mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.

And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create weird, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me Bro, and organizer for trans liberation in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is Shannon Clay, author of We Go Where They Go, a history of anti racist action.

Shannon: Hello. Yes, me, Shannon. He him. I’m stoked to be here.

mk: So to start us off, who were Anti Racist Action and how were youth and teens involved?

Shannon: Cool. Yeah. So Anti Racist Action was I’m sorry. I realized I maybe to give a bit of introduction about myself could have done that a second ago when you teed me up for it.

Sorry about that. Yeah. So I am 1 of the 4 authors of a book called we go where they go with the story of antiracist action which first title is a history of this group called. Anti racist action other three coauthors were all in area back in the day I was not so yeah as far as what anti racist action was ARA, as it’s often called, was the like primary anti fascist movement.

In the so called us and Canada for 15 to 20 ish years. Our book covers the history from when it started in 1986 through the early two thousands groups continue to call themselves ARA to this day. But that’s the main history that we cover. It started in the twin cities. Like Minneapolis and St. Paul in the skinhead scene. And then lots of other like punk and other youth subcultures of basically people were in these youth spaces. And then all of a sudden Nazis started showing up in those spaces. And kids joined together and got organized to fight back very literally like in terms of organizing and then also often physically to defend themselves and their communities and their scenes and their friends from a very real and immediate threat of fascists.

And then from there, it grew significantly over years, it coalesced into a more like formal, but still very decentralized network. in 1994. It’s a huge history. Maybe for that reason we, we can’t, I don’t think we’re trying to cover everything, but yeah the basic gist is that yeah, 1994 got into this network, which continued to grow Probably not probably there were like hundreds of chapters over the course of areas life with many people involved doing all kinds of things from again, like fighting Nazis in their own scene to then expanding out to go out into a more public facing world and contest.

The Ku Klux Klan was a really big one in the Midwest, Ohio, Indiana many states around that region in the nineties, lots of other things. As far as youth involvement it very much was throughout its whole history, a youth movement. I mentioned how it was started by kids who were in their own scenes and.

Yeah, just had to get together to take care of each other basically. And also to yeah, to make a like political statement that also they were politically opposed to racism. And yeah, I think like throughout its entire history, you continue to have maybe 20 somethings at the upper end maybe through, at least the period of our book again, towards The early 2000s really yeah, upper twenties was probably the upper limit of the vast majority of involvement in era.

And area was always very like conscious and proud of this, that they were a youth movement. And that sort of went in both directions of both, like bringing in this sort of youthful energy and a lot of like youthful cultural things into their anti racist organizing. And also going the other direction of trying to make anti racism, a part of the youth cultures that they were in which punk is like a really big example of that.

Also some like techno scenes in, especially in like Canada and stuff like ska scenes, hip hop, all of these things Yeah they really throughout ARA’s history it was always very much a youth movement and aware of that and proud of that and tried to inject that into their politics.

mk: As you’re talking about, the punk scene has historically been considered a space for young, usually queer and trans folks, and I’m wondering how you conceive of that. groups like A. R. A. fitting into a broader youth liberationist politic and subculture? By trying to make punk spaces and obviously all of society less racist, were they explicitly doing youth liberationist work, or were they more working towards this intersectional approach to anti racism that so happened to be within a youth subculture?

Shannon: Yeah, great question. Both those things and neither of those things. I don’t. Yeah, let’s get into it. Use the word like intersectional. For example, 1 thing is I would not. Tend to say that had a very intersectional approach if for no other reason than, that term wasn’t really in use by area people.

I think it was invented. I forget when the original essay was published that came up with intersectional, but it was like, around the same time that I already started. By the time that intersectionality, really had spread that was not really a big part of areas explicit analysis.

I don’t think. But maybe I would describe area as like their objective what they were trying to do. Was pretty explicitly like anti fascism. They did over the course of their history have different people pulling in different directions of how much they also wanted to work in other things like for example, like reproductive freedom was like a really big thing, but you can think of if like their primary objective was anti fascism I think they’re like tactics to get there were youth focused or youth liberation focused ARA, started as a youth movement because they were responding to things in their own scenes.

They were the ones being targeted for alternately like both recruitment if they were white or also violence by these fascists including white kids, obviously, especially like kids of color. They were being targeted by these fascists, like in their youth spaces. So then they responded to that fascism, like with anti fascism and then their anti fascism was itself youth focused because they were in their youth spaces, so I think it’s a really cool and interesting thing where they didn’t necessarily need a super explicit, like youth focus when they were starting out because they already had it. Or so like when I say they didn’t need it, they didn’t need to like work hard to inject a sort of youth liberation politics into it because they were already Yeah.

Doing that and already living that if that makes sense as far as they were all these kids getting together. And yeah, trying to make again, like their spaces safer for themselves and for their homies. And then different people to different degrees and over time, then expand that also into a. Broader outer, like critique of racism and fascism in the U S.

So later on it was a two way street where later on and over time, both the sort of youth liberation stuff and the anti fascism both grow and then continue to influence each other later. You have area groups like consciously choosing to do cool shit for like youth scenes or youth spaces just for their own sake slash also to grow the movement and to recruit people into it.

An area also take their anti fascism beyond just youth spaces, where they are also like going to clan rallies, which were in more of a public sphere and not only in the youth spaces, but all both the anti fascism and the youth focus continued and they influenced each other. And then they also didn’t.

Always have to only be in conversation with each other. Like I said, sometimes you can just like do youth shit cause it’s cool and fun. And yeah.

mk: Thank you so much for bringing this up. I really agree that in youth spaces, we don’t necessarily need an explicitly youth liberationist politic because the very act of teenagers and youth articulating anarchism, because that’s what we need in our lives.

And, family abolition, because that’s where we’re facing oppression, et cetera. Yeah. That is inherently youth liberationist. And I was talking to someone about this at an activist conversions recently. The people who need youth liberation the most are the people who are already adult, but haven’t unpacked the trauma of their childhoods because they think it was justified by compulsory education or the nuclear family.

If you’re a teenager and you’re already resisting those things, calling it youth liberation might not do that much for you, other than obviously finding communities and spaces and theories that feel resonant. But in terms of calling someone out, oh, you need to work more on youth liberation, that’s a charge that I think adults tend to face more than teens do, and for good reason.

Because with the exception of a few teenagers who really condescend to younger children, which, as a teenager I’ve had to push back on that a lot, there aren’t that many. Ages, young people. And when there are, it’s an internalized thing, thinking that the hate that we face is ethical.

But I feel like what you’re describing with A. R. A. really did that well, because their views were so youth liberationist, but it also wasn’t this idea that, oh, we need to work on youth liberation, because obviously doing that work with this positionality was, of course, youth liberationist. On this topic what do you think about this strategy of starting movements in youth spaces and then making them more generalized?

Because I’ve been part of movements like that, and they’re great, but if an adult is at the helm and the goal is to radicalize youth without caring about the struggles that we face, then it starts to get into racist territory. So I’m really curious about your thoughts on this in the context of ARA.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s, especially that last part you mentioned of and then when you have like an older person who’s like trying to engage, but like, how much are they like, trying to educate or, recruit young people basically versus like work side by side with them.

Yeah, it’s tough. I think it’s tough. I think it’s very, not to get too meta on the question, but I think the question is also very good because it’s like such a good sort of, you can do such a parallel for so many other things of for example, like white people trying to organize in for anti racism or like in predominantly POC spaces.

Or straight people trying to like work for queer liberation, like what’s that sort of just when you mentioned,

mk: yeah, like as a folks having tried to organize a GSA at my school only to watch straight people try to take it over. I feel that very acutely.

Shannon: Yeah. Okay. So I’m sorry, I gave a lot of meta commentary on the question.

So the question itself was like this strategy of starting movement in youth spaces and then making them more generalized Like how ultimately like youth liberationist, do we think that is that’s the question, right?

mk: Yeah. Do we think it’s youth liberationist for movements to start in youth spaces and then expand? And if so, how do we make it youth liberationist and keep it from this elite capture dynamic in which an adult infiltrates a youth space, radicalizes people, then starts an ML trope.

Shannon: Too real. Yeah, great question. I think short answer. Yes, I think it’s a good strategy. To I think if you can build movements in youth spaces, then yeah, it’s almost like technological, then like you have organized youth into a movement.

And that’s a really powerful thing. And then that also, those movements don’t even necessarily only have to be like, quote unquote, about youth in the, for example, in the case of ARA. being most obviously about like anti fascism still, like we discussed then when you like, because it is a group of youth doing it, it has that youth liberationist dimension.

So yeah, I, I think it is a very powerful model to get people organized to get people bring people in when they are, It’s again, just such a common theme across like many different dimensions, but just like seeing that people who you have something in common with or like out here doing this thing, it just feels very much more accessible.

Then if, for example, you’re like a teenager and then there is a group of yeah, all these 30 something hardcore theory bros or something, I’ll doing something. So let’s see. Yeah, one thing it puts in my mind is that can also be like, A movement of movements. I think is an important and valuable thing.

And so yeah, I think obviously in our like quest for liberation, any one movement, much less anyone like single group is not going to do the whole thing. And so that’s why I think it does make sense to like, have movements that are organizing in specific spaces or like for specific things.

That then they don’t have to be too like limited or, for example, if you have like a group of youth who are working on youth liberation things I think that’s awesome. And as far as to construct, maybe a counter argument to it to be like but that’s of course not enough.

And we need to grow into these other things. That’s when I think the, again, like movement of movements would be a very useful that you can have. Youth focusing on youth liberation spaces and queer people focusing on like queer liberation. And you can have all these different movements. And all these different identities but then none of them being like mutually exclusive that of course.

mk: Kids can be youth and queer. Wow.

Shannon: Exactly.

mk: All of our listeners.

Shannon: Exactly.

It’s 2024. What kind of, yeah. I, sometimes I like to joke of what kind of 15 year old in 2024 isn’t a little gay. But I don’t know. It’s okay.

mk: Statistically, 20 percent of Generation Z identifies as queer in France, and this is in a time where homophobia is rampant and we have a neo fascist state. I’ll just let that be there.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s why I was like, holding back that I sometimes joke about that, but of course, yeah. Let’s see here. I guess to try to wrap it up Yeah, I think it is a like valid and powerful strategy to have like youth dedicated spaces and youth dedicated movements for reasons that honestly might be like pretty self explanatory of like why that’s cool and valuable of again, just like seeing other people who look like, if I’m this young person, I’m seeing other young people organizing that is like motivating and more accessible to me.

And that, again, I think it can take place as part of this broader ecosystem of resistance movements that can all be overlapping and sharing members and sharing ideas and sharing propaganda and all learning from each other and working side by side.

mk: Yeah I am. I definitely agree there that making it own voices is absolutely necessary for youth liberation. I really value youth live movements that are intergenerational and very intentionally non hierarchical. Because if something has even the slightest hint of hierarchy and explicitly liberationist movement, then pretty soon that will get towards ageism.

And then the 50 year old will start announcing that because they were once a teenager, they can speak on this. Which, But I also think that the idea that teenagers should only organize with each other and not really be in the broader anarchist movement is profoundly ageist, as is the huge stigma around adults who maybe want to have mentorships or friendships with anarchist teens.

Because that’s absolutely necessary to social movements. And if we can’t have intergenerational friendships and community and organizing together, we also can’t really combat ageism. If someone doesn’t interact with teenagers. then they’ll end up being ageist toward us. So I feel like that separatist impetus, or perhaps like the fear some people have that if someone is an adult they’ll necessarily be ageist, is pretty unfounded.

But I think the fact that hierarchy enables ageism is something to be incredibly mindful of. Which is most anarchist teenagers I know avoid the DSA and similar organizations because, who is in leadership really determines what happens, and it’s impossible for a teenager to get onto leadership.

And of course, due to this podcast being anarchist, that much was obvious, but yeah on this topic how would you define youth liberation in punk spaces and subcultural spaces generally? What can it mean for punk to be anti racist and anti ageist, and how can those struggles be intertwined?

Shannon: Cool. What can it mean for punk spaces to be anti racist and anti ageist? How are those struggles intertwined? And in punk? Okay, I think A couple of first thoughts to briefly touch on some things that we’ve alluded to. I think so in punk sort of explicit youth liberation politics, using that term and with the.

More like theoretical and generally anarchist, like underpinnings beneath. It is pretty rare in punk rock from what I see. Whereas what is extremely common is the, of course natural instincts that, like. The natural instincts that like ideologically liberation grows out of, like the feeling of being a young person and being like, yo, like this fucking sucks.

Like a lot of shit is really getting me down in a way that I don’t think I’m okay with. That and that sort of lived experience, which, of course, is very valid, I think, is the much more common thing. And then it’s rare to see people super explicitly, I think turn it into a deeper sort of read of society that’s 1 thing I think was really cool about era was again that while it started as a very natural thing, over time, there were people trying to push it more explicitly as hey, this is something we should. Yeah, just be explicitly aware of and care about and and so I think that is really cool. For punk spaces to be anti racist. I think anti racism is punk has a trickier relationship with anti racism really because it’s often I would explain ARA in terms of the punk scene. And so if people are familiar with punk, then maybe this can be helpful. And if not use this, however helpful it is, but ARA like punk was like often white. And different like cities could be like very heavily white could be super white. And you have to like always balance, both acknowledging that as like a real thing that was happening while also not. In the case of like punk, I think people then sometimes go too far in the other direction and say Oh, punk is just like white people shit in a way that is then shitty. Cause you’re like erasing the presence that like, there are people of color in punk who are like doing really cool shit and have been since the beginning and so you don’t want to erase that But you also need to be able to acknowledge the ways that punk spaces can often be super white.

So I hope that made sense in the case of both era and the punk scene at different places and times. I’d say that the two are like, pretty white things that in different places and times have very important exceptions to that, that in a city like Baltimore or something, like it’s a pretty diverse scene because like it’s fucking Baltimore. They’re not a ton of white people in Baltimore. If anything, they’re probably like disproportionately present in the punk scene. But still, yeah then you have a a punk scene that like has more melanin than a lot of other places. And so I guess, what does it mean for like punk spaces to be anti racist?

I think it can be, That can depend, on which punk spaces we mean almost where again, like if it’s a punk scene, like of a bunch of kids of color, which totally does exist in many different cities, then like just doing the thing, obviously, just like we were talking about with age, like they’re already there and doing the thing.

So that has like important anti racist value. I think probably like kids of color, punks of color I probably know that and they don’t need me to explain to them like how to be anti racist. But then on the other hand, you have spaces that might be pretty heavily white in punk spaces.

And so I think that is something that maybe I can speak to a bit more directly and as a white person. That then it comes down to this sort of like perennial question, right? Of What does it mean to not be a part of, but to want to be in solidarity with a oppressed, marginalized group?

So that can be, like, older people wanting to be in solidarity with younger people, or cishet folks wanting to be in solidarity with queer people. Or white people wanting to be in solidarity with people of color. Yeah, I don’t know if I have a like super specific prescription for like white kids in punk spaces other than just to put the politics out there, I think is like really important. And that might sound basic, but I think in sort of cultural spaces it can be interesting how sometimes it’s taken for granted that, for example, like a punk scene is like anti racist and cool.

And then because it’s taken for granted, people like, don’t feel the need to talk about it a ton. And then you turn around and all of a sudden you’re like, wait, all of a sudden I’m like hearing a bunch of whack shit, like I’m hearing people say whack racist shit in like my punk scene don’t they know that punk is anti racist and it’s wait, but if we weren’t, I guess we weren’t putting it forward enough to like, make that clear to make people believe that understand that if you’re going to be in this space anti racism really matters. And yeah to use a lot of words to get to a pretty simple point, I think punk spaces just need to be like, Very open and explicit about including the politics and not let the politics be removed. And then you end up with, maybe just a bunch of really macho dudes who really love like chugga, hardcore loud music. And then. It was such a, it was such a great question with there are so many directions to potentially take it.

I want to try to wrap up here. But then you also asked about what it might mean for spaces to be both anti racist and anti ageist. And how the struggles can intertwine. Yeah, I don’t know, I think I unfortunately I can easily imagine or I’ve been in spaces that are like anti wage ageist but aren’t super anti racist.

Again, coming at this is like a white person. You can be like in youth spaces that are going to contain that again, at least like intuitive anti ageism, but might be like really white and aren’t automatically anti racist. So I don’t know if you’re like a white kid, who’s trying to do this shit, I guess I would just say stay humble and keep trying.

And I think honestly, I don’t know, like giving a shit and like understanding that this is something that needs to be like taken seriously and thought about all the time and needs to be a lens for like many different things that you continuously work for and aren’t necessarily super perfect in every time, but that is something that you just continue to work hard to incorporate if you’re like white kid in these youth spaces.

Be aware of what spaces you’re in. If you’re in a space, that’s like super white why might that be? And that doesn’t even mean necessarily that it’s like a problem to be fixed by quote unquote, like recruiting people of color. Maybe people of color have like their own spaces they’d rather be in and it’s not obviously like their job to show up at our shit to make us feel better and cooler. And we’re a part of a more diverse scene or something. But it’s I think one, one lesson that I’ve taken out of things like that as again, like a white person is to maybe instead of is to, yeah, be aware of what spaces I’m in and when those are like, heavily white spaces and to like, counterpoint to then go and, you can maybe seek out the spaces where people of color do want to be not in a weird, shitty culture vulture way where you’re just like showing up and like taking and consuming or thinking that because you’re giving a shit about like culture of primarily people of color, that makes you super woke or anti racist.

But yeah, just being aware that I think again I don’t know, the world is like that movement of movements thing. There are so many different things. That, you can have a music scene in one city that’s like pretty white and you can have a music scene in that same city, that’s like maybe a lot of kids of color and I don’t know, at a certain point you may not be able to if you’re trying to make your white scene more like anti racist, you may not be able to like, quote unquote, fix it by like bringing in a bunch of people of color, which might feel like the thing you’re supposed to do but instead maybe one scene is just going to be pretty white and one scene is going to be a lot of people of color. But what we should be short, what we should be ensuring is that those scenes are like, can walk side by side and support each other. And yeah be a part of the same sort of broader movement towards towards liberation and towards taking care of each other and towards Yeah, again, in the case of like white people, like giving a shit,

mk: thank you so much for bringing this up, like this idea that it isn’t about who is in our scene and it isn’t about pressuring people to be in our scenes who don’t want to be. It’s about making sure that every community that we have is welcoming and that our politics are explicitly anarchist. And like in my view, ideally, youth liberationist movements are for everyone, but at the same time, like sometimes cultural spaces really do just need to be cultural spaces and what allyship looks is to have spaces that are, as you say, side by side with them. On the topic of your personal experience were you into punk and anarchy as a kid? And what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you at that age?

Shannon: Yeah, I don’t. So yes, I was I was like introduced to politics and specifically anarchism through punk rock as a kid and like through the internet, I think I like YouTube auto played. Johnny hobo and the freight trains for me, which I think for a certain like super hyper specific genre of like punk anarchist and a certain generation of a punk anarchist kid. I think that’s 100 percent of us were introduced to music by this person, Pat Schneeweiss AKA Johnny hobo or ramshackle glory ring that dishwashers union.

