True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 369: Claude Marks
Aired: 2024-04-11
Duration: 01:34:33


=== Claude's Political Bravery (14:35) ===

[00:00:00]  Comrades and friends, our entire people from north to south, close to united, have raised up to defend their freedom and independence.
[00:00:16]  And at the same time, contribute to the cause of the peoples struggling for their emancipation and peace.
[00:00:29]  When anticipating the world, the U.S. aggressors speak about peace negotiation in an attempt to deceive the world and American public opinion.
[00:00:47]  The U.S. imperialists are the aggressors.
[00:00:53]  We are in our country.
[00:00:56]  We have not done any harm to the United States.
[00:01:00]  Let the U.S. imperialist put an end to the aggression and back up.
[00:01:08]  And peace will be restored at once in Vietnam.
[00:01:17]  Could you please give us your name?
[00:01:21]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:26]  Could you please give us your name?
[00:01:30]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:32]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:35]  It never cash.
[00:01:39]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:43]  It never cash.
[00:01:47]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:52]  It never cashed.
[00:01:53]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Radio T-R-U-E-A-Non.
[00:01:58]  Only on.
[00:02:00]  What numbers do they have for that?
[00:02:02]  107.7 Truan.
[00:02:04]  Yeah.
[00:02:05]  The Bone.
[00:02:06]  The Bone.
[00:02:06]  Do you remember that?
[00:02:07]  Yeah.
[00:02:08]  Yeah.
[00:02:08]  I was just trying to think, what was KMEL James?
[00:02:11]  That was the one I listened to.
[00:02:12]  Wasn't that 94.9?
[00:02:14]  I don't know.
[00:02:15]  Now I'm just thinking back.
[00:02:16]  I'm mixing up what the radio station was in LA, which was The With.
[00:02:22]  I was always, I listened to 107.7 The Bone.
[00:02:25]  I would listen to live 105.
[00:02:27]  1052.
[00:02:28]  Yeah.
[00:02:28]  KMEL Jams was 106.1.
[00:02:31]  Yes, that's what it was.
[00:02:32]  Yeah.
[00:02:32]  And I listened to KPOO too.
[00:02:34]  Sure.
[00:02:35]  Which I think is like really crazy.
[00:02:36]  They went with that one.
[00:02:37]  Kaypoo?
[00:02:38]  Yeah.
[00:02:38]  And in fact, it's on Divisadera.
[00:02:40]  I used to watch it.
[00:02:40]  You know what?
[00:02:41]  I'm going to say this right now.
[00:02:42]  In our interview, he said that, and I like laughed.
[00:02:46]  I love Kaypoo.
[00:02:47]  I would listen to Grinder's Grooveyard.
[00:02:49]  That was a great show on there.
[00:02:50]  Grinder's Grooveyard and Kaypoo shaped a lot of my childhood.
[00:02:54]  Everyone, I'm Liz.
[00:02:56]  My name is B-R-A-C-E because I want to.
[00:03:00]  And we have with us, as always, our producer, Young Chomsky.
[00:03:03]  And the podcast is called...
[00:03:04]  Tune on.
[00:03:06]  Hello.
[00:03:07]  Hello.
[00:03:08]  I have to say that this is possibly, I think, unless you have some secrets that you have not divulged to me, which I know is not true.
[00:03:19]  Okay.
[00:03:20]  Because you told me everything.
[00:03:22]  But I think this is the first episode.
[00:03:24]  Where we've interviewed someone that worked with your dad.
[00:03:27]  I know.
[00:03:28]  Yeah.
[00:03:28]  This is a straight Nepo episode.
[00:03:30]  You had no idea where I was going with that one.
[00:03:31]  Frankly.
[00:03:31]  No, I did.
[00:03:32]  The fear in your face.
[00:03:34]  I did.
[00:03:34]  This is my confessions episode.
[00:03:37]  You thought I was going to divulge some secrets.
[00:03:39]  We are, in fact, we have, we're interviewing my dad's old co-worker.
[00:03:43]  Yeah.
[00:03:45]  Listeners of the show, probably, I've mentioned this before.
[00:03:48]  My dad worked at the radio station KPFA in the 1970s.
[00:03:54]  Which, by the way, Brace, cover your ears for this.
[00:03:57]  You guys, isn't it so cute that Brace is like continuing the like, I'm a radio man too.
[00:04:03]  Well, he became a new, he was a new person.
[00:04:05]  I know, but it just warms my heart.
[00:04:07]  Okay, come back to it.
[00:04:08]  But my dad, my dad, well, anyways.
[00:04:10]  And so, of course, I have heard a lot of stories from this time.
[00:04:13]  He'd always tell me about these guys, Claude Marks and Lincoln Bergman.
[00:04:16]  And, you know, so sort of, I mean, he worked there for a number of years before transitioning to, I believe he worked for the SF Bay Guardian, which he was fired from, and which years later, I was able to confront the editor-in-chief, Bruce Brugman, about when he would deliver The Guardian to the flower shop I worked at.
[00:04:33]  And I'd be like, you fired my dad like 50 years ago.
[00:04:35]  And he'd be like, oh, I remember him.
[00:04:37]  And I was like, all right, I forgive you.
[00:04:42]  But I met Claude, which we talked about in the interview.
[00:04:45]  I met Claude when I was pretty young.
[00:04:47]  He had recently gotten out of prison, and there was some kind of benefit poetry reading style thing in Oakland.
[00:04:59]  And then I had always been, and maybe jumping ahead a little bit.
[00:05:04]  This stuff will make sense in the interview.
[00:05:06]  But he ran this thing called, he still does, runs this thing called the Freedom Archives, which is an incredible, I cannot stress this enough, an incredible resource for both original documentary films that they made.
[00:05:18]  Co-intell one in particular is really good, but also just an incredible archival resource for real voice recordings of revolutionary heroes and videos and stuff like this.
[00:05:31]  It's really wonderful.
[00:05:34]  But I got these CDs with speeches by, I can't really even remember anymore, but like Ho Chi Minh and shit like that.
[00:05:43]  And I would listen to those.
[00:05:45]  And then maybe six or seven years ago, and I'd seen Claude Marx various times throughout the years and stuff, but I hadn't seen him in a while.
[00:05:57]  And then, like, six or seven years ago, I went to the Freedom Archives to rent out the space beneath them on Valencia Street because I was supposed to give a talk on the Russian Revolution.
[00:06:08]  So, I guess this is 2017 because it was like 100 years.
[00:06:12]  And I don't know why I gave a talk on the Russian Revolution.
[00:06:14]  Well, it was about like, you know, anti-Russian Revolution.
[00:06:19]  Mine was, of course, restoration.
[00:06:21]  My brief, yeah, Romanov Restorationist period, which I have done to me a couple before.
[00:06:25]  I apologize.
[00:06:26]  But I'm in there and I'm talking to him.
[00:06:28]  He's like, oh, my God, you're Joe Belden.
[00:06:29]  So I started talking about that stuff.
