with Abed for Jewish Currents Live recently where he reiterated the sentiment, how heartbroken he was over Sami's decision. And this has ignited the debate again among Palestinians about whether there's any point in participating in the Israeli system if you're a citizen.

10:43 Because if you stay in, you lend legitimacy to a rigged game. Or you exit and you lose the one lever you might have. Palestinian citizens are being asked to keep voting in a system that basically doesn't want them and showed them where the line is. Now, there's a parallel attempt to disqualify the entire joint list, the number of Arab parties and Rom, which is an Islamist party, as whole parties. And that attempt failed. So they're still on the ballot. But after election day, they'll be negotiating with the same parties that helped push their leader out.

11:15 So which of the Jewish-Israeli teams in this election will win? the upcoming election. Probably nobody at first. Rough numbers from the latest polling show that Netanyahu's bloc will likely get around 50 seats. And then the opposition will also likely get around 50 seats. Then the joint list, the Arab parties and Ram, the Islamist party together, will get around 14.

11:49 And then there's a new right-wing anti-Haredi slate, the Reservists. They might get maybe four, and they're leaning towards Eisenkot. So let's do the math. Nobody gets to 61 without the Palestinian parties. Crisis Group puts the odds of either bloc winning an outright majority well under 10%. On paper, that would make the Palestinian parties extremely important. They're kingmakers in this election. But in practice, Eisenkot, Bennett, Lieberman, all of them have said they won't govern with them. Jewish Currents compares it to the riddle of the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage. If you bring in the Haredim, you lose Lieberman. You bring in the Islamist party, you lose Yashar.

12:27 Every boat sinks. So here are the four scenarios that Crisis Group lays out might happen. Number one is a hung parliament. Nobody forms a government. Israel votes again early next year. Netanyahu stays on with Ben-Kavir and Smotrich still in their ministries until that next election. He doesn't have to win. He just has to make sure nobody else does.

12:46 Number two, Eisenhower forms a minority government with Palestinian parties backing it from the outside. Now, there's precedent for this. Arab parties in the past have, for example, propped up Yitzhak Rabin from outside his coalition in the early 90s. Under Israeli law, a government just needs more yes votes than no votes. So, Ram, the Islamist party, wants in.

13:08 They want to be included. The head of that party, Mansour Abbas's attitude is basically, we're here to govern. Furthermore, the joint list leader, Yusuf Jabarin, has offered to be a safety net for any anti-Netanyahu government. The catch is Lieberman. He says he won't sit in a minority government, and he won't be on the side of any Arab party.

13:27 If you take him out, then Jewish Currents Math puts that coalition at around 49, outvoted by Netanyahu's bloc. So this only happens if Eisenkant decides losing is worse than breaking his promise. Then the third scenario is defections. In this scenario, one of the parties or a few lawmakers switch sides. Now, Yashar's list, for example, is full of political newcomers, makes them targets. And another party, Shah's, has hinted it could back Isingard because they're angry that Netanyahu never delivered their draft exemption. Or maybe there's a unity government with Likud minus the Kahanists, which Netanyahu has floated.

14:04 A number of different ways that that could happen. And finally, the fourth scenario is that someone wins outright. This is possible if several small parties fall under the threshold and burn their votes. But it would mean months of polling were wrong, so we're not sure how likely this is. Now, after the vote, Israeli President Herzog picks someone to try, and they get 28 days plus up to two weeks more to try to form a government. And if that fails, two more people get a shot than new elections. And there's one more wild card. Axios reported that Netanyahu and Trump discussed restarting the war with Iran before both countries vote.

14:40 The U.S.

14:40 Defense Secretary was in Israel this week to talk about Iran. And Crisis Group notes some Israelis worry a strike could be used to delay the election. So if something big happens before the election, all of this is basically up in the air. Now, what does this mean for Palestinians? Obviously, for me, the top concern. Let's go place by place, because Palestinians here means people living under very different rules.

15:03 So first, Palestinian citizens of Israel. They're about a fifth of the population. And their most urgent issue is surviving an increasingly repressive and racist society and government. And also dealing with a record wave of organized crime and gun violence in Arab towns that they feel is being allowed to happen under Ben-Gavir's watch over the police. And behind that is a deeper fear. Orly Noy, again, Bennett member, told Jewish Currents that Palestinian citizens increasingly feel they're next in line, that forced expulsion could come for them too.

15:34 Crisis Group says Netanyahu's opponents worry he may try to discourage or intimidate Arab voters, as in past campaigns. And turnout in Arab towns is quite variable in this race. If it's high, then the anti-Netanyahu math gets easier. And obviously it makes sense why he would want to depress their vote. Now, for Palestinians in the West Bank, the situation is different. Remember that settler violence is the one occupation issue Israel's actually arguing about a little bit. Even Netanyahu has, you know, pretended to condemn what he calls fringe groups while making every excuse for them, of course.

16:08 But Crisis Group points out that the worry is mostly about the strain on the army and Israel's image globally. No one in Israeli politics actually cares about the Palestinians being attacked by settlers. And little has been done to stop it. I argued in an op-ed beginning of this month for Prospect Magazine that The settlers in the state are symbiotic. They work together to achieve objectives using tactics the other side can't use. So the state can continue pretending these are fringe groups while achieving their goal of ethnic cleansing. For Israeli politics, the issues of economic strangulation, home demolitions, land expropriation, they barely come up outside the Arab parties. So an Eisenhower government might rein in vigilantes

16:50 and evict some of the smaller outposts. And of course, that might mean the difference for a Palestinian villager who faces expulsion. The joint-list baseline ask is basically that you need to stop the daily terror. But actually annexing Area C and doing something about permanent security control and doing something about the fact that Palestinians have no state, that's not on the table. This has brought support across both blocks. Now, let's turn to what the election means for Palestinians in Gaza. Here, the blocs mostly argue about who should govern Gaza and whether to prop up the Palestinian Authority. The Crisis Group report calls these peripheral disagreements. The far right still talks about expelling Gaza's population and rebuilding settlements there. The opposition

17:37 doesn't say that, but it also doesn't say anything else. Then there's international pressure. In September, the UK led a ban on trade with settlements. And crisis groups read is that it won't really shift Israeli views much in the short run, because Israelis tend to dismiss outside criticism. But they're also not oblivious to isolation. And maybe that'll matter a little bit after Election Day, whoever wins. Okay, one last statistic. An Israel Democracy Institute poll in September found that 51% of Jewish citizens are optimistic about the future of democracy in Israel. But among Palestinian citizens, that number falls to 20%. So it's pretty obvious to everyone that the system is working as designed for one group of voters.

18:20 Which brings us back to the photo I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, the farmer in Runtis walking under the banner of two candidates who both agree he doesn't get a state, but they just disagree about how hard to squeeze him in the meantime. That disagreement is small, but it's also the difference between the next harvest and a burned olive grove, between a prisoner who gets visits and a prisoner who doesn't. So, yes, let's watch the Israeli elections, but we can't confuse a change of management with a change of the system. That is really not on the table. And if Eisenkot really would rather hand the country back to Netanyahu than lean on Palestinian votes, you know, the audacity of actually including some of your citizens,

19:02 we'll learn exactly what Jewish and democratic means in practice. Thanks for listening, everyone. Take care and stay safe.

19:22 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast sometimes about elections, but a different kind of election. Hell yeah, we're talking union elections, talking loosely reform caucus-y stuff, kind of, not really, but sort of. Yeah, I don't know. Welcome to a different kind of 2026 election episode. I am your host, Mia Wong. And today I'm going to be talking about some other kind of union election. That's just to say union election in the IWW. And yeah, here with me to talk about that is Pam Sweetland-Hallis, who's an IWW member in DC.

20:04 Also, Andrew D.

20:05 Ferguson, who's an at-large member from Houston. And Elizabeth Coppice-Duclos, an IWW member and is the Associate Treasurer of the Portland Branch. Yeah, you three, welcome to the show.

20:16 Thank you.

20:16 Thank you.

20:18 Thank you very much.

20:19 So let's start, I guess, by doing the thing we've done a few times on this show, but I think is worth at least getting into briefly here, which is, can you talk a bit about what the IWW is? And I guess for these purposes, like what it's up to these days?

20:38 Yeah, so the IWW is an all industries industrial union, which means that we're organized based on what the people working, what the union members make, what industry they're in, rather than exactly what specific job they are. So if, you know, you're an accountant. for a school, then you are part of the educational workers. Um, uh, and if you're an accountant for a car manufacturer, your industry is, is manufacturing because it's based on, you know, who employs you and not what specific job you do.

21:13 Yeah.

21:14 It's just not like divided into different like trades or whatever.

21:17 It's like, no, no, no. One, one union, one big one.

21:20 Yes. Yes.

21:22 Uh, the dream of the IWW is to have all workers in one big union organized and as best we can so as to maximize worker power so that we can end the wage system and the need for people to be exploited by a capitalist class by having their labor stolen from in the form of profits.

21:47 Yeah.

21:48 Something that we emphasize a lot is like workers' democracy or like workplace democracy. So one thing that like the IWW does when organizing, you know, like building up to the industrial, because it's not like you get everyone all at once. You might do office by office or shop by shop, but we don't. defer decisions to an outside representative, people tend to be able to vote on things themselves when it comes to them and like what they want to do and how they want to do it.

22:20 Aside from four national paid employees that just take care of mostly paperwork style stuff, we are an entirely volunteer-based organization. People engage in this, you know, not as their job, but as in a way of helping their fellow workers, sort of in a mutualistic, mutual aid sense.

22:40 And all power within the union is held by members who are elected by other members in elections like the one that we're running in.

22:48 Yeah.

22:50 Yeah.

22:50 And that's, I think, like a very unique aspect of the IWW in that it is the most democratic of the unions, but both in terms of like, you know, I guess what you would call like shop floor autonomy, where, you know, like the actual like unions themselves get to, make decisions on how they're going to run their campaigns.

23:13 But also, yeah, in terms of the direct election of officials, which is a like it's like genuinely staggering that there have been a lot.

23:24 Of unions in the U.S. that, you know, the names of.

23:26 Where you couldn't directly elect like the president of the union for a very long time.

23:32 I mean, I don't think I have a vote in electing the president of the National Educators Association, even though I'm a member of that.

23:40 Yeah. Yeah. And that's like distressingly very common.

23:45 Well, to be fair to our allies in the broader labor movement, a number of the larger unions, the UAW, the AFL-CIO, I believe they do actually elect their leadership from among the members now. So that's not as big of a difference as it used to be.

24:05 It is good.

24:06 Exactly.

24:08 But, you know, there is still even among those unions, even though they've made that change, they still often will come into a workplace where a group of workers have said, Hey, we want to unionize. They will come in with a playbook and say, okay, this is step one. This is step two. This is step three. And if you deviate from this, we're not going to help you anymore because you're not doing what we want you to do. The IWW is different because we believe that the people who are doing the work know the best about the work and know the best about what the workplace needs. So we let them lead and we just support them.

24:41 Yeah.

24:42 And as a practical matter, because we are, you know, more accepting of the shop floor democracy, we often get a lot of union and unionization efforts that come from places that are overlooked or rejected by the mainstream unions yeah recently of course as probably many of your listeners have heard we you know organized an all trans union which i'm incredibly proud of to have been a part of yeah the organization effort not the union.

25:09 Yeah and like there's been a lot of service worker union organizing which also doesn't mean you get a bunch of trans people because guess guess who's doing service work if most unions won't organize.

25:21 Well, one of the things that I meant when I said that, like, you know, we get to represent ourselves like folks are talking about here is I don't know which major union it was, but I know some library workers locally who didn't get to see their contract.

25:37 That like I'm using scare quotes here.

25:39 They agreed to until after the city council had seen it, like until after it had been fully negotiated.

25:46 You know, they they.

25:47 Yeah.

25:48 There's not a lot of participation in that sense. I think that's what's very different in the IWW compared to other people.

25:54 Yeah.

25:56 Yeah.

25:57 And like, I mean, we've talked to NNU or National Nations United folks on here have talked about like their union, like cutting deals with bosses behind their backs like that. Like not a thing you can even do here.

26:11 Yeah.

26:13 Yeah.

26:14 Because when workers want to engage in negotiations with the boss, which we don't require them to do, we have an organizing model that doesn't necessarily rely on formal structure or negotiations. But when the workers do negotiate, it is the workers negotiating. The union does not send people in from Chicago, where we're based, to negotiate for them. So there is no possibility that the workers at the workplace can get cut out.

26:40 Yeah, and I think the other consequence of that structure and of that decision making is that it also means that sort of internal elections are very important, even though union elections are. We finally found a kind of election that has lower turnout than like regular elections, which is sort of astonishing. But Jesus Christ, nobody votes in these. Which, yeah, is especially a problem in larger unions where like you get these, you know, you get these like admin caucuses that have been in power for like 40 years and who suck and who just win on incumbency every single year.

27:17 Yeah.

27:18 And the situation's a.

27:19 Little different in the AWW. Do you want to talk a bit about what the elections are like actually for and what people do?

27:26 And yeah.

27:28 Yeah.

27:29 So, um, uh, right now there is the North American, uh, wide election for the North American regional administration. And so that's electing a handful of people for offices. Usually these aren't all very competitive races. Often these are races to fill committees like the education department or the IW editor.

27:51 And it's a matter of more of wanting people to step up and volunteer to do that than a super competitive race. But typically GST, the general secretary treasurer who is in charge of finances– not wholly in charge, but who has a lot of say over finances and the execution of the union's constitution, as well as the general executive board that's supposed to act as a check on the general secretary-treasurer and being a board of seven people.

28:22 It's the sort of highest level executive for the IWW. In my eyes, these are people that are supposed to be acting in the background, largely, the education committees, the general secretary-treasurer that facilitate all of the branches and industrial unions being able to execute their own local union democracy, you know, and there are some elections there for treasure and whatnot, but largely the democratic decisions are made at union meetings. And the secretary for Portland, for instance, like his main job is just onboarding and offboarding people. He's not in charge of the union at all. He just, you know, facilitates the, you know, kind of secretarial work.

29:04 Yeah.