Yeah. So it was like the internet, I was already into punk. Like as a sort of musical genre and then yeah then being, randomly again, through like the algorithm, which come to think of it feels pretty shitty to say yeah, just like randomly introduced to Punk music that was much more like explicitly anarchist.

And again, not treating it as the like background vibe, but like explicitly I don’t know, fucking lecturing the listener about here’s why the police are your enemy. Which I think is really cool and important. And so then from there and again, through the internet, I found out about more shows happening in my local community, in my local city and started going to shows.

And then the overlap between punk and politics was not always as strong as I would have liked. Sometimes the punk scene was pretty apolitical and most of my political friends were also into punk, but then we were, like, the minority at the punk scene of, people actually I don’t know, maybe that’s inevitable that if you’re in a cultural scene, maybe the majority of people might always be, like, generally supportive, but not necessarily turning their whole lives into another aspect of it, like the politics, but yeah.

So then. Like I said the punk scene in the organizing spaces didn’t overlap a ton, necessarily, for me, as much as I might have liked them to as much as they might have in, for example, the history of, hey, anti racist action in A. R. A., punk and organizing spaces were often very closely linked.

But yeah, so while they weren’t the same thing to me to answer your question about what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for me when I was younger I think I, I may have been pretty lucky in that regard. I don’t think I faced big barriers of accessibility. I think. Honestly, if anything, what I would have liked more of is what you mentioned of the inter-generational youth liberation spaces or just inter-generational spaces in general. That like when I started coming around in the punk scene, pretty much everyone was like, five or six years older than me, but not significantly older.

And then in the political scenes that I was in, I was, I got involved through student organizing. And so then it was all people who were, the same age as me in college. Yeah. And so then by the same token that it wasn’t super alienating of I was surrounded by people who were not a very similar age to me.

I actually would have loved to have more elders around I think more feelings of oh, there are people who have done this shit before. There are people who are like older than 25, but still give a shit, still show up to things. Yeah, if that’s okay, if that’s not just like completely inverting your question too much, I would say what I would have.

mk: It isn’t at all. anti ageism goes in both directions, and I’m so glad you brought that up. And honestly, I feel like that’s necessary for youth liberation too, because one of the most common critiques anarchists use Base is, oh, this is just a youthful base, you’ll grow out of this. And the existence of adult anarchists in our spaces and the possibility for youth to have mentorships and friendships, etc. that are outside the bubble of youth spaces is so important to our liberation. So I honestly think that spaces being more accessible to people who aren’t, the stereotypical age of an anarchist organizer is equally necessary. I was going to ask what advice you have for kids and teens who want to get into anarchism or subculture or anti racism. I know you covered a lot of that, but is there anything else you wanted to share in that regard?

Shannon: I was actually just about to say something as part of that last question that so yeah, when you, I think we both mentioned, and so I would maybe if I could. Yeah, but I think my advice to any kids who need to hear it is like, That yes, there are older anarchists out there and so good, right?

I just know that if someone had been able to tell me that when I was fucking like 16, I would have really loved to hear that. Like they’re out there. You’re, it’s not like inevitable that you’re going to fucking turn old and turn into a Democrat and and and also you’re not crazy because like you see the world this way and it seems like no one else does except for like other 16 year olds or something.

mk: Yeah, just chiming in. Sometimes as we get older, we feel more resonant in our anarchism. Like I got radicalized when I was 13 and two years in I have new pronouns. So if that’s any indication.

Shannon: Yeah, it I am very grateful and humbled by the way that like my anarchism has evolved over time. And I do feel very yeah very lucky to have been able to like, I feel like anarchism is a really important part of who I am. And so as far as my anarchism has been able to grow over the years, that’s like me as a person going over the years in a way that’s, that I’m very grateful for. But yeah I guess to, to simplify it a bit, as far as any message for the kids out there?

I would just say the older people who still give a shit, are out there and if you feel really alienated or isolated, cause you don’t know any of them I hope it can be of some reassurance that like they’re out there somewhere. And they’re probably wondering where you are too. As I have honestly, just in the last 18 months, as I finally have met anarchists who are like older than myself, which side note is a huge reason that I’m so grateful for this ARA project. And ARA was not all 100 percent anarchists, but very anarchist influenced through the course of doing this project. I’ve been able to meet so many like older, like 40, 50, 60 year old anarchists who are still active. That yeah, they are out there. And I’ve met a lot of people of that age who in turn are wondering of like, Where are the kids? Cause, cause they go to, cause we’re all in our own bubbles. And so like they go to their meetings maybe, and, they’re all working alongside all their like 40 year old comrades who are all like yeah. And then facing their own struggles of trying to juggle making a living under capitalism and maybe provide for kids and all these other things. So I would say to, as far as an advice thing, I think that we are all out here and a lot of us are like looking for each other, but don’t know where to look.

And so I would say one big thing I’ve learned over the years is I’m just going to dive into the like negative term for it. I think how much of like politics is basically like networking, which is such a gross word, obviously to me. And at least for me and my like class background, I, that was the thing that was thrown at me is like when I was 17 and a junior.

Of like something career something networking. And I was like I don’t fucking want, I don’t give a shit about a career. So I don’t but in fact, like it is a skill to be able to go out and find like minded people and forge those relationships. And it’s a really important and valuable one.

And it’s not some shitty, like cynical thing where you’re like trying to find people who can do something for you. It’s Yeah. Think of like how much you value your friendships and how beautiful our relationships are and how much they make worth life worth living. Wouldn’t it, isn’t it awesome that you can go out and try to forge more of those connections.

And so it is just if you haven’t done it already, like that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. Yeah, you can go out and look for, I think we’ve been talking about like bubbles and about like youth specific circles, for example, should exist side by side with other movements or groups.

Try to just go find those other groups and maybe, and you don’t have to do it in the sense of am I going to quote unquote, join and like full time be in a group or something. But just trying to find what groups are out there and going to some of their stuff sometimes at least just to meet people.

And you can even explicitly say Hey, I’m not necessarily super interested. In dedicating as much time as you guys are to the thing that you’re working on, but I wanted to show up to meet you guys because I’m doing this other thing. And wanted you to know about that. And we’re doing our different things, but supporting each other.

Yeah, I can be long winded sometimes, but the message is pretty simple. Like there are older, cool people out there who didn’t sell out and try to like, go out and find them and you don’t have to do every single thing with them, but you can go to like different groups and you don’t have to agree with 100 percent of everything that’s going on or with their emphasis.

Cause you don’t have to like. Quote unquote, join and dedicate your life to a group. You can just show up sometimes different things, different places, try to meet people. And then, like, when you guys can help each other out, then you know each other, and that’s great.

mk: Thank you so much for touching on this. The idea that we really want our youth specific spaces, and we also need intergenerationality to remind us what’s possible in the anarchist movement. And, there can absolutely be, like, a sense of intertwinement and mutual care between those. That’s why I love being part of, Bashback and other anarchist tendencies, in which, all of that is normalized and it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. And I feel like that’s something ARA did really well. On that topic, do you have any shameless plugs regarding your book or other organizing?

Shannon: Mainly just the one, which is the book. It’s really fucking good. Yeah. I think listening, you like assume that like the author has to say that, or of course, every author thinks their book is good. Our book is so fucking good. I don’t give a shit dog. I know it is.

mk: Like having self published one. I feel the same way. I get it.

Shannon: Cool. Yeah. But yeah, so our book is we go where they go, the story of anti racist action. You don’t have to read it or seek it out if you don’t want to, but if you’re wondering if it sounds like something you might like, I bet you will it’s a really cool it’s very heavily based on.

The first hand accounts that like oral histories interviews that we did with people who were there it’s largely a story. We tried to make it a story of kind of. Are telling its own story as far as these people who are in anti racist action also not at all in a cheerleading way it’s a lot of really thoughtful, really dedicated people who are both giving their own first hand knowledge of what they did but also with like really sharp. Awareness and with the benefit of like 20 to 40 years of hindsight very wise things of, yeah, just the benefit of hindsight of things that they might’ve done differently and lessons learned and all this thing. So yeah, very accessible.

It’s a lot of it is like interviews told first person, a lot of cool stories, a lot of fun shit, a lot of good politics, a lot of pretty pictures and flyers and stuff. We go where they go. The story of anti racist action was published by PM press. You can get it from that website or. I think like bookshop.

org, maybe bookshop. com is, yeah something where you is a website where you can just order any book and it just like automatically connects you to your nearest independent bookstore. So that’s a good one. Yeah, sure.

mk: That one of our listeners right now is thinking this sounds amazing, but I’m 12 and my parents don’t know I’m an anarchist and I can’t purchase books. Where can I find a PDF? What would you say to that kid and anyone else like them?

Shannon: You, if you have a way to pay for things online, I think the ebook is like 8. If you can, yeah, from PM press. org.

mk: Thank you so much. Yeah. And also just a shameless plug for any during the world looking to get into anarchist theory the anarchist library. org has most historical anarchist theory and some of the newer stuff as well. If you’re someone who’s interested in anarchism, but maybe can’t pay for things online, and maybe can’t, talk to your parents about being interested in anarchism because who wants to do that I would highly suggest it.

And yeah so much. Yeah. And are there any other anarchy resources you’d like to share before we close out?

Shannon: I don’t think so, no.

mk: Super fair. Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey. I’m MK Zariel, this has been Shannon Clay, and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies.

Shannon: Thanks. Thanks, everybody.

https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/shannon-clay-on-the-history-of-anti-racist-action/

#6600cc #72b372

Shannon Clay on the History of Anti-Racist Action

mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inh

https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/shannon-clay-on-the-history-of-anti-racist-action/

#General #Podcasts #TheChildAndItsEnemies #6600cc #72b372

Outline:

S: This is Sprout

C: and this is Charyan, and we are the hosts of Molotov Now!, on The Channel Zero Podcast Network, thank you for joining us on this episode of the podcast.

S: if you like what we do here and want to support it, you can do that by going to linktr.ee/al1312 and clicking donate, or scrolling to the bottom for Patreon.

C: It’s been another little while since we have posted an episode, and we would like to apologize for that. We appreciate our listeners greatly and want to provide you all with relevant news and updates from Aberdeen and Radical Scenes in general. But life happens, and this podcast doesn’t exactly always take priority, hope you understand.

S: Because of ongoing changes in both of our personal lives the next couple episodes may be a bit sporadic. But we aren’t going anywhere, and will be posting as often as we can. Again, we appreciate your understanding at this time. With that lets get into what were talking about today.

C: Do we have a guest?

S: Yeah, I caught up with Honey, an organizer who recently fled a red state, fae have been doing what fae can to create queer & trans community, safe spaces, along the way. This spring, Fae and another trans organizer put together the Disco at the Moral Panic action, a celebration in protest of the fascist Don’t Mess with Our Kids! rally in Olympia, Washington.

C: Oh cool, what did y’all talk about?

S: Well, we get a report back of the event, what went into it, what came out of it, etc. We also delve into the far right wave of Christian Fascism happening right now, and the recent Million Women’s March on Washington DC. They ended up getting tens of thousands, according to an article by By Mike Hixenbaugh on NBCnews.com, the only outlet that seemed to cover the event at all. The interview was recorded before the march which occurred on the 12th of October, and we would love to talk to anyone invoked in any counter protesting against this march.

All this and more coming up soon after our audio newsletter, and radical news roundup, but first a message from our sponsor:

The Communique Volume 15:

To read in full click here

From Sabotage Noise Productions:

In Bremerton:

At The Chuck – 333 Callow Ave:

In Chicago:

Aberdeen City Council attempting to build better, together

After the chaos of this summer’s unhoused encampment eviction and subsequent enforcement of the City’s anti-homeless ordinances. A debacle which ended up with one councilor in jail awaiting trial, and one reprimanded and stripped of her position as council president. A new council president is now in place, Sydney Swor, and Joshua Francy reclaimed his seat which he had lost to Riley Carter, now in jail. The Aberdeen City Council has decided to draft something it has never had before, a council and procedures document. Who knew they were just flying by the seat of their pants this whole time.

This was raised by the incoming Council president, Sydney Swor, as a good idea since the council has spiraled into a chaotic mix of paranoid right wing conspiracy theorists and scared shitless liberals unable to understand what is at play. Their “decorum” is not up to snuff apparently. The proposed document will include:

• General policies
• Meeting regulations
• How to fill vacant positions
• Procedures for voting
• Policies for suspending any of these rules

When Swor sought four or five volunteers to head the drafting of this document several offered. Without hesitation, city councilors David Gakin, Liz Ellis, Stan Sidor and Scott Prato all volunteered to be part of the group.

Since the last update you will have received we have seen these ordinance be enforced on the most vulnerable population in our community. We saw many people flee in fear, some found temporary refuge in friend’s or family’s houses or yards, some ended up scattered around town, and a few did manage to obtain their housing in time for the eviction.

Managing this violent upset and destruction of a micro community down at camp has made everyone’s lives harder. Not just the unhoused themselves, which should be obvious, but social workers, case managers, peers, mutual aid workers, and friends and family have all found it difficult to keep track of their clients or loved ones. Not to mention the horror of not being able to stand or sit on downtown sidewalks, which the City has expressed a desire to extend to all of Aberdeen, and not having any camping or sleeping gear allowed full stop.

The City Administrator Ruth Clemens has been spreading her opinions on where people have gone off too with the Daily World, mostly amounting to the suspicion that “a majority of people” left the county, acting as though they probably left because the party was over and it was time to go back home, instead of fleeing the repression faced in this county for a safer place to live.

The local Catholic Mission the Union Gospel has opined about their high barrier, forced-worship services not being taken advantage of since the camp eviction.

In talking to the paper about the new laws, and the law enforcement officer response to being “unchained” and allowed to run rough shod all over the unhoused residents who ended up with nowhere else to go.

Clemens sounded supportive of the work Aberdeen Police Department has done about the unhoused collectively moving elsewhere in the city.

“Police officers and code enforcement have been very vigilant checking for new camps throughout the city,” Clemens said.

Clemens also commended the city’s ordinances. Part of the ordinance is to inform people of what they’re allowed to do.

“I think the enforcement of both ordinances have been very effective as exemplified by the large, visible reduction of homelessness,” Clemens said about the sit-and-lie ordinances. “Aberdeen Police Department have done a great job consistently educating people and enforcing the law.”

Speaking of moving elsewhere in the city, the City of Aberdeen also decided to remove the “unpopular” Request For Proposal for a contract to make their half though out “homeless village”. They said it was after all not the City’s job but the County’s, the same refrain that has cycled back and forth between the two for years now, precluding any forward progress for those on the streets.

Clemens called it “a long-awaited,” presentation.

“One of the things we had been waiting for outside of the Grants Pass (decision) or Johnson v. Grants Pass case was Potter v. City of Lacey, which came soon after the ruling on Grants Pass, which affirmed the authority cities have to enact and enforce parking regulation,” Clemens said. “We also have Aberdeen Municipal Code Title 10 that was impacted, which didn’t allow us to address people living in their vehicles around the city. But I think what we’re proposing today would also address not only that, but other RVs parked around the city on the city streets.”

As for barriers to accessing this pittance, she said:“I talked to Chief (Green) yesterday, (they) would handle unlocking it and locking the facility,” Clemens said. “APD will patrol the site. APD will conduct the background checks for those individuals who want to stay there. And they will lock and unlock the on-site restroom facilities as stated.”

To be able to park on the TASL site, visitors require a permit. To get a permit, they must be engaged with social services. They must have a government-issued driver’s license or ID. There may be more than one person staying in the RV. All people in the RV must have a government-issued ID. They must have valid vehicle insurance, valid vehicle registration and their vehicle must meet all standards and requirements to legally operate.

“They must also undergo a background check completed by Aberdeen Police Department,” Clemens said. “They can’t have any outstanding warrants from any jurisdiction and they must not be a registered sex offender.” To get a permit for Temporary Alternative Shelter Location, the people have to apply for a permit every day.

“There might be a way, because they have to be compensated some way, I think we might be able to use opioid funds to kind of cover this one. I think it would be an appropriate use.”

Monthly Radical News Roundup:

September 1, 2024 Miami Anti-Abortion ‘Fake Clinic’ Tied to Proud Boys, January 6, Far-Right, Clinic Invasions
September 5, 2024Rally to Ban Artificial Turf with Toxic PFAS in Philadelphia City Properties
September 6, 2024 Salt Lake City Police Broke A Woman’s Leg During An Arrest. Weeks Later, It Had To Be Amputated.
September 10, 2024 Protest Near Harris-Trump Presidential Debate Opposes Bipartisan Support for Israeli Genocide in Palestine
September 18, 2024 Georgia Drops Money Laundering Charges in Cop City RICO Prosecution
September 19, 2024 Killed by a Vigilante Who Received No Prison Time: The Murder of AJ Stewart
September 22, 2024 8th Annual Prisoners’ Families Brunch in West Philly
September 24, 2024 Palestinian Girls’ Boxing Club Continues Amid Genocide
September 26, 2024 Racist Mobs Rampage England, Anti-Racists Fight Back
September 30, 2024 Pakistani Immigrant With Signs of Torture Found Dead in a Greek  Police Station
October 1, 2024 Aramark Concession Workers Strike at Philly Sports Complex
October 2, 2024 Israeli Airstrikes Target Medical Facility, Kill Five Health Ministry Workers
October 8, 2024White Mesa Indigenous Community and Supporters Rally Against Uranium Mill
October 9, 2024 South Africa’s Energy Crises Increasingly Target Poor Communitie
October 9, 2024 APIII Militia Infiltrator Warns of Danger to 2024 Elections; Leaks Show Targeting Journalists
October 10, 2024 Amid Ongoing Bombardment, Gaza Strives for Second Round of Polio Vaccination

Sep 9, 24 Grants Pass and the Carceral Conjuncture

CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance. CrimethInc. is a banner for anonymous collective action. CrimethInc. is an international network of aspiring revolutionaries. CrimethInc. is a desperate venture.

2024-08-11 Charlottesville, Revisited—2017 to 2024:What Can a Moment of Peril Tell Us about Our Own Dangerous Times?
2024-08-14 In Memory of Luciano Pitronello, also Known as Tortuga
2024-08-19 Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld:An Invocation 2024-09-17 Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street, Thirteen Years Later
2024-09-23 Anarchists on the Wave of Protest in Indonesia
2024-09-23 “Live Free, Ride Free, Fuck NYPD”: A Report from a Mass Fare Evasion in New York City
2024-10-03 Ya Ghazze Habibti—Gaza, My Love:Understanding the Genocide in Palestine

Music:

Segment one:

Sprout: Welcome back to Molotov now. We are now joined by Honey to discuss the Christian Parenting Industrial Complex that is fueling, funding, and creating fascist political subjects here, a la James Dobson’s Focus on the Family Empire, and to talk about how transgender children are being used as a boogeyman to, quote, unite the right under a Christo-fascist banner and to brainstorm possible ways we can intervene.