[00:06:32]  But, you know, I really look up to Claude.
[00:06:36]  Yeah.
[00:06:36]  And, you know, we've talked, we've had mixed feelings about New Left stuff on the show.
[00:06:45]  And it differs in case-to-case basis.
[00:06:47]  There was a wonderful thing.
[00:06:47]  It's an incredible bravery that came out of the New Left.
[00:06:50]  And then, of course, like the kind of classic silliness.
[00:06:53]  And I think Claude, to me, is emblematic of somebody who was and still is genuinely about it.
[00:07:00]  About that life.
[00:07:01]  And has been ready to rock for a number of decades.
[00:07:05]  But yeah, I'm not really sure what other intro.
[00:07:07]  I mean, the interview is pretty, you know, Claude did some time for some political activities.
[00:07:15]  You know, was on the FBI Most Wanted list.
[00:07:17]  But prior to that, he was involved in this sort of nascent radical media, which came up against this kind of different, like, pacifistic element at KPFA.
[00:07:35]  And there's sort of various legends in Bay Area left-wing circles.
[00:07:41]  A lot of it is like the iHotel was a really big incident.
[00:07:44]  The iHotel, I guess, protest was a really big incident.
[00:07:48]  But also these flowerings of these alternative media institutions.
[00:07:55]  With KPFA, you know, they had some victories and they had some losses, which we get into here.
[00:08:01]  But a lot of, you know, it's a pretty fascinating story.
[00:08:05]  I'm glad we got to talk to somebody who was really at the forefront of a lot of it.
[00:08:09]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:10]  Let's get to it.
[00:08:21]  Claude, welcome to the show.
[00:08:22]  It is fantastic to have you here.
[00:08:24]  Well, thanks for asking me.
[00:08:27]  Let's see what happens.
[00:08:28]  Yeah, let's see.
[00:08:29]  Friend of the family, so stakes are high.
[00:08:31]  Oh, my God.
[00:08:33]  I met you, I believe, in, I guess, the 1990s at a poetry reading in, or maybe it was the early 2000s, but I think it was the 1990s, at a poetry reading in Oakland that I think was either a benefit, I believe, for the Freedom Archives, maybe when it was starting.
[00:08:52]  That's possible.
[00:08:54]  My memory isn't as sharp.
[00:08:59]  The earliest it could have been would have been the 99 era.
[00:09:04]  That sounds like more likely because the Freedom Archives hadn't really been physically established until January 1st, 2000.
[00:09:17]  Okay, so, well, it could have been around then, too, or maybe a little post.
[00:09:22]  I just don't remember doing something that kind of was more outward facing or public facing quite that early in terms of it could have been some other random poetry reading too.
[00:09:37]  That's also true.
[00:09:38]  Yeah, I feel like I went to a fair few of like poetry readings in Oakland as a child.
[00:09:43]  For our listeners, can you explain really quickly what, we'll get into it much more in depth later, I'm sure, but just what the Freedom Archives are.
[00:09:51]  Okay.
[00:09:52]  So maybe this is a way to launch into something right.
[00:09:57]  Yeah.
[00:09:58]  So a lot of us found ourselves in and around KPFA and KPOO in the period starting with the late 60s and into the early 70s.
[00:10:15]  And we did a lot of things that were very breakthrough and specifically in relationship to KPFA.
[00:10:26]  You know, for myself, I got to KPFA in a kind of organic but life-transforming way because I was a student at Cal during the Third World strike.
[00:10:43]  And KPFA had one reporter in the field covering the strike at San Francisco State.
[00:10:51]  But their news wasn't covering anything happening at Cal, which ironically was two blocks away.
[00:10:59]  And being kind of trying to think about what some of the possibilities were, here I was not going to class, participating in whatever was going on in any given day, but kind of pissed that the local educational media wasn't even capable of covering it.
[00:11:25]  So one day I walked down to the radio station and rang the doorbell and went upstairs and wanted to talk to the news director who was happy to talk.
[00:11:41]  And I said, how come you're not covering it?
[00:11:44]  You know, here's all this stuff going on on campus.
[00:11:49]  And there were a lot of similarities to the politics of what was happening at Cal to state.
[00:11:58]  It was, at least in the initial period, far less confrontational with the police.
[00:12:05]  But because it was Berkeley and because the Panthers headquarters were, you know, not that far away, there was a lot happening politically that was connected to, you know, the development of the Black Panther Party and certainly the anti-war movement and any number of other things that were going on.
[00:12:28]  So it was a very politicized situation on campus that took inspiration from state.
[00:12:37]  And I thought it was important.
[00:12:38]  And they said, well, look, we don't have anybody to cover this.
[00:12:41]  So you were like, hire me, I'll do it.
[00:12:43]  You don't even have to hire me.
[00:12:44]  I'll just do it.
[00:12:45]  It wasn't anything about hiring.
[00:12:48]  They said, look, if you want to go and write a story about what happened today, you know, go back to campus, figure it out, come on back.
[00:12:58]  So I went to campus and came back and sat in front of an old royal typewriter and banged out a story, which they liked.
[00:13:07]  And, you know, I mean, I wasn't being put on the air.
[00:13:10]  Yeah.
[00:13:11]  It's like I typed a story and they read it on the news.
[00:13:16]  And they said, you know, if you want to do this some more, I'm thinking, well, this is certainly more productive than just being in a picket line or something.
[00:13:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:26]  And they gave me this clunky reel-to-reel tape machine called a Ewer and said, this is how it works.
[00:13:38]  Like a portable one.
[00:13:40]  Portable one.
[00:13:41]  Yeah.
[00:13:42]  I mean, you know, it weighed, you know, maybe 10 pounds.
[00:13:47]  Yeah, You know, it's not like a cell phone today.
[00:13:51]  No.
[00:13:53]  And so I went up and started recording stuff also.
[00:13:58]  And they said, this is how you put a news story together.
[00:14:01]  And you just kind of put it together on the spot.
[00:14:03]  And I just started digging, doing that.
[00:14:07]  Well, you know, here I was in the streets of Berkeley, and there was a lot going on on campus, but there was a lot of other stuff going on, too.
[00:14:18]  So suddenly their field reporter team grew.
[00:14:24]  Right.
[00:14:25]  And for me, this was terrific.
[00:14:28]  So you expanded out from campus from there.
[00:14:30]  Well, you know, I mean, stuff would be happening with the Panthers, and I'd go and do that.