29:04 Also on the ballot this year, like in addition to what you were talking about, Elizabeth, there's the Gender Equity Committee, which they do a lot of great things, but they also, you know, facilitate like mediations between conflicts and that kind of thing.

29:19 The IW editor, by the way, is the editor of Industrial Worker, which is our official publication. There are a number of committees, suffice it to say. that do really important administrative work to keep the union running and support our core mission of organizing workplaces to put workers in power, not bosses. And, you know, when these roles go unfilled, the union suffers. When people who are less concerned about the work and more concerned about the status come into these positions, the union suffers. So these positions are really important, as they would be in any organization. But Especially here, because we are trying to do something that is bigger than just, oh, we want to raise, oh, we want

30:03 more break time. We're trying to actually build worker power in society. And so we really want to encourage the members of the IWW who are listening to this, as we hope many of them are in your audience, to pay attention to these elections, to look at the options on the ballot, and next year, consider running for any office that takes your fancy.

30:25 Mm-hmm.

30:26 Yeah.

30:26 Also, there will be positions that will go unfilled after the election unless there are a freak amount of writing campaigns. So if you can fill those positions, you can also volunteer for them after the election is up if they are still vacant.

30:41 Yeah, it is one of the classic like there's this kind of like. dialectic is not the right term, but it's what's appearing in my somewhat sleep-deprived brain of, on the one hand, you have this thing where it's like, okay, this is a position that allows you to do stuff, and there's people who want to do it, and there's also sort of the classic anarchist thing of like, okay, all right, there's a responsibility here, and it technically comes with power, but you have to find someone.

31:06 To do it because... Yeah, otherwise it's just like....

31:11 That's exactly right, and it's reflective of broader trends within the IWW as well, because historically we were inspired quite a lot by Marxist ideas, obviously, but we are structured very much in a very much a syndicalist way. I'm not going to say fully anarchist necessarily, but we take a lot of inspiration from anarchism and how we operate.

31:33 So the IWW is very much a meeting of the minds there. So it makes sense that we'd have sort of problems from both ends as well.

31:43 Yeah.

31:44 I mean, syndicalist organization as a method generally came about after the IWW, but I'm not sure that's really that important. So maybe don't include that IDK.

31:56 Yeah.

31:56 I love to get into the history of it.

32:00 You're right that it wasn't necessarily a form thing. I'm not good on dates, but like for the nerds out there who want to look into it, like the IWW kind of was like one of the early voices in some of these things, you know, so like syndicalism and all of its flavors, there were a lot of socialists, what, you know, whatever their political tendency was, like collective control over your working conditions was a central theme for sure.

32:28 Well, I just mean the specific structure of the IWW union, I think moreover came about through naturally recognizing the troubles that the IWW encountered and sort of created its own, uh, idea about how to solve these things, certainly based on previous theory, but in a lot of ways contributing to future theory that would come from later workers and philosophers, you know, anarchist and syndicalist ideas. That's my very brief understanding.

33:09 Yeah, I guess.

33:11 What I'm sort of curious about is, I guess, partially, like, what y'all have been up to and talking a little bit about, like, what the union has been sort of up to recently and then how that relates to, yeah, like, what you want to see happen at the kind of, like, large-scale level of, like, the national union.

33:31 Well, I could talk on a very particular Portland experience, but maybe one of the two of you would like to talk about the larger experiences first.

33:40 Well.

33:41 I mean, I think that's part of it is that the North American regional, that it's transnational, spans many, many boundaries.

33:49 And, you know, most of what the union is up to is.

33:51 The aggregate of what all the branches and at-large members are doing. So I can speak on my recent campaign in D.C. going back to, like, what was it we were saying before? That there's sometimes the bosses go and make, like, backdoor deals with the unions. Well, I'm a canvasser. You know, I've got a lot of skills. I've worked a lot of jobs. But for the last seven years, I've been a canvasser in the D.C.

34:16 Area.

34:18 And the people that I worked for when we formed our canvassers union with IWW a couple of years ago on their board is the heads and like like union industry leaders of our state. And that absolutely played into, you know, how things worked out for that specific campaign. But yeah, I've seen campaign a lot. So a lot of what we're doing is organizing campaigns across the country.

34:44 I think different sections of people are coming together depending on the locality.

34:49 Yeah, I guess I'm curious sort of on that level where something I run into with the NW a lot is like people know maybe about like one thing that the union is doing. doing in their like local area and then there's like 16 000 campaigns going on yeah yeah that people just don't know anything about so i guess what i'm kind of curious about is like yeah like what are you taking from your sort of local campaigns that make you like want to get involved and like what do you want to see out of like out of the union from.

35:23 That Mine are pie in the sky. I mean, like, my goals are, you know, I mean, first of all, I do want to build up industrial unions, but, like, I'm hoping that we double our membership, triple our membership, and, like, not just, like, growing numbers to have numbers, but have people participating. You know, you were talking about how we found an election that somehow has lower turnout than all the others. But that can be turned around if you decide to go out and vote in your local election.

35:56 And our election period doesn't run for very long, so it's not supposed to take up too much of you as a rank and file member's time. But if you go out and vote, if you vote in the congressional races, for example, your vote might be represented as one in 400,000. Here, you are making a much bigger impact when you do that and then take next steps to say, What do you want to see? Like, that's actually been my experience.

36:22 And what I've heard from a lot of people who get good stuff out of the union is it's folks who say, I think we should be doing this. You know, like I have this frustration here at work or whatever. And then you have an avenue to kind of pursue that within the union.

36:37 Yeah, absolutely.

36:38 Like.

36:39 The unfortunate reality is that, you know, a lot of the people who are members of the IWW are, I wouldn't say not awake members of the IWW. They're not active participants. But that means that everybody who does participate has a massively outsized impact. You have a genuine chance to change the trajectory of the union if you get involved.

37:01 And as far as, you know, what our goals are, why we're running, you know, my perspective as an at-large member, a recently at-large member, because the Houston branch unfortunately had to de-charter a few months back because we couldn't find somebody who had the time to be branch secretary. You know, a lot of the experience that we had in Houston was that We were waiting for somebody to come along who wanted to organize their workplace. The members of our branch, we were all very eager to help people organize, but none of us were in a situation where we could organize ourselves. So I think there are branches like ours out there who, you know, the problem that they're facing is that there isn't enough interest from the general public

37:52 to find people who are in a position where they could and want to organize. There are branches that are like Portland and like Philadelphia and like Chicago, where they've got a lot of people in them already. They've got a lot of leads, is what we call them, to organize already. They don't need publicity necessarily. They need material support in order to support all those leads. So there's not a one size fits all path here to making the union stronger. But I think all of us who are running together, and it is a broader group than just the three of us, All of us who are running together want to treat branches as individual branches, want to speak to them, understand their circumstances, and provide them

38:38 with support that they need to be successful, whether that is more people to help onboard members and process leads, or whether it is better support to use the internet to get the word out about, hey, you have an IWW branch in your city. If you want to organize, come do.

38:56 It with us.

38:57 Oh, yeah.

38:59 So.

39:00 My perspective from Portland has been sort of based on the just reality of how it's been organizing in Portland. So in Portland, we entered say 2024 or so on a bit of a downturn. We had a couple campaigns that were moving along very slowly and weren't working on a whole lot else aside from that. As a group, we put together a strategy to increase membership, to find and create campaigns. and to generally just make the union, our general membership branch of the IWW, much more impactful in Portland and much more active. So we started tabling at any sort of political rallies or You know, queer events or just, I mean, any events that, you know, would have us and that we would fit for. And we would, we began to, you know, sign up people.

39:54 We would talk to people, you know, learn what their workplace problems were. And we started, you know, finding a lot of leads. We started working on a lot of campaigns. We have a number of private campaigns that, of course, I... I'm not at liberty to talk about.

40:07 Fun IWW problem of, sorry, we have a bunch of campaigns you're working on that no one can know what they are.

40:14 Because don't want it getting out.

40:17 Yeah.

40:18 Unless you join.

40:21 Even then, we generally try and keep secrecy a priority so people don't get fired for organizing. But, you know, publicly, we have the Muji Workers United, Realm Workers United, Real You Electrolysis Workers United, Burgerville Workers Union, Friday Workers Union, Punchbowl Workers United, I want to say. I think these are all of our public campaigns. We might have a couple more.

40:46 There's a lot going on. It's going to be a long list.

40:49 And so we've had a lot of success as an IWW branch, and we're really proud about that. And unfortunately, in my experience, working as the assistant treasurer for Portland IWW and as an external organizer helping these unions, GEB has, and general headquarters as a large, has ended up acting more as a hurdle to us than as somebody helping us.

41:18 Our Realm Workers United campaign got stuck in a limbo regarding the acceptance of it by the general executive board. They demanded that we jump through a handful of hoops. I forget the exacts of it. Admittedly, I think some of them were just genuinely needed. But rather than try and help us in getting everything in order, they would just continuously send us back with no ratification from the general executive board. And Muji Workers United, the lawyers working for Muji, were able to put out actually true information about how the IWW has had a ULP filed against it by the workers working for the IWW. We'll probably have to talk about this later. Maybe we won't be talking about it too much.

42:10 I don't know.

42:11 This is sort of an aside. And we've had plenty of people who, you know, talk about signing up, talk about wanting to sign up. And they're like, I love the Portland IWW. Y'all are doing great things. But why is 40% of my dues going to National when I have no idea what National does? And it becomes hard to justify it when, you know, we're not able to get monetary support from national when we are having our campaigns hindered by nationals for us, like the ratification and whatnot.

42:41 And when national has been often dismissive of the work that we've been doing. And so I saw those and I started attending GEP meetings and, And what I saw was really disappointing. I think the first GEB meeting I was at, one trans woman was talked over by one of the members of the General Executive Board. And then when another trans woman asked him to be more polite, he dismissed that other person. And then after that whole, frankly, rude incident, at the very least... He never apologized. Instead, another GEB member apologized on his behalf to everyone, which I just... Wow. comes off as very deeply childish. And I feel like, unfortunately, this immature behavior has been repeated over and over by different general executive board members. And

43:42 it seems to be that a lot of them, not all of them, have found more interest in common with their fellow executive board members than with the union as a whole. and see themselves, and have sometimes described themselves, not as stewards of the union, but as its leaders, that they have been acting with authority to control and dictate how the union is run. I can go on about this at length, but it was the disappointment by the general hindrance and lack of support from general headquarters and the belligerent behavior of some of the general executive board members. That made me realize that there needed to be members of, I think, better character and greater humility running.

44:32 And to be honest, I don't want to have to be that person. But I've always believed that if you see a problem, the first step to solving it is finding someone to try and solve it. And if you're the one seeing the problem, that'll often have to be you.

44:49 So.

44:51 When we started talking about the problems we were experiencing as Portlanders and how those problems were being reflected to other general membership branches, I was one of the Portlanders that raised their hand and said, I will do this if it means that Portland can continue to do its amazing work. I love the NABW as a whole, but I have given so much of my time, my effort, and my life to Portland in particular. And I want to make sure that Portland is able to do its amazing stuff without having to deal with national. National should not be an obstacle we have to overcome or opponents we have to fight. It should be our, you know, backup in the corner in case we, you know, need it.

45:34 And it should be stewarding the union along so that, you know, these local, more democratic, more, you know, grassroots organization of the branches and the IUSBs can do what they are meant to do.

45:48 Well, I'd like to pick up from that, if I may, if everyone's all right with that.

45:51 Yeah, go for it.

45:53 Everything Elizabeth is saying is things that I think all of us running have seen in this current general administration. And it is the impetus for why I think all of us are running. The culture that we have seen of disrespect for members is based on their identity, but also just based on the fact that sometimes they don't seem to agree with everything that the officers are saying, is a major point of contention in the union. And it drives people away from participating in the NARA level of the IWW. And I think that is one of the priorities for all of us running together in this campaign.

46:40 It's certainly one of my priorities. I am running to restore respect for the membership on the general executive board. One of my major points in my campaign has been that it does not matter who you are. It does not matter what I personally think of you. If you are a dues paying member of the IWW, you deserve a basic amount of respect. And that basic respect involves me not calling you names. It involves me not talking over you. It involves me being willing to listen to your ideas, even if I disagree with them in the end, but being willing to hear you out. And that's how I try to live right now. And I think it's really important for our administrative officers to live that way as well. If we're talking about personal stories, one of

47:26 the issues that I've faced, I was a member of our international committee working with unions around the world last year. And we had an incident where one of the portions, one of the sections of our union, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, there was some irregularity with their finances. And it turned out that they hadn't been keeping proper records.

47:48 And that was a serious problem. But the general administration took that as an opportunity to punish them and sort of freeze their accounts for while the investigation was going on. They could make very specific transactions, but the rest of the things that they needed at that time were subject to review or not approved. And the international committee, we decided to sort of speak up because we felt that this was a concern of the entire union. We felt that this was a concern of all the members. If this could happen to one organ of the IWW, it could happen to any one of us. And in the process of that, I expressed my personal view that Legal compliance is not always the goal. It's not the thing

48:36 that we should be always striving for. What we should always be striving for is to do the right thing. What is ethical, what hurts the least people. And that is a sentiment that I believe is obviously that I believe is reasonable, but it's a sentiment that I've heard expressed by many people inside and outside of our union.

48:57 It's not an uncommon sentiment within our union at all. But because I was an officer, it was deemed dangerous. For those who aren't familiar, the Constitution of the IWW, as well as the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, as amended, guarantees union members certain rights, including the right to freedom of expression. And despite both the Constitution and the LMRDA guaranteeing me a right to freely express my views, in this case, this was a view that I was expressing. I was doing so respectfully. I was still removed from my office.

49:33 And the.

49:35 General executive board had the opportunity to overturn the charges because they were in violation, direct violation of the IWW constitution and of US federal labor law, and they failed.

49:47 To do so.

49:48 And so that was my personal moment of, okay, this is the last straw. I have to do something to change who we've got making these decisions because they're not putting the members first. They're not putting our rights first. They're not putting our interests first. they are doing what appears to them.

50:07 To be the easiest option.

50:11 They are doing what appears to them to be what the law demands of them, whether they're correct or not.