If you could please introduce yourself, give your pronouns. A brief visual description and any organizing experience relevant to the conversation today.

Honey: Hi thanks for having me on. I’m going to go by Honey here. My pronouns are he, fey. I am a white gender fluid trans man who recently fled red state and I’ve been doing what I can here on the coast to Great queer and trans community and safe spaces.

And this spring, a fellow trans comrade and I organized Disco at the Moral Panic, which was a celebration slash protest of the fascist Don’t Mess With Our Kids rally in Olympia, Washington.

Sprout: Yeah, I’m so sorry to hear that you had to flee your home state. I do remember us publishing Sabo Media a call out for that event.

How did it end up going?

Honey: Yeah it was organized pretty quickly. We had less than a month to put it together. So it was put on by this fascist organization. That’s nationwide. And it was this rally at every single state Capitol simultaneously, but some of the main organizers are from Oregon, Washington.

So it actually had a pretty big turnouts. We were taken a little bit of back at how violent the rhetoric was and how intense the experience was. I do believe they also moved the location based on seeing some of our posters. For the, it wasn’t originally intended to be a protest. It was intended to be a celebration.

To counteract the energy that the fascists were bringing to Olympia, but it ended up also being a protest because we were going to have it on the lawn in front of the build the capitol building and they moved from the steps to the lawn of the capitol building and corralled us off to a little corner and Yeah, I as far as the results I know one comrade got arrested after the event and there was a gun drawn by the Proud Boys were there and there were a few, not quite altercations, but the fascists definitely wanted it to be an altercation and things were a lot more chaotic than we planned, but The people who showed up were all wonderful.

We had a marching band and played music and our drag performers dropped out last minute due to feeling unsafe. So we ended up just doing like a little fashion catwalk and teaching people how to Vogue and catwalk a little bit, which I noticed that we had to do that at the end because the atmosphere had gotten really intense and I noticed that.

When people were going up to the line that had been drawn for us and shouting across to the fascists, things were, it was drawing more of them over. And when we started to do our catwalk and whatever, they got very uncomfortable and their attention dwindled away, because, which was the original intent of the event.

So I think it was a mixed bag, but we learned a lot about I guess you could say our enemies.

Sprout: Yeah, I had no idea it was that sort of tense of a situation, but. Sounds like you guys managed to keep things on the lighter end and celebratory.

Honey: We also made sure to get everyone out of there before the ending of the event, because it was definitely not like a safe space for people to be,

Sprout: yeah. Yeah, I can see that. All right. So since we want to probably dedicate a good chunk of the time today to brainstorming possible solutions, can you give us and our listeners a quick rundown on the planned million women’s March and what organizations are behind it currently?

Honey: Yeah. So the same people who organized don’t mess with our kids.

Jenny and Bob Donnelly are Big names here on the coast. They live in Portland, Oregon, but have some connections up here in Washington, like Matt Shea might be a familiar name for people listening. He is a Republican senator who has actual terrorism charges for yeah, being involved in plots against the US government.

Don’t Mess With Our Kids was a nationwide rally to fearmonger about the alleged trans agenda quote unquote in schools and to uphold gender essentialism. What’s interesting to know about Jenny Donnelly is, and the women and the organizers that she runs with, is a lot of them brand themselves as lifestyle coaches or marriage counselors or giving parenting advice.

And their movement is Runs essentially like a new age cult, but it’s Christianized. They have these prayer hubs going to quote across the United States where people go to speak in tongues and be inspired and whatever. And so what they’re doing is trying to mobilize in every single state and get all of these women involved in this cult and become, quote, unquote, Esther’s prayer warriors.

And Don’t Mess With Our Kids was a way to build energy for this Million Women’s March in October. In their own words, they’re calling it, or they’re saying, The Lord is summoning a million women, esters, young and old, with their husbands and children, to gather to the Washington D. C. Mall on October 12th, the Day of Atonement, in all caps, Last Stand moment for America.

Sprout: The Day of Atonement, Jesus Christ. Yeah, we’re familiar with Matt Shea on this podcast, and our listeners should be fairly familiar with the Christian right wing fascism as a movement. For those who aren’t familiar with what happened with the Don’t Mess With Our Kids event, can you provide a brief description?

Honey: Yeah, so like I said, it was more organized and funded than we expected. They were busing people in from churches across the entire state. They had a grandstand, booths, huge sound system, pig protection, Proud Boys, other far right groups were all there visibly aggressing queer people. It was a sea of hot pink and royal blue because they had attendees wear colors marking their gender.

Lots of screaming, quote unquote, praying and speaking in tongues, and there were some honestly terrifying speeches about the wrath of God, the day of atonement the sins of America, and how America is going to be cleansed, which You know what that’s a code word for we did speak with some attendees who went with their churches and actually left early because they were uncomfortable with the violent rhetoric or experienced racist aggression.

There was one Hispanic lady who left early because of that or saw Nazi salutes. And yeah, one of the proud boys tried to pull a gun on us. And it is the whole nine yards. Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. It shook us up.

Sprout: That’s awful to hear. And it’s so telling that even people within their own crowd were off put by the level of rhetoric and aggression that was happening there.

I can only imagine. Can you speak to the institutions funding this kind of rhetoric in action? This kind of stuff always reeks of dark money, never seeming to be truly grassroots. Can you speak to this at all?

Honey: Yeah, this whole thing is manufactured. So Jenny and Bob Donnelly are grifters. They, I would have to look up the name of it again, but they run a kind of a front that it’s like a, it’s like a wedding venue.

They run a front in Oregon where they have, they host events. And have people living on the property but all of it, all of this is essentially money laundering. And I did a little bit of research into the dark money links. And so the evangelical, right? There’s a town. In Colorado Springs, that’s known as the evangelical Vatican and a lot of the churches, like this new wave of churches that you see popping up in strip malls and abandoned warehouses and all of that, they are essentially money laundering groups.

And the people who are doing this all the way over in like Uganda. So Jenny Donnelly runs her voice movement, which is the force behind Don’t Mess With Our Kids. And funding her voice is. To quote unquote to tell us time ministry ministries, it’s run by Jenny and Bob Donnelly and it only has 1 paid employee.

That’s Jenny. She also teaches these classes on the side as a hustle and how to master inner peace with her book and has an online shop with no listed products. The Donnelly’s described their work as marketplace ministry. Through the quote, seven mountains of influence, business, arts, entertainment, media, government, family, education, and religion.

If you’re unfamiliar, that is the seven mountain mandate. It’s a dominionist movement within Pentecostal evangelical Christianity. And their focus is Christianizing all spheres of culture, government, and media to create a theocracy. And you can find on their website that they purchased a retreat center in Oregon, Crestview Manor.

And they have nine other families that live on site doing volunteer manual labor to remodel it. The mothers in each of these families are like diet pill, multi level marketing peddlers, Christian life coaches, entrepreneurs, marketing strategists. None of them have real jobs. Denny Donnelly also runs Esther Ministries, which is that network of prayer hubs of quote unquote mama bears and has like a weekly zoom call and sells dieting and detox recipe substitutions on her Instagram page.

So all of this is funded through scamming people and they raise essentially their model is to create fear by spreading myths about quote unquote maps minor attractive persons being included in lessons on pronouns in schools stuff like that. And then they spread that into existing churches and draw women in, like vulnerable people who would already be vulnerable to joining a cult in and get their money to fund these prayer hubs.

And then the Donnellys are also connected to Lou Engle. If you know who Lou Engle is, You probably know about the Ugandan Kill the Gays Bill that he promoted with his cross continental ministry, The Call which also supported Proposition 8 in California, of course. So the Donnellys and Lou Engle co founded the Collective Church in Portland alongside the Portland Police Chaplain, Clyde Lewis, and MUFA David Bissek and Malakai Salcido, who are real estate and property development moguls and cryptocurrency mining.

This church also runs a Christian nationalist homeschooling cooperative, which is the Liberty Homeschool Academy, and is a front for the coalition of the evangelical style of congregation home churches. Which prioritized charismatic style calls and meditations that focus on your own personal brokenness and pain as a foundation for your relationship with Jesus.

Why bring all of this up? Lou Engle went to Kampala, Uganda in 2010 and called homosexuality a spirit of lawlessness and called for martyrs to become gods, avengers of blood. Quote unquote to stop this agenda at all costs. And he also endorses christian advocates for israel in 2012 it’s not it’s known as kufi.

I don’t really know why it became the largest us based pro israel organization And in 2017 they hosted mike pence as a speaker for their night to honor israel summit in washington, dc They sponsor Daughters of Zion, which is founded by Lynn Hammond. There’s this global quote unquote community of loosely networked prayer groups.

And the craziest part of all of this is that the Seven Mountain Mandate declares evangelical Christians must go and make disciples of all nations. That’s from Matthew 28, 19. That means infiltrating and winning places over for Christ. This is neocolonialism. And it’s the foundation of the New apostolic reformation, which is a movement built on the pillars of the church in the workplace and the great transfer of wealth.

And it’s influenced by managerial self help empire of Peter Drucker, who emphasized meeting. Worker’s social and community needs at work as a form of like union vesting. So really Let me know if I’m going into too much detail here But I think it’s important to get into all this before we even bring up trans people.

Sprout: No, the details are vital

Honey: Yeah,

Sprout: naming names.

Honey: Okay, so the Dominionist movement embraces the quote Theology of Vigilantism. This is a term coined by scholar Frederick Carlson to describe the legacy of Pat Robertson’s theocratic, right wing bullshit, frankly. And most of them endorsed the presidency of Donald Trump.

A Dominionist was Trump’s spiritual advisor, her name’s Paula White, and she claimed that Trump will play a critical role in Armageddon as the United States stands along Israel in the battle against Islam. Beautiful people. So all of these people and especially centralized in They’re building power in the pacific northwest, but they’re really centralized in Colorado And there’s this guy in Colorado Billy Epperhart, who is a retired real estate mogul and he runs wealth builders Which is an overtly christian real estate and business coaching business that teaches people how to flip houses and buy risky investment properties It has an international arm called Tricord.

He’s a ceo of Wealth Builders, Tricord, and a third company, Andrew Womack Industries, which together founded GlowTrans. This is it’s like a web. I feel like a conspiracy theorist sometimes, but GlowTrans Financial Services is a microfinancing institute which offers housing, church building, and business related microloans in Uganda.

And they fund another Bank, like a kind of a scammy bank, Glory Sacco in Uganda. While these organizations purport to have the beneficial goal of assisting impoverished villagers and impoverished people in the so called United States with loans to build housing and start businesses microfinancial institutions have long been under scrutiny for profiting off of the poor with high interest rates and creating undue repayment.

Burdens that lead to houselessness, perpetual debt, and even suicide. I was able to find, I was not able to assess like the level of predation tricord has in Uganda, but I was able to find civil court cases that were brought against individual parties, likely for failure to pay repay loans. Biglotrans at the High Court of Uganda Kampala.

Yeah, and I I could go on and on about, there’s Andrew Womack Ministries, and they have a media arm called Gospel Truth TV, they run these Bible colleges, they host the Truth and Liberty Awards Banquet, and this is actually where we get close to talking about trans people again. My point is that all of these people are linked.

And scammers, Womack industry offers a series of quack faith healing courses that turn chronic illnesses into an individual center’s responsibility and promise deliverance for 500. You can learn how to administer healing to your pop with Parkinson’s. It’s not predatory at all. And this year, Womack’s Cherished Bible College hosted the Truth and Liberty Awards, with exclusive ticket bundles selling for 50, 000.

And they hosted Riley Gaines, the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championship swimmer from Kentucky, who tied against Leah Thomas for fifth place. Riley Gaines was miffed that the one on site trophy was given to Leah, because they tied, and since has been running a petty vengeance campaign to harass trans women out of the s Or entirely.

So I’m gonna, I’m just gonna quote journalist Carly Webb. This issue does not exist in a vacuum. The groups pushing this suit and this hysteria have used support in general, and Thomas in particular, to push anti trans discrimination laws that now affect more than 30 U. S. states. The recent combination of anti trans laws passed in Ohio in January is a textbook example.

Womack also has his fingers in school boards. So in 2021, the Truth and Liberty Coalition backed four candidates for their local school board and won their races. Womack partners with the Aledo, Texas based Wall Builders, which is a Dominionist Christian Nationalist organization to distribute English and Spanish flyers in mega churches to encourage them to vote in accordance with the Christian Voters Guide.

They also offer guides for clergy. These flyers pit churchgoers against the LGBT community and racialized community members via questions about critical race theory, parental rights, boys playing girl sports, sex ed, and gender identity pronouns. Yeah, I’m gonna I’m gonna stop there, but I hope it’s clear that what her voice movement, the Donnellys, and their ilk are doing is a cynical attempt to weaponize bigotry, ignorance, and fear of change against an already vulnerable population in service of their own callow political agendas and financial gain.

They collude with white supremacists, and their ideological goals are a theocratic ethnostate. This is serious.

Sprout: Yeah, and it sounds like they’re running every scam out there. Yeah, it seems an attempt to make it seem like there are more people in support of these ideas than there actually are.

Does that make sense? Yeah, I watched It seems like there’s only six people involved in so much of what you’ve talked about, and it just seems like they just go and go 24 7 to create this sense of outrage. That’s not really there in the wider population.

Honey: Yes. I actually watched it was a funny, but sad video when I was doing this research from the.

Don’t mess with our kids and her voice movement because they have these weekly zoom calls for their prayer hubs and One of the the 20 something year olds who’s leading it was bemoaning that they can’t get Like any young people involved and it was trying to strategize for how to get more young people involved and I think it’s pretty obvious why they can’t get young people involved.

You have to be pretty You have to be pretty unwell to fall for these scams Yeah, very

Sprout: predatory. Those with an agenda to commit often utilize the argument. Think of the children or what about the children in order to drum up seemingly grassroots resistance to things that can impact the lives of children in public, which could arguably be most things.

Why is this such a pattern for authoritarians? And is there an effective counter position to take here? It doesn’t capitulate to the values of the far right in order to appease the sensibilities of the center.

Honey: Yeah, that’s a big question. And I think it’s really at the heart, ideologically, of what they’re doing, this focus on children.

I really want everyone to read this book, if you can get your hands on it. It’s called Innocence and Corruption. It’s by Ayanna Goodfellow. Her name is spelled A I Y A N A. Goodfellow. Yeah, just do it. She’s 16 when she wrote it and it’s one of the clearest pieces of theory i’ve ever read. On The oppression of children and the creation of children as a class to justify other oppressions to invalidate and justify to invalidate people who are resisting oppression and to justify colonialism.

If you want to understand the links between authoritarian, paternalistic parenting and the Christofascist far I’d recommend, there’s two podcasts. The first one’s called Strong Willed, and the second one is called I Hate James Dobson. There’s a whole rabbit trail I won’t get into around Christian homeschooling.

I was a Christian homeschooled child, so this stuff is very personal for me. The Advanced Training Institute, you could look up them, another cult leader trying to Essentially army of fascist subjects, Bill Gothard, it would, I would look up ATI and Bill Gothard using volunteer labor and essentially child abuse to, to build his empire.

So it’s the same shape from top to bottom, paternalism, infantilizing someone is violent. Even the notions we have of. the child, right? When you infantilize any group, you tacitly assert they don’t know their own best interests, they need to be controlled and cared for, and you’re the person to do that. So with the parenting industry, specifically James Dobson, it’s about breaking the child’s will and spirit early on, like people will break horses, right?

Wild horses. To create obedience above any other traits or values. Nothing matters more than obedience. And so it is about creating fascist subjects who can’t say no to authority, they’ve had their spirit broken, can’t say no, are trained to be obedient, who don’t trust themselves or anyone who isn’t.

A paternal authority or representing the paternal authority. So that means cops. That means, presidents. That means senators. Basically, and it’s really funny how some people who get into this authoritarian parenting and whatnot are still libertarians, ideologically, they’re. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a very violent ideology.

It’s essential to rape culture as well. They use this smoke screen of the innocent child to deflect what they’re actually doing. It’s very similar to using the image of the innocent white woman who needs to be protected to justify, lynch mobs and racial violence. The best thing we can do, I believe, to counteract their efforts Is to teach and practice consent and honor children’s autonomy see them as our comrades And I would go to say that doesn’t just mean children that means everybody right anyone who is not in a position of authority learning to treat each other with respect and really educate About what consent and autonomy are and why they’re important.

I think learning about child liberation or youth liberation, joining the fight in the school boards, getting people into the school boards and libraries to retain the right to things like sex ed, queer literature, access to information. We’re essentially going through another strain of book burning right now with all the banned books, Idaho has been like one of the red states that passed a bunch of basically, Idaho and Florida, some of those other states are trying to empty the libraries of anything that isn’t biblical.

And And the Puritan sensibility is pretty widespread in the United States. I think it’s a founding part of the philosophy of our government. Worked in schools. I see repression start really early with just like fear of profanity or of talking about any adult topics with children, because if you do, then you’re liable to be called a pedophile.

But I think there’s a lot of power for all of us in engaging with, let me put it this way. I saw an altered billboard. Someone posted it on the internet, which was really brilliant. It was one of those Christian giant billboards that says, trapped by lust Jesus will save you and they cut out Jesus and lust and they swapped them.

So it said trapped by Jesus, lust will save you. And yeah, I think there’s a lot of power in engaging with queer culture and with the right to profanity the right to the full expression Of the human experience and really engaging with our own disgust impulses kids are only hurt when we assume they’re stupid and naive and there is child appropriate education about just like having a human body and we also all of us need to work on our shame about having a human body and about, just existing because we live in this.

Essentially, quasi police state where so many expressions of ourselves are not allowed or socially policed by, by this fear that people internalize. Is that the root of this, all of this, is the belief that the human body in the material world is inherently evil. And it needs to be punished and corrected and hidden and shamed.

James Dobson and Focus on the Family teach that children are inherently corrupt. They need to be corrected. But they’re also innocent. You can’t ask which is it. Because it’s two sides of the same coin, right? It’s dehumanizing. It’s fetishizing and degrading. And I really I’m sorry to say that all of this is very pedophilic.

Like all of this way of thinking is charged with repressed sexual energy and it has its roots in that aspect of imperialist culture. I think you could trace this all the way back to Rome, the way that the deists, quote unquote, founding fathers of America were looking to these Roman legal forms, right?

And the rights of the father, which in ancient Rome, the father had the right To do whatever he wanted to his wife and his children, like if, like a child is considered property. And so you could literally whatever you want, the child has no rights under the law and is owned by the father. And we’re still operating in that system in a lot of ways.

So that got in codified into American property law. And a lot of these churches and ministries are, of course, fronts for abuse, like they’re literally pedophile rings in a lot of, like the the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I, I’ve got trans survivor friends who were trafficked through Jehovah’s Witness or through the Mormon church.

There’s a lot of projection at play. It’s my point.