=== Indirect Voices and Social Change (12:00) ===

[00:14:36]  Yeah.
[00:14:36]  Yeah.
[00:14:37]  People's Park was a thing.
[00:14:40]  Yes.
[00:14:41]  You know, all these events, you know, massive anti-war demonstrations where they put more than one person on it.
[00:14:49]  And so, okay, so that's that for me is a personal beginning.
[00:14:56]  It's like a transformation.
[00:14:57]  Like, suddenly I don't care about school, really.
[00:15:01]  This is far more interesting, engaging, political, valuable to me personally.
[00:15:10]  But, you know, suddenly I'm able to talk to a lot of people.
[00:15:16]  And get that message out there.
[00:15:18]  You have a kind of a vehicle.
[00:15:20]  So, and, you know, and I was pretty good at it and was learning how to produce documentaries at the same time.
[00:15:29]  And I was being mentored by somebody who was, you know, very close to the Panthers and who had very developed skills in radio.
[00:15:42]  And so, you know, what could be better, right?
[00:15:47]  Yeah.
[00:15:49]  KPFA at the time was Nabit.
[00:15:53]  Was what?
[00:15:54]  Nabet, which is the National Association of Broadcast Engineers.
[00:16:02]  Okay.
[00:16:03]  Yeah, You know, and the rule at the station, according to the union contract, was that nobody could touch any broadcast equipment unless they were, you know, union members.
[00:16:19]  Okay, Teamster style, yeah.
[00:16:21]  And no, Nabet style.
[00:16:22]  Oh, yeah, I guess Nabet style.
[00:16:24]  But I associate that heavily with the Teamsters now.
[00:16:28]  The Teamsters is more than truck drivers.
[00:16:30]  Yeah, I know, I know.
[00:16:31]  There's a lot of Cal workers that in the library, for example, who are Teamsters.
[00:16:38]  Yeah.
[00:16:39]  My daughter worked for UCSF, still does, but at one point, you know, she was a Teamster.
[00:16:47]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:48]  she wouldn't know what to do with a semi.
[00:16:52]  And so you weren't allowed to...
[00:16:54]  So, yeah, and...
[00:16:56]  And so this was the beginning of, you know, those of us who were at the station were really influenced by this idea that the community had a right to its opinion on the air, both directly and indirectly.
[00:17:14]  And the station's position was indirectly.
[00:17:16]  Yeah.
[00:17:17]  And we were saying, you know, this doesn't make sense, you know, given, look, there's demands happening for inclusion of black and other third world voices in terms of curricula on campuses.
[00:17:34]  There should be departments that are dedicated to seriously deal with the academic aspect of, you know, the civil rights movement, black power, anti-war, feminism, you know, queer politics, all this stuff, right?
[00:17:54]  And, well, what does that look like at the station?
[00:17:56]  Well, we have to get rid of the union and replace it with something else because this is bullshit.
[00:18:03]  You know, what does it mean that only two people are allowed to do this stuff?
[00:18:08]  And so there was an internal struggle at KPFA.
[00:18:13]  Yeah, which ended up getting rid of Nabet and suddenly all of this set of skills and equipment became fair game to, in a responsible way, be used by the community.
[00:18:31]  Well, how do you bring more community into the station when traditionally up to that point, by and large, the people programming were white, mostly men, very academic.
[00:18:48]  And there was really, you know, unless somebody chose to put a microphone in front of someone, which did happen, that's not enough.
[00:18:58]  You know, what does self-determinant broadcasting look like?
[00:19:03]  Yeah.
[00:19:04]  So there was a whole move.
[00:19:06]  And what we did is we went and solicited people from the community to form collaborations, collectives to do programming and place demands on the station to diversify what radio was.
[00:19:29]  And it was successful, but they never thought that the product that was being created, you know, these programs that had different kinds of voices and were paying attention to different issues from a very different point of view,
[00:19:57]  they never thought that that was significant enough to archive.
[00:20:02]  Interesting.
[00:20:02]  Yeah, I know, I've looked through KPFA archives, mostly looking for stuff for my dad.
[00:20:09]  And it is strange how like, I know, I mean, I've read a lot about KPFA.
[00:20:13]  You know, there's so much stuff missing just in general from that.
[00:20:19]  Which is also crazy given the time period.
[00:20:20]  I mean, this is like a heavily, I mean, archived isn't the right word, but like a lot of attention is paid to Berkeley 1968 from all different sorts of angles.
[00:20:32]  And so you'd think that with just interest in preserving a lot of the like, you know, the activity that's going on and trying to, you know, I mean, that's something that I think we're trying to kind of get out here too, is like getting a full picture of what everyone was feeling at the time, what they were saying, and the kind of the different avenues that they were sort of carving out for transformation, for social transformation.
[00:21:01]  Yeah, I think an important thing too is you talk about the previous way that it was done where like you wouldn't hear somebody's voice unless somebody put their microphone in front of their face, you know, unless a reporter put the microphone in front of their face.
[00:21:14]  And there's this sort of this intermediary that you have to go through.
[00:21:18]  You know, there's so many people from that era and from before, but particularly from the 1960s, 1970s, who were, you know, revolutionary leaders or great orators.
[00:21:28]  And the only way that people would actually hear their message unless they were buying their party's newspaper or maybe actually attending a speech is oftentimes through like either a heavily edited excerpt that's played on the radio, oftentimes portraying them as this great evil, a terrorist, or just like a summation given by somebody who is either disinterested or trying to gussy it up for their own purposes.
[00:21:50]  And so you weren't really able to, I mean, and this is less so the case now because there's a little too much audio out there sometimes, but you aren't able to actually interface or hear what these so-called, like, you know, apparently important figures are saying.
[00:22:10]  I mean, it's a whole other area that we could dig into, which is like what's changed.
[00:22:15]  Yeah.
[00:22:16]  But there's always been barriers intentionally placed between people with radical thinking, people of color, people who are challenging gender normativity, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:22:39]  People who are opposed to the genocide in Gaza, for example.
[00:22:46]  All these are barriers to prevent opinions, ideas to be played out in a way that's unimpeded by the intervention of somebody who's got the credibility of being a news person who is essentially guided and motivated by corporate funding and thinking and buys into it.
[00:23:16]  Or their own career.
[00:23:17]  Yeah, I was going to say personal social activity.
[00:23:20]  That's kind of the interesting thing now is because there's sort of been this like diffusion of like a vaguely, I don't know if I want to say radical, but like, you know, progressive outlook among a lot of people in the media.
[00:23:32]  But there are certain things that like I think people realize that for their own career, they can't really push on or like push back from.
[00:23:38]  For instance, if you work for the New York Times and you have perhaps a different opinion on what's going on in Gaza than the New York Times editorial board does, you know, you can have that opinion all you want, but you aren't allowed to in private.
[00:23:52]  But the moment you maybe speak about it publicly or even to the wrong person in private, I mean, you'll be out.
[00:23:59]  Well, and I mean, that's been consistent because the corporate world and the government world understand the power of media.
[00:24:11]  And they've always understood the necessity to utilize it to protect their own interests.
[00:24:18]  Yeah.
[00:24:19]  And so it's not surprising that you can't use certain language.
[00:24:27]  And I mean, that was certainly true even at KPFA where, you know, I remember big fights about essentially being told you can't use the word U.S. imperialism on the air.
[00:24:42]  Really?
[00:24:43]  What was the thinking behind that?
[00:24:45]  The thinking behind that was that, you know, you could be anti-war, but you can't call out U.S. imperialism.
[00:24:52]  You can't deal in a real way with the structural nature of what's going on in Southeast Asia, for example.
[00:25:00]  You can't link, you know, a liberation struggle in the African continent with the struggle to bring about black power in the United States.
[00:25:12]  Yeah.
[00:25:13]  And so even though something like a KPFA posed itself as an alternative, there were limits.
[00:25:24]  Yeah.
[00:25:25]  And especially when you're dealing with people who aren't being paid, whose opinion is being put out on the air, the power can be exerted to censor certain things.
[00:25:41]  Now, of course, there were struggles about that.
[00:25:43]  Yeah, I can imagine.
[00:25:44]  And there were people, you know, myself included, who insisted on the legitimacy of actually using terminology like that because it's not just propaganda.
[00:25:59]  Yeah.
[00:26:00]  You know, it's not just made up.
[00:26:02]  Right.
[00:26:02]  That, in fact, you can establish clearly that, you know, there is an imperial system functioning.
[00:26:11]  And it's not even about being correct.
[00:26:13]  It's about, it's a very like direct and important distinction because it's one thing to kind of have vague anti-war platitudes and it's another to try to like, you know, to name, you know, like you say, a structural arrangement that has many different components and parts and exerts itself in, you know, various arenas in order to bring about a certain level of consciousness.
[00:26:35]  Right.