50:19 Allegedly.

50:20 Allegedly.

50:20 I think you both encapsulated that motivation for running pretty well in terms of how I've.

50:30 Related to it as well.

50:31 Yeah, for those who don't know, I am running for the GEB, along with these lovely people. But my candidacy has been kept off of the ballot. So I'm actually running a writing campaign.

50:45 Oh, geez. Oh, no. You know, yay.

50:52 But yeah, something that's really important is just like the common theme is that the IWW is and has always been a diverse and inclusive union, every good organizer knows that you're supposed to meet people with compassion and be constructive in your solutions for things. So the GEB does many things, but to me, one of the more important things that they're tasked with and are empowered to do is supporting campaigns, like Elizabeth was talking about, and supporting branch formations. So if Andrew's area becomes particularly interested in that way again, then It should be that you aren't feeling alienated or excluded when you try to access these things, but that you're being guided and supported. Yeah, when you're

51:47 interacting with your union.

51:48 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

51:50 And if we can touch on sort of the legalistic sense for a second, I've seen the GST and GEB back up their arguments by referencing a sort of reverence or respect for the law. And for the IWW Constitution, when, of course, they're only giving their personal interpretations on the law. And if you, you know, talk to a union lawyer or any lawyer, they will tell you, you know, these things vary and they're dependent on specific circumstances. And it's, you know, a lawyer's favorite two words are it depends.

52:26 Just below this is not legal advice is it depends.

52:29 Yeah.

52:30 Yeah.

52:31 Well, it depends also allows you to get out of giving legal advice. The one-two punch.

52:38 Yeah. So even if they were experts on labor law, they would not necessarily have the correct answer. In fact, the matter is they're not experts on labor law. But members of the GEB have acted as if they have the final say on what is and isn't legally correct. And whatever they say is them following the Constitution correctly.

53:02 or is them following labor law is just unquestionably what needs to be followed. And so they have sort of used that authority to reach their power beyond what I think it's responsible for the GEB to be doing. Well, I can go on with what they've done with this, but I think just the thing I was trying to say, I think I'm trying to get at is that like, I think that there is, to some degree, a certain amount of legalism that the GEB and GST are following that is guiding what they're doing. But I also think what they want to be doing is guiding their legal opinions regarding matters of the IWW.

53:55 A lot of this kind of comes back to a question that we've talked about on this show a lot. This kind of fundamental question of what democracy is in the sense of is democracy a process by which you come together and make decisions or is democracy a process by which a group of people is elected and they get to make the decisions for everyone? And it feels like a lot of what is being described here is people sort of wielding their power to make decisions for everyone and try to enforce them.

54:32 I think it would be fair to describe this as a conflict between those two notions of democracy. I think that our notion is that the members are the ones making the decisions. We appoint people who execute those decisions and, yes, sometimes make very small incidental decisions in the process of carrying out our will but the people who are in the regional administration are not supposed to be making decisions for us they're supposed to be carrying out our will as the rank and file and It is our sense that they haven't been doing that. So we are stepping up to say, and we can do this because of how democracy in the IWW works. We are stepping up to say, it is time for you to go. It is time for an administration that will follow the membership,

55:24 not try and leave it.

55:26 Yeah, I think that's very true.

55:28 Yeah.

55:29 So I guess in that spirit, what do you want to see the GEB do if you were able to take office?

55:36 Yeah, so.

55:38 My hope is to act as a GB member as somebody who is, you know, somewhat distant and partial and, you know, connects with the branches and talks to them, you know, as a fellow member and a fellow worker and finds where I can help them where they want help and where there's confusion and otherwise just facilitate the smooth running of the union without much, if any, intervention.

56:01 You know, I would rather focus on connecting people, connecting different local branches together as they can help each other connecting people to the different parts of the regional administration that are, you know, dedicated to education and organizing and international connections and whatnot. And, you know, otherwise being someone who helps but does not lead.

56:23 Yeah, I think what I would like to focus on quite explicitly is, like I said, helping branches form, helping new branches grow, you know, supporting the smaller groups among us. And, I mean, it sounds so dry, but like properly funding campaigns, just making sure things are properly funded, not irresponsibly. You know, I like to look at spreadsheets and I like to look at budgets and that's a lot of what you have to do with the GEP. But above all else, I'm hoping that I can learn. Like it will be such a privileged position to be in to, like as my job, essentially, be in contact with membership and branches and just learn about what's going on with people and.

57:08 What they need.

57:10 My personal goals for a term on the GEB are honestly cultural, because at the local level, we're in somewhat of a holding pattern right now. We need to sort of lick our wounds and rebuild. But we need people to do that. We need driven people who want to organize. We believe that, frankly, a branch is best built around active organizing already. So we're going to try and foster that at the local level. But really, for me, at the national level or at the regional level, rather, I want to model the kind of officer I want to see.

57:47 I want to be a respectful officer. I want to be an officer who listens. I want to be an officer who will basically take orders from the membership and, you know, not do what is convenient, but do what is right.

58:00 And.

58:01 That involves, obviously motivated by my personal experiences, defending our members' rights. When something threatens those rights and it is in my power to push back on that, I will. I will defend our members' rights to freedom of expression. I will defend our members' rights to a safe environment in which to express themselves and speak to power, to disagree with power.

58:29 But at the same time, I want to reach out to those members who I described earlier as being asleep. I want to reach out to the people who aren't taking an active role in our union, and I want to see what it is that we can do to make them interested, whether that's at the local level, because there are plenty of places out there that don't have branches, or at the regional level, and make NARA basically a place that isn't hellish to interact in. Make the NARA level something that members can participate in without fear. Maybe I'm shooting too high there, but I think it is a change that can be made. And I think that every little bit helps. And I think that modeling those changes on the GEB will help bring them about.

59:19 Yeah, I think that's a fairly reasonable set of things to want the national level of your.

59:24 Union to do.

59:27 No, we're just wild and out there.

59:30 I would like to be able to safely interact with the national level of my union. It is incredibly radical demands.

59:38 And have it actually support the things that I'm doing at the local level. Oh my God, yeah.

59:42 Like a national organization is supposed to function.

59:45 Hot take, organizing can be fun.

59:48 You know, many are saying this.

59:55 And it should be fun. And when it's not fun... We need to figure out why, and we need to change it. And that's what we're here to do. We're here to make organizing fun again. Hang on a minute.

1:00:07 No.

1:00:08 No.

1:00:08 That's a bad cadence.

1:00:10 Hang on.

1:00:10 Scratch that.

1:00:11 If I can pull things back to Raiwu, because it's just one that I'm always happy to talk about. All of the people who are on the picket line at Raiwu, they were showing up every day. They were there in June and July heat.

1:00:25 Yeah.

1:00:26 But they were all always approaching things in a happy and positive way, not because it was easy to do or because it was exactly fun to do, but because everyone there was uplifting everyone else. It was a community that had come together and was based on mutual support and mutual love. And I want to see that in the IWW at large. And I also want to be able to, as a external organizer, be able to say, You know, this is what we do in Portland. This is what we do at National. And both of these can help you in this way. Not this is what we do at Portland. And don't worry about National. They won't help you, but we'll try our hardest to make sure they won't mess anything up for you.

1:01:12 Yeah.

1:01:13 That's not a good pitch to prospective fellow workers.

1:01:18 Well, full circle, that 40% goes to strike funds. Or they should, you know. That's a much better answer than I'll.

1:01:27 Get back to you.

1:01:28 Yeah.

1:01:29 Yeah.

1:01:30 This current GEB has, in addition to other problems, they've also been pretty dedicated budget hawks. You know, they have basically been cutting from every single committee as much as possible. And while I do understand there is a need for, you know, fiscal security and whatnot, I think it's been taken to the point where it's been sort of overriding the needs and community decision makings of the individual committees to the point where just a lot of funding for the things that the committees at national are supposed to do and want to do isn't supportive. And you only really get support if GEB likes you or likes what you're doing. I know members of the education committee, they had put together a budget and, you know, a list

1:02:17 for what they're planning on doing for the year. And GEB said, well, we don't want to support this. Do you want to do something completely different instead? No, then we're not going to fund you. It, again, comes back to this question of whether or not you are a steward or a leader. Obviously, no matter what, the people in GEB will have an amount of power. But I think we need to elect people who do not want to use that power and.

1:02:49 Who will not take that as permission to have control over other people. And also maybe in the future, we can institute, you know, reforms to decrease the amount of power that GB can take for itself and that other institutions can take for itself, continue to make the IW more and more democratic. The IW is, I'm going to say just pretty definitively, the most democratic union in the country and in Canada as well, but it can always be more democratic. And I think that we can always make the AWW better, as amazing as it currently is.

1:03:25 Yeah.

1:03:25 If I may, actually, this is something that's really important to me. I don't think there's any place for austerity in a radical left union.

1:03:34 Yeah.

1:03:36 Or any radical left organization. You can't grow by cutting, you know? Like, there are many creative solutions to times, like, of downturn, but I think how Elizabeth described it is perfect. To me, there is a difference between fiscal responsibility and using the budget as a boogeyman. I think it's incredibly dismissive and assumes that like myself and my fellow workers are too ignorant to understand numbers when people say, so this is a personal experience of mine that I'll ask for like line items on things and they'll say, just look at the budget.

1:04:11 And it's like, well, I did. That's why I'm asking, right?

1:04:14 Yeah.

1:04:15 It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. There's a huge fund here that's not being dispersed, you know, if that makes sense. To me, there's no place for austerity here. Our solutions will come from other ways of organizing and supporting each other.

1:04:30 And this current administration has seen a huge downturn in members and therefore in funding. And I don't want to say it's all general headquarters doing. I think a lot of these are trends outside of any members control, but... I don't think that it has to be as bad as it is now. And I think that if we were a union more willing to support its members, more visibly supporting its members, that we would not be having to worry as much about the budget because you would have growing membership and therefore increasing funds.

1:05:03 Yes, it is absolutely a policy of austerity that the current general executive board is maintaining. And that's their solution. Their solution is cuts, not growth. And that doesn't work. Obviously, growth cannot be infinite. That's one of the problems that we're running into with capitalism. But, you know, in July 2026, the Federal Reserve estimated that there were 210 million working age people in the United States. We are a union of I think the largest estimate we've got is 9000 members.

1:05:35 I'm not even sure if that's accurate anymore. So we are not at any point of reaching the limits of our potential growth yet. And in terms of specific financial analysis, I looked at our balance sheets, which is something that any member can do. And I sent my analysis in a letter to the member bulletin in July of 2025.

1:05:57 And from what I saw, I calculated that we could afford to maintain the deficit at the time for six and a half years. Now, that is not forever, but it's certainly not the kind of crisis that this GEB is has used it as in order to slash committee budgets and barely touch their own. And it's definitely enough time to turn around our flagging recruitment numbers. You know, we need a GEB that can meet this moment, and that is the kind of board that we want to be. Yeah.

1:06:31 Also, one note, I mentioned some ways that we might change the union and improve it. I don't think it's necessarily the GEB's place to make those changes for the members. We shouldn't get in the way of change. We should be able to facilitate it when it happens. But again, we're not in charge. We're not the ones changing the union, the membership at largest.

1:06:51 Yeah, it's ultimately the workers, the fellow workers of a union who will change it is a good place to start wrapping up. So there has been a lot of mention of we in this endeavor. Do you all want to talk about who is running and what the sort of campaigns and write-ins are?

1:07:11 Yeah, I specifically would like to highlight the write-ins. So for a recap, I'm Pamela Sweetland-Aulis.

1:07:17 Hey, y'all.

1:07:18 I'm running a writing campaign. So that means that if you could please write in for GEB, Pam S or Pamela S. In addition, we have John Hollingsworth running for GEB as a write-in and Greg Murray from Portland running a write-in for GEB. So to recap that, Bryden's for the GEB includes Pam S., John Hollingsworth, and Greg Murray.

1:07:47 In addition, we have a fellow worker who, in addition to myself, was obstructed from the ballot, who is running for the IWOC administrative assistant. They go by Iggy, but I believe their name in red card is Philip I.

1:08:06 or Philip Iguerto. So, yeah.

1:08:10 And then you can find the rest of us in the GOB, me and Andrew, both cross-endorsed each other and a whole bunch of other people who are all supporting each other in trying to make this union better.

1:08:21 Yes, there is a candidate statement section in the October GOB that lists our visions for the union. And then make sure to check the member submission section for our write-in candidates statements. Because unfortunately, as write-in candidates, they weren't given... dedicated space.

1:08:42 Yeah we will get a link to that in the description and yeah thank you all so much for being on the show and thanks for fighting to make the union a better place.

1:08:53 Thank you very much for having us thank you for having me indeed and trans.

1:08:59 Rights are workers' rights.

1:09:00 Hell yeah.

1:09:01 Hell yeah.

1:09:02 Hell yeah.

1:09:15 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is normally about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. However, as I think you can tell by the opening music, you're listening to a very special episode today about El Chupacabras. I'm Carlos Barrios Polanco. And I'm at an undisclosed location outside somewhere in Puerto Rico where my only company are the creatures of the night and the sweet music that they make. Also, my dog is here with me and she's pretty chill. The reason that I'm out here is that I wanted to set the scene for this episode by being in the same headspace and meat space as all of those people that claim to have seen something eating their livestock and draining

1:10:06 their blood 32 years ago. And so far, I can definitely see why a person might see something, probably a dog or a mongoose, ripping the throats or biting the necks of their cows than attributing it to something that.

1:10:21 They could not explain.

1:10:23 If you spend any time in the middle of the woods, away from the noise and lights of the city, it's easy for your mind to play tricks on you, especially if hundreds of years of colonialism and societal and economic stress have your mind reeling.

1:10:39 It would be easy to.