Sprout: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for bringing up that sort of duality that the Christian theology engenders. I always found growing up Christian that it was you always had to hold 2 opposing views in your head. If you wanted to wrap your head around something, you It was like intentionally confusing.

It’s like a part of it. I think

Honey: it’s not logically coherent.

Sprout: It’s also the part about Christian theology that I hate the most is this idea that the human body or spirit or just entity is inherently evil and corrupt. I think that’s so damaging to so many facets of life and that people just don’t really even think about it.

And I think it’s even secularized to some degree. There’s this idea that you should be ashamed of who you are, where you are, is so ingrained in like Western culture. Yeah. Have we been able to pinpoint where the original focus on the transgender community came from? Oftentimes, what ends up being the single issue for the center right started out in a fascist space such as 4chan or Stormfront.

Do we know where this agenda began?

Honey: I think that somebody who’s more online in those spaces might be able to trace the particular appearance of transphobia as this major focus for the alt but Generally speaking, I wouldn’t blame 4chan. There are fascists on Tumblr, on Twitter, everywhere. I think this wave of transphobia is a response to the organic evolution of the trans community and our broader social acceptance, even though it’s still limited.

The more awareness and education about trans lives exists, the easier it is for fascists to fear monger about us as well. And we’ve had to fight to exist forever. If you look at Germany under the National Socialists, they started off their book burning programs by burning all of the research at the Institute for Sexual Wischenkraft, which was the sexology clinic run by Magnus Hirschfeld, and it was a big hub for the trans community.

in Germany. It was a safe place. It was like a spa. It was a clinic. It was a social scene. They’re researching different surgeries and the Nazis burned all of their papers and equipment. When you look at the classic pictures of Nazi book burning, that’s what they’re burning. They’re burning research on transgender, gender affirming surgeries.

And if you want to go a layer deeper, you can look at how colonialist missionaries tortured, executed, and Shamed two spirit and other gendered individuals like here in Turtle Island or another, even in other continents. So I’m gonna quote DNA scholar Wesley Thomas who says about colonization, We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos which did not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior.

Rather than the intricate roles that two spirit people played. I think this, the focus and the fear mongering about sexual predation and sexual behavior is an inherently colonial view of what trans people are. It’s a de spiritualized view. It’s a view stripped of, wisdom and knowledge about our Role in community and our place in the broader scheme of things and for like colonialist imperialism There’s this focus on reproduction and war like that’s all it really needs to spread right?

You just need to reproduce and Fight and conquer new land. It’s it’s It’s a viral mindset we just need to take over as much as possible, not considering the quality of life, the spiritual well being of anybody involved. So you just need women to bear children and men to fight. More soldiers supply, reproductive supply, and then fighters.

There’s no room for the whole human spirit there, for the natural diversity of our communal roles, our beauty, and our sacred practices. All of that is seen as extraneous. So now we have the system where children are hit over the head with this binary immediately at birth and sexualized. It’s normal to make jokes about baby boys being womanizers, for example but if you dare to imply a children’s TV show is depicting a lesbian relationship or feelings, it’s suddenly sexualized and taboo.

And I wanted to point out too that intersex people, like people with genetic diversity and their like reproductive systems or their secondary sex characteristics have always existed and a fair amount, there’s a fair amount of overlap between the trans and intersex. community. Some intersex people consider themselves trans or are trans because they choose to move away from the gender they were assigned at birth.

Other intersex people don’t move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, or they embrace their natural intersex bodies and identities outside of the label of being trans. But the real, there’s a lot of this bogus focus on surgeries being done on children, and as anything from the right it’s usually darvo, it’s usually projection of something that they’re already doing.

So intersex children are operated on often, like non consensually, and assigned a gender, and have their genitals mutilated to match an assigned a gender that fits within the binary, and forced to live in that without any explanation. That is a common violence that happens to intersex individuals.

And all this focus on the binary and on reproduction is about advancing and speeding up the reproduction of the race. It’s like an inherently racist mode of existence. Trans people challenge that productive mentality. We are seen as extraneous and dangerous. So our oppression is inextricably linked to colonialism and war and imperialism, there’s no way to really separate our existence unless from these other oppressions, unless our identities are co opted and made these superficial things, so it’s oh, now you can have trans people, piloting drones in the Middle East it doesn’t change the fact that at root we are always expendable if the fascists need a scapegoat.

Sprout: Yeah. Thank you for joining those comparisons. So let’s get into some possible solutions or counter movements to this push from the right to criminalize and eliminate trans people. Have you or your networks had any discussions or come to any conclusions on this issue? How can we best defend all trans people in this moment?

Honey: I have a, I have had an answer prepared and I’ve also given it some thought and I am going to expand A little bit past what I was going to say, which was that everyone should be educating themselves deeply on gender and colonialism and divesting from these consumerist notions of identity, right?

Like seeing yourself as a man because you wear pants and Try just all the really simplistic ways of thinking about our identity. If you can start to work through those and see yourself first and foremost as a human being with an inherent divinity or spirituality or necessity on this earth, that does a lot to cushion the violence of the binary.

And I also wanted to add that like part of this is people have to get weirder, get like getting weirder and being more yourself. It’s like cis, cisness itself is a construct, like to be totally on the same side as, that’s what cis means, trans means across from, as the, of the binary to be like comfortable with what you’re given at birth.

If what you’re given at birth is like a racist and paternalistic view of gender, then you’re going to have to work through some of that anyway. So I’m not saying no one is cis, I’m just saying that the only reason this divide between us exists is because it’s been created. Step one, I think, of really being able to see people as they’re themselves, right?

I don’t have, when I first transitioned and started meeting trans people, I had the problem. that many people do, or they have a hard time shifting pronouns, or seeing them as their true selves. And I know people who try to mask being transphobic by like mentally superimposing the pronouns because they feel like they’re going to get in trouble if they say the wrong pronouns, but they’re not doing the work to really see us, like to really see the person and why they’re asking you to refer to them in a different way.

Or by a different name and there’s not like an actual respect going into it. And I think part of that is because people are so afraid to transgress what they were handed, right? Oh, we could never change. I could never change my name. I was like, yeah, you could like, if you’re a cis person, nothing is stopping you.

Actually says people get the most gender affirming surgery, like past the plastic surgery industry. Exists to affirm cis people’s gender. A lot of advances in trans surgery actually came from like plastic surgery, like plastic reconstructive surgery, because it’s so hard to get people to see our medical needs as actually necessary.

But access to medical care and treatment, like cis men take testosterone, trans men take testosterone. We’re not really that different, right? And if you’re more comfortable with your own inner fluidity, that doesn’t mean go take up space in transpaces and be like, hey, we’re all fluid here.

But it means making Broader society, less rigid is good for everybody. It’s just good, and it will help also counteract some of the racism for example, Native men having long hair, and having it cut and violated, or being teased about it part of pushing back on these strict norms that are enforced on us is to make space for us all to have autonomy in determining our identity within community.

And it also, so there’s that part, and then there’s also just like showing up if you have the privilege of being perceived as cis, showing up when trans people’s existence is questioned and utilizing that social privilege. Intervene in the violent rhetoric. Don’t tolerate the open ended questions like, what is a woman?

That Ben Shapiro asks, or the sports bullshit. Just shut it down in your workplace and wherever you start to see it happen. And another thing I think that I want more cis people to start noticing is when there specifically is a trans woman in a space who’s isolated and maybe is the only one.

How often there’s a way higher standard of behavior placed on trans women to make up for the fact that people feel uncomfortable and have disgust reactions because of their trans misogyny. And so there’s way too many stories I know of girls getting literally pushed out of their jobs or their careers or their hobbies or their lives because, they’re trying to adapt and become smaller and smaller to make up for the, Facts that people are uncomfortable with them and like You can notice when that’s happening and you can intervene and not let people talk so much shit on trans women or spread really nasty rumors, and this has happened so many times at this point, I think it’s a matter of reparations that sending trans survivors of violence money, valuing us uplifting The people who are doing the work, like paying attention to mutual aid requests and how often they are coming from the trans community because people are disabled, they’ve survived violence, they might not be able to work, or they might be getting discriminated against in the hiring process redistributing the wealth that you are able to earn.

because of those invisible privileges is a huge thing. It does a lot because trans people know where the money needs to go. If you send me 100 bucks only 20 of it is probably staying with me. The rest of it’s going to get distributed out. And I would also say don’t let disabled trans people shoulder all the burden or do all the dirty work.

In your orgs if you see people in a pattern of volunteering for the hard work all the time, or always carrying, especially Black trans women or even Black trans men share the load and share the blessings. I see a lot of people repost images of Marsha P. Johnson and, she’s been made into this saintly figure.

But there are real life Marshas out here, and they’re starving, and they’re feeding their sisters, and begging money for money on the internet, and during hate attacks, theft, job discrimination, it’s hard to believe sometimes, like, how much people endure, because you’re just like that sounds like a Lifetime TV movie, but it’s people’s lives, and that’s why there’s like a genocide of black trans women in this country, because Okay.

When you get pushed to the outskirts and socially excluded, no one is checking on you, no one’s making sure that you don’t end up homeless, no one’s accompanying you to things or making sending a text to know oh, you’re going out with this person it’s really easy to disappear people when they’re isolated, and I see a lot of people get overlooked because they’re quote unquote crazy or too much or they get seen as scammers or annoying.

When there’s mental health issues in the trans community, and people have to learn, like, when I say get weirder, I mean get more comfortable with the unacceptable parts of human experience, honestly. We need to educate our communities on how to actually process conflict and transformative justice so that trans survivors don’t keep becoming communal scapegoats.

Ending up on the streets. There’s this essay, hot allostatic load. I would highly recommend people to read but most of all, I think the movement needs to interrogate our complacency and our comfort and our sanism, where we have privilege. It’s the same. way you’d confront the anti homeless patterns of thought in yourself and behavior.

You have to understand that a lot of people can’t afford to perform goodness, and they don’t need a carrot dangled in front of them to perform it. They just need to be resourced. And that’s what support Black trans women means to me. It’s not about tokenizing them, it’s about looking to those margins in this so called country and understanding the work that trans people have been doing.

Of course the other thing is we need people on school boards to fight the moms for liberty types and really like people just need to understand we’re everywhere. We can’t be ignored, we’re not going away. And also most trans people that I meet our vision for the future is just It’s just full of love and play and economy and sex positivity and these Christians are miserable.

Who wants the rich hard? They want all of us to be miserable. They’re just trying to drag us into their miserable plays. And they want a lot of us to be dead. So I think protecting trans kids in particular means arming them with the knowledge that all the possibilities for what a human being can be are theirs.

Giving them agency and choice and protection and guidance. That’s a lot. But I’m saying there’s a lot we can do.

Sprout: That’s great. No, that’s really powerful stuff. I appreciate you saying that. On another note, but speaking of arming trans people, there are many groups working to help arm and train trans comrades and save gun use.

What does this trend towards armed self defense mean for the wider left political movement? And does this provide a fracture point from the center that might be irreconcilable? Or are we at a place where the minority armed self defense can be framed? As an acceptable position to be normalized.

Honey: I’m not really sure about Fracture Point.

To me, it’s a matter of survival. All the trans women that I know shoot guns. And even if they don’t actively shoot guns, they know how. I think predators want Their victims to go easy. They target people who are easy victims and Not I’m not saying everyone should carry a gun But at the very least having a baton or pepper spray or knowing how to say no and defend yourself in a way That’s adjusted for the socially violent reality of being a trans woman It’s necessary.

A lot of times a gun is just a way to flat show your power. You can slash a gun It shows don’t fuck with me. I don’t think that we are irreconcilably fractured unless someone believes that we are Right? And so they’re believing that brings that into reality. They want me dead and believe my life isn’t worth living, or my sister’s lives aren’t worth living, or my brother’s lives aren’t worth living.

I can’t engage with them. That person is not a person that I’m really interested in building community with until they back down from their violence. I must protect myself from them and defend my community who support my life, and I can do that from a place of love, but a lot of arming oneself is about power and displaying that you aren’t to be fucked with, and you have dignity and capability to defend yourself.

That’s why the union makes us strong, right? It’s not just about guns and money. It’s about showing that it’s like a I don’t want to say it’s performative, but it’s like showing that you’re ready and you mean business. I think that everyone should read Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender History.

They talk a lot about the history of trans women in leading peasant revolts, or St. Joan of Arc, that kind of thing. Trans coded or gender non conforming people throughout history often lead social change and revolution because once you’ve experienced, like, when you’ve experienced going through the kind of transformation that it requires, and that bravery that it requires, To cross those boundaries, a lot of times you can see other radical truths as well or feel called to really lead the change in your community, and I think with arming ourselves, the Black Panthers didn’t go around just shooting up cops, and I might not really have a problem with I don’t know, some gangs or people doing that.

That’s not, far be it for me to criticize, but at the same time, it does lead to an escalation. The Black Panthers just showed up with guns and dignity and stared the cops in the face. So we’re gonna defend our community and I wish a motherfucker would. You can try me. And if you want to talk about moving to the offensive, we need to talk about street politics and how to build coalitions across The suburbs and the hood and like the different like strata of American racialized class society.

I haven’t read it but a lot of people when I start talking about this stuff say to go read George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye. That’s another episode. I also think a lot of American and especially white trans people turn to guns because that’s the language we know. That’s the way we’ve seen power enacted by our enemies.

But there’s also a lot of power in dancing and art and just showing up and Speaking softly and carrying a big stick vibes. At the don’t mess with our kids thing, like at the disco at the moral panic, our response to that, I got very frustrated with how much energy everyone was focusing on yelling at the fascists, when explicitly from the beginning Had been communicated, we were going to gather there to be visible to the public, being ourselves it’s like political theater we’re not there to fight this larger power, these people with all this money, and who are really aggressive and dangerous, we’re there to show up, be ourselves, and show the public this is who we are.

And that energy got drained away from being a protective circle, partially because of the way they moved things around and people were stressed out. But it just ended up escalating things and there was even one person who was trying to start a fight with Olympia Chud, who is a very dangerous person.

And and he feeds off of that. He loves getting people upset but so we were able to turn that energy around at the end by just having a catwalk. Like I was like, okay, I give up on this circle. We’re just going to use the sidewalk that, the barriers have been put up next to and this like crowd of fascists that had gathered on the across the like across the way and yelling and screaming and Drawing their guns, whatever.

They just dwindled away, because I think seeing people of all genders and body types laughing and wiggling their asses and strutting and posing, they were just so uncomfortable they did not know how to process that. We just played our music really loud, and, there were people in wheelchairs, there were, like, people who had never done any kind of drag before it was really beautiful, it was a beautiful way to finish the day.

And then we noticed that Raleigh was ending and we all scurried out of there because no one wants to be alone with a bunch of frothing anti trans proud boys. But yeah, so I think arming ourselves is important, but also it’s about protecting that beauty and spirit that we are defending, we’re not trying to, we’re not going to go do violence in, The violence is already happening to us by our social position like that’s that goes straight back to Paulo Freire like the oppressed to do not commit violence when they react to the violence of their oppressor I don’t know, I guess that’s one way of

Sprout: seeing it.

Yeah, wonderfully said. Thank you. I really appreciate what you. Brought up there about the tactic of using, joy to counter rage. And, we’ve interviewed quite a few people and then that’s come up a few times, the idea of Oh, fuck yelling at these guys and let’s just enjoy our lives.

And then they depart and so it seems like a tactic that’s worked numerous times to de escalate things in tense situations.

Honey: Yeah, there’s actually a lot of clowns. So in Portland, there’s actually like a group of clowns that go and de escalate like or show up to like right wing marches and stuff.

This is also a tactic they use in Germany. When the Nazis try to reconvene, people often show up in like giant poop emoji costumes or bananas and just mock them and have a good time. They don’t like it.

Sprout: Yeah, that’s great. So in this climate of severe repression of people’s basic right to even exist, it can be very easy to become reactionary ourselves and start wanting to line people up against the wall.

But I think that most people just need some education around trans issues. And to have trans people visible in their communities. I don’t think the average person wants to murder trans people. They might have concerns about the safety of their children, and we can address those concerns while championing and celebrating trans diversity and inclusion in public life.

We can show people that it’s not only possible for a society that is inclusive of trans people to exist safely, but in fact it is trans safety That is fundamental to any healthy social structure. What can anarchists do to keep this empathetic mindset when approaching this hard topic? How can we remember that most people are just scared and alienated and not murderous fascists?

How do we connect with the Christian community in tackling this cancer in their ranks and how can we keep ourselves grounded in the deliberate and intentional actions that we want to be known for?

Honey: Yeah, it’s a real problem with the reaction. Becoming reactionary is an easy way out, but a dark way. I think it is a big ask to There’s so much anger and pain sometimes I do know of there’s a movement to reintegrate trans people into spiritual spaces that was happening like a few years back called trans, it was like a social media campaign where people would hold up signs that say transphobia is a sin, transphobia is haram etc.

If you wanted to look that up, it was by the authors of the Black Trans Prayer Book, Jay Mace. The third, and Deja Baptiste. I think they’re both still around. They’re poet, activist people. And yeah, and I do know quite a few religious trans people, actually. I know many trans people who have converted to Islam or Judaism as a way of, reconnecting with religion.

But Being unable to face the harm or being unable to healthily reintegrate into Christianity after the harm that it’s done. But I know there’s also people, who have been harmed by the fundamentalist sects of their own religions. Yeah, it’s like trans people really belong In sacred spaces too, I think we have a lot of wisdom and perspective to offer there.

I know there’s a trans rabbi in Seattle who I might meet at some point. So there’s already, I think it comes back again to protecting the people that you know, like making sure, and by protecting them I don’t mean Playing white night or whatever, but just checking on the environment, noticing microaggressions and like also noticing the factors that keep people from being involved in spaces or speaking up, and sometimes speaking up. But for anarchists, yeah, I think keeping ourselves grounded as a spiritual task, tapping into our own senses of spirituality, following indigenous leadership, especially like really understanding what it means to be a settler on stolen land and how that will affect you spiritually.

And that, if we turn reactionary, we’re just more violent settlers. Like it’s not, I think it’s really, Society has really shown a light on some of the contradictions on Turtle Island, because, sure, there’s an Israeli left wing and they’re fighting against the Netanyahu regime, but at the end of the day, it’s an occupation that entirely needs to be dissolved and reconciliation needs to happen, right?

I think we just, like, all do need to remember that we are divine, spiritual, and complex beings, however that shows up for you, and not get caught up in this dour, militaristic thinking. And if we’re gonna fight, you have to think about being warriors, not just soldiers, right? Like a warrior, in warrior traditions, people have to study the arts and it’s a communal practice of keeping oneself strong.

It’s not just about fetishizing violence. I barely got into James Dobson because there’s already entire podcasts and books doing that. But it’s very important to know he’s a miserable man. Fascists are taking out their fear, paranoia, and misery on us. They want someone else to blame, and they’re also grieving.

But they only know how to be violent. Sometimes violence is necessary against them to defend ourselves. But I’ve learned and unlearned a lot from elders and teachers in organizing spaces or like even just online, like Palestinian queer leaders and teachers who have to retain their dignity while fighting the aggression of Zionists.