=== Establishing Collective Consciousness (05:01) ===

[00:26:36]  But try using that word today even.
[00:26:39]  Right.
[00:26:40]  Good luck.
[00:26:40]  Oh, yeah.
[00:26:41]  Well, I mean, I'm not saying you might not.
[00:26:44]  Well, what the fuck is going to happen if someone, if someone's going to leave us an angry comment or not?
[00:26:49]  It's no.
[00:26:50]  I'm curious what, if you think, you know, there's so many different mediums, but do you think there's something about radio in particular?
[00:26:58]  I mean, that distinguishes itself in, I don't know, in kind versus, you know, video or versus, you know, writing?
[00:27:07]  Like, you know, or did you see something there with the programming that you started doing at KPFA and the stuff you were covering in Berkeley that was specifically attuned to that medium?
[00:27:21]  Well, it was, I mean, there's something about radio.
[00:27:25]  Yeah.
[00:27:26]  You know, it hits people in a way that forces them to pay attention, if that's what they're doing.
[00:27:36]  Because when you're listening to something and it's not just a visual thing, there's a, to me, there's a sort of a brain focus that happens when you're talking about an audience of people who are listening to words rather than,
[00:27:57]  you know, you can turn the TV on and images will float by forever and you may or may not actually register what's going on unless you're really attentive.
[00:28:10]  I think radio demands more attention in some ways.
[00:28:17]  But I wanted to circle back just to be clear that in that period of the early 70s, the influx of people who weren't professional,
[00:28:31]  who were from the community, who were functioning collectively, who were representing different parts of the community kind of created the situation where there was a tremendous amount of cross-fertilization and collaboration among various groups that had a more grounded and radical perspective,
[00:28:59]  not just politically, but culturally as well.
[00:29:02]  And so it really created this very interesting space that was a very different sound to what had existed before.
[00:29:16]  And yet there was a very organized backlash to that that I think was driven by racism, by a fear of more radical politics being articulated.
[00:29:33]  And along with that, on a foundation level, there was a rejection of the seriousness with which the programs were put together and the content, which was very challenging to what had established the station for many years.
[00:29:57]  And so, you know, I mean, it wasn't strictly a labor struggle.
[00:30:03]  It was actually a higher level confrontation over who had a right to speak, essentially, and what cultures would be represented.
[00:30:20]  Now, when, I mean, they did ghettoize certain programs.
[00:30:25]  How do you mean?
[00:30:26]  Well, a lot of these programs were basically put together on a Saturday and said, we'll give you that one day.
[00:30:36]  You know, they didn't say it formally.
[00:30:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:40]  But that's what ended up happening, which they thought was, okay, let's marginalize this.
[00:30:46]  But what ended up happening is that the more of us that were working collectively and feeding off of one another and sharing both cultural stuff, but also, you know, some major event happens in the world, everybody swings into action behind it.
[00:31:04]  It became very powerful.
[00:31:07]  And it established some relationships that are bonding to this day.
[00:31:17]  And as I said, the refusal to archive produced programming from these various collectives and forces on the way we dealt with that was to hold on to our own material.
[00:31:36]  Oh.

=== Able to Reconnect (02:36) ===

[00:31:37]  Yeah.
[00:31:38]  Yeah.
[00:31:39]  And so, you know, many years later, when I'm able to reconnect with a lot of these folks, which is when I'm in prison,
[00:31:53]  and I've got plenty of time, it turns out that body of work, not just stuff that I worked on, but including that, but all these other kind of collective products from, you know, Comunicación Naslan, from a black collective, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:32:16]  All that stuff was in storage.
[00:32:20]  And I'm thinking, well, whoa, you know, this is what they didn't want, but this has real value.
[00:32:27]  Yeah.
[00:32:28]  And in my absence, a couple of people got Pacifica to sign a contract giving us full rights to everything in our possession.
[00:32:39]  Oh, wow.
[00:32:40]  And Pacifica was like the...
[00:32:42]  Pacifica was the foundation running KPFA and other stations.
[00:32:47]  Yeah.
[00:32:48]  And I get their emails about the various meetings that they have for the various factions.
[00:32:55]  Well, good for you.
[00:32:56]  I don't read that.
[00:32:57]  I'll read them.
[00:32:58]  But, you know, and, you know, and my purpose isn't to denigrate KPFA.
[00:33:05]  I mean, it's unfortunate that, you know, it's one station among a lot where there is the potential to get stuff out still.
[00:33:17]  You know, and we need to fight for that, especially given that it's highly accessible to somebody with a radio and a car, which a lot of people don't even use anymore.
[00:33:29]  But okay.
[00:33:30]  Yeah.
[00:33:31]  Well, now that you don't need a driver for the cars.
[00:33:34]  Right, exactly.
[00:33:35]  But you're probably going to be in the radio.
[00:33:42]  That's how that works.
[00:33:44]  Or at the gym or whatever you're doing.
[00:33:46]  But anyway, we won't get into that.
[00:33:50]  So, I mean, I guess long story short is all this rejected material was stashed.
[00:33:56]  Yeah.
[00:33:57]  And we started to reconnect and re-network and said, this is of value.
[00:34:03]  We want to figure out a way to repurpose it.
[00:34:07]  And, you know, by now, by 2000, this stuff is at least 30 years old, right?