1:10:40 Think that something was stalking you out here. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So what even is a chupacabras anyway? Well, in Spanish, it's called chupacabras, which often gets translated as goat sucker in English, which has always rubbed me the wrong way because it's cabras as in multiple goats. So it should actually be goat sucker. That's just a quibble I've had for ages that I'm happy to share with you right now. I'm sure that I must have seen something about the Chupacabras on the History Channel, but my first interaction with the Chupacabras as a cultural artifact was probably the 2003 direct-to-DVD movie Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico, which is like really funny to me because it's actually

1:11:24 the monster of Puerto Rico and everybody else just ripped us off. I should say upfront that I'm not a believer. Although I think the truth is out there, the truth is that the Chupacabra is fake, a shape-shifting creature of the mind, not an extraterrestrial creature of the night. However, while it's not real, the animal attacks and the hysteria they caused, as well as the enduring obsession with it in some circles, I think, is really interesting because it is kind of the perfect boogeyman manifestation of a lot of the colonial history here and all over the world, honestly.

1:11:56 Heard the book Tracking the Chupacabra, the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore by Benjamin Radford, which was a huge source for this episode and was way more serious than I expected it to be, there's three versions of this blood-sucking beast. The first is the original, the Puerto Rican version that is about three to four feet tall with spines or feathers running down its back that also has some kind of reptilian look to it that was first quote-unquote seen in the small town of Canoanas in 1995. The second is more of a dog-slash-coyote-looking thing that's been seen up and down the American continent, but mostly on the Mexico-US borderlands and Latin America. Several corpses of this type of

1:12:37 chupacabra have been found in that area, and pretty much every single time it ends up being some type of animal with mange. Meanwhile, the third version is a catch-all for any type of unidentified animal that can carry the blame for an unexplained attack pretty much anywhere in the world. For this episode, I'm mainly going to be talking about the Puerto Rican version with a little bit of context here and there about the other versions. So the first quote unquote sighting of the Chupacabra occurred in August 1995 in the small town of Canovanas in the center north part of the archipelago. There had previously been attacks on livestock that year that had left them with two bite marks in the neck and without a single drop of blood.

1:13:18 But this was the first time that it was seen. The woman who saw it, Madeline Torrentino, claimed that she saw the beast from a window from her house alongside her mother. And she didn't get a sighting of a piece of it caught in the moonlight as it slipped into the darkness. No, she got such a good look that she was able to describe it in incredible detail.

1:13:38 Her tracking the chupacabra, quoting the book Chupacabra and Other Mysteries by Scott Corrales, which I cannot find an ebook for, so I'm trusting Radford on this. It had dark gray or black eyes that ran up its temples, and went up into its sides. It walked like a human and its arms were, quote, drawn back in an attack position as though it were a TV monster, end quote. Keep that in mind for later, by the way. It had long skinny fingers and close cropped hair all over its body and skinny legs that had three separate toes like a goose. It never opened its mouth and had feathers running down its back that were flat. Tolentino even got a close enough look to see its genitals, or I should say lack thereof. According to Corrales' book, she somehow

1:14:26 got on the floor from her window and managed to see that its genitals were sealed, even having time to make a joke to her mom about how it might have pooped through its mouth. According to the book, a young boy who worked for Tolentino's husband was also in the house and he sprinted out to catch the beast, even managing to do so and get close enough to perform an impromptu dental inspection because he opened its mouth and saw fangs. However, it eventually got away. From seeing the covers of Corrales' books, they are truly wild-looking, and from what I can tell, they're pretty much all written from the perspective of a person who believes, or at least wants you to believe, that the cryptids and aliens

1:15:07 described in them are real. Meanwhile, Radford's book is written by a skeptic, a person who's open to the idea, but is actually trying to use a scientific method to see if the chupacabra is real. From reading Radford's book, He kind of has some serious beef with Corrales. And in some instances of the book, you can really see the contempt come through. Anyway, dragging the chupacabra points out several inconsistencies in Tolentino's statement. First, it moved like a robot, but then it ran, then hopped, then seemed to float. Also, she was watching from the window, but was able to get to the floor to see its genitals. It's possible that she said window, but she meant like a sliding door in her house.

1:15:51 But yeah, it's improbable.

1:15:53 Also, the fact that the boy managed to catch the creature and inspect it is wild. And when Radford interviewed Tolentino in 2010, she said that that never happened. The kid went out to find it, but he didn't actually see it. So it's unclear where that description came from. To let the cat out of the bag quickly, per Radford's book, The creature that Tolentino saw in the darkness was actually a half-remembered and more reptilian version of the creature Sil from the 1995 Roger Donaldson film Species. Sil was played by Natasha Henstridge and designed by H.R.

1:16:29 Giger.

1:16:30 Yeah, the guy who designed the xenomorphs is the reason that the chupacabra exists. Tolentino quote-unquote saw the chupacabra in August and Species had come out just a month before, in July. And if you look at pictures of Sil and the chupacabra drawn from Tolentino's memories, there's an uncanny resemblance there. I know that this is an audio medium, but I'll publish pictures on Blue Sky whenever this episode drops and you'll see it. Part of the movie had even been filmed in Puerto Rico, and one of the first images presented in the film is the Arecibo telescope, a gigantic radio telescope that was destroyed by Hurricane Maria in 2017. that had actually been used to send the first ever signals into space in 1974. Tolentino was even

1:17:15 asked about the film, but her reaction was interesting, to say the least. In a 1996 interview with Lucy Pla and José Manuel Rodríguez, highlighted by tracking the Chupacabra, Tolentino said that Sill's resemblance to the Chupacabra was, quote, really impressive, end quote. And she wondered, quote, how can they make a movie like that when these things are happening in Puerto Rico?

1:17:39 End quote.

1:17:40 I really do not want this to come off as being mean to Tolentino because we've all seen weird stuff in the woods that we can't explain, told a few friends and then forgot about it. But the reason that Tolentino's tall tale became the myth that it did is because the news media absolutely pounced on her story and took it to insane heights. attributing any and all mysterious occurrences involving cattle mutilation or unexplained attacks or anything along those lines to the chupacabra. Before Tolentino saw, quote-unquote, the chupacabras, there had been other attacks that were retroactively attributed to the chupacabras, and it slowly became a boogeyman that was at the scene of everything that could not have an

1:18:23 easy or normal explanation. I should also say that the name Chupacabras was reportedly coined by comedian Silverio Perez, although that's disputed by some. Shortly after Tolentino's encounter with the Chupacabra, she described the Chupacabra to artist Jorge Martín, whose drawing made the front page of El Nuevo Día according to tracking the Chupacabra. El Nuevo Día is our paper of record, so this was.

1:18:48 A big deal.

1:18:50 And although I can't find this front page anymore, as a nation we're pretty bad at archiving the past and it's not really easily accessible online. From reading the book, their coverage seems to have been significantly less sensationalist than other local papers. Although, I did manage to find an article from 2010 whose headline reads, quote, two chupacabra attacks reported, end quote. So your mileage may vary. However, the chupacabra reached worldwide fame when talk show host Cristina Saralegui aired a story about the chupacabra on El Show de Cristina, which aired across the Spanish-speaking world. Saralegui even had the mayor of Canobanas, José Chemo Soto, who was up for re-election to talk about his experience hunting the chupacabra in

1:19:38 his municipality, which is something that he became super famous for in that late 90s period, and it helped him a lot because he was re-elected all the way to 2004. It was a publicity stunt, clear and simple, but it worked. Per the book, Governing Spirits, Religion, Miracles, and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898-1956, by Renaldo Román, he eventually came to be called Chemo Jones because of his hunt for the bloodsucker. It was clear to everyone this was a publicity stunt, but everybody went along with it, including more than 200 volunteers, scores of journalists, and off-duty police officers that accompanied him on a hunt on October 29th, 1995. Wait, you hear that? Is that something moving in the woods? Wait, no, no, no.

1:20:28 It's just ads.

1:20:38 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we're talking about the chupacabra. Even though not all Puerto Ricans believed in this blood-sucking beast, urban and international media almost always portrayed these rural folks as being a mass of fools that believed in mysticism and this extraterrestrial beast. So there was always a very real class aspect to the whole coverage.

1:21:03 of this Chupacabra. Per the book Tracking the Chupacabra, quote, when reading accounts of the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico, I often came across phrases like, quote, the Chupacabra terrorized the island, end quote, or, quote, fear gripped Puerto Rico, end quote, or, quote, the island populace was near fever pitch, end quote. There is, of course, some truth to this description, but mystery-mongering hyperbole aside, it is not accurate to suggest that the entire Puerto Rican population, or even a majority of it, was gripped in terror over the goat sucker. Of course, some individuals and groups grew very concerned over the mystery, but most Puerto Ricans, especially city dwellers, went about their daily lives

1:21:46 giving little thought or concern to the creature that they had heard about, mostly in backyard gossip and tabloids. If El Nuevo Día and Cristina brought the creature to mainstream attention, El Vocero, which is now a respectable newspaper but was a lurid tabloid back then, is what quote-unquote created the chupacabra in the popular imagination. Per Governing Spirits, El Vocero lifted dozens and dozens of stories about chupacabra attacks, adding details to every single one that in hindsight were clearly just kind of made up. One such story highlighted in Tracking the Chupacabra is about a five-year-old girl almost being abducted by the beast, but then she managed to escape And it raised her IQ to a genius level. This

1:22:32 story was seemingly confirmed by a police officer at El Vocero, which saw it fit to print. We're going to talk a little bit more later about people in positions of authority confirming Chupacabra, but this was the type of thing that flooded El Vocero newspapers at the time. When I spoke to a friend who was alive at the time this was happening, he told me that El Bosero's tabloidness and propensity for publishing the most lurid pictures of accidents and murders led people to say that if you squeezed the newspaper, it would bleed. Ironically enough, per Tracking the Chupacabra, the majority of claims that animals were left without blood were published by El Bosero, without really any proof or an autopsy being performed. Quoting from Radford here, It is

1:23:17 likely that if the animal's owners expressed any doubts that their animals had been vampirized, the tabloid reporter would have no reservations about massaging the facts and selecting the quotes that would make for a better story. A farmer or housewife who excitedly swears that the goat they found had absolutely been drained of every single drop of blood makes for a better story than one who isn't sure, or who admits he or she didn't really look.

1:23:42 End quote.

1:23:43 Mass hysteria is often caused by mass media covering an event badly, essentially a failure to perform journalism. Each instance of the chupacabra getting attention made it spread wider and wider until it was absolutely inescapable. Yet very little of this coverage attempted to show that it wasn't real. Any mysterious thing was now the result of the chupacabra, because it was the new thing that everybody knew about, and the creature that everybody was telling you to be very, very, very afraid about all the time. Actually, the animated 100% real documentary Paranoia Agent deals with mass hysteria spreading throughout Japan as a result of a mysterious boy attacking people with a bat.

1:24:25 Highly recommend.

1:24:27 El Vocero has a long history of making up stuff to sell papers. In fact, El Vocero's first year of publication was marked by another vampire creature boosting its numbers. In 1975, there were unexplained attacks in the western municipality of Moca that also reportedly left animals without blood. This creature was called El Vampiro de Moca, the Vampire of Moca.

1:24:53 El Vocero latched onto this story like a tick and published dozens of stories that would come to foreshadow their coverage of El Chupacabra. Although they were admonished for their coverage at the time by editors from other newspapers, they said they were just reporting the stories out Just the facts.

1:25:10 Although they later acknowledged it did lead them to reach a circulation of nearly 90,000 in their first year, according to Governing Spirits, which is a fuckton for a small tabloid in an archipelago that at the time had a population of less than 3 million people. So we see how history kind of repeats itself with El Chupacabra by analyzing El Vocero's actions during the time of El Vampiro de Moca. Both times, they knew that by focusing on sensationalism and obscurantism, it could make money, which is a lot of the reason that these myths spread. By the way, if you speak Spanish, the great podcast El Hilo did an episode in March of this year about El Vampiro de Moca called, quote, El Vampiro Entre Nosotros, end quote.

1:25:57 That's excellent and was a big source for this section of the episode.

1:26:00 So.

1:26:00 20 years before the chupacabra struck, Puerto Ricans were already familiar with another bloodsucker. And although the natural inclination is to think that the vampiro de moca is just the chupacabra, from what I've read, people mostly view them as two separate creatures that show there are unexplained things going bump in the night in Puerto Rico. And that the government was either mostly powerless to do something about it or largely uninterested in doing so. Speaking of the government, there's an even older story than the Vampiro de Moca that had already created a strong association between the government and vampirism on the archipelago. First, to set the scene, Puerto Rico has been an important U.S. military stronghold since the

1:26:47 late 1930s because of its strategic location that allows the military to project force towards Latin America. The archipelago eventually became an incredibly important part of U.S. military strategy in the Atlantic. At its peak, there were 20 separate installations that occupied roughly 13% of all arable land in the archipelago per a master's thesis written by Robert Jordan in 2008 for the University of Texas at Dallas titled El Chupacabra, Icon of Resistance to U.S. Imperialism. The biggest installation was the Roosevelt Road's Naval Station, which was eventually closed in 2004 but was reopened last year.

1:27:24 The U.S.

1:27:25 Military also occupied the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra which they used for all types of training, including using it as a bombing range. Per the Guardian, they dropped up to 3 million pounds of ordnance in Vieques per year. This includes 263 rounds of depleted uranium-tipped munitions that were quote-unquote accidentally expended during a training exercise on February 19, 1999, per Navy Facilities Command. Today, about two-thirds of Vieques are natural reserves that the public can't access because of all the unexploited ordnance there, and its people have sky-high cancer rates compared to the rest of the archipelago's population. I talk a little bit more about all this in my episodes about U.S. colonies, so check that out if you

1:28:10 want to learn more. Vieques and Culebra were so important to U.S. military strategy that in the 1960s, the U.S. government attempted to purchase the entirety of the two island municipalities for bombing practice. This would have involved moving the nearly 9,000 people that live there to another part of the archipelago, as well as exhuming all the bodies in the cemeteries, some which had been there for over 200 years, and reburying them.

1:28:40 Somewhere else.