And understand that Israelis are really sick and brainwashed people. I would recommend the film Where Olive Trees Weep with Ashira Darwish for that. And also Yaffa’s Utopia on Instagram. Because a lot of the work that we have to do is cultural work in addition to militant work, I don’t think we have to take their shit or make excuses, but the spiritual truth is that every violence the oppressor does violate their own spirit, too.

It’s that term soul loss, right? Like, when you see Israeli soldiers talking about the crimes they’ve committed and the light goes out of their eyes and they’re just like, Put on this kind of creepy smile and are just like dissociated, right? They’re not able to be fully present with themselves.

They’re self destructive to be so destructive to other human beings. I don’t want that to be my problem, right? And everyone needs to take responsibility for their healing. But everything is connected and woven together. Unfortunately, we are connected to these people with this violent ideology.

And this framing, I see. Standing up to people’s bullshit as part of their own healing, as well as my own healing. If I’ve been taught to put myself down, and I start standing up for myself, I’m healing. If someone has been taught to put others down, and they start getting pushed back and put in their place, they’re healing.

The longer abusers, apologists, rapists, and mass murderers are enabled, the sicker they get, and the sicker the whole planet gets. We have a responsibility to stand up to them. It’s not about punishment. We didn’t actually get to do this skit at Don’t Mess With Our Kids, but we came up with a little bit where performers in white women like Karen drag did this elaborate shrieking grief ritual for a performer dressed as a man who was labeled patriarchy.

Who’s on life support and clearly dead. While these trans nurses were trying to help and watching with a combination of amusement and cringe. And so at the end all these white women prop up this lifeless body and they’re like screaming at their children who are like Hey, he’s dead and they’re like no he’s dead, right?

And they like make him walk out of the hospital and cursing the hospital and the nurses are just like Okay I think seeing what people are doing as a symptom of their sickness does allow us to tap into that compassion. It’s about it’s cult deprogramming, in fact. So the Million Women’s March they’re targeting these vulnerable women and then having them frame themselves as esters, right?

As these like heroines of the story, using this appropriated Jewish story about a woman who leveraged her beauty to save her people from ethnic cleansing. The irony is they’re doing the opposite. What the hell? They’re participating in mass psychosis, they’re being scammed, they’re being grifted, they’re supporting further colonization and expropriation, and a lot of them think they’re doing good.

So we really need to learn how to handle cult deprogramming, like the people Who are least likely to be harmed by that cult deprogramming are those of us who exited it and have healed, but don’t, aren’t target groups for them, right? And learn how to do that restorative process of reconciliation. I have had a few ideas about ways that people could intervene in specifically the Million Women’s March.

I don’t think they’re feasible for me to pull off. Especially given it’s in Washington, D. C. and a month away. But, I know if a couple of broke, disabled, and near homeless transsexuals can rally up the energy and put together a resistance event in less than a month here, that people in the D.

C. area, or who are at least a little bit closer, can probably find the same go in it and then to do that. The idea that I had was that because they’ve chosen their date, October 12th, as Yom Kippur, it’s the Jewish Day of Atonement. So it’s supposed to be this day of asking forgiveness from people you’ve wronged?

And instead they’re like, yeah, no, Day of Atonement means we’re going to like, call for violence against queer people. I really love the level of appropriation there, but yeah, my thought was just that they could be met by people all wearing, cultural costumes and or dressed as ghosts honoring our ghosts and our past and the people who have been killed and who have been wronged the AIDS victims the people who died.

In Germany or like the even the people in Palestine who have been being killed and just meet them with their sort of fervor, their like religious fervor with this silence and like spiritual response I, I wish I could pull something like that off, but I think that changing our tactic from being like, Oh my God, they’re so terrible, like everyone look Cause that’s just, people are going to get burnt out with the outrage and they already are, and we only have so much energy to look at terrible things before we’re just like, what do you want me to do?

And I think centering and grounding ourselves and seeing our resistance as cultural is going to be really crucial to its longevity. Yeah, I think we need activities that are regenerative, and it’s not always stuff that’s draining. So much of what we do is draining. And we want to really honor and uplift and share all that work and beauty that you’ve spoken of today.

Sprout: Thank you for so much for taking the time to come on today. We really appreciate your insight and the discussion around what can be done. We’re big on action in this podcast. Is there anything that we didn’t get to touch on that you still want to cover before we wrap up?

Honey: Yeah one small thing you could do is if you find any of those fascinating little Christian fundamentalist lit, like the parenting lit, the focus on the family stuff in little free libraries and bookstores, you can take it, use it to make word cutout collages or

I never wanted to recommend book burning, but there’s a lot of it’s very fun and very freeing to process your religious drama by scribbling in sharpie in books that these guys made millions off of. I don’t know if I shouted it out earlier, but if you want to learn more about James Dobson, there’s the podcast, I Hate James Dobson, great podcast, very funny, by someone who was raised with his methodology and ended up, Being a successful queer psychiatrist, I think.

And then there’s Strong Willed, which is about that Christian fundamentalist or religious authoritarian parenting styles and how to heal from them. Because these ideas hurt children. There’s a video I remember watching, I’m trying to remember this guy’s name. Might be like something Oliver one of, one of the Christian Fundamentalist Parenting Advice guys.

And he was talking about with disgust about how could a culture reject spanking children and how offended he was that he saw the sign on a freeway that said, stop hurting children, right? I think helping people recognize the ways that they are treating their own children, partially including children as comrades in your work is a really good thing to do.

Not overburdening them with more than they can handle, but like Understanding that our human, the human spirit is in us from the start, right? And the more public services and mutual network, aid networks we build, especially ones that prioritize children and parents and families that allow kids to exist there, right?

That aren’t just hushing them and seeing them as annoyance. The left pole, these fascist churches and ministries have, because a lot of people, they just want a safe place for their families. To find friends and to hang out and find community and spirituality. So yeah, it’s a fight on a lot of fronts, but it’s also just about how we live our lives and at least we’re allowed to have fun and trans our gender on this side.

So yeah, I don’t know, go to drag shows and culture events and meet people where they’re at. Don’t fall into the trap of being a bitter, isolated anarchist, rotting in the woods and glaring at everybody, sure, some of those, some of us are just going to be like that, but not everyone and don’t forget to wear a mask because COVID is killing us too, and trans people at higher rates than cis people.

That’s another episode, but thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure talking with you about this stuff.

Sprout: Yeah, I appreciate it.

Music: 

Segment two:

Welcome back to Molotov Now! With some hindsight we can now take a look at the article by Mike Hixenbaugh for NBCnews.com about the actual October 12th event itself.

According to Mike, “Tens of thousands of evangelical Christians gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday [October 12th] to pray for America’s atonement and for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.”

For hours, the gathered masses sang worship songs, waved flags symbolizing their belief that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and prayed aloud for Jesus to intercede on behalf of Trump in November.

He seems to have spoken to quite a few attendees of the events and asked them why they were there.

“If we don’t stand now,” said Grace Lin, who traveled from Los Angeles for the rally and came wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, “then the enemy will take over our country. If that happens, that’s the end.”

Susan Marsh, who drove from Maryland, said she attended because she fears if Democrats maintain power, her 10-month old grandson will grow up in a nation where he’s pressured to identify as a girl. As she sang and prayed, Marsh waved a large Appeal to Heaven flag — a prominent symbol of the Christian movement to end the separation of church and state in America.

“So many people are hopeless right now,” Marsh said, choking up as she spoke to a reporter. “Our children are going through surgeries that are unnecessary because their hearts are broken and they think they’re not who they’re supposed to be.”

Maryn Freitag was part of a group of about 50 people who traveled from Minnesota. She said she came “to stand with the man who God has selected as the president.” She then gestured to her hat, which spelled out “Trump 2024” in shimmering rhinestones.

Freitag refused to contemplate what would happen if Trump loses to Vice President Kamala Harris: “I don’t even want to go there,” she said.

Sandi Woskie, another member of the Minnesota contingent, overheard the comment. She leaned in and said: “Think Armageddon.”

“That’s right,” Freitag said. “If we don’t turn this nation back to the Lord, we’re on a fast slide into the abyss with no return.”

LaTrece Curry, a Black mother who said she voted for Barack Obama in 2008, drove from Ohio with her husband and four children. She said her support for Trump — a twice-divorced billionaire who’s facing a range of criminal charges related to his business practices and alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election — has led to divisions and arguments with her Black friends and family members. But she believes he’s the only candidate who will set America back on a moral course.

“I do think it is a last stand,” Curry said. “But God has given us so much time. Now judgment will come.”

Phil Heilman drove with his wife from Florida. They learned about the event while attending a get-out-the-vote rally in Georgia hosted by Lance Wallnau, an evangelist who coined and popularized the Seven Mountains Mandate — a growing belief on the American right that says conservative Christians are called to occupy positions of power in seven key spheres of society, including business, education, media and government. Wallnau was among the speakers Saturday.

Heilman said he gets his news from FlashPoint, a TV program that reaches hundreds of thousands of followers with a blend of pro-Trump political commentary and prophetic messages about God’s divine plans for America.

He worries about what will happen if Trump loses, but he said he has faith that Satan will be defeated even if Harris and the Democrats prevail.

“If that happens, it’s not going to be a political solution,” Heilman said. “God will provide other opportunities to take the country back that will be more surreptitious, or underground.”

Heilman, holding a large, red “Jesus Is King” flag over his shoulder, didn’t expand on what that might look like.

One way or another, he said, “righteousness will prevail.”

Mike reports that Lou Engle, the self-described prophet who organized the event, said God told him in a dream to call on a million women to march on Washington in order to restore God’s dominion over the nation. Engle is a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement of charismatic Christians who for years have portrayed U.S. politics as a spiritual clash between good and evil and Trump as a flawed leader anointed by God to redeem the nation.

Engle was there on Saturday and on stage near the Washington Monument, he warned of crime, religious persecution, abortion and the growing acceptance of LGBTQ people

As Mike reports the thousands of women in attendance wore pink shirts with the slogan “Don’t Mess With Our Kids”

Taylor, who attended the march Saturday as part of his research, has spent years studying the New Apostolic Reformation and its unwavering support for Trump. He documented in his book, “The Violent Take It by Force,” how false claims about widespread election fraud by Engle and other Christian nationalist leaders helped fuel the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Taylor said he worries that the dire messaging — and the portrayal of Trump as God’s chosen candidate to defeat evil Democrats — could set the stage for more violence.

“This is about activating the most ardent Christian supporters of Donald Trump, putting them into an apocalyptic mindset that says this election is do or die for America,” Taylor said. “The danger is that these folks can easily be converted over into Capitol rioters if the right circumstances come about and if their leaders give them that guidance.”

Taylor — and many others in attendance — noted that the crowd was more racially and ethnically diverse than most conservative political rallies. Churches from across the country, including some majority-Black denominations, chartered buses for the event. Organizers chose to hold the event on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, because it is a day to atone for sin.

Conclusion:

So in conclusion get ready for an interesting election. In the words of Atlanta Antifascists, in their piece An Anti-fascist Guide to the US 2024 Election: “In case of a Trump win, our work, and anti-fascist work in general, will become harder.” And this is undoubtedly true. This is an excellent article and makes a few predictions about what will happen under a Trump or Harris win, and what antifascists should be preparing for and doing now to combat those futures.

As for Harris they say, “From the anti-fascist perspective, a Harris administration would largely continue the domestic status quo of the Biden administration. On one hand, based on prior behavior in office, this is a less damaging alternative to Trump on both the domestic and international level, and we would face less danger of being extra-judicially assassinated. On the other hand, this kind of status quo maintains all current repressive policies and simply kicks the can down the road in terms of fascist political violence. The Harris administration will promise legal and carceral solutions to fascism, and those simply do not work. Laws enacted against fascists are used against anti-fascists in practice: one example is the use of mask laws, which were originally supposed to affect groups like the KKK but are now instead applied by the courts against anti-fascists, anti-racists, and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.”

They conclude, “There will be work to do no matter who wins. Candidates and conditions may change, but our anti-fascist principles should remain the same.”

Again, its is a great read and you should check out our show notes or go to to itsgoingdown.org to read it. These Christian Nationalists are allowing their fires to be stoked by con-men and bastards, they are themselves fanning the flames of their own wished for apocalypse. Judgement i.e. death for all perceived “sinners” is their main goal, it is what they desire more than anything else and for whatever reason, they think Trump will get them there.

Things are extremely heightened right now, and to add the fire and brimstone of God’s judgement into this whole national political scene is alarming to someone who comes from a very Christian background, and knows well the intensity of these beliefs. We have a recommendation: Anarchists need to be aware of effective cult deprogramming methods, and begin training themselves on how to use them to get our friends and families, and yes, even enemies, out of this mess. No one is coming to save us, all we have is each other. If you don’t hear from us before this election just know that whatever happens, we all have lots of work to do outside of this electoral bubble.

Outro:

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Molotov Now! We hope you found it informative and inspiring. Our goal with the podcast is to reach out beyond our boundaries and connect the happenings in our small town with the struggles going on in major urban centers. We want to talk to you if your a big city organizer, we think we have a lot you can learn from, and we know you have much to teach us. If you would like to come on the show please email us at sabot_media@riseup.net with the header “Molotov Now!” and we will be in touch about setting up an interview and crafting an episode to feature you.

We want to give a shout out to our friends at:

• C: Sabotage Noise Productions for putting on awesome benefit shows, including one for The Blackflower Collective, and for being all around awesome people who help us with the upcoming events section of this podcast.
• S: The South Florida Anti-Repression Committee who have launched a solidarity campaign for two individuals facing 12 years for an alleged graffiti attack on a fake Christian anti-choice clinic that does not provide any reproductive care. This Federal overreach and use of the FACE Act, an act meant to protect people visiting reproductive clinics from harassment, is unprecedented. To support this solidarity campaign please visit bit.ly/freeourfighters
• C: We want to thank The Blackflower Collective for their continued support and wish them luck in their fundraising efforts. To support them or learn more their website is blackflowercollective.noblogs.org.
• S: Kolektiva, the anarchist mastodon server, is growing faster than ever thanks to Elon Musk’s stupidity as many activists close their accounts for bluer skies as can be seen in the fluctuation of followers over on IGD’s socials, join at kolektiva.social and follow us and other online activists on decentralized federated internet.
• C: Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network is holding a fundraiser for their weekly meals with Food Not Bombs. To donate visit linktr.ee/crmutualaidnet
• S: The Communique is looking for artist and upcoming event submissions, please write to sabot_media@riseup.net to submit your entry.
• C: Thank you to Pixel Passionate for producing our soundtrack, please check out their website at https://www.radicalpraxisclothing.com and check out their portfolio in our show notes
• S: and Thank you to the Channel Zero Anarchist Podcast Network. We are proud to be members of a network that creates and shares leading critical analysis, news, and actions from an anarchist persepctive.

Remember to check out sabot media’s new website for new episodes, articles, comics, and columns. We have new content all the time. Make sure you follow, like, and subscribe on your favorite corporate data mining platform of choice and go ahead and make the switch to federated social media on the Kolektiva Mastodon server today @AberdeenLocal1312 for updates on Sabot Media projects such as The Harbor Rat Report, The Saboteurs, The Communique, our podcast Molotov Now! and many other upcoming projects.

That’s all for tonight. Please remember to spay and neuter your cats and don’t forget to cast your votes at those who deserve them.
Solidarity Comrades,
This is Molotov Now! Signing off

Music this Episode:

Total Chroma – Driftless

THE GOBS – “13 TALL BOYS”

TIWHWYDPBD -BaptationN

Noble Hobo | Song for a Friend

Chapped – Belladonna Ciao & The So-Called New West Chungus Liberation Front

Even if the End Is Near by Evan Greer

https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/we-are-everywhere-a-trans-response-to-christian-nationalists/

#138 #200 #201 #4 #44 #45 #6600cc #72b372

An anarchist educator talks GEDs, queer youth organizing in schools, how to navigate academia as an anarchist, free schools, homeschooling, unschooling, and other queer insurrection <3

mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids flipping out anarchy and deliberation. Here at The Child and His Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.

And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create feared, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent of the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Negro, and organizer for trans liberation in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is Jordan, a radical educator, here to talk about all this.

Jordan: Hi, yeah, my name is Jordan. I use he, him pronouns. I’m from Nebraska on the Great Plains Otoe, Missouri treaty lands. And I’ve been a GED program facilitator for the last 10 years. I’m an anarchist. I’m a feminist. I’m an abolitionist.

And I am a father to three kids.

mk: So when you originally pitched this to me, you expressed an interest in GEDs as an option for teenage humans looking to evade the statism of compulsory education. Can you talk a bit about this?

Jordan: Yeah, I was thinking so school districts have attendance policies and those policies lack the nuance to recognize really any of The complexity is impacting young people’s lives that would lead them to miss class and after a certain number of absences, an escalating series of consequences ensue.

This includes, this can include a referral to juvenile probation or sometimes diversion. And these truancy cases can also lead to caregivers being subjected to state surveillance, it can lead to young people being removed from the home. And while, there are circumstances where young people would benefit from being in a different environment or under different care.

I’m sure that the child and its enemy’s listeners can imagine myriad ways in which community care can be implemented or implicated without carceral systems being the driver of those interventions, but as it is now carceral systems of surveillance and control are all too often the consequence of quote unquote truancy.

The G. D. Routes. Even in a program that’s structured similarly to conventional school. Can provide a fresh start, right? And there might also be community based programs where you live that offer much more flexible structure. Thankfully that’s the type of program I’m involved with. You could also, you could attain your GED with the help of, with friends, trusted mentors.

You could also go the kind of library card autodidact routes and do a lot of this work on your. But there are, right? We should recognize that there are some barriers for young people to be able to access the GD. Some pro Programs will pay for testing, but, costs are associated with the GED.

You need ID from your state, like a state issued ID, and that often means, the name on your ID is the one you have to answer. To there there will be age based eligibility in your state, and that can vary some from state to state, like when you’re old enough to withdraw from school.

And the GED is not going to offer a lot of the opportunities that you might find in your public school, like art or drama or sports. So that’s another thing to take into consideration. You also, when you, if you want to pursue like post secondary ed. Which is totally still a possibility you very much, you very likely might lack the prerequisites to just jump into a four year university type setting, but those credits can still be obtained usually like at a community college yeah, so those are some of those options, some of those things to think about, also accommodations.

For learning disabilities are very, they make it really onerous the process to try to get that we can talk more about that if you want, but yeah, those are some of the barriers so all things to take into consideration but again, you have a different level of scrutiny from the state as a GED student, then you will.

Would as a traditional student. Yeah, that’s those are some of those initial thoughts.

mk: Thank you so much for bringing all that up. I find it fascinating and horrifying how even with this state sanctioned thing that is very much within compulsory education, there’s still some form of state repression and some form of stigma around it.