=== Reconnecting And Repurposing (03:38) ===

[00:34:14]  Yeah.
[00:34:14]  And so let's figure out what we have.
[00:34:20]  So that's the genesis to answer the question that you asked probably a half an hour ago.
[00:34:26]  No, that's how we like answers.
[00:34:28]  Yeah.
[00:34:28]  Long and windy and good and rich.
[00:34:30]  Yeah.
[00:34:31]  So, you know, we decided to call it the Freedom Archives.
[00:34:36]  And we, you know, the founding group represents a lot of the different forces that were working collectively back in the day.
[00:34:44]  Yeah.
[00:34:45]  Because we all had an interest in, you know, figuring this out of like, here's these oral histories.
[00:34:55]  Here are cultural events.
[00:34:58]  Yeah.
[00:34:58]  You know, poetry and music that were created in a different era that have tremendous value to anybody who's trying to understand that era and to look at the continuity of, you know, communities of various struggles.
[00:35:20]  You know, what was it like to be, you know, at a rally in front of California Hall and listen to Eldridge Cleaver get 5,000 people to chant fuck Reagan.
[00:35:35]  You know?
[00:35:36]  Yeah.
[00:35:36]  I mean, that's interesting.
[00:35:39]  Absolutely.
[00:35:40]  And a classic slogan that is still potent today, I think.
[00:35:45]  I mean, that's that, I kind of wanted to talk about what, to move back a little bit to the early, late 1960s, early 1970s, is from, you know, I think in the popular understanding of the 60s and the sort of ferment, the political, I don't know, plays that were happening at that time.
[00:36:03]  The Bay Area is seen as like a very, very major kind of nexus of struggle with all these different, I mean, you had the Berkeley stuff is very famous, Third World Strike, also very famous.
[00:36:15]  But then, you know, in Oakland with the Black Panthers, in San Francisco, with some of the Asian groups, just in general, with a lot of political groups happening here and having a major both struggles and oftentimes some pretty bad stuff happening to them here.
[00:36:37]  What was it like to be around during that period?
[00:36:39]  I mean, what did it feel like very, I guess, electric in the air?
[00:36:42]  Did it always feel like something was happening?
[00:36:45]  Or did it feel more mundane in the day-to-day?
[00:36:48]  It wasn't mundane.
[00:36:50]  I mean, you know, it's like I saw the Alameda County Sheriff point their shotguns and shoot at people on a rooftop.
[00:37:00]  You know, they were firing at people in the streets.
[00:37:06]  I mean, I got hit with shot ricocheting off the pavement.
[00:37:12]  That didn't feel too good.
[00:37:13]  Yeah.
[00:37:14]  I can't imagine.
[00:37:15]  Where did you get hit?
[00:37:17]  Hit in the legs.
[00:37:18]  You know, it was just bruises.
[00:37:21]  You know, I mean, it's, you know, nobody shot me.
[00:37:24]  I'm not saying they shot me.
[00:37:26]  Right, right, right.
[00:37:26]  But I saw people shot and got shot.
[00:37:30]  You know, I hadn't experienced that.
[00:37:33]  I mean, I'd been, when I was in high school, I went to an anti-war rally that got attacked by the cops in LA.
[00:37:39]  And, you know, I knew what it was like to get tear gassed and hit.
[00:37:44]  Yeah.
[00:37:44]  Well, I mean, that happened again when I was covering the firebombing of the ROTC building at Cal.

=== People Performing Poetry (06:03) ===

[00:37:52]  When I was just standing there with my press ID and had my tape recorder out and was recording it.
[00:38:01]  Got dragged into the bushes by the cops and the next morning turns out they filed felony assault charges on me for attacking the cops, which you know that's pretty typical.
[00:38:14]  It's an interesting life lesson yeah, you know, when it happens to you, you realize.
[00:38:19]  Well, these people lie like crazy because you know they're not interested in protecting my rights.
[00:38:25]  Yeah, that's not their job.
[00:38:28]  Um so, you know, you learn this and experience it and see it happening to other people, and you know we were always very attentive to cover what was happening in the prisons.
[00:38:43]  Talk about voices that don't get heard.
[00:38:46]  Um, you did a radio show.
[00:38:48]  That was.
[00:38:49]  That was we.
[00:38:50]  We did a weekly news montage, which was an attempt and this predates MTV and all this stuff right which combined poetry, music and news.
[00:39:07]  Uh-huh, and it.
[00:39:08]  It made an attempt to be cohesive without being linear.
[00:39:12]  Yeah, and we didn't explain everything that we were doing, you know, in the most classic sense of intros and outros and yeah yeah formality we, what we did is we created a weekly montage that was, in and of itself, an attempt to create a cultural product that was also informative and cohesive,
[00:39:37]  because people were writing some radical poetry and people were performing, even in top 40.
[00:39:45]  People were performing and creating music that had content that was challenging, you know, even in the most commercial level.
[00:39:54]  Yeah.
[00:39:56]  And people that we knew who were doing that as well, who were getting no exposure at all as creative forces connected to a movement.
[00:40:06]  Right.
[00:40:07]  We wanted to reflect that as a totality.
[00:40:10]  Totally.
[00:40:11]  And so we did that.
[00:40:13]  And as I said, you know, we became the Saturday evening news program.
[00:40:20]  And at first it was a half an hour.
[00:40:24]  Later on, it turned into more of a news magazine when it expanded into an hour.
[00:40:30]  We never stopped integrating culture and politics in this work.
[00:40:38]  So, you know, to me, that was also really, it was challenging, but it was so rewarding to do something that wasn't, that broke from the confines of what was acceptable as creating news.
[00:41:01]  even.
[00:41:01]  Well, it's cool to push the form to be as transformative as the content, to kind of get it to kind of, you know, as a feedback on one another and kind of push each other almost.
[00:41:13]  Right.
[00:41:13]  And people in the streets were inspired by a lot of the cultural production that was happening at the same time.
[00:41:23]  You know, so, you know, to reflect the totality of how people were impacted, not just by world events and how they chose to organize around it, but how that was reflected in popular culture or an attempt to change what popular culture was.
[00:41:45]  And so, you know, we were really privileged to have the space to be more on the cutting edge and to experiment.
[00:42:00]  And that level of experimentation was a creative process in and of itself.
[00:42:06]  And so it was very satisfying and sustaining because people were paying attention in a way that, you know, a dry, normal newscast would never captivate people in the same way.
[00:42:22]  Yeah, yeah, it is interesting because especially if you're trying to reach people, I mean, this is something that I think I think about a lot with the stuff that we do because we try not to be like an overtly like, here are your politics, you believe this kind of stuff.
[00:42:35]  But if you want to get a political idea across, you have to oftentimes kind of mix it in with a cultural product that people understand.
[00:42:45]  I mean, that has been the case, I think, for hundreds and hundreds of years.
[00:42:51]  And it certainly is the case for like how the bourgeois operate, right?
[00:42:57]  I mean, it's even thinking to like Hollywood movies and the way that ideology, the governing ideology is expressed through those cultural products in a very sometimes pretty overt, but oftentimes sort of smuggled in with like a Top Gun style movie or whatever.
[00:43:12]  I mean, the fact of the matter is that is kind of what's effective.
[00:43:16]  I want to talk a little bit about the kind of popular narrative of the 1970s and your experience with that.
[00:43:35]  Because I think a lot of people view in broad strokes the new left as kind of coming apart with the SDS conference that, you know, with the fracturing of the SDS and with increased repression and jailings and killings of the Panthers in the early 1970s.