1:28:42 Because of this wild and weird ask, the negotiations were codenamed the Dracula Plan, Plan Dracula, by Puerto Rican officials. Although the plan never came to pass, per el Chupacabra icon of resistance, this early association between the U.S. government with a blood-sucking monster was prophetic for the way it viewed the bloodsuckers to come. Before I continue citing all the ways U.S. presence influenced the Chupacabra, it's worth noting that the Navy left Culebra in 1975 and Vieques in 2003 after years of sustained and massive protests. And, per Jordan's thesis... Chupacabra sightings dropped off massively after Puerto Ricans were able to wrestle more control over their land from the U.S. But you know what you can't wrestle away

1:29:32 control from? These products and services. And also, I'm sure they won't suck your blood out like the Chupacabra, but maybe watch out a little bit.

1:29:45 Ha ha ha.

1:29:51 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we are diving into the origin story of the Chupacabra. Since the Chupacabra came into the popular imagination, its origin has always been linked to the U.S.

1:30:03 Government.

1:30:04 The most prominent rumor goes that it was created for genetic experimentation on extraterrestrial life at a secret laboratory in El Yunque, which is the largest rainforest on our small archipelago. Many people consider it to be the last bastion of pristine and untouched Puerto Rico. And while that's not really true, it certainly is beautiful, and hiking the two to three hours or so that it takes to reach the top is something I would recommend to everyone. While the Chupacabra definitely did not emerge from a secret lab in Ajunque, there were definitely strange experiments taking place there, but of the man-made horrors beyond my comprehension variety. There are two big ones. The first was related to Project Plowshares, wherein

1:30:45 the Atomic Energy Commission was attempting to quote-unquote peacefully destroy employ atomic explosions to create canals and harbors in Panama. As part of this project, scientists from the University of Puerto Rico injected trees and other vegetation in El Yunque with radioactive isotopes to see what would happen to them. Meanwhile, the second big one is the testing of Agent Orange, Agent White, and other tactical herbicides there and in six other locations because our vegetation resembled that of Southeast Asia.

1:31:17 According to a document titled quote, the history of the U.S. Department of Defense programs for the testing, evaluation, and storage of tactical herbicides, end quote, written by Alvin L. Young in 2006 and submitted to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense. As far as I've been alive, there's always been rumors of creepy things going on in Ajunque. It's a popular spot for UFO sightings as well, which people often attribute to the presence of U.S. military installations there.

1:31:46 It's worth noting that El Junque's facilities were also used as a guided missile operations control unit and a joint surveillance site in the latter half of the 20th century, which is part of the reason that people always thought there was some secret spy shit going on that was calling the aliens to El Junque. Actually, my dad has this story that he's told me and my siblings maybe a dozen times over our lives where him and his best friend were confused for men in black at an El Junque stargazing slash UFO event. Because he was wearing aviators at night and a bomber jacket? Just the type of beliefs that can be inspired by something you can't quite explain. The Chupacabra being from a secret facility also

1:32:27 ties in well enough with the plot of Species, which inspired that first sighting. Lauren Derby, in a paper titled, quote, Imperial Secrets, Vampires, and Nationhood in Puerto Rico, end quote, says that, quote, The Chupacabras reflects a contradiction very peculiar to Puerto Rico, which is a very small island with an extraordinarily pervasive array of U.S. military installations, most of which are called as top secret and therefore declared off-limits to locals, end quote. Per Derby's paper, quote, disproportionate number of Chupacabra narratives have been generated by the inside-class outsiders who have some access to the secrets of power or police its margins. Those who are close enough to touch

1:33:11 the walls and halls of power, comma, the skin of the secrets and yet are still denied real access, end quote. These are mostly retired army personnel or police. I would wager to guess that like many other cryptids, the tail of the chupacabra was used whether consciously or unconsciously to keep people away from these restricted government areas. Essentially, el chupacabra was a psyop. You heard it here first. Tales of government experimentation weigh heavy on the Puerto Rican mind.

1:33:43 In 1941, the American doctor Cornelius Rhodes, who worked on Puerto Rican patients, wrote a letter saying that he had, quote, done his best to further the process of extermination by killing eight and transplanting cancer into several more. Although an investigation found no evidence of unethical human experimentation, The rumor that he did inject people with cancer cells remains very permanent in Puerto Rican society. Meanwhile, between the 1930s and the 1970s, Puerto Rican officials, with support of the U.S. government, pushed a massive campaign of sterilization because of fears of overpopulation.

1:34:21 Women who got la operación, the operation, as it was colloquially called, were promised a solution to poverty and economic stability. Many were also led to believe that the operation was reversible. but this proved not to be the case. About a third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized during that time. There's a very good documentary that I'll link in the sources called La Operación by Ana María García that talks about the sterilization campaign. Really recommend you take a look at it if you're interested in more context.

1:34:51 Although both the peak of militarism and La Operación happened decades before the first Chupacabra sighting, it's within this blaze of government secrets and conspiracy and U.S. colonialism that tall tales of the Chupacabra bursting out of the woods and laying waste to livestock came about all throughout the archipelago.

1:35:09 It's worth highlighting that economically and socially, things were not going very well for Puerto Ricans at the time that the Chupacabra myth started. The archipelago had been undergoing a drought that lasted from mid-1994 to 1997, per reporting from El Vocero. It's respectable now, I swear. This drought was one of the worst for PR in the 20th century, and it reached its peak in 1995. It caused 300 million in damages, and approximately 165 million corresponded to the agricultural sector, aka the rural communities who owned the livestock that was being attacked by the Chupacabras. Meanwhile, a hurricane was also bearing down on the archipelago in 1995. Hurricane Mariling hit Puerto Rico in September 1995 and as a

1:35:53 Category 2 hurricane and caused about $ 2. 5 billion in damages between PR and the U.S. Virgin Islands and 13 deaths between the two. At the same time, rural communities who largely depended on agriculture to sustain themselves had been forced to leave that work behind and move towards industrial jobs as part of Operation Bootstrap. This fragmentation was built on by the encroachment of urbanism throughout much of the region surrounding the capital municipality of San Juan. It's important to point out that Canovanas has experienced marked urban and commercial development over the past 30 or 40 years, to the point that what the municipality is most known for to people like me who don't live there is because of

1:36:35 its gigantic outlet mall that started construction in 1998. Meanwhile, Orocovis and Morovis, where the first unexplained livestock attack happened, are still isolated rural communities that have been more or less forgotten by the central government. to the point that in 2019, Morovis had to sue our central water utility because of continued lack of access to potable water. So when rural communities composed mostly of lower or middle class people started seeing their livestock, a kind of physical manifestation of what little wealth they had, being attacked by something, it caused a panic. And within that panic, the Chupacabra emerged as the quote-unquote real thing that was hurting them, that they could theoretically find and stop, versus the growing environmental, societal,

1:37:22 and economic crisis built on top of centuries of colonialism. Through the creation of the chupacabra, people were able to maintain their collective identity and impose a sense of control at a point where they felt powerless. Per tracking the chupacabra, quote, it was within this desperate environment of perceived U.S. intrusion and imperialism that the symbol of the chupacabra became the vessel into which many of the rural people of Puerto Rico poured all their fears and apprehensions about the strange industrial world seemingly thrust upon them by the United States. However, those rural municipalities of Puerto Rico where the U.S. lacked a major military or economic presence during this drought period

1:38:03 did not receive any visits from the Chupacabra. Furthermore, large urban areas such as San Juan, where industrial or service-based livelihoods were less affected by the drought found elsewhere in the country, did not report sightings of the creature, end quote. In a sense, the creation of the Chupacabra also left the government that was not doing anything at all about the crisis its people were facing off the hook. For Chemo Jones, he even used it as a way to ride into re-election for free more cycles. However, for the people actually affected by the drought and the random attacks on their livestock, probably by wild dogs, the Chupacabra was a way to explain their misery, but it didn't provide

1:38:45 a solution to their problems. They were left to fester and just have to take even more pressure onto themselves. The other countries in Latin America where Chupacabra sightings were also reported after the Cristina show aired were also suffering from economic and social turmoil at the time. In Mexico, the agricultural industry was suffering because of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Per an essay by William Calvoquiros titled Sucking Vulnerability, Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years, NAFTA caused the Mexican government to change their constitution to allow the privatization of communal land, which displaced several rural communities. It also deregulated import restrictions and

1:39:31 caused an increase in unemployment. The reality of a monster attacking them was undeniable. It wasn't just chickens and goats, but entire communities were displaced because of NAFTA. Similar things were happening up and down the American continent.

1:39:47 In the U.S.

1:39:48 Borderlands, the myth of the Chupacabra came to embody the government's war against the welfare state and rising anti-immigration sentiment. The historian Mike Davis described the Chupacabra phenomenon in California as a byproduct of the increasingly hostile environment for migrants and the violence that the state was imposing on them.

1:40:08 Quoting Calvoquiros here, at a base level, monsters and the phantasmagoric allow for the out-of-this-world atrocious experiences in daily life to become a collective spectacle that comes to represent the social relations and realities imposed over the community.

1:40:25 Therefore, as a.

1:40:26 Collective entity, the Chupacabras calls attention to the atrocities experienced by small farmers and those at the vulnerable and peripheral edges of society. As Jordan talks about in his thesis, the chupacabras can also be seen as a symbol of resistance against the very imperialism that kind of created it.

1:40:45 The chupacabras was a creature so powerful that it could escape the ever-present eye of the state and the encroaching militarism that was affecting Puerto Rico at the time the alleged sightings were happening. Culturally, this has remolded the chupacabra from predator of the night to protector in some stories, like the comic Beast of Boricang. but that Chupacabras is actually physically fighting colonialism. To wrap up, Puerto Rico has always had vampires on it, except that they've never been beasts.

1:41:16 The most visible of these vampires is the simple mosquito, a vicious bloodsucker that I've been attacked by at least once in the course of writing this essay. It is the deadliest animal in the world and is a victim of dengue fever in my youth. That shit sucks ass. Meanwhile, the second vampire is the continued colonization of the archipelago that has stripped it of so many resources for centuries and continues to do so to this day. Colonialism has always been vampiric, extracting as much as it can with little care to the corpses it leaves in its wake.

1:41:51 Although the Chupacabra mass hysteria died down at the turn of the century, the forces that shaped its creation are still here and they've become even more acute. Whether it be the unelected fiscal control board imposed by the U.S. government, or corrupt Puerto Rican officials, there have always been vampires walking among us. They're just not beasts. They look just like us, and their system of oppression has harmed more than any single chupacabra ever could. Thanks for listening. You can find me pretty much everywhere online, at Vaquero2XL. That's about it.

1:42:37 Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Kim Kelly and I'll be your host for today's episode. I'm a labor journalist and the author of a book called Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor. One of my self-styled superpowers is finding a way to link labor history with present day goings on. I'm not an official historian, but I've read a lot of books and talked to a lot of workers, and that's how you find all the good stuff anyway. I like to say that every story is a labor story, and that ethos can be applied to basically any scenario, especially if you dig down deep enough. Autumn has finally come to the East Coast. I'm talking leather weather, dead leaves, cool temperatures,

1:43:24 and a blessed end to the infernal sunshine that has plagued my days for so long. Those of us in my neck of the woods are preparing for mischief night, and Halloween itself is only a few nights away. It's a good time to tell stories around a campfire or in a darkened room. Though, if your spirit cat is still in the shop, your headphones will work just fine. Now, since I've already got you in my clutches, let's get into a little morbid labor history. And, admittedly, there's a real dearth of genuinely spooky labor actions out there in the modern day or otherwise. I mean, we haven't seen any vampiric work stoppages or witches strikes, though I wouldn't put it past the Etsy coven to eventually get organized.

1:44:08 And the only real monster we can point to as workers is capitalism and its bloodthirsty minions in the employer class. There's a historical fantasy novel called The Factory Witches of Lowell that looks pretty cute and does involve a witch's union, but I'd rather take this in a more concrete direction, shall we say. Let's talk about gravedigger strikes. So, quick note on language. Gravedigger is clearly way more fun to say, but the proper term is cemetery worker. The classic horror movie trope of the disheveled, shady, creepy gravedigger with his shovel and medicine cackle doesn't quite apply these days. And I'm sure today's cemetery workers don't really appreciate that stereotype.

1:44:54 There are no midnight resurrections or bloody shovels lying around anymore. This is municipal work, really. Nowadays, cemetery workers operate heavy machinery to perform burials, to maintain cemetery grounds and dig foundations for headstones and monuments. These are skilled workers whose world straddles maintenance, construction, and landscaping. And a lot of them are union city workers. They're first on the scene to ready the grave and the last to say goodbye once everyone else leaves. It is tempting to romanticize the gig, especially if you're a morbid little freak like me, but Even with the aid of modern advancements, digging graves remains hard, dirty, intensive physical labor that can wear down the body and

1:45:37 take a mental and emotional toll on the worker. There's still a lot of dead bodies involved, after all. Given the nature of their work, cemetery workers are no strangers to cooperation on the job. Nor are they afraid of collective action. There's a long history of gravediggers going on strike. though it's truly a wonder that any boss has ever dared to push them to that point, given the kind of leverage these particular workers wield. Strikes are meant to be disruptive, and there are few things more guaranteed to disrupt a city's normal operating procedure than a rotting pile of unburied corpses. That's what happened in 1949 in New York City, when tensions rose between the trustees of St.

1:46:19 Patrick's Cathedral in Queens and 250 of its cemetery workers. These workers were predominantly Irish and Italian Catholics who earned about $ 60 a week, around $ 700 in today's dollars, for a six-day, 40-hour work week. After a breakdown in contract negotiations between the bosses and the unions, in which the workers were pushing for a five-day, 40-hour work week, higher wages, and overtime, the union called a strike for January 13th.

1:46:48 I don't think it was a Friday, but it would be very satisfying if it was. So the work stoppage lasted for just under two months, and in that time, a thousand bodies went unburied. Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of the city's Roman Catholic Archdiocese, summoned 200 untrained college students from St. Joe's Seminary to fill in the scabs. One can only imagine how well these kids, who were far more used to flipping Bible pages than engaging in any kind of real heavy toil, adapted to chipping grays out of the cold winter dirt, But it's not exactly the kind of assignment you can turn down if you're trying to be like an extra special kind of priest.

1:47:29 You know?

1:47:29 I was raised Catholic. I feel like I can be as rude about these dudes as I want.

1:47:34 Sorry, Grandma.