It’s almost as if statist beauty standards for education will never apply to queer and trans folks. Actually, that’s exactly what it is, because statism is deeply unethical, as our listeners know. How do you think that this can look for us For those of us who want to pursue higher education without engaging in statism, like I’ve known so many teens who have academic special interests and might want to for that reason, or maybe are fleeing homophobic states or harmful family situations so on an excuse to try a different location what can it look like to navigate college without engaging in that Commodification of life and education.

Jordan: Yeah. A tough question that a lot of us have faced, and but I think, my. The answer to that address is that we live in a society that individuates success and failure. Of course we know that’s a lie, that’s, not real. More predictive of someone’s academic success than their own intellectual capacities is the breadth of their network of support and the ease at which they can access that.

That’s where my head went with this. And I think of many of our quote, high achieving students those that receive accolades, high marks and scholarships are convinced. Instead of the same fallacies of meritocracy that delude those that are more generally accumulating into fewer and fewer hands, money, power, and prestige in our society and those those fallacies include, because I worked hard, because I’m smart and because I was blessed by God there’s no mention in those reasonings, Of the caregivers, that read read bedtime stories, or fed them, or drove them to their practices, and attended their events no mention of clean air and drinkable water, no mention of lead contamination, or the lack thereof, no mention of the unearned privileges of gender, race, and class, or the unfreedoms associated with those socially constructed modes of life, Oppression right the flip side of that coin many of your listeners will know that their immediate family.

The only people that are really sanctioned to be your network of support under our current paradigm can’t always be relied upon for the kind of support that students require. My best advice is to look, to our chosen families whatever your educational pursuits consist of. I think you should arm yourself with the love and care of your committed your community as you pursue those, academic interests.

Even if it’s, one peer Don’t go it alone. I was thinking of Kropotkin. In Conquest of Bread, there’s discussion of how capitalism doesn’t just exploit the labor of the living, but it subsumes into its, mass, all of the work that our ancestors did. And, all of the Discoveries, the intellectual developments and all those things become, used and abused by this system.

The work on behalf of those that actually did the labor was intended for the prosperity of future generations writ large and not for the profit of an increasingly fewer. A few number of expropriators the genes of crops that were domesticated by the ancestors of people indigenous to where I live are now the intellectual property of Monsanto.

We know better than this though, right? We have to reject the internalization of these fallacies. We are all interdependent, and we are all connected. So ideally, I think you would have a study group that is outside of academia, where you can develop your interests and sharpen your skills, and together with the support of your network and your developed analytic analytical skills I think you can confidently enter into those spaces and those spaces will benefit from your participation.

And there are benefits that you can derive being in those kinds of academic spaces, but it’s not. It’s not our home it’s not a resting place, it’s a site of struggle, it’s a contested space and, yeah we can’t concede that space to our enemies either yeah, it’s a site of struggle and, yeah, there are things that those kinds of intellectual pursuits and That kind of environment can benefit us and I think that we have stuff to offer to the conversation certainly so it’s, striking a balance there.

mk: I love this idea that being a queer anarchist teen in academia is conflictual as someone who has started an anarchist group at my middle school before. Like it’s so valuable to be in those spaces, especially because so many people there really haven’t had access to anarchism or access to queerness even, and desperately need peer support and care that’s outside of that graded judge.

community, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be the only place we derive our identity from. One can’t be an anarchist while also thinking that their grades define their worth. We all think that sometimes being alive, but I digress. So zooming out for a second, what do you think education would look like in your vision of queer and trans anarchy?

Jordan: Yeah. I think the first word that comes to mind is queer. Prefigurative or prefiguration, right? As with as with a lot of organizing for a better world, a world where many worlds fit, we have to be deliberately experimenting with the means of our collective liberation in ways that honor and demonstrate the principles and values we want to build into those worlds.

Those include, but are not limited to, autonomy, free association, participatory democracy, horizontality, and direct action. I would emphasize experimentation in this process. There are no panaceas. Young people are under different material conditions, and each of them brings their own idiosyncrasies.

idiosyncrasies to their, yes, to the table. And if I can pin down one piece of this, we would look to play. Play gives us the freedom to iterate, to experiment, to generate means of our pedagogy and relationship to each other and to our environment. And I’d emphasize that play is not the standard. Sometimes if we say oh, that’s just play it separates it from, real material conditions.

The real muscle memory and the neural pathways that build our capacity to do everything from the dishes to dealing with conflict are very real capacity to cause harm. I think that should be, at the fore of our educational pursuits. Early and often discussing, playing at, and dealing with the ideas of consent and community agreements and boundaries.

Again, how do we deal with conflict? How do we navigate and embrace our messy humanness? Polycentric and horizontal and messy systems are more robust and sustainable. hierarchical top down systems. That’s a shout out to Elinor Ostrom. This is the frustration and misery of many of our young people.

They know intuitively that there’s a better way. Better way. Yeah. And then if you like, basically anything that I’m saying in this interview, it’s coming from community, it’s coming from study. None of these are my original ideas. And a lot of this I’ve learned in community with my kids and with, their learning community.

So two of my kids go to a school whose philosophy is they say democratic self-directed, and the youngest is in a Montessori school. There’s a relationship there to unschooling. We’re going to get to that, I think. And, but yeah, so I can’t really speak to unschooling, but in this case our school has taught us a lot about Clicked resolution, which I touched on in conflict resolution is a huge emphasis in their pedagogy.

It undergirds really all of their offerings. So the young people vote on, we do like a rate choice voting on what they’re going to learn and pursue and study and inquire, that, time period a quarter semester and but the conflict resolution piece is always present in how they’re navigating that space with each other and learning from each other.

Yeah, a big shout out to. While learning. My kids’ school,

mk: I love the idea here that education isn’t just about factual information that we can call on. It’s about learning to build dual power and practicing what social organization might look like that’s anarchist. Like personally, even as someone who’s in the education system, I’ve learned much more in the practical sense from anarchist organizing than I have anywhere else.

And honestly, anarchist organizing teaches so many skills implicitly, like especially around technology in my case, like I would never know how to do the basics of digital security or graphic design or any of it. If I hadn’t been engaged in anarchist organizing since I was 13 and I feel like even for youth who aren’t into organizing or maybe don’t want to do anything that’s conflictual, which is totally valid, that idea of DIY and autonomous ways of educating each other rather than passively waiting to be educated are absolutely crucial.

How do you think anarchists can disrupt the education system in the here and now other than opting out and building alternatives? What would be the insurrectionary answer to this rather than the prefigurative one? And on that note, what are your thoughts on homeschooling and unschooling?

Jordan: Yeah, first, so the unschooling I will defer to other folks on, that, that know more about that that movement.

Homeschooling is interesting because it can be. An escape from that compulsory education, state education but it can also be like a retreat into like toxic family dynamics, right? So it’s it’s, it can be very much what you make of it. And, it can be used as a way to free young people.

It could be used as a way to control young people. Yeah, but I think it’s definitely something that a lot of folks are taking, more seriously and taking a close look at and really asking themselves, if it works with their family, with their community to be able to, meet the needs of young people and children in that setting, it’s totally achievable.

And there are resources to support that work, and the other, big question there. I think, the first part of that is, I think of solidarity, which will not be a new concept to your audience. School can be, I also, yeah, we need that. School can be a significant source of stress.

To the students and to the family. And I think of all the adults that we know that myself included, that still have the, the nightmare where you, we forgot your homework or you didn’t realize there was a pop quiz or, you’re, you have some sort of humiliating experience in the classroom or something like that.

But that’s like you pretty well recognized as as something that, we, many of us that share that experience have an after effect of right. And yeah, it can also, as I said, it can be a source of tension in our relationships at home and in our communities, especially If we’re on the receiving end of those attendance policies we talked about earlier so I currently work in an office with seven people and I see four to ten participants in a given day and this is enough, For me to drain my social battery, on some days and weeks where I need, alone time to recover or like nature time to recharge, but we have the expectation that our young people navigate school buildings with like Very often thousands of students, not to mention teachers, administrators and support staff, and these high social demands can be a source of anxiety for a lot of students.

And I’d say a significant percentage of the young people in my GED program sought out this alternative because of the social pressures. More so than simply being like credit deficient behind, In credits or something like that, but because they are feeling a sense of school misery, right?

A sinking gut feeling that they don’t want to go back there. And so in my experience, what we can do for our young comrades and others that are invested in the education system. Is recognize the reality of their experience, recognize those realities that I was just now trying to countenance and we are all in a state of constant development of our sense of self and place and with, ongoing genocides and climate catastrophe and ecological.

or, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as bell hooks would say, we have every reason to be alternatingly sad and determined indignant With rage, overwhelmed by love, despondent, joyful, and these are all our human emotions. And I dare say, in this context, that even the desire to end one’s life is human.

Yeah, I want to address this. Because as with a abstinence only sex education, or a just say no to drugs idea, if we can’t look at our messy human reality, we can’t help each other. And we can’t do harm reduction, we can’t understand risk, and while there are tools that I would encourage people to seek out from biomedicine, or psychology, psychiatry, those things can be vital, and but we shouldn’t only medicalize what has been called a sacred crisis of self.

The point being that your sensitivity to your world around you is not merely you being chemically unbalanced. This is a real response to stimuli. And the solution is not a world without you, I promise. The solution is our collective struggle towards liberation. The world with your presence and the presence of justice together, those things together, as as Martin Luther King who was murdered, with at least the complicity of the state said, there are things in our nation and in the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I call upon all people of goodwill, To remain maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination.

I never intend to adjust to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessity. It’s from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self defeating effects of physical violence. We keep us safe.

Some folks may need to have watch kept over them and other interventions. But people also need empathy. People need commiseration. We can’t fix everything. But We can be in solidarity with our friends that are going through dark places, and we can’t gaslight them they’re the thing that is unwell in this world.

We have to recognize the darkness and collectively commit to the fight back against it. Access to liberatory education is suicide prevention. Hosting. Housing, excuse me. Housing is suicide prevention. Environmental justice is suicide prevention. Anti imperialism is suicide prevention. Anti fascist organizing is suicide prevention.

And queer liberation is suicide prevention. So I feel like that’s not maybe the most direct answer to your question, but I feel like that’s our starting place to build networks of solidarity around the real world that we’re living in to be outside of and against until we can, Build that better world or as we build that better world and make it a reality in our relationships in everyday life.

That’s the best. That’s the best I’ve got for that question, especially in the context of young people trying to escape compulsory education and find their own path. Let’s and let’s, as. As we are at which is, often hurting. And that is that’s where I took that.

Yeah.

mk: Thank you so much for talking about that. The idea that mutual aid and queer networks of care and see mental health struggles not just as something to resolve and then move on from, but as a symptom of statist harm is so real. As someone who is neurodivergent, just by virtue of who I am, but has also had mental health challenges as a result of statism, honestly, like pervasive anxiety about state repression and the like, I appreciate that so much, because there will always be a range of neurologies and that is absolutely beautiful and necessary.

But if people are suffering in the mental health way, that isn’t like physical disease, it isn’t something to just. Medicaid and then ignore. It is something that statism causes and so often youth are totally ignored when we struggle with that. There are carceral hotlines, there are peer support groups that don’t do anything, but there isn’t flexual organizing, which is so often just what we need for our mental health.

So On that note, so many queer and trans young people, myself included, have faced anti queer bias at school, whether from administration, other students, or just the system of compulsory education. So from a queer liberationist standpoint, what can we do to resist anti queer bias in our schools?

Jordan: I continue with the theme, and I quote here, Mariam Kaba, everything that is worthwhile is done with other people.

There will always be the need for individual acts of defiance, and we will always have moments where we have to face the consequences of upholding our principles. The best way to resist anti queer bias in education is collectively. Across the lines, between educators and students, possibly across the divisions between age grades, across the queer and cis heteronormative divide.

But in doing this, I think the experience of the most impacted by this oppression needs to be centered. queer youth shouldn’t be organized by people outside of that experience. To say that organized queer youth can in principled alignment with other groups. Form coalitions, or they could agitate within established groups for example, a queer caucus within an existing student organization or student government, but as opposed to the individual candidate in that case participating in student government, thinking that they could reform the system from within either have a separate organization, that can choose to align with other groups as conditions allow or be self organized as like a cadre, a caucus, an affinity group within larger organizations that You have the clear objective of agitating toward collective liberation and away from the kind of performative reforms that, are gainable, maybe through some of the tactics of even on this smaller scale, like of electoralism, but does that really get us to collectivism?

Liberation and the other observation I had here is that, you really have to as a young person in these spaces, you have to work very hard to avoid being tokenized. It’s rampant in these spaces that are ostensibly for young people tokenism will elevate the stories of resilience, right? In this frame, barriers are to be like heroically overcome to inspire others.

Not ripped apart, not torn down. This obviously maintains the same system of oppression. Nobody’s free until everybody’s free. We don’t accept tokenism.

mk: Thank you so much for speaking to that, and like this exp The experience of being the only teenager in any queer liberationist group, and the only queer person in any teen focused group, is so real. And honestly, this is why The Child and His Enemies facilitates two online spaces on Discord and Signal, respectively, for anarchist teens to come together and build that translocal community, and maybe even plan meetups in various bioregions, and just do whatever it takes to Build teenage anarchist faces that are not about ageism and are not about tokenism.

Yeah, thank you again. And to close out, are there any shameless plugs that you have for various organizations or other media that’s meaningful to you? Yes,

Jordan: I do have some plugs. If I wanted to chat about some of the mutual aid organizing in my community,

The Lincoln and Omaha Street Medics, The Legible Distro, Mississippi State Prayer Camp and its Land Defenders. Shout out to them. Shout out to Black Cat House and Common Root. Shout out to Omaha Tenants United and the burgeoning Lincoln Sister Org. Lincoln Tenants United. Look out for them. And WOW Learning.

It’s cool, as I mentioned before. And there’s a really cool school for preschool age. Included in Omaha Falls one community childcare, which yeah, and I wanted to throw this in here. We talked about some heavy content today. If you’re looking, you need to talk to somebody now, you could call the nine eight eight you suicide or crisis.

Available in several languages. And and I’ll also make my contact available to any listeners who could use help navigating this. Yes, that’s it.

mk: Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey. This has been Jordan and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies. If you want to learn more or join us on Discord and Signal, our website is thechildanditsenemies. noplots. org. I’m MK Zariel, thanks for listening. Stay safe, stay dangerous.

https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/anarchist-educator-jordan-on-alternative-schooling/

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Check out the latest Defensive Security Podcast Ep. 276! From cow milking robots held ransom to why IT folks dread patching, Jerry Bell and Andrew Kalat cover it all. Tune in and stay informed on the latest in cybersecurity!

Summary:

In episode 276 of the Defensive Security Podcast, hosts Jerry Bell and Andrew Kalat delve into a variety of security topics including a ransomware attack on a Swedish farm’s milking machine leading to the tragic death of a cow, issues with patch management in IT industries, and an alarming new wormable IPv6 vulnerability patch from Microsoft. The episode also covers a fascinating study on the exposure and exploitation of AWS credentials left in public places, highlighting the urgency of automating patching and establishing robust credential management systems. The hosts engage listeners with a mix of humor and in-depth technical discussions aimed at shedding light on critical cybersecurity challenges.

00:00 Introduction and Casual Banter
01:14 Milking Robot Ransomware Incident
04:47 Patch Management Challenges
05:41 CrowdStrike Outage and Patching Strategies
08:24 The Importance of Regular Maintenance and Automation
15:01 Technical Debt and Ownership Issues
18:57 Vulnerability Management and Exploitation
25:55 Prioritizing Vulnerability Patching
26:14 AWS Credentials Left in Public: A Case Study
29:06 The Speed of Credential Exploitation
31:05 Container Image Vulnerabilities
37:07 Teaching Secure Development Practices
40:02 Microsoft’s IPv6 Security Bug
43:29 Podcast Wrap-Up and Social Media Plugs-tokens-in-popular-projects/

Links:

•  https://securityaffairs.com/166839/cyber-crime/cow-milking-robot-hacked.html
• https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/patch_management_study/
• https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/misguided-lessons-crowdstrike-outage/723991/
• https://cybenari.com/2024/08/whats-the-worst-place-to-leave-your-secrets/
• https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/14/august_patch_tuesday_ipv6/

Transcript:

Jerry: Today is Thursday, August 15th, 2024. And this is episode 276 of the defensive security podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always is Mr. Andrew Kalat.

Andrew: Good evening, Jerry. Once again, from your southern compound, I see.

Jerry: Once again, in the final time for a two whole weeks, and then I’ll be back.

Andrew: Alright hopefully next time you come back, you’ll have yet another hurricane to dodge.

Jerry: God, I hope not.

Andrew: How are you, sir?

Jerry: I’m doing great. It’s a, it’s been a great couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to going home for a little bit and then then coming back. How are you?

Andrew: I’m good, man. It’s getting towards the end of summer. forward to a fall trip coming up pretty soon, and just cruising along. Livin the dream.

Jerry: We will make up for last week’s banter about storms and just get into some stories. But first a reminder that the thoughts and opinions we express are those of us and not our employers.

Andrew: Indeed. Which is important because they would probably fire me. You’ve tried.

Jerry: I would yeah. So the the first story we have tonight is very Moving.

Andrew: I got some beef with these people.

Jerry: Great. Very moving. This one comes from security affairs and the title is crooks took control of a cow milking robot, causing the death of a cow. Now, I will tell you that the headline is much more salacious than the actual story that the. When I saw the headline, I thought, oh my God, somebody hacked a robot and it somehow kill the cow, but no, that’s not actually what happened,

Andrew: Now, also, let’s just say up front, the death of a cow is terrible, and we are not making light of that. But we are gonna milk this story for a little while.

Jerry: that’s very true.

Andrew: I’m almost out of cow puns.

Jerry: Thank God for that. So, what happened here is this farm in Sweden had their milking machine, I guess is a milking machine ransomware and the farmer noticed that he was no longer able to manage the system, contacted the support for that system. And they said, no, you’ve been ransomware.

Actually, the milking machine itself apparently was pretty trivial to get back up and running, but apparently what was lost in the attack was important health information about the cows, including when some of the cows were inseminated. And because of that, they didn’t know that one of the pregnant cows was supposed to have given birth, but actually hadn’t.

And so it. What had turned out to be the case is that the cow’s fetus, unfortunately passed away inside the cow and the farmer didn’t know it until they found the cow laying lethargic in it stall, and they called a vet. And unfortunately, at that point it was too late to save the cow.

This is an unfortunate situation where a ransomware attack did cause a fatality.

Andrew: Yeah, and I think in the interest of accuracy, I think it was in Switzerland,

Jerry: Is it switzerland? Okay. I knew it started with a S W.

Andrew: That’s fair. You’re close. It’s Europe.

Jerry: It’s all up there.

Andrew: But yeah, I guess in this theory that if they had a better tracking date when the cow had been inseminated, they would have known that the cow was in distress with labor and could have done something more proactively to save cow and potentially the calf. And unfortunately, because I didn’t have that data, because it was in this ransomwared milking robot machine we ended up with a dead cow and a dead calf.