=== Consequences Of Political Positions (11:49) ===

[00:43:56]  Was this something that you were like sort of like, was this something that felt like dangerous at the time?
[00:44:03]  Or were you just like, well, this is just like another, you know, okay, there's like a, you know, a factionalization thing happening.
[00:44:09]  This kind of thing happens all the time.
[00:44:10]  Or did it feel like there was a sea change that was occurring?
[00:44:16]  I think that what was becoming clear to people is that taking certain positions politically and organizing on the basis of it had its consequences because the state was very clear about what the limits were.
[00:44:41]  And so if you were part of the black struggle, you know, you were faced with a military assault.
[00:44:52]  Yeah.
[00:44:52]  If you were in an organization like SNCC, you know, or the or the Black Panther Party.
[00:45:01]  So there were consequences to taking those values and organizing and acting upon them.
[00:45:10]  So, for example, as a reporter when the police were threatening to storm the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, I was in the building behind the sandbags and trying to get on the air.
[00:45:33]  Yeah.
[00:45:35]  And so not only was it something that the Panthers experienced, but me as this kid essentially being, you know, like making like I'm a street reporter for the first time.
[00:45:49]  How old were you?
[00:45:51]  Well, you know, when that particular thing happened, I think I was probably about 19, maybe 20 years old.
[00:45:57]  Yeah.
[00:45:58]  I mean, I wasn't.
[00:46:00]  I mean, my politics had developed.
[00:46:04]  Yeah.
[00:46:04]  But, you know, experientially, I mean, what?
[00:46:07]  What do you know here that?
[00:46:10]  Exactly.
[00:46:11]  You can have a very hard and ideological line at 19 still, you know.
[00:46:15]  But, you know, there was a reality to this.
[00:46:17]  So, you know, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark happens, you know, Bunchy Carter happens, you know, all these things are going on.
[00:46:29]  If you're a cognizant person and a caring person, this is meaningful.
[00:46:36]  Yeah.
[00:46:37]  You know, and yes, it's also experiential.
[00:46:40]  And you take on the responsibility of giving voice to the people who are being attacked, you know, whether it's the Vietnamese or folks that are in the black power struggle.
[00:46:57]  You know, that changes how you think and how you experience life if you're serious about it.
[00:47:04]  Yeah.
[00:47:05]  And so, you know, the blur between the journalist and, you know, somebody who, in fact,
[00:47:18]  is taking risks becomes very blurred, you know, particularly because of the vehemence and the brutality of the state and its willingness to assassinate political leaders.
[00:47:36]  You know, they were clearly doing that.
[00:47:38]  I mean, wounded knee in 73, the goon squads killed dozens of AI members, you know, people who were being shot.
[00:47:48]  Yeah.
[00:47:49]  You know, I mean, this wasn't a game.
[00:47:51]  This wasn't just an exercise in, you know, I have my right to free speech or something like that.
[00:47:58]  I mean, that's not true when you're really challenging the nature of the state.
[00:48:05]  Yeah.
[00:48:06]  When the Black Panther Party, and I was just re-listening to this the other day, when Huey Newton starts talking about, we're going to be sending people to Vietnam to fight on their side, although that didn't happen.
[00:48:22]  The Vietnamese said, no, thanks to your struggles at home.
[00:48:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:26]  Which was smart on their part.
[00:48:29]  But when you're organizing effectively and you are, in fact, challenging the stability of the U.S. Empire from within, they're going to take you seriously and they're going to take you out.
[00:48:46]  And the people who survived the assassination process, who are getting picked up and imprisoned, either because they're perceived to be a dangerous leader like somebody like Geronimo Gijaga, who does 27 years behind a total bullshit case.
[00:49:07]  I mean, why did they want to take him off the streets?
[00:49:10]  They attacked the L.A. headquarters right after they killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago.
[00:49:18]  But the L.A. Panthers had fortified the buildings so that the police didn't succeed after hours of throwing all of their munitions at the building.
[00:49:31]  Nobody died.
[00:49:34]  Well, Geronimo didn't die in that action, but they certainly want him off the street.
[00:49:43]  So they set him up.
[00:49:44]  Yeah, I mean, that was the pattern, right?
[00:49:46]  It's like they either kill you or they put you away for as long as possible or put you on the run.
[00:49:53]  Well, and who do you think is in prison?
[00:49:55]  People who are surviving the violence of the empire, who for whether whether they're put in a position of having to survive by being part of a different economy or,
[00:50:12]  you know, I mean, I'm not saying everybody, you know, that's in prison, you know, is a saint, but we're looking at people who are surviving the violence of the community and the intent of the state to dismantle community and family.
[00:50:28]  That's the purpose of putting black people in their place, of putting brown people in their place.
[00:50:36]  That's what the state does.
[00:50:39]  And so, you know, how do you give voice to those that survive?
[00:50:47]  You know, you also have to take some initiative to people who are in the grips of the repressive legal process to put out, you know, their side of what's happening.
[00:51:09]  That's problematic too, from the standpoint of people want to control information.
[00:51:17]  You know, what does it mean to take a position that the Vietnamese people have a right to use people's war as a way of liberating themselves from the U.S. after having defeated the French, after having, you know, gone up against, you know, the Japanese before that, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:51:41]  And to come out and say, well, this war that's being waged has legitimacy from their point of view.
[00:51:51]  That's not like bring our boys home, we don't want them dying.
[00:51:54]  Totally, totally.
[00:51:55]  That's about the right of people to liberate themselves, to fight for independence and self-determination.
[00:52:02]  When you say that on the air, that's not a very popular thing to people who want to control the politics being expressed to the public.
[00:52:15]  And so you find yourself, you know, in a challenging situation oftentimes, or your access to the air is going to be eliminated.
[00:52:29]  And so you have to fight those fights.
[00:52:32]  And there were versions of those fights within the radio station that were, you know, largely led by third world people who were also struggling for the right to access the airwaves for the first time,
[00:52:49]  not as victims of violence being interviewed by a white reporter, but by people producing programs and interviewing their own community members to talk about what liberation might look like if it succeeds.
[00:53:06]  And so understanding even before we knew what the word COINTELPRO was, you know, a counterinsurgent politics of the state, understanding that viscerally by being in the street and being in the community is a, I mean, it's a major life lesson for anybody.
[00:53:29]  And when you can in turn communicate that effectively to other people, that becomes a very different way of looking at media and its role.
[00:53:44]  And so it too was transformative, not just personally, but to many of us who found ourselves with access and the ability to decide what to put out and how to put it out, whether it be, you know, a news program or a cultural program that reflected the emergence of a resistant culture.
[00:54:14]  So, you know, it was very rich in that sense.
[00:54:18]  And it really meant that we all had to take a position.
[00:54:26]  And ultimately, a lot of us, you know, were kicked out because it was too challenging.
[00:54:35]  You said around this time, you know, when you're talking about that attack on the Panthers, like that your politics were already pretty developed.
[00:54:43]  But through this kind of period of increased repression and, I don't know, backlash and counter strike from the state, basically, did you feel your politics not change, but like, I don't know, further develop or it's radicalized, it's radicalized even further.
[00:55:02]  It doesn't feel like the right terminology.
[00:55:04]  I don't know.
[00:55:05]  I'm searching for the words, but well, I mean, it's one thing to be a high school kid, going to a meeting of the Black Panther Party in LA, trying to raise community awareness to being a reporter and seeing what was actually happening in the street and witnessing state violence, police violence,
[00:55:28]  and to understand what counterinsurgency looked like and the commitment of the state to essentially eliminate not just individuals, but a movement.