1:47:36 The strike caused a stir among the city's Catholic labor activists, particularly the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, the Catholic Worker newspaper, and its founder, the renowned Catholic anarchist labor activist Dorothy Day. Still waiting for her to be sainted. It's coming. I can feel it. She personally took up the cause, both at the cemetery and outside the Cardinal's residence on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, and delivered food and medicine to the Stryker's families.

1:48:04 Dorothy Day wrote directly to the Cardinal, emphasizing the economic hardships the workers faced and asking him to go to them, conciliate them. It is easier for the great to give in than the poor. They are hungry men. Their only weapon has been their labor. which they have sold for a means of livelihood to feed themselves and their families.

1:48:26 The 70s being what they were, what had begun as a pretty straightforward dispute over time and money morphed into a really ugly, weird squabble over communism?

1:48:36 Ha!

1:48:37 Conservative Catholic leaders red-baited the union members because union, and the Cardinal decried their tactics as communistic. And now the workers got really pissed off about this because they hated communism too. And they took an anti-red oath to denounce communism in the middle of their strike. And they also, at the Archdiocese's insistence, disaffiliated from their union and joined the more conservative AFL as members of the Building Services Employees International Union. So they, like, got red-baited out of their union, and they still didn't even really win the strike.

1:49:13 They eventually went back to work on March 12th and picked up their shovels in defeat. But it would be far from the last time America's gravediggers would call the bosses bluff. In 1975, 1,700 members of the local 365 of the Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendance Union followed the lead of their predecessors. and struck for higher wages at 44 cemeteries in the New York metropolitan area. By the end of that 27-day strike, the workers had won a small wage increase, and 1,400 bodies were waiting to be buried.

1:49:49 Absent from those piles were the dead of the Orthodox Jewish community, whose faith requires burial within 24 hours. In recognition... the union had invited the loved ones of deceased Orthodox Jews to enter the cemetery and bury those bodies in accordance with their religion. Picket lines are sacred, but so are a lot of other things too. The next year, gravediggers from Cemetery Workers Local 265 on the West Coast launched a four-month strike that shut down 10 California cemeteries, including in Colma, a small town near San Francisco that had, quote, 500 living residents, and hundreds of thousands of graves. The combination of manual labor, low pay, and cemetery-specific occupational hazards continued to spur cemetery workers to strike throughout the 80s

1:50:36 and 90s. A few years earlier, a massive wave of strikes had overtaken the UK during 1978 and 1979's Winter of Discontent, and a group of cemetery workers in Liverpool had found themselves embroiled in a conflict that would become the subject of feverish national attention. Those 80 workers were the members of GMB, a general trade union, who had decided to join the thousands of other public sector employees who were already on strike around the country at the time. Unfortunately, those other workers' absence was a little less visible, and the backlash to the cemetery strike was brutal. The workers were demonized in the press and condemned by art school Margaret Thatcher herself. Photos of unburied bodies ran on the

1:51:22 front pages over headlines screaming things like, Now they won't let us bury our dead. Members of Parliament called the strike an outrage to human decency. It was a lot. So the workers decided to end the strike after a week and a half. They were worried that their actions were hurting everyday people instead of the government that was causing so much suffering. Conservative politicians seized on the strike's shocking imagery to batter the Labour Party. They swept into power in the next election, all of which allowed Margaret Thatcher to eventually launch her own war on the working class.

1:51:55 In 2021, with Thatcher safely rotting in her own grave, Liverpool's cemetery workers threatened to walk out again, but this time they managed to strike a deal at the 11th hour. I have a feeling no one wanted to repeat that whole situation. As each of these strike actions and many more besides have shown, cemetery workers and the work they do are absolutely essential. Without them, neither the living nor the dead can find peace. and the vital importance of that work should leave no argument over whether they should be paid fairly and treated well. Greedy bosses who have refused to recognize that have done so at their peril. Remember, gravediggers know where all the bodies are buried. Who do you think put them there in the first place? Speaking

1:52:51 of unburied corpses... Cemetery workers weren't the only unionized workforce that has had to navigate a truly cursed minefield of bad bosses, public horror, and decaying human remains during a labor dispute. Here in Philadelphia, we got a front-row seat to that particular balancing act last summer during the huge Astme DC-33 municipal workers' strike that effectively shut down a good chunk of the city for eight very sweaty days in July. The most visible of the workers who went out came from the sanitation department, A heat wave was pummeling the city when they walked out on July 1st.

1:53:26 And if you think Philly's a little grimy on a normal day, you should have seen and smelled the reeking mountains of trash that accumulated in what seemed like mere hours. Being the deep-thin serious city that we are, we obviously dubbed them Parker Piles after our evil mayor. The sanitation workers weren't the only municipal workers who went out, though.

1:53:46 The strike also included clerical employees, library staff, street pavers, water department workers, and the medical examiner's office. That last one made a real big splash real quick. Because you know what the medical examiner is in charge of? The city morgue. Now, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, the 160-bed facility was filled to overflowing within the first 48 hours of the strike. Look, Philly's the best city in the world, but we do have our problems, and among those problems are, you know, sometimes people get murked. The city morgue is a pretty busy place. Now, during the strike, during those first awful 48 hours, the remaining staffers were left scrambling to find room for 180 bodies, and they ultimately had

1:54:32 to double up on space, squeezing two cadavers into each bed. While the workers who usually handle death investigations and body transportation were on the picket line, grieving families were left in the lurch. In one especially horrific moment, the body of a 19-year-old gunshot victim... was left bleeding in the street for hours before someone came to pick him up.

1:54:54 By day three of the strike, the city had had enough. They forced the medical examiner's office back to work via a court injunction, citing a threat to public health and safety. You'd think the mayor and her cronies at City Hall would have maybe taken a minute to look into what had happened in other recent morgue-related strikes, or even into what had happened back in 1986. when the Philadelphia city workers had launched another massive strike that included medical examiner staff.

1:55:20 If they had, they might have realized just what a terrifically bad idea it can be to piss off the people who take care of all the dead bodies. Chicago folks might know where I'm going with this. Let's talk about the Cook County morgue scandal. In 2011, a string of institutional failures at the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner Illinois had led to a truly unbearable work environment for both the workers and the human remains they were charged with handling. Among other factors, funding cuts and changes in policy for handling infant remains and the unclaimed bodies of the dead had led to a staggering pileup of cadavers. At the time, CBS News reported that 400 adults and 100 babies were being kept in a cooler

1:56:04 meant for 300 bodies total. A whistleblower leaked photos of the carnage to the media, who predictably blew it up into a massive public scandal. Which seems pretty fair, honestly, when you read some of the workers' quotes on the subject. As one said, There are so many bodies in there now, they can't keep it cool enough. The stench is like nothing I've ever seen. I think it's sacrilegious. Photos showed bodies wrapped in plastic, haphazardly stacked on wooden shelves, while others were left rotting on the floor.

1:56:37 Like, it was.

1:56:38 It was fucked. It was really, really bad. And a worker told the public about it and some stuff changed. Shout out to the whistleblowers. Health hazards aside, it's just really fucking grim to hear these stories and to think about someone's grandma or granddaughter or mom left in that condition because someone in an office somewhere decided that those greedy corpse handlers could get by on a smaller budget.

1:57:06 The state labor department dinged them with 21 safety and sanitation violations after this all came out, including exposure to hepatitis B, blood splatter, and a failure to protect workers from the risk of being hit by falling bodies. The resulting reforms, purges, and mass burials that followed the whole affair make it sound even more like something out of an indie horror movie, but that's bureaucracy, baby. We've jumped from the graveyard to the morgue. and now it's time to make a stop at the funeral home. To bounce back to New York City, I want to shout out one of its other particularly ghoulish post-mortem labor conflicts. For whatever reason, there have been a lot of corpse-related worker

1:57:48 actions out there. Like, more than really seems reasonable, but with so many of the living being pushed out of New York every day, I guess it makes sense that even the dead can't always find a decent place to rest. So back in 1964, on October 1st, Over 400 embalmers, undertakers, and funeral directors from across the five boroughs of went on strike. Classic strike action. They're calling for higher wages, better pensions, and a 35-hour work week, which does sound like a pretty big ask for the 60s if you don't think much about what their work days actually looked like and forget that they're only making $ 122 a week.

1:58:29 When talks broke down between members of Local 407, of the Funeral Directors and Balmers and Undertakers Union, who are part of the SEIU Extended Universe, also, if anyone can find a t-shirt, I will give you not a lot of dollars, because I don't have a lot, but I would, let me know. I will haunt eBay for the rest of my days if I can find a Local 407 shirt.

1:58:53 But when talks broke down between the union and the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, workers at 100 of the busiest, most high-profile funeral homes in the city walked out, which left their supervisors, funeral home executives, and owners to handle the avalanche of bodies that were quickly left in their wake.

1:59:13 It's funny, after only eight days of getting their hands dirty, the bosses were absolutely exhausted and dying for their workers to come back. So they backed down. The embalmers came back to work with an immediate wage increase and a bunch of other goodies too. As we've learned, as far as leverage goes, it's hard to argue with a rotting corpse.

1:59:34 One last little tidbit I'd like to share before we go our separate ways comes courtesy of the Columbarium, an extremely fun newsletter about death from writer and death educator Becky Robeson. I saw her post about this story a little bit ago, and I had to hit her up for more details. Labor ghouls of a feather flock together, I guess. So, 1852. 200 of New York's coffin makers went on strike. Now, it may have been the Gilded Age, but it still stunk pretty bad back then, especially in the summertime when diseases like cholera, smallpox, and typhoid ran rampant.

2:00:10 The poor bastards working at the city morgue would have killed for the kind of refrigeration setup they had in Cook County. But at the time, the best they could do was to keep their stiffs on ice.

2:00:21 Literally.

2:00:22 They would have used ice-lined wooden boxes called corpse coolers to keep the deceased and their loved ones by proxy as comfortable as possible before the funeral. We can really only do so much. The coffin workers were well aware of this fact and used their leverage, there's that word again, to ensure that when they joined the strike, their impact would be felt immediately. But this wasn't just a coffin maker's strike. They were part of a much bigger labor action that pulled together thousands upon thousands of workers from across 30 different industries from all over the city to call for an eight-hour workday. That movement had been bubbling for years at that point, with smaller local wins in

2:01:03 New England inspiring workers in other regions to take up the rally and cry. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. That 1872 strike drew over 100,000 workers in total and scared the bejesus out of the corporate titans and city elites, who were suddenly faced with the harsh reality that, gosh, there really were a whole lot more workers than there were of them. They responded accordingly, weaponizing the police department. Piano man William Steinway personally hired 300 cops to protect his factory.

2:01:38 Very fancy. forcing lockouts, and basically doing whatever they could to knock the fight out of the strikers. The workers won eventually, and that strike would prove to be just one more bloody stepping stone towards that eventual victory. The coffin makers had the last laugh, though. By the time that strike ended, 125 of the 200 strikers had forced concessions out of their bosses, which, given the way Victorian bosses tended to react to workers' labor demands, is pretty incredible.

2:02:10 The unique nature of their employment as death workers saved them once again. As the Chicago Tribune wrote of the coffin makers and their strike at the time, quote, We see no escape from his clutches. We can resist the bricklayer by not building houses. We can offset the calciminer by refusing to whiten our walls. We can checkmate the servant by doing our own work. But unfortunately, as far as our pockets are concerned, we have got to die and we have got to be buried. And if the coffin maker persists in his demands, we know of no way in which we can refuse to patronize him. I'll leave you with one final quote from that same article that I just love. Not because of his intention, which was essentially whining about the coffin makers daring to demand

2:02:53 to be paid fairly for their essential work, but because the Tribune accidentally makes a great observation about how fucked up it is that we're forced to spend every moment of our lives worrying about paying bills. You're right, 19th century newspaper hack. Unions are cool, and the necessities of life and death should be free for everyone. Quote, It is not enough that man, worm of the dust, must be perplexed and worried in life, must be reminded at every turn that this is a veil of tears and that all is vanity, but even after he is dead and no longer exposed to tailor's bills and house rents and butcher's bills and pew rents and servant-galism, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh his air to, there is

2:03:36 still a class of men left who can worry his ghost. So that was my spooky labor Halloween episode for you. I hope you liked it. Thank you for listening. Now go give your boss a scare for me, and have a happy Halloween.

2:04:08 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you.

2:04:17 I'm Garrison Davis.

2:04:18 Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent Margaret Kiljoy, who is joining us for our spooky, slightly spooky, but also kind of regular edition of Executive Disorder.

2:04:32 Class war. That's right. That's right. Um, The specter that's haunting Europe.

2:04:40 We're covering the week of October 21st to October 28th. Not actually covering Halloween because that hasn't happened yet. But what can you do?

2:04:49 Halloween's a season now, Garrison.

2:04:52 It's months.

2:04:52 That's true. That is true. I'm pushing for it to consume Thanksgiving. Okay.

2:04:57 I'm so down.

2:04:57 Halloween runs until the solstice. Yeah, straight into Saturnalia.

2:05:02 Yeah.

2:05:03 Sick.

2:05:03 I love it.

2:05:04 James, do you want to begin with some short stories? Let's do it. Okay.

2:05:09 So starting, I guess, in this hemisphere, about a thousand troops from El Salvador have deployed to Haiti this week. The deployment came after four Salvadoran members of the UN task force went missing after they were ambushed and jumped out of their burning vehicle on the 18th of October. Bukele says that these people weren't on a combat patrol, that they were Air Force techs who are returning from a market.

2:05:35 When they got ambushed. I won't comment. Four bodies have been handed over. They were handed.

2:05:41 Over via one of these NGOs that does extraction work in the region.

2:05:45 They were found burned and the NGO recovered them.

2:05:48 I'm not quite sure if they were alerted that they were burned bodies or not. Bukele came to see these are not the missing personnel and he posted a picture of a Chadian soldier's ID but allegedly that Chadian soldier is alive but was injured and lost their ID in a mission. But Bukele came that the Bodies did not match the age or height of the.

2:06:07 Lost Salvadoran personnel.