Jerry: So not without grilling the farmer too much. I was I was thinking, that,

Andrew: Wow!

Jerry: I’m sorry. I was thinking that, they clearly had an ability to recover. And what they thought was the important aspect of that machine’s operation, which was milking, they were able to get that back up and running pretty quickly.

But it seemed to me like they were unaware that this other information was in kind tied to that same system. I don’t fully understand. Seems like it’s a little more complicated than I’m, than I’ve got it envisioned in my mind. But very clearly they hadn’t thought through all the the potential harm.

A good lesson, I think for us all.

Andrew: I feel like we’ve butchered this story.

Jerry: The the next story we have for today comes from register. com and the title is patch management still seemingly abysmal because no one wants the job can’t stop laughing. All right.

Andrew: A cow died! That’s tragic!

Jerry: I’m laughing at your terrible attempts at humor.

Andrew: I couldn’t work leather in there. I tried. I kept trying to come up with a leather pun.

Jerry: We appreciate your efforts.

So anyhow. This next story talks about the challenge that we as an IT industry have with patching. And basically that it is a very boring task that not a lot of people who are in IT actually want to do. And so it, it highlights the importance again of automation and.

This in the complimentary story which is titled misguided lessons from CrowdStrike outage could be disastrous from cybersecurity dive. I put these two together for a reason because one of the, one of the. I think takeaways from the recent CrowdStrike disaster is we need to go slower with patching and updates and perhaps not rely on automatic updates.

And these 2 articles really point out the folly in that. Number 1, this. Article from the register is pointing out that relying on manual patching is a losing proposition because really nobody wants to do it and it doesn’t scale. It’s, it’s already, it’s IT operations is already a crap job in many instances, and then trying to expect people to to do things manually is a problem.

The second article points out the security issues that come along with Adopting that strategy, which is, you’re exposing your environment unduly unnecessarily. And in fact the improvements in. Your security posture and the let the reduction in likelihood of some kind of an attack far outweigh the remote possibility of what happened.

Like we saw with CrowdStrike. Now there is a kind of an asterisk at the bottom. They point out the importance of doing staged deployments of patches, which I think is one of the central lessons of the, at least for my Perspective, one of the central lessons of the CrowdStrike disaster is that go fast, but stage it.

Andrew: yeah it’s an interesting problem that we’re struggling with here, which is how many times have we saved our own butts without knowing it by automate or rapidly patching? It’s very difficult to prove that negative. And so it’s very difficult to. Weigh the pros and cons empirical data showing where automatic patching or rapid patching solved a problem or avoided a problem versus when patching broke something.

Cause all we know about is when it breaks, like when a Microsoft patch rolls out and breaks and that sort of thing. And it’s one of those things where it has to be perfect every time is the feeling from a lot of folks. And if it, if every time we have a problem, we break some of that trust. It hurts the credibility of auto patching or, rapidly patching. The other thing that comes to mind is I would love to get more IT folks and technical operations folks and SREs and DevOps folks, with the concept of patching as just part of regular maintenance. That is, just built into their process. A lot of times it feels like a patch is an interrupt driven or toil type work that they have to stop what they’re doing to go work on this.

Where, in my mind, at least the way I look at it from a risk manager perspective, unless something’s on fire or is a known RCE or known exploited, certain criteria. I’m good. Hey, take patch on a monthly cadence and just catch everything up on that monthly cadence, whatever it is. I can work within that cadence.

If I’ve got something that I think is a higher priority, we can try to interrupt that or drive a different cadence to get that patched or mitigated in some way. But the problem often is that, Okay. Every one of these patches seems to be like a one off action if you’re not doing automatic patching in some way, that is very Cognitively dissonant with what a lot of these teams are doing and I don’t know how to get Across very well that you will always have to patch it was all this will never stop So you have to plan for it.

You have to build time for that. You have to build Automation and cycles for that and around it and it’ll be a lot less painful It’s it feels like pushing the rock up the hill on that one.

Jerry: One of my observations was

an impediment to fast patching is the reluctance for downtime and, or the potential impacts from downtime. And I think that dovetails with what you just said, in part, that concern stems from the way we design our IT systems and our IT environments. If we design them in a way that they’re not patchable without interrupting operations, then my view is we’ve not been successful in designing the environment to meet the business.

And that’s something that, that I tried hard to drive and just thinks in some aspects I was successful and others I was not. But I think that is one of the real key things that, that we as a it leader or security leaders really need to be imparting in the teams is that when we’re designing things, it needs to be, Maintainable as a, not as a, like you described it as an interrupt, but as an, in the normal course of business without heroic efforts, it has to be maintainable.

You have to be able to patch, you have to be able to take the system down. You can’t say that gosh, this system is so important. Like we can’t, we take it down. We’re going to lose millions of dollars ever. Like we can’t take it down. Not a good, it’s not a good look. You didn’t design it right.

Andrew: That system is gonna go down. Is it gonna be on your schedule or not? The other thing I think about with patching is not just vulnerability management But you know Let’s say you don’t patch and suddenly you’ve got a very urgent Vulnerability that does need to be patched and your four major versions and three sub versions behind now you have this massive uplift That’s probably going to be far more disruptive to get that security patch applied, as opposed to if you’re staying relatively current, n minus one or n minus two, it’s much less disruptive get that up to date.

Not to mention all of the end of life and end of support issues that come with running really old software. And don’t even know what vulnerabilities might be running out there, but just keeping things current as a matter of course, I believe. It makes dealing with emergency patches much, much easier. all these things take time and resources away from what is perceived to be higher value activities. So it’s constantly a resource battle.

Jerry: And there was like, there was a quote related to what you just said in, at the end of this article, it said I think it mostly comes down to quote, I think it mostly comes down to technical debt. You explained it’s very, it’s a very unsexy thing to work on. Nobody wants to do it and everyone feels like it should be automated, but nobody wants to take responsibility for doing it.

You added the net effect is that nothing gets done and people stay in the state of technical debt. Where they’re not able to prioritize it.

Andrew: That’s not a great place to be.

Jerry: No, there wasn’t another interesting quote that I often see thrown around and it has to do with the percent of patches. And so the, I’ll just give the quote towards the beginning of the article. Patching is still notoriously difficult for us to principal analyst. Andrew Hewitt told the register.

Hewitt, who specializes in it ops said that while organizations strive for a 97 99 percent patch rate, they typically only managed to successfully fix between 75 and 85 percent of issues in their software. I’m left wondering, what does that mean?

Andrew: Yeah, like in what time frame? In what? I don’t know. I feel like what he’s talking about maybe is They only have the ability to automatically patch up to 85 percent of the deployed software in their environment.

Jerry: That could be, it’s a little ambiguous.

Andrew: It is. And from my perspective, there’s actually a couple different things where we’re talking about here, and we’re not being very specific. We’re talking about I. T. Operations are talking about corporate I. T. Solutions and systems and servers. For an IT house, I work in a software shop, so we’ve got the whole software side of this equation, too, for the code we’re writing and keeping all that stuff up to date, which is a whole other complicated problem that, some of which I think would be inappropriate for me to talk about, but, so there’s, it’s doubly difficult, I think, if you’re a software dev shop to keep all of your components and dependencies and containers and all that stuff up to date.

Jerry: Absolutely. Absolutely. I will also say that A couple of other random thoughts on my part, this, in my view, gets harder or gets more complicated, the larger in larger organizations, because you end up having these kind of siloed functions where responsibility for patching isn’t necessarily clear, whereas in a smaller shop.

You may have an IT function who’s responsible end to end for everything, but in large organizations, oftentimes you’ll have a platform engineering team or who’s responsible for, let’s say, operating systems. And then you may have a, that, that team is a service provider for other other parts of the business.

And those other parts of the business may not have a full appreciation for what they’re responsible for from an application perspective, and especially in larger companies where, they’re want to reduce head count and cut costs, the, those application type people in my, my experience, as well as the platform team are are ripe targets for reductions.

And when that happens. You end up in this kind of a weird spot of having systems and no clear owner on who’s actually responsible. You may even know that you have to patch it, but you may not know whose job it is.

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. In my perfect world, every application has a technical owner and every underlying operating system or underlying container has a technical owner. Might be the same, might be different. And they have their own set of expectations. Often they’re different and often they’re not talking to each other. So there could be issues in dependencies between the two that they’re not coordinating well. And then you get gridlock and nobody does anything.

Jerry: So these are pragmatic problems that in my experience. They present themselves as salt is a sand in the gears, right? They make it very difficult to move swiftly. And that’s what in my ex in my experience drives that heroic effort, especially when something important comes down the line, because now you have to pay extra attention because that something is not going to, that there isn’t a well functioning process.

And I think that’s. Something as an industry, we need to focus on. Oh, go ahead.

Andrew: I was just gonna say, in my mind, some of the ways you solve this, and these are usually said difficult to do, but proper. I should define that. Maintained asset management, I. T. asset management is key. And in my mind, you’ve got to push your business to make sure that somebody has accountability to every layer of that application. And push your business to say, hey, if we’re not willing to invest in maintaining this, and nobody’s going to take ownership of it, it shouldn’t be in our environment. must be well owned. This is, it’s like when you adopt a dog. Somebody’s got to take care of it. And you can’t just neglect it in the backyard. So we run into stuff all the time where it’s just, Oh, nobody knows what that is. Then get rid of it. attack surface. That’s a single thing out there is something that could be attacked. If it’s about being maintained, that becomes far riskier from an attack surface perspective. So I think that, and I also think about, Hey, tell people before you go buy a piece of software, do you have the cycles to maintain it? Do you have the expertise to maintain it?

Jerry: The business commitment to fund its ongoing operations, right?

Andrew: Exactly. I don’t know. It gets stickier. And now we have this concept of SaaS, where a lot of people are buying software and not even thinking about the backend of it because it’s all just auto magic to them. So they get surprised when it’s, Oh, it’s in house. We’ve got to actually patch it ourselves. Yeah,

Jerry: The other article in cybersecurity dive had a, another interesting quote that I thought lacked some context and the quote was. There are, there were 26, 447 vulnerabilities disclosed last year and bad actors exploited 75 percent of vulnerabilities within 19 days.

Andrew: no, that’s not right.

Jerry: Yeah, here’s, here is the missing context.

Oh, and it also says one in four high risk vulnerabilities were exploited the same day they were disclosed. What now, the missing context is this report linked, or this quote is referring to a report by QALYS that came out early. At the beginning of the year and what it was saying is that about 1 percent of vulnerabilities or are what they call high risk and those are the vulnerabilities that end up having exploits created, which is an interesting data point in and of itself, that only 1 percent of vulnerabilities are what people go after.

Patching our goal is to patch all of them. What they’re saying is that 75 percent of the 1%, which had vulnerability or had exploits created, had those exploits created within 19 days.

Andrew: That makes, that’s a lot more in line with my understanding.

Jerry: And 25 percent were exploited within this the same day. So I, and that’s the important context. It’s a very salacious statement without that extra context. And I will say that as a as a security leader, one of the challenges we have is, again, that there, there were almost 27, 000.

Vulnerabilities. I think we’re going to blow the doors off that this year,

not all that they’re not all equally important. Obviously they’re rated at different levels of severity, but the real, the reality for those of us who pay attention, that it’s not just the critical vulnerabilities that are leading to. being exploited and hacked and data breaches and whatnot.

There’s plenty of instances where you have lower severity from a CVSS perspective, vulnerabilities being exploited either on their own or as put together but the problem is which ones are important. And so there’s a whole cottage industry growing up around trying to help you prioritize better with which which vulnerabilities to go after.

But that is the problem, right? We, like we, we, I feel like we have quite Kind of a crying wolf problem because 99 percent of the time or more, the thing that we’re saying the business has to go off and spend lots of time and disrupting their their availability and pulling people in on the weekends and whatnot is not, Exploited, it’s not a targeted by the bad guys, you only know which ones are in that camp after the fact.

So if you had that visibility before the fact, it’d be better, but that’s a that’s a very naive thing at this point.

Andrew: Yeah. If 1%.

Jerry: If I could only predict the winning lottery numbers.

Andrew: The other thing, and the debate, this opens up, which I’ve had, Many times in my career is ops folks, whomever, I’m not the bad guys. They’re just asking questions, trying to prioritize. Prove to me how this is exploitable. That’s a really unfair question. I can’t because I’m not hacker who could predict every single way this could be used against a business.

I have to play the odds. I have to play statistically what I know to be true, which is that some of them will be exploited. One of the things I could do is I could prioritize, Hey, what’s open to the internet? What’s my attack service? What services do I know are open to anonymous browsing or not browsing, but, reachability from the internet. Maybe those are my top priority. And I watched those carefully for open RCEs or likely exploitable things or, and I prioritize on those, but at the end of the day, not patching something because I can’t prove it’s exploitable. that I can predict what every bad guy is ever going to do in the future or chain attacks in the future that I’m not aware of.

And I think that’s a really difficult thing to prove.

Jerry: Yeah, a hundred percent. There, there are some things that can help you, some things beyond just CVSS scores that can help you a bit, certainly if you look at something and it is worm able , right? Remote code, execution of any sort is something in my estimation that you really need to prioritize the the CISA agency, the cybersecurity infrastructure security agency, whose name still pisses me off.

All these years later, because they has the word security too many times in it, but they didn’t ask me. They have this list they call Kev. It’s the known exploited vulnerabilities list, which, in, in previous years was a joke because they didn’t update it very often. But now it’s actually upgrade updated very aggressively.

And so it contains the list of vulnerabilities that the U S government and some other foreign partners see actively being exploited in the industry. And so there’s a, that’s also a data point. And I would say. My perspective is that shouldn’t be the thing that you say that’s, those are going to be what we patch then it’s your, my view, your approach should be, we were going to patch it all, but those are the ones that we’re not going to relent on.

There’s always going to be a need. There’s going to be some sort of There’s going to be an end of quarter situation or what have you, but these are the ones that, that you should be looking at and saying, no, like these can’t wait they have to, we have to patch those.

Andrew: Yep. 100%. And a lot of your vulnerability management tools are now integrating that list. So it can help you right in the tool know what the prioritization is. But bear in mind, there’s a lot of assumptions in that, that those authorities have noted activity, have noted and shared it, understood it, and zero days happen.

Jerry: Somebody had to get, the reality is somebody had to get hacked.

Autologically, somebody had to get hacked for it to be on the list.

Andrew: right, so don’t rely only on that, but it is absolutely a good prioritization tool and a good focusing item of look, we have this, know we have this is known exploitable. We’re seeing exploits in the wild. We need to get this patched.

Jerry: Yeah, absolutely. So moving on to the next story, this one is from a cybersecurity consulting company called Cybernary. I guess it’s how you would say it.

Andrew: I’d go with that. That seems reasonable.

Jerry: The title is, I’m sure somebody will correct me if I got it wrong. Title here is what’s the worst place to leave your secrets. Research into what happens to AWS credentials that are left in public places. I thought this was a fascinating read, especially given where I had come from. I’ve been saying for some time now on this, on the show, API keys and whatnot are the next big horizon for attacks.

And in fact, we had been seeing that, we’re actually, I think on the upswing in the past, in my former role, we saw a lot of that manifesting itself as attackers using those to mine crypto, like they would hijack servers or platforms. Or containers or whatever to mine cryptocurrency.

But I think over time, we’re going to see that morph into, more data theft and perhaps less overt actions. I’m sure it’s, it is already happening. I’m not, I don’t mean to say that it isn’t happening, but I think it’s in the periphery right now where a lot of the activity, at least A lot of the voluminous activity tends to be what I’ll call more benign, like again, crypto mining.

But anyway, this the approach that this organization took here was pretty interesting. There’s a company called thinkst that has this kind of like. Concept of canary tokens and canary credentials. And they are exactly what they sound like. It’s a set, it’s a set of secrets that you can create through this company and watch how they’re used.

You can see, you can get an alert when somebody tries to use them. And that’s exactly what they did here. They created, I think it was 121, 121. That’s the number of total attempts. I don’t know exactly how many credentials they created. They created a number of credentials and they spread them around and they they used a number of different services.

Let’s see, they had GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Docker hub. They created their own FTP web server. And blog, they put them on pastebin jfiddle. They put them into the NPM JS repository in the PyPI repository, which we just talked about. They put them in the various cloud storage buckets. And then they just waited to see how and when they were accessed.

And unsurprisingly to me this. Was pretty successful. It was a very successful test. I am a little surprised at some of the results. So the one of the, one of the charts they give is how long it took for different credit credentials planted at different places to be used.

Andrew: It’s insane.

Jerry: So the NPM JS was less than 60 seconds.

Andrew: So that means, from the time of posting, somebody somehow picked it up with some kind of scanner and could turn around and test using it in less than a minute.

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: That’s insane.

Jerry: Pi was 120 seconds. So just shy of two minutes. GitHub was 127. 127 seconds, just just over two minutes. Pastebin was 50 minutes their own web server, 47 hours and docker hub 6. 9 days.

Andrew: Man, what’s going on with Docker Hub? Just nobody cares?

Around to it.

Jerry: nobody cares. I think it’s a lot more involved. It’s not as it’s not as readily scannable, I would say.

Andrew: I can tell you from my own experience in previous roles, we used to get reports all the time for Hey, you’ve got the secret out here. Hey, you’ve got the secret out here people looking for bounties. I still want to know what tools are using to find this stuff so rapidly because it’s fast.

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: And

Jerry: Like a GitHub, GitHub will, we’ll give you a, an API so you can actually subscribe to an API. Again, it’s not perfect because it’s obviously they are. Typically relying on randomness or, something being prefixed with password equals or what have you. But it’s not a, it’s not a perfect match, but there’s lots of lots of tools out there that people are using.

The one that I found most interesting and it’s more aligned with the Docker Hub one, but not. And I think it’s something that is a much larger problem that hasn’t manifested itself as a big problem yet. And that is, with container images you can continue to iterate on them.

You can and by default when you spin up a container, it is the end state of a whole bunch of what I’ll just call layers And so if you, let’s say included credentials at some point in a configuration file, and then you later deleted that file, when you spin up that container in a running image, you won’t find that file.

But it actually is still in that container image file. And so if you were to upload that container image file to, let’s say Docker hub and somebody knew what they were doing, they could actually look through the history and find that file. And that has happened I’ve seen it happen a fair number of times you, you have to go through some extra steps to squash down the container image so that you basically purge all the history and you only ended up with the last intended state of the container file, but not a lot of people know that, like how many people know that you have to do that?

Andrew: well, including you, the six people listening to this show, maybe four others.

Jerry: So there’s a lot of there’s a lot of nuance here. So I thought, The time the timing was just. Fascinating. That, that it was going to be fast just based on my experience. I knew it was going to be fast, but I did not expect it to be that fast. Now in terms of where most of the credentials were used.

That was also very interesting. Hello. Was a little, in some areas, some respects, not what I expected. So the most the most targeted or the place where the most credentials was used was Pastebin, which is interesting because Pastebin also had a relatively long time to detect. And so I think it means that people are more aggressively crawling it.