=== Greatest Threat Defined (15:15) ===

[00:55:45]  I mean, the intent was, and it's not illogical.
[00:55:52]  You know, when J. Edgar Hoover says the Black Panther Party was the greatest threat to the stability of the United States, he was right.
[00:56:00]  Yeah.
[00:56:01]  You know.
[00:56:01]  Yeah, take him seriously.
[00:56:03]  Well, no, I mean, you know, I mean, I'm not defending him.
[00:56:08]  No, no, I know.
[00:56:09]  I'm just saying, like, he's not being cynical.
[00:56:11]  You know, he understood what the real threat of masses of, you know, poor third world people feeling a kinship to the anti-colonial struggles that were happening globally,
[00:56:29]  to successful revolutions, whether it be, you know, the Soviet Union or China or Vietnam and Cuba, you know, especially when there were massive amounts of people in the street behind this stuff.
[00:56:48]  You know, that's a real thing to them.
[00:56:50]  And so they, you know, they colonize historically.
[00:56:56]  They commit genocide against indigenous people.
[00:56:59]  They, you know, they create the slave trade.
[00:57:05]  They arrive at power through brutality and violence by killing people and stealing their land.
[00:57:14]  And how are they going to hang on to power in the long run?
[00:57:17]  Well, I mean, they're going to use the same methodology.
[00:57:20]  They're not shy about it.
[00:57:22]  They'll justify it in different ways.
[00:57:25]  They'll criminalize the resistance.
[00:57:27]  They'll criminalize those that are fighting for liberation because, you know, they can write whatever laws they want.
[00:57:34]  Yeah.
[00:57:34]  Well, they brought a lot of the counterinsurgency methods that were refined overseas back home for use on what they viewed as the insurgency here, too.
[00:57:42]  Sure.
[00:57:43]  And that, I mean, it's from my understanding of it, you know, it's this really increased throughout the 1970s, you know, like the amounts of jailings, shootings, But then also just like the diffusion of like drugs and the cultural force to like really diffuse any kind of movement.
[00:58:04]  And of course, the ending of the Vietnam War, too, like, you know, it's.
[00:58:08]  But let me interject something.
[00:58:11]  Absolutely.
[00:58:11]  Absolutely.
[00:58:15]  Let's get away from the passive tense here for a second.
[00:58:18]  Yeah.
[00:58:19]  When you say the ending of the Vietnam War, really what we're talking about here is the victory of a people's war against the largest, strongest military in history.
[00:58:34]  True.
[00:58:35]  Yeah.
[00:58:35]  Right?
[00:58:37]  And there's a reason why it won isn't referred to like that.
[00:58:42]  Right.
[00:58:43]  And this isn't to jump on your case.
[00:58:46]  No, I think we're also not pro-American Vietnam.
[00:58:49]  Vietnam isn't taught for a reason.
[00:58:54]  The reason it's not taught is because here's this underdeveloped country that in fact wins a victory politically and militarily against the United States, which is transformative globally.
[00:59:11]  The fact that they were able to do that, and it didn't just happen overnight.
[00:59:16]  I mean, this is a protracted struggle that takes place and succeeds in mobilizing, you know, the pacifists in Vietnam maybe didn't pull triggers, but they certainly smuggled weapons and ammunition to the people who did.
[00:59:36]  Yeah.
[00:59:37]  You know, why did they do that?
[00:59:40]  I mean, they were one to the cause of fighting for their independence and liberation against colonialism.
[00:59:50]  It's not that different in any number of other struggles that were taking place, even though today one can look back and say, well, it didn't really accomplish what they said, but this is a period in which anti-colonial struggles, you know, liberatory politics, revolutionary thinking, a struggle for socialism.
[01:00:13]  Good God, why do we want to do that?
[01:00:17]  You know, all this stuff is happening.
[01:00:19]  And of course, it's reflected internally.
[01:00:22]  Yeah.
[01:00:23]  It makes sense.
[01:00:24]  So, yeah, Huey had the right idea because he was struggling to develop an internationalist politics.
[01:00:33]  Was he the first?
[01:00:34]  No, I mean, Malcolm X went to the continent.
[01:00:36]  Yeah.
[01:00:37]  You know, what did he learn?
[01:00:38]  I mean, he learned a lot and he was too dangerous when he got back.
[01:00:45]  I mean, even Martin Luther King Jr. was too dangerous for them, you know, because he was becoming an anti-imperialist too.
[01:00:55]  It's not that he wanted everyone to dream.
[01:00:58]  He wanted people to struggle.
[01:01:00]  And he understood why urban rebellions happened.
[01:01:04]  And he defended his people's right to do that in the face of a global movement that was rising up and challenging some of the essence of what capitalism was able to accomplish.
[01:01:21]  These, you know, these issues are not small.
[01:01:25]  This is a real challenge to their power.
[01:01:29]  And the way they could sustain themselves in the face of that is by unleashing untold kind of violence, both directed at specific people and at whole communities.
[01:01:45]  So the violence, you know, the occupied community by the military, i.e. the police, you know, happens for a reason.
[01:01:56]  It's just not coincidental that suddenly there's over-policing in a black community.
[01:02:03]  I mean, this is about preventing slave rebellion.
[01:02:06]  And it's no different, really, than what it looked like 100 years before that.
[01:02:12]  It's just a more modern version of it.
[01:02:15]  And, you know, they have to sell that in order to accomplish it.
[01:02:21]  So they need to control the messaging too.
[01:02:24]  And believe, you know, I mean, if you really break down what the role of the media is, you can see a reflection of the same kind of struggles emerging, you know, from the grassroots on one hand, where it can.
[01:02:45]  And by and large, the corporate media stepping in to say, these people are criminals and we have to put them away.
[01:02:55]  And so once COINTELPRO or counterinsurgency program succeeds in destroying the leading people and organizations, what do they do?
[01:03:07]  Suddenly mass imprisonment becomes a way to harness the potential for rebellion by essentially criminalizing virtually everything, infusing drugs into the community because if you're drugged out, you're not going to be rising up.
[01:03:29]  Well, also, if you have drugs, it's really easy to arrest you.
[01:03:32]  That's right.
[01:03:33]  So they can do both.
[01:03:35]  Two words with one stone.
[01:03:36]  Exactly.
[01:03:37]  So suddenly, you know, I mean, you know, in the early 70s, what the prison population was maybe, you know, quarter of a million people.
[01:03:47]  And it grows exponentially over the next 20 years to be, you know, 2.5 million.
[01:03:55]  I mean, does that mean that there's increased criminality?
[01:03:59]  No.
[01:04:00]  It means there's increased repression.
[01:04:02]  Yeah.
[01:04:03]  And that being black and being brown is a criminal act in the face, you know, to the state, because they have to prevent an upsurge of socially organized, politically organized challenge to the ideas that they represent, to the power that they have.
[01:04:33]  So people demanding equity, you know, which is at its most tepid, you know, becomes a real threat.
[01:04:45]  And they understand that.
[01:04:48]  They understand it.
[01:04:49]  And that's why, you know, that same thinking is so clearly unmasked in a period like this when you look at the complicity between the U.S. and the Israeli governments and the genocide that's taking place.
[01:05:07]  I mean, they continue to justify this horrific level of violence by saying, well, there are terrorists using these people as human shields and whatever it is.
[01:05:21]  You know, I mean, I don't want to get into a whole conversation about it.
[01:05:25]  Our listeners know all the excuses that they have.
[01:05:26]  Well, I was going to say it's hard, you know, when you're bringing all this stuff up, it's really hard not to bring in what's going on today because it's just so clear-cut with the example of Gaza.
[01:05:36]  I mean, you talk about the media, you talk about all this.
[01:05:38]  We talk about it in the past tense, in the 70s, but it is like literally all of these same, you know, weapons of the state or whatever are on full display right now.
[01:05:50]  Well, I mean, especially there's also the pretty clear example of campus stuff, too.
[01:05:55]  I mean, one of the first things they did in the weeks after Israel's invasion of Gaza is focus on all these like SJP and like, you know, these pro-Palestine groups on campuses.
[01:06:07]  And like in Columbia, for example, I think they banned their Columbia University banned pro-Palestine groups from being on campus.
[01:06:14]  In Florida, I think there was a state-level bill to ban SJP from the state or from state schools.
[01:06:22]  It became very clear that there's this apparatus that still exists.
[01:06:27]  And I think that a lot of people point to COINTELPRO ending, the program officially ending.
[01:06:33]  And we've talked about this on the show before, But people will point to that as like, well, that's over.
[01:06:37]  Like that kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore.
[01:06:40]  And which isn't the case.
[01:06:42]  I mean, that's not the case of how history works.
[01:06:44]  That's also not the case of how governments work.
[01:06:46]  You don't just put all the tools away and then never think about them again.
[01:06:50]  But there is more at this point, you know, with the development of technology and the way that politics function in this country now, which is slightly different from the 1960s and 70s.
[01:07:00]  There is this immense apparatus of repression that is ready to be directed basically at any point.
[01:07:07]  Well, and it's like, you know, I was just thinking about it when, you know, a little while back, you're saying that certain media, there are certain types of character, like we can show this type of this voice on this program.
[01:07:21]  I can put a microphone a little bit in front of this person, but I can't let them speak for themselves.
[01:07:26]  I can't, you know, let them sort of stand alone and say what they need to say, like from their position and explain themselves.
[01:07:33]  And it's so clear with how Palestinian voices are, like which Palestinian voices are allowed to speak and when and in what forums and how I think, you know, mainstream Americans, middle-class Americans are, you know, allow themselves or, you know, you know, take what media representations of the Palestinian struggle is.
[01:07:57]  That it's just, it's very, very, very narrow.
[01:08:00]  Well, something, something that I always think about is like, if, if, if you're Palestinian, you have to, the only thing you can really advocate for is peace and peace and understanding.
[01:08:08]  And like, you know, maybe inject some vague nationalist rhetoric, but like the type of voice that is supposed to be elevated is one that is just like seeking peace.
[01:08:17]  It can never be someone that's seeking victory.
[01:08:19]  Whereas if you're on the Israeli side, whatever you say is fine, because that is like that, it's this, you see the similar thing kind of play out with the wars that America gets in or any ally of America gets in is that like if you are the aggressor, you're allowed to seek total victory, final victory, whatever.
[01:08:38]  But if you're being attacked, it has to just be, you're just looking for like a peace or only a ceasefire.
[01:08:44]  And even that becomes like a controversial thing to say.
[01:08:47]  It's, yeah.
[01:08:49]  I want to talk a little bit.
[01:08:51]  We can talk in fairly general terms about this.
[01:08:54]  But you spent a number of years underground.
[01:08:59]  And I've always, I've, just on a personal level, really been fascinated by stories of the 1930s, 1920s.
[01:09:07]  Many, many members of CPUSA and communist movements in Europe went underground.
[01:09:12]  And I've read a lot of books by people talking about not only their own experiences, but the experience in general.
[01:09:20]  And I've never really spoken to somebody who, I've spoken to people from other countries who've had that experience, from America who spent a number of years underground.
[01:09:28]  And I just want to ask, like, how did you make that decision?
[01:09:31]  Was that like a very conscious thing or was it something that circumstances were just slowly leading to?
[01:09:37]  Well, let me back up for just a second and feed off of what you're describing, which is that, you know, successful revolutionary movements don't function just in the public sphere in order to win.
[01:09:59]  They have to function on a lot of levels because you're talking about changing the power dynamics.
[01:10:08]  If you're talking about seizing power and overthrowing a colonial power, you don't have the expectation that the colonial power will reach a moral epiphany and change its mind and suddenly give it up.
[01:10:27]  So you have to think about a movement that can function on a mass level, but also outside the purview of the state.
[01:10:37]  And any successful anti-colonial movement includes, you know, mass public organizing and mobilization, but also a capacity to inflict damage to the oppressor, both politically and militarily, even if it's just symbolic.