2:06:10 Either way, it continues to be really desperate for folks trying to get along in Haiti. And I don't think the El Salvador military are going to make that much better for them. Another person has died in immigration detention. His death occurred in Core Civics' Otay Mesa facility, which is here in San Diego. Daylight San Diego confirmed this.

2:06:30 ICE hasn't published anything on its news page yet. There were rumors earlier this weekend that someone has died. Daylight San Diego got confirmation, but I haven't seen anything yet on the ICE news page, so we don't know who that person was.

2:06:44 At least I don't.

2:06:45 Next, an Iraqi court has sentenced seven French Islamic State members to prison in the first verdict of a trial involving 47 accused Islamic State fighters. Because the international community manifestly failed to set up tribunals since the collapse of the territorial caliphate, the accused and their victims have faced massive delays in getting justice. The big worry for European Union states here seemed to be that their citizens would be sentenced to death, right? Some French citizens were sentenced to death in 2019, but their sentences were commuted. In this case, these people were sentenced to prison, not death.

2:07:22 The United States, of course, helped transfer thousands of suspects from Syria, the SDG and the SNA began their offensive against the SDF earlier this year. In this case, Iraq is beginning these domestic trials of accused foreign fighters. Meanwhile, talking of Syria, both Jordan and Israel have conducted operations inside Syria this week. The Jordanians bombed what it claimed were Islamic State remnants responsible for an attack on a church in Jordan on the 26th of October which killed nine people. Israel, The IDF killed a young man with an intellectual disability and hearing problems during a night raid in Syria. they claimed that he kept approaching them and so they decided to.

2:08:03 Kill him inside the country he lived in and that they don't live in.

2:08:07 Inside the country that they were illegally invading along with all the other countries that they are illegally occupying yes there was like a really massive funeral for this man it's deeply fucking sad it's one of the thousands of horrific crimes against humanity that IDF likes to do about every week. So yeah, that's, it's all not the most, uh, happy stuff from me, but that's what I got for small things. The, the hunt is still taking an ass kicking every fucking day, man.

2:08:32 So that's nice.

2:08:33 In Myanmar, to be clear.

2:08:35 In Myanmar.

2:08:36 Yeah.

2:08:36 Yeah.

2:08:37 Yeah.

2:08:39 I mean, it's nice to see them losing. I guess they've also decided to... Maybe I should report this. They've started to deploy their senior officers to the front lines.

2:08:46 Oh, wow.

2:08:46 Previously, their tactic was that the officers would plan the assault and then send conscripts in to die while they remained in the rear. And it seems that senior leadership is getting very pissed off at their absolute dedication to using World War II tactics in 2026.

2:09:00 There are people....

2:09:03 Doing opposed amphibious assaults and getting mown down with MG42 machine guns. They're doing an unsuccessful D-Day every day. It's tragic that that many conscripts are dying, but hopefully some of those officers find their way to the front too.

2:09:17 Line all them up.

2:09:19 I want to mention two things that we'll probably cover more next week. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have released a new report on Trump's ties with Jeffrey Epstein. which contains details about Trump's involvement in Epstein's trafficking operations, and a new rape accusation against Trump made by a former beauty pageant contestant. Earlier this week, Trump instructed the DOJ to block the certification of Alaska's election results if the Democratic Senate candidate, Mary Paltola, wins Tuesday's election. The White House's preemptive justification is is that two different people named Daniel J.

2:10:02 Sullivan Jr. and Dan S.

2:10:05 Sullivan are both on the ballot, Dan S. Sullivan being the Republican incumbent, who is marked as such on the ballot. Alaska also has ranked choice voting, so if there's any confusion, voters can scribble in both Daniel and Dan Sullivan. We'll see what comes of this next week. Robert. Do you want to do our first considerably not spooky story? Unless you want to consider Flavio's disappearing act in Miami.

2:10:38 Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of spook in that, I guess. But no, this is actually one of the happiest stories we'll have to say. And honestly, this is like the happiest I've ever been to be wrong and the happiest I've ever been to like more accurately read a bunch of sources that wound up being wrong. Because a couple of weeks back during my segment on ED, I talked about Lula's disastrous first round against Flavio Bolsonaro for Brazil's presidential election. And it went almost as badly for Lula as it could have gone. Neither side won outright. Obviously, Flavio winning outright would have been worse.

2:11:12 But Flavio got more votes than Lula.

2:11:15 Nearly all of the other candidates who got meaningful numbers of votes during that first round were further right even than Flavio and a lot weirder than Flavio. There was only like one left-wing candidate besides Lula that like got a notable really amount of votes. And it was still very small in the grand scheme of things. And so the assumption was that obviously for the second round of voting, you expect that people who voted for kind of other right-wing candidates and other left-wing candidates would they'll mostly coalesce behind whoever got the most kind of on that broad side.

2:11:43 That's generally how you expect things to go.

2:11:45 And so because most of the other candidates who'd gotten meaningful numbers of votes were further right, the assumption was, well, if Lula is going to pull a win out in the second round, he's going to have to turn a lot of these right wing votes. And that just doesn't seem like it's going to.

2:11:58 Happen, right?

2:12:00 There was a lot of the sources that I was reading said it's essentially, it seems essentially impossible for Lula to pull out a second round win, like based on what we're seeing and how previous Brazilian elections are going. Something unprecedented would have to happen for him to win. And something unprecedented did in fact happen because Lula won last weekend. And he didn't just flip out an absolute, like barely eking out a win. This wasn't a case where, well, it was kind of close the first round and Lula just sort of barely managed to edge his way ahead of Flavio. Lula won by almost 3.6% in the popular vote, like he doubled his margin of victory from the election in 2022. Why did this happen? Because the flaws in

2:12:39 Lula's last administration didn't go away, and the fact that Bolsonaro nearly wound up right back in charge is proof of that, right? It points to the fact that Lula and the Brazilian left have a lot of work to do. And there's some other issues here. The most recent elections also handed Congress to the far right. So Lula is going to be fighting Congress basically from the moment he takes office. But the fact that Lula is president means that there's a fight to be had. You know, Flavio is not going to be able to, among other things, force out a bunch of Supreme Court justices who ruled against his father and stack the court in his own favor.

2:13:11 There's a bunch of shit Flavio is not going to be able to do.

2:13:14 Yeah.

2:13:15 Putting Lula in prison again, which is a thing that is weirdly not discussed. But like, yeah, this was an election that was loser goes to prison. Like, that's a big part of this.

2:13:24 Oh, Miami.

2:13:25 In Flavio's case, it was losers go to prison because he had committed a bunch of crimes he was actively being investigated for.

2:13:31 Yeah. And Lula, it was Lula. They'll send Lula to prison again for bullshit. Because fuck you.

2:13:37 Yeah.

2:13:38 Yes, but this was a loser-ghost-person kind of election.

2:13:42 You are right about that.

2:13:43 So in the next few days, we're going to have an episode from a Brazilian activist who was part of the massive grassroots campaign to turn things around for the second round of voting. And that's going to be the majority of our coverage on the subject because obviously the person that we picked is a lot more qualified than any of us to talk about this sort of stuff, living there and having been a part of this. So we'll have more detail for you on what exactly happened later.

2:14:05 But for the purpose of this episode, there's a couple important things I want to go over that are important in terms of understanding how this all happened, like how Lula was able to pull out a win. One is that people got galvanized by terror at what a second Bolsonaro, well, Flavio Bolsonaro, which was seen as an extension of like Jair's presidency, what that would actually mean. And they had weeks to marinate in that anxiety. And that helped motivate a major get out the vote effort.

2:14:31 Right.

2:14:31 A lot of people who had been kind of, well, I don't want to vote because I'm disappointed in Lula or I'm just not motivated to vote. Like a significant number of people were willing to come out because of what the stakes were. But a massive reason as to why things worked out for Lula comes down to the fact that he and his team fought a lot smarter this time around. Bolsonaro, as one of my sources pointed out, because I've talked to a few Brazilians about this election and like what happened during this like couple of weeks span of time. And several of the people I talked to pointed out that Bolsonaro relies heavily on being able to propagate their message through a bunch of different mouths and make whatever issue or scandal they think will get

2:15:09 them power to go viral.

2:15:11 Right.

2:15:11 The U.S.

2:15:11 MAGA right works basically the same way. You have a bunch of people who are all ostensibly independent content creators and media people who are all taking marching orders, probably from the same couple of like signal groups or whatever, where somebody says, hey, we're angry about trans people doing this this week. And then suddenly you have like 40 different people all putting out the same message and it goes viral, right? That's like a major thing in the United States on the right. And it was a big part of how The Bolsonaros, like, did what they were able to do. Like, it was a major messaging thing that they engaged in. Lula teamed up with a guy named Andres Llanones to come up with a counter to

2:15:46 this media strategy. Llanones started out as a lawyer for the poor and went through a mixed political awakening. This is not a guy who has had, like, a straight shot to helping the left win an election. He did initially, when he was a much younger man, join Lula's party at one point, the Workers' Party. But then after that, he joined a far right party that was run by Carlos Bolsonaro. In 2018, he was the federal deputy of a centrist party. But then in 2022, after he had kind of an abortive presidential run himself and decided not to go through with it and declared himself for Lula.

2:16:19 Yonanez's background helped him to develop a shit-stirring strategy that was used to great effect. The big thing this guy's been talking about for a while is the left can't win unless we're willing to do some of the dirty shit that the right is doing, right? Like we have to actually get down into the muck and try some, basically some dirty tricks in order to make shit work.

2:16:37 And that's very much what happened. He created a WhatsApp channel called Lula's Army, which he estimated would need about 10 million subscribers in order to guarantee Lula a win. It wound up with more than 11 million subscribers. Andre was the only person who could make posts there, and he used it to issue orders to his millions of followers about what to do online and in social media.

2:16:56 And among these kind of standing orders were do not engage with far-right narratives. Don't talk to these people. Don't argue with them. Don't respond to bait posts, not even to, like, dunk them. Block all of the shit that you see from these guys to cut off the flow of attention to the fascists and at the same time flood the internet with stories that are useful to Lula's campaign. These are not just like pro-Lula messages. There was a lot of like, in some cases, boarding on conspiracy theorizing about Flavio Bolsonaro and the stuff that he had gotten up to, like pointing out his ties to Freemasonry, right? It was all stuff that would go viral and it would make fellow far-right assholes look bad. This channel, Lula's Army, was

2:17:32 cited as a major reason for Lula's victory by everyone I've interviewed so far and by Lula at their victory party. He specifically shouted out General Llanones as the guy who had been the architect of of a lot of their online strategy. And this was very much framed as like, this is the far right's place of strength is the internet and like virality. And if we're going to actually beat these people, we have to be willing to like take the fight to them in this domain and win.

2:17:59 And this was very much like Lula's army was very much an attempt to I want to quote from an anonymous source or a source that I talked to that wants to remain anonymous, but provided me some of his thoughts on like what had happened and what had worked from this online strategy. One of the things I thought was interesting, he described, you know, his thesis to me as we can reverse SEO and election through mass action.

2:18:21 What I have witnessed from afar is basically millions of politically disengaged, normie working people saw this kind of small-time politician make some Instagram video about how they personally could change history by blocking your chud Bolsonaro cousin, printing out some articles to show your unconvinced auntie, searching things like Flavio Bolsonaro defended murderer of child on Google repeatedly until national newspapers were forced to mention it. He was literally doing little courses and videos like guys practice with me, anti-Lula clickbait, swipe away, don't click, don't argue, don't screenshot and quote tweet. Just swipe away like this. And now all these people have been posting for days, like, I

2:18:54 have social anxiety, but I've been sleeping four hours a night to go talk with people all day. My life has changed. I think we'll need to be doing this for years to crush the fascists. This person expressed to me that they doubted at one point whether what was going on was any different from like the common social media delusion of thinking, oh, if I like retweet the right stuff, maybe it'll change politics. But this concerted activism did change politics because people were not just engaging with shit that inspired or pissed them off based on their id.

2:19:22 They were acting strategically to block and deny the enemy terrain in which to maneuver. Here's another quote from that source. One of his tips, he's talking about Yonona's, One of his tips slash directives was something like, okay, we will post about topic X, but we will avoid keywords like Lula, PT, which is Lula's party, because meta has muted them. And instead, we'll use the hashtags of the enemy. So like Clockwork searching hashtag I'm with Flavio 22 or something on Instagram got you a wall of people doing the L fingers for Lula. It's all very signal jamming-y, while also completely low tech, like Americans just shooting flock cameras and all.

2:19:57 LOL.

2:19:58 That's it.

2:19:58 Incredible. I've never been more proud of my people.

2:20:05 I hope that becomes a new American international thing. They wear the fucking Realtree camouflage and they shoot flock cameras.

2:20:13 Yeah, that's our new stereotype. A flock camera is not safe. This is our new Goku. It's the international communication.

2:20:19 That's that communication. Hang on.

2:20:21 Hang on.

2:20:24 Now, as I said, we'll have a more detailed explanation of what happens soon.

2:20:27 It's important that you know.

2:20:28 And one thing I did want to point out is like one reason why they were focused on having, hey, we've got 10 million people start searching for like the same things, the same terms to make them go viral. Some Brazilian major news stations had like developed a kind of like a daily thing they would do of like.

2:20:42 What's trending online.

2:20:44 Yeah.

2:20:44 And so if you have 11 million people in a WhatsApp group and you can make whatever shit you want about like the guy you want to defeat.

2:20:51 Trend, that's a really powerful tactic.

2:20:54 You know?

2:20:54 If there's anything I've learned from using Twitter, Brazilians love to post.

2:21:00 They're huge posters. They're posty-ass people, yeah.

2:21:03 They are some of the most online people I've ever encountered.

2:21:08 Yeah.

2:21:08 But as much as this sort of organized posting strategy was a major aspect of this election and this organizing, which it was, there was a few other things you mentioned about printing off things to give to your aunt. Yes. other like in-person engagement, like having every person go out and like try to either flip someone that they know or talk to people who've like checked out of the political process and like harassed them into voting.

2:21:35 Yeah.

2:21:35 And I've even seen cases of people just sort of convincing their Bolsonaro supporting relatives to like go on vacation during the election.

2:21:46 That's pretty funny.