And then the second most common is a website. And I think that one does not surprise me because crawling websites has been a thing for a very long time. And I think there’s lots and lots of tools out there to help identify credentials. So obviously it’s a little. Dependent on how present them.

If you have a password. txt file and that’s available in a index in directory index on your webpage. That’s probably going to get hit on a lot more.

Andrew: I’m, you know what?

Jerry: Yeah, I know. You’re not even going to go there. Yep. You’re I’ll tell you the trouble with your mom. There you go. Feel better.

Andrew: I feel like she’s going to tan your hide.

Jerry: See, there you go. You got the leather joke after all. Just like your mom.

Andrew: Oh, of nowhere,

Jerry: All right. Then GitHub was a distant third.

Andrew: which surprises me. I,

Jerry: That did surprise me too.

Andrew: Yeah. And also I also know GitHub is a place that tons and tons of secrets get leaked and get labs and similar because developers do have, it’s very easy for them to accidentally leak secrets in their code up to these public repos. And then you can never get rid of them.

You’ve got to rotate them.

Jerry: I think it. So my view is it’s more a reflection of the complexity with finding them, because in a repository, you got to search through a lot of crap. And I don’t think that the tools to search for them is as sophisticated as let’s say, a web crawler, hitting paste in the website.

Andrew: Which is fascinating that the incentive is on finding the mistake by third parties. Yeah. got better tooling then. Now, to be fair, all of these, like if GitHub for instance, has plenty of tools you can buy, both homegrown at GitHub or third parties that in theory will help you detect a secret before you commit it, but they’re not perfect and not everybody has them.

Jerry: Correct. Correct. And I also think it’s more in my experience. It’s much more of a common problem from a, from a likelihood of exposure from from the average it shop, you’re much more likely to see your keys leak through GitHub than you are from people posting them on a website or on pastebin.

But, knowing that if they do end up on pastebin, like somebody’s going to find them is I think important to know, but my Experience it’s, it’s Docker hub in the code repositories, like PyPy and MPM and GitLab and GitHub. That’s where it happens, right? That’s where we leak them.

It’s interesting in this, in this test, they tried out all the different channels to see which ones were more, more or less likely to get hit on. I think you get hub in my experience, GitHub and Docker hub and whatnot. are the places that you have to really focus and worry about because that’s where they’re, that’s where they’re leaking.

Andrew: Yeah. It makes sense. It’s a fascinating study.

Jerry: Yeah. And it

sorry, go ahead.

Andrew: I would love for other people to replicate it and see if they get similar findings.

Jerry: Yes. Yes. I, and this is one of those things that, again the tooling is not there’s not a deterministic way to tell whether or not your code has a password or not in it. There are tools, like you said, that will help identify them. To me, it’s. And it’s important to create a I would call the three, three legs of the stool approach.

One is making sure that you have those tools available. Another would be making sure that you have the tools available on how to store credentials securely, like having. Hash a car vault or something like that available. And then the third leg of the stool is making sure that the developers know how to use those.

Know that they exist and that’s how you’re, how they’re expected to actually use them. Again, it’s not perfect. It’s not a firewall. It’s, you’re still reliant on people who make mistakes.

Andrew: Two questions. First of all, that three legged stool, would that be a milking stool?

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: Second, plus a question, more comment. I would also try to teach your teams, hey, try to develop this software with the idea that we may have to rotate this secret at some point.

Jerry: Oh, great point. Yes.

Andrew: and try not to back yourself into a corner that makes it very difficult to rotate.

Jerry: Yeah. I will also, I’ll go one step further and say that not only should you do that, but you should at the same time implement a strategy where those credentials are automatically rotated on some periodic basis. Whether it’s a month, a quarter, every six months, a year, it doesn’t really matter having the ability to automate it or to have them automated, have that change automated, gives you the ability in the worst case scenario that somebody calls you up and says, Hey, like we just found our key on on GitHub, you have an ability to go exercise that automation, but Without having to go create it or incur downtime or whatnot.

And that the worst case is you’re stuck with this hellacious situation of I’ve got to rotate the keys, but if I rotate the keys, the only guy that knows how to, this application works is on a cruise right now. And if we rotate it, we know it’s going to go down and we, so you’re end up in this That’s really bad spot.

And I’ve seen that happen so many times.

Andrew: And then the see saw ends up foaming at the mouth like a mad cow.

Jerry: Yes, that’s right. Cannot wait for this to be over. All right. The the last story mercifully is Mike is also from the register. com. And the title is Microsoft patches is scary. Wormable hijacked my box via IPv6 security bug and others. It’s been a while since we’ve had one that feels like this. So the the issue here is that Microsoft just released a patch as part of its patch Tuesday for a a light touch pre authentication, remote code exploit yeah, remote code exploit over the network, but only for IPv6,

Andrew: which to me is holy crap, big deal. That’s really scary.

Jerry: incredible.

Andrew: and either, I don’t know, I feel like this hasn’t gotten a ton of attention yet. Maybe because there wasn’t like a website and a mascot and a theme song and a catchy name.

Jerry: Yes. And

Andrew: But, so if you’ve got IPv6 running on pretty much any modern version of Windows, zero click RCE exploit, over, have a nice day. That’s scary. That’s a big deal.

Jerry: the better part is that it is IPv6. Now I guess on the on the downside it’s IPv6 and IPv6 typically is isn’t. Affected by things like NAT based firewalls. And so quite often you have a line of sight from the internet straight to your device, which is a problem. Obviously not always the case.

On the other

Hand, it’s not widely adapted.

Andrew: but a lot of modern windows systems are automatically turning it on by default. fact, I would wager a lot of people have IPv6 turned on and don’t even know it.

Jerry: Very true.

Andrew: Now you’ve got to have all the interim networking equipment, also supporting IPv6 and for that to be a problem, but it could be.

Jerry: So there, there’s the the researcher who identified this has not released any exploit code or in fact, any details other than it exists. But I would say now that Apache exists I think it’s fair to say every freaking security researcher out there right now is trying to reverse those patches to figure out exactly what changed in hopes of finding out what the.

Problem was because they want to create blogware and create a name for it and whatnot. I’m sure. This is a huge deal. I think it is for alarm fire, you’ve got to get this one patched like yesterday.

Andrew: Yeah. It’s been a while since we’ve seen something like this. Like you said, at the top of the story, it’s, Vulnerable, zero clickable, RCE, just being on the network with IPv6 is all it takes. And I think it’s everything past Windows 2008. Server, is vulnerable. Obviously patches are out, but it’s gnarly. It’s a big deal.

Jerry: As you would say, get ye to the patchery.

Andrew: Get ye to the patchery. I’ve not used that lately much. I need to get back to that. Fresh patches available to you at the patchery.

Jerry: All right. I think I think we’ll cut it off there and then ride the rest home.

Andrew: Go do some grazing in the meadow. As you can probably imagine, this is not our first radio.

Jerry: Jesus Christ. Where did I go wrong? Anyway, we I I sincerely apologize but I also find it. I also find it weird.

Andrew: I don’t apologize in the least.

Jerry: We’ll, I’m sure there’ll be more.

Andrew: Look man, this is a tough job. You gotta add a little lightness to it. It can drain your soul if you’re not careful.

Jerry: Absolutely. Now I Was

Andrew: But once again, I feel bad for the cow and the calf. That’s terrible. That’s, I don’t wish that on anyone.

Jerry: alright. Just a reminder that you can find all of our podcast episodes on our website@wwwdefensivesecurity.org, including jokes like that and the infamous llama jokes way, way back way, way back. You can find Mr. Clet on X at LER.

Andrew: That is correct.

Jerry: Wonderful, beautiful social media site, InfoSec. Exchange at L E R G there as well. And I am at Jerry on InfoSec. Exchange. And by the way, if you like this show, give us a good rating on your favorite podcast platform. If you don’t like this show, keep it to yourself.

Andrew: Or still give us a good reading. That’s fine.

Jerry: Or just, yeah, that works.

Andrew: allowed,

Jerry: That works too.

We don’t discriminate.

Andrew: hopefully you find it useful. That’s all we can that’s our hope,

Jerry: That’s right.

Andrew: us riffing about craziness for an hour and hopefully you pick up a something or two and you can take it, use it and be happy.

Jerry: All right. Have a lovely week ahead and weekend. And we’ll talk to you again very soon.

Andrew: See you later guys. Bye bye.

​

https://defensivesecurity.org/defensive-security-podcast-episode-276/

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The Child and its Enemies

mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast for and about queer and neurodivergent kids and teens living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is the key. me is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself.

Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives. And kids, teens, and everyone else affected by anti child ageism are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for kids and teens that challenges all forms of control, and inspires us to create neuroqueer, feral, ageless networks of care.

I’m your host, MK Zariel, my pronouns are they them, I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at the anarchist review of books, author of the blog debate me bruh, and organizer of some all ages queer spaces in my city and online. With me today is our first ever guest, Sky Gia Garcia, who is a community organizer and freedom fighter.

Hello, Sky.

Skye: I am so stoked to be your first guest. As MK said, my name is Skyjia Garcia, my pronouns are she, her, hers, and my business in Madison is primarily centered around my work with Outreach LGBTQ Community Center, along with my personal advocacy work that continues no matter where I live and who I am affiliated with.

mk: So you work with Dane County Youth Action Board for a project led by queer, trans, and unhoused young people, correct?

Skye: Yes, I am employed by Outreach LGBTQ Plus Community Center here in Madison. I was hired to work for a program that’s now called EverStrong, and at one point it was called YHDP, which stands for Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project.

EverStrong is a program that has been designed and led by Dane County’s Youth Action Board, and the Youth Action Board is made up of youth between the ages of 13 and 24 who have lived experience of housing insecurity, and some of them just so happen to be queer as well. I think that one of the most amazing things about this Program that the Youth Action Board has spearheaded is that it is designed to be incredibly inclusive to people that are most marginalized, including the LGBTQ community.

mk: That is so cool. I would love to learn more about that. But before we get into all that, I am so curious about how you organized when you were a younger person, did you have access to spaces like the youth action board or was there other organizing or just other ways of experiencing and creating anarchy that were meaningful for you?

Skye: Honestly, I wish that I had access to the spaces like the Youth Action Board. No, there was nothing for me to access like the Youth Action Board in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois. I believe that every city should have a Youth Action Board and that we should continue to be led by radical youth who wish to break the molds that bind us.

The best ways I was able to create anarchy was by defying gender norms that existed. I would purposely position myself to be put in a space that was historically not meant for me, and at times this would create chaos because due to the support I would have from my peers, we would successfully overthrow the status quo and authority rooted in heteronormativity and patriarchy.

mk: Honestly, I love that. It would be so beautiful to live in a world where every city had youth liberationist spaces that anarchist teens could find when we need belonging and care. So, on that note, why don’t you tell me about the Youth Action Board? What kind of cool projects do you support these queer kids in?

Skye: Well, My favorite way to support the Youth Action Board is by creating a space for their autonomy to flourish respectively. Um, I’ve made sure to show up in meetings with other adults who may not understand the importance of their leadership due to the indoctrination. And I continuously center our compass on the truth that this project is to be led by the Youth Action Board.

And without their leadership, we simply wouldn’t have it. There is so much adultism that exists in the world that it really attempts to delegitimize the ways that the youth’s lived experience can create revolution. And if we didn’t have this program, Dane County, it would be a shame. Uh, this program is designed to be like no other social service offered in the area.

So, we’re able to provide necessary support in ways that hasn’t been possible, all in an effort to end youth homelessness.

mk: I love that moment of accompliceship, that showing up to not only educate other adults, but to help them advocate for youth liberation in the way you have. So on that note, um, what would you say your experience as an adult human facilitating YAB have taught you about youth liberation?

And more broadly, what would you say that youth liberation means to you?

Skye: So this is actually one of my first times ever Working on a program that was not led by all adults. Um, and so for that reason, my experience with the Youth Action Board, it’s reminded me of the success that comes from having no hierarchy of leadership.

You know, the Youth Action Board, they’re very horizontal and they’re organizing and I think that that is so valuable because a lot of the institutions that are perpetuating the violence and, uh, they. Are structured in this hierarchical way that is responsible for the oppression that we are seeing. And to me, youth liberation means listening to the voices of the youth and allowing those voices to overpower our own so long as it is rooted in expanding consciousness.

And liberation of all oppressed people.

mk: That is really interesting about how the more adult dominated spaces you’ve been in also tend to be hierarchically organized because I would say hierarchy almost originates with the HSM we all face as kids and teens with compulsory education and being grouped by age in a system that’s mostly about compliance.

And it makes so much sense and it’s so meaningful that a radical youth space would be so IC and horizontally organized. And, um, on that. On that note, what would you say your relationship to anarchy is like as a trans liberationist and youth liberationist organizer?

Skye: You know, my relationship to anarchy looks like being a part of a multitude of different horizontal projects and constantly sacrificing any type of privilege that I could hold by refusing to stay silent.

Instead, I put myself on the front lines and assure that the institutions who wish to uphold the patriarchy that is responsible for this mess know who I am and who I stand with.

mk: So Skye, how would you say that your. How does your work with Youth Action Board interfaces with the other radical spaces in so called medicine, Wisconsin?

Skye: Well, I think that the way that the project that the Youth Action Board has designed is in solidarity with other radical spaces is that it’s really done a great job at legitimizing these practices.

Because This is a program that is federally funded. It’s partnered with the city of Madison. So, I think that provides this opportunity for these new approaches, and I only say new as in Being actively practice and embrace in such a capacity, but for them to be legitimized in a way that the radical communities, especially the grassroot radical communities that don’t have the backing of a federal funded program, you know, these practices are ones that.

Radical communities have continued to attempt to implement and have continuously been destabilized and delegitimized and criminalized. So I think that it’s really beautiful watching the ways that we are really shattering the illusion that these solutions won’t work because. The proof is in the results.

You know, we are reaching so many youth who are homeless within our community of Dayton County and due to the approach, the individualized approach, the unique approach to having. Each community member design the ways in which their circumstances are barriers and how to overcome how to overcome them and providing housing 1st is the data that we have needed and being a part of that is.

Extremely liberating. I love it.

mk: What advice would you have for youth and teens who want to get into community organizing and, you know, being on the front lines in that way you describe? Or youth and teens who just want to liberate themselves and find more autonomy and care despite the ageism they face?

Or what would have been useful for you when you were younger?

Skye: Honestly, something that would have been really useful was More of the support that I shouldn’t be so quick to doubt myself. I think that that is a big problem within our society today, especially in raising youth is that youth are commonly tested of whether or not they know what they’re talking about, especially when they’re talking about themselves.

So the. Words that I have for any youth out there that are listening, I would love for you to accept whatever fear you have and go ahead and work with that fear, allow that fear to guide you and identifying barriers because. It can work in your favor. You know, while fear is heavily corrupted and influenced by external factors, fear can serve a purpose that is productive.

It’s a human experience. And I would say, the more I have healed my relationship with fear, the more it has served to protect me. So, to anyone who’s listening out there, if you want to get into community organizing because you recognize the ways that it will liberate you and your community, start your own collective.

And don’t allow the fact that you may only start with a few people to deter you. Remember to value the contribution and power that just one person has to offer, even if that one person is just you. Believe in yourself. I believe in you. And if you ever forget, find me. I will remind you.

mk: That idea of starting a collective as a teenager is so meaningful.

When I was bullied in middle school for being gay, I started a queer liberationist collective at my middle school, which, you know, middle school anarchist group. While it sounds like a sitcom, it was really liberatory at the time, and I think that so many teenagers would love that experience of finding their people and organizing and providing care.

So, if you could say anything to a teen out there struggling with something in their life and looking for community and connection, what would that be? Wow.

Skye: Well, before I get into that, I just have to say, MK, that is really, really, really cool. Thank you so much. I love it. Yeah, you are very inspiring. So when it comes to teens that are struggling with something going on in their life and looking for community or connection, I, I’d love to let you know that if you find yourself disappointed and uninterested in the status quo of mainstream society, and you want something different for yourself, because you just Don’t relate.

Please don’t give up. Listen to my voice when I say this. Please don’t give up. Another world is possible. Another world is happening at the exact same time actually. I see it and I live it with my eyes and my soul every day. Allow my voice to support you in shattering the illusion that your community isn’t trying to find you.

Shatter the illusion that your community doesn’t exist. We are here. We are looking for you, and we believe that we will win.

mk: I love that so much. And if teenagers are trying to find community with you, would you please share your shameless plugs?

Skye: Oh, yeah. So, if you’d like to connect with me, you can find me on Instagram.

Uh, my at name on Instagram is Sky Binary. That’s S K Y E B I N A R Y. And you can also find me on Facebook at Sky Gia Garcia. I’ve got a few Facebook accounts floating around, so make sure you add my most recent one.

mk: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being our first ever guest on The Child and Its Enemies.

This was so cool. And thank you so much for all the work you do for youth liberation. Any last words you’d like to close out the podcast on?

Skye: I think I would just like to say thank you so much for having me. And I really look I look forward to the ways that this will support the progress of the liberationist work that I’m dedicated my life to.

https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/skye-gia-garcia-outreach-lgbtq-community-center/

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I SEE U, Episode 101: Sylvester Turner: Mayor of Heaven, Hell and Houston

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner sits down with I SEE U inside of his office for an unguarded chat about how he led the nation’s fourth largest city through a global pandemic, historic flooding, violent crime, homelessness and notions of racial inequities as a Black man in a blue city inside a red state.

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I SEE U, Episode 100: Victoria, Texas—A Town Like Yours

Our special 100th episode of I SEE U offers fresh insights into questions raised about identity and community solidarity around the country in a powerful conversation with the filmmaker and participants of the PBS docu-series, A Town Called Victoria.

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I SEE U, Episode 29: Civil Whites Movement [Encore]

Civil Rights activist Joan Mulholland speaks unguarded about being held on death row in a notorious Mississippi penitentiary. This episode is an encore of the December 18th, 2021 broadcast.

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I SEE U, Episode 58: Slavery Ties That Bind Freedom [Encore]

Two women, one Black and the other White, connected through slavery, share intimate moments about how they were able to forge a remarkable friendship despite their family’s painful history. This episode is an encore of the September 17, 2022 original broadcast.

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I SEE U, Episode 78: Say It Loud! Woosah! [Encore]

Mindfulness author Zee Clarke not only offers a meditative guidebook for Black people who seek healing from racial trauma but also provides insight for allies into the inequities these communities face, so that empathy and affirmation can lead to effective change and transformation. This episode is an encore of the March 11, 2023 original broadcast.

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/i-see-u/2023/10/20/466717/i-see-u-episode-78-say-it-loud-woosah-encore/

#6600cc #72b372 #blackPeople #BlackPeopleBreathe #BreatheBreathwork #EatPrayLove #EddieRobinson #iSeeU #meditation #microaggressions #mindfulness #NationalWomenSHistoryMonth #News887FM #OscarSlap #podcasts #shows #WillSmith #womenSHistory #yoga #ZeeClarke