2:21:48 Yeah, it was a wide-ranging and creative effort, and I think this is really important. A lot of the stuff that was being done through Lula's army is not what you'd traditionally call ethical, certainly not in American politics. I don't have a problem with it, but this is getting down into the muck, right? This is not clean fighting.

2:22:08 This is not going high. This is seeing what the far right's been doing for the last decade to get into power and going like, all right, well, two can play at that game, motherfucker. You know, like, I think that is important to acknowledge here. I'm seeing a lot of people online going like, this is proof that all we need to do is vote. And it's like, well, the first round is proof of what happens when all you do is vote. The second round victory is proof of what happens is when you get fucking creative, you know? Anyway, we'll have a more detailed explanation of everything that happens soon.

2:22:39 It's important that you know right now that after his defeat, Flavia was ordered to turn in his passport because he was actively under investigation for a bunch of crimes related to corruption that he definitely committed.

2:22:50 Yeah, tons of them.

2:22:51 And after initially trying to get the election results rescinded, Flavio gave up on that, promised to return in his passport, and then fled the country. It looks like Marco Rubio helped orchestrate all of this. Basically, my understanding is he stepped into Argentina and then got on a flight that eventually led him to the United States with the help of the State Department. A senior State Department official told USA Today the State Department will issue visas to Flavio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States. And sure enough, a few hours after that, He landed in Miami.

2:23:22 Like father, like son.

2:23:23 Like father, like son.

2:23:26 I love that the list of Asylees and fucking refugees we accept is white South Africans are people whose last name is Bolsonaro.

2:23:33 Yeah, we're great on that.

2:23:34 This is my one initial criticism of Lula too, which is, as the great Marxist historian C.L.R. James said, the rich are only defeated when they are running for your lives. He forgot to add, you have to actually catch them.

2:23:47 You have to catch them before they can run.

2:23:49 I've got to wonder where he was watching the election party from, right? Like to have easy access to a land border where he can walk across.

2:23:55 He must have been really making sure that he had that figured out ahead of time. Yeah, he covered his back there. I know Lula had a good response when it came out that Flavio has fled. He stated at a rally, this is what the Bolsonaro family is like. Brazil is their second nation.

2:24:10 The U.S.

2:24:11 Is their first.

2:24:14 That's a fucking dunk. That's good.

2:24:16 We'll see what happens and how the U.S. regime uses Flavio. Will Chamberlain of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is supported by Peter Thiel. And I want to note that Ginny Kahn is the person who made me aware of this. She writes for the Bucks County Beacon. But yeah, he recently put out a statement saying, and I'm going to read from Will Chamberlain's statement, Flavio Bolsonaro's passport was canceled.

2:24:40 He was forced to flee the country by Lula. His brother Eduardo has an arrest warrant for lobbying against the U.S. It's time for the Brazilian left to face the full force of American diplomatic and economic sanctions until they stop acting like a banana republic.

2:24:52 And he's basically encouraging the.

2:24:54 United States to treat Brazil like we treated Russia after the expanded invasion of Ukraine. including visa bans on government officials and also quadrupling tariffs on Brazilian goods. Chamberlain ended his message by saying the Brazilian regime should look carefully at what has happened to Venezuela and Cuba and remember that this hemisphere belongs to the United States of America.

2:25:13 Oh, I don't like that. I don't like that at all.

2:25:16 We'll see where that goes.

2:25:17 That's the Don Roe doctrine. That's a new advanced level of Don Roe doctrine. Actually, this hemisphere belongs to is wild.

2:25:26 Yeah.

2:25:28 It was interesting how kind of slightly tepid Trump's reaction to Bolsonaro losing was like he, he didn't, he didn't echo Bolsonaro's claims that the election was like rigged or stolen, but also said, I didn't take sides, but it was a terrible look for the world. Elections have to be indisputable. And it looked really bad to me, but he didn't really elaborate much more. Like he could, he could have gone a lot harder. And it's like, I didn't take sides is his first main response.

2:25:59 Yeah. I assume he was like, all right, well, if they'd thrown a coup, we would have supported it, but he didn't throw a coup, so fuck it. Yeah.

2:26:05 I think he also doesn't like to be associated with failure.

2:26:08 He doesn't like a loser. And he lost by 4 million votes.

2:26:11 Oh, yeah.

2:26:12 Dude took a fat L.

2:26:13 Lula had to catch up by 2.5 million votes. And then won by 4 million.

2:26:19 It's crazy.

2:26:19 It's hard to dispute that. Even the extended voting hours because of issues on voting day only netted him 30,000 votes, 35,000 votes. And that election extension was requested by both Bolsonaro and Lula. Yeah.

2:26:37 Yeah, but Flavio Bolsonaro has pretended he didn't ask for it.

2:26:40 Yeah, well, and he, I think, announced today that he's like the rightful president of Brazil from Florida.

2:26:46 Sure, yeah, great. Keep that grift going.

2:26:49 Get those four million.

2:26:50 People out of the way. Maybe the coup's still to come.

2:26:53 Oh, yeah.

2:26:54 I mean, who knows what kind of shit they'll try. But also, Brazil is not Venezuela.

2:26:59 Well, he's going to get on the list. At some point, they're going to try some shit in Cuba, right? So, like... Cuba.

2:27:04 That's another one where they might be able to at least accomplish their initial goal of like kidnapping and excising the people they want to get out.

2:27:11 Of the country.

2:27:12 Rubio made a fantastic tweet, like trying to recruit CIA operatives.

2:27:17 Oh, yeah.

2:27:17 Yes.

2:27:18 Yes. Well, I don't think you can do that with Brazil.

2:27:22 Big ass country. Yeah.

2:27:24 Very big country.

2:27:24 Yeah.

2:27:26 This is certainly the most exciting kind of election turnaround that we've seen. And like you said, it's going to be a hard fight for Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil because they are dealing with a very, very far-right Congress. Yeah.

2:27:39 But at least there will be a fight. It's a fight. Yeah. We have a game. All right. Let's hear from Bolsonaro. It's New Colón. All right, we are back.

2:28:04 And what we are talking about now is non-citizen voting.

2:28:08 Very scary. This qualifies as a spooky segment. Yeah. Yeah, I heard it's a big deal. This is what's going to destroy the democracy. And I feel strongly about borders. Maybe that's what Bolsonaro is going to go for, you know? He's the only one who's going to get caught voting.

2:28:24 Well, unfortunately, Margaret. Well, not the only one, Margaret. Some people have already been committing voter fraud. We're going to hear about that after we hear... Well, actually, ISIS News page yesterday announced that they had arrested a legal permanent resident for voting in the 2024 election. Joyce Pitts, they allege, is a Dutch citizen living in Pennsylvania who cast a ballot illegally in 2024. She's one of nine people charged in a statewide investigation.

2:28:50 Nine people.

2:28:50 Ooh.

2:28:51 So yeah, if anyone's keeping tabs, you probably won't need more than your fingers and toes, and you will actually. Meanwhile, the DOJ is claiming that 20,000 non-citizens are on California's voter rolls. In a post on x.com, the Everything website, the White House asserts this number as an absolute. But in the complaint filed by the DOJ, they are referred to as, quote, likely.

2:29:21 Non-citizens. And this is a super important distinction.

2:29:24 Yeah. Yeah. It's incredibly important. We're going to find out why, but... Lest us forget Nevada.

2:29:29 Yes.

2:29:29 Yeah.

2:29:29 Right.

2:29:30 And I think where none of them turned out to be non-citizens who are voting. It's worth noting that the DOJ is attempting to get California to sequester ballots from its 20,000 likely non-citizens, right? Saying that they could influence the outcome of the election. It's worth noting that they filed this on October the 15th. That is less than a month before polls close, right? Well into early voting in some states. The list was sent on a thumb drive to the state and the state failed to review said thumb drive within 48 hours as a DOJ asked them to. The DOJ is asking California to sequester this ballot and is trying to go through the courts to make them do it. Whether or not they will have to do that is currently being decided in court by

2:30:14 Judge David O.

2:30:15 Carter. O is his middle name, the initial of his middle name. It's not like the way that an Irish person would have their name. I was just confused for a long time about this, but I couldn't find an apostrophe anywhere and it took me a while. Yeah, honestly, if your middle name starts with O, I feel like you kind of got to... go by your middle name or cut it out entirely.

2:30:34 Yeah, it's either way, but a very confusing way to present one's name. On Monday, the Ninth Circuit dismissed the Trump administration's appeal saying, quote, the United States failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider its application for a temporary restraining order. For that reason, we lack jurisdiction over this appeal. So we grant the county's motion to dismiss this appeal and deny as moot the United States emergency motion for relief. So In this case, the county would be L.A.

2:31:00 County, right?

2:31:00 They're trying to force the counties to sequester these ballots. The county is saying, no, we're not going to do that. In the hearing the day before we're recording this on Tuesday, Judge Carter, going to just use Carter from now on, asked First Assistant United States Attorney Bilala Saleh why, if the issue was so big, they had not charged more people.

2:31:20 Karl Matos has some good courtroom reporting on this. Quote, if it's that big, you've got a remedy for goodness sakes, the judge said. Go out and indict. Carter, who has previously denied the DOJ's request for the entire voter rolls to the state, also said, quote, some of these may be very valid voters, and that's my concern about disenfranchisement.

2:31:39 He indicated that he's likely to appoint a special master to look at the evidence, which will not happen before November 3rd. He did seem to indicate that he would be ordering the feds to stop intimidating local election officials, saying, quote, this court believes it would be wise to any threats to state or county election employees cease immediately. What a formal way of saying, like, I'll fuck you up.

2:32:00 Yeah.

2:32:01 The court believes it would be wise if you were to step back.

2:32:04 Yeah.

2:32:05 Immediately.

2:32:05 Yeah.

2:32:06 That is a very judgy way of saying, come at me. Like, oh, don't. Yeah. I will come at you.

2:32:13 So let's talk about that intimidation. On Friday, the DOJ sent letters to all 53 California counties, according to reporting in the New York Times. The letters contained a subset of the 20,000, they say, and gave election officials 48 hours from Friday, that's the weekend, to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not.

2:32:34 It's a quotation.

2:32:35 It then went on to say if, quote, citizenship status cannot be confirmed, we request you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate, not cancel, those individuals vote by mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined. It seems that they tried to cut up the list by county here. In your county, for example, Northern California, got two names, neither of whom have been issued ballots. Mendocino, according to the registrar who was interviewed by the Times, got the wrong list.

2:33:05 Quote, it's from another county. Incredible.

2:33:08 Feds requested sensitive personal information like social security numbers to determine eligibility.

2:33:13 And social security numbers do not... correspond to someone's citizenship status necessarily.

2:33:18 Yeah well i mean yeah you there are certain points within your citizenship journey where you can get very like an itin or an ssn but that is not like a that's not like a black white as you say the feds also sent a letter to the office of the council so that i'm saying council sel not council c-i-l for Los Angeles County.

2:33:39 Like legal counsel. Yes, exactly.

2:33:41 Yeah.

2:33:41 It's just in the audio format. I'm trying to distinguish between the two, right?

2:33:46 They sent a letter to the Office of the Council for LA County and included a statement, quote, if persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as non-citizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.

2:34:00 Yeah.

2:34:01 Bill Asseili posted a very similar message to X last week saying, quote, it's simple. California has not verified citizenship status. We did the work for them. We obtained the registered voter list and told them who we believe are non-citizens on their rolls. Knowingly processing non-citizen ballots is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. Section 611 and 2. We hold election officials accountable. No one is above the law.

2:34:26 Yeah, they're trying to scare local officials into taking away people's ballots.

2:34:30 Exactly.

2:34:30 Yeah, they're trying to scare people out of voting and scare people out of taking votes. This comes after Trump, in June, at a rally, said he asked United States attorneys to, quote, look into the state's voting practice.

2:34:41 I called up the very powerful, very good U.S.

2:34:44 Attorney in California, and I said, do me a favor, take a look.

2:34:48 They're trying to steal that election, too. I guess they called up.

2:34:51 Over the next week, he was definitely going to lose, but the U.S.

2:34:54 Attorney called.

2:34:55 We want to check your votes. About an hour after the call, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hilton has won.

2:35:04 We did trim a little diversion that the president went on in the middle there about the local US attorney being present. So the DOJ has also brought in California charges against 28 foreign nationals who it claims voted or registered to do so. There are various charges here, right? In some cases, they're charging people with lying on the naturalization application, either lying and saying they hadn't previously committed a crime for which they had not been prosecuted or lying and saying that they had not fraudulently claimed to be a US citizen when they had. Not everybody here actually voted. In some cases, they registered to do so.

2:35:42 I was kind of just looking demographically at this group. Obviously, it's people who are not born in the US, right? But they tend to be older folks, I noticed. I think the youngest person was 30. It's very easy to register to vote. And I could maybe see how it'd be possible that someone who didn't have English as their first language or the best command of the language could accidentally do that, but I don't know about any of these cases. The DOJ says they're all legal permanent residents, as was the case in Pennsylvania. I want to move on now to another case of misrepresentation of illegal voting practices.

2:36:21 This one takes place in Hennepin County and involves serial streamer of his own crimes, james o'keefe uh because he is at it again this shit is wild have any of you seen this video i have not watched the video yet we're gonna go on a fucking journey together friends oh no.

2:36:41 But i just want to acknowledge that oh in this case is part of the last name and not a middle initial i know everyone's confused.

2:36:47 So yeah yeah well really uh we're mixing up with those yes in this case james o'keefe uh that is that is his last name and his colleague Cam Higby. They misrepresented themselves in Minnesota by entering polling places and representing themselves as registered voters. Quote, James Edward O'Keefe, 42, and Cam Higby, 26, both face felony charges of unlawful voting and identity theft in the primary in Minnesota, according to a Hennepin County Attorney's Office press release that came out this morning.

2:37:19 These are like right-wing trolls. Yes.

2:37:21 James O'Keefe, probably most famous for his Project Veritas stuff back in the day. I think they kicked him out of Veritas, something to do with The Definer. he's the guy who killed Acorn wait do people even no one remembers Acorn never mind this yeah that's like 15 years ago yeah dawn yeah it's the.