=== Choices For Survival (10:03) ===

[01:11:01]  So, yes, of course, as anti-communism at its peak creates the conditions, the repression in which, you know, people have to make choices about how to sustain a level of political resistance over time.
[01:11:23]  And that means that everybody who is part of that struggle can't be known and everything that happens or whatever tactics are chosen in any given period can't just be conducted in the most public way because of the vulnerability of that.
[01:11:42]  But also that the lesson historically of successful movement is to understand a struggle functioning on multiple levels.
[01:11:53]  So it's not surprising that people who were thinking more seriously about what's needed in any given period might make choices to also try to build a clandestine capacity,
[01:12:12]  the capacity of some grouping of people to function who aren't known already and who can function and do things, you know, which Oftentimes, it took the form of basically armed propaganda that didn't have the intent of harming people as much as creating a level of damage against property, government and corporate, frequently,
[01:12:41]  that would be able to, in a more emphatic way, talk about, you know, various political issues, liberatory struggle, anti-capitalism, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:12:57]  So many movements undertake this.
[01:13:01]  It's also true that as the seriousness of the counterinsurgency program of the 60s is understood, that in order to survive, certain people were also forced to function outside the purview of the state because anybody connected to certain movements or thinking was vulnerable to basically being taken out.
[01:13:27]  So all those things kind of coexist and there isn't one formulaic approach, but people were trying to think of ways that were both creative and serious about what kind of resistance needed to get built to really impact on the empire's ability to continue to function in such a violent and repressive
[01:13:57]  way.
[01:13:58]  way, both internally, but also externally.
[01:14:04]  I mean, we can look and we see.
[01:14:07]  We've been talking about all the examples of, what does it mean that a country decides to carpet bomb Vietnam and defoliate all of the country in order to, if you're going down, leave rubble behind.
[01:14:23]  That was basically, you know, the military strategy of the United States.
[01:14:28]  Let's pull the ground troops out and just destroy everything that remains now that our people aren't on the ground there.
[01:14:36]  I mean, they had no moral compunction about doing that.
[01:14:41]  And in fact, that's what the U.S. strategy towards the latter part of the war was about.
[01:14:48]  Did it in Korea, too.
[01:14:49]  Yeah, it was just a matter of time.
[01:14:49]  And they did it in Korea.
[01:14:50]  Well, look at Japan.
[01:14:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:14:53]  I mean, you know, look at the genocide against Native people.
[01:14:59]  It was a less, the technology wasn't as developed, but the purpose, you know, of the colonial violence is consistent.
[01:15:11]  So, you know, if you don't think they're going to give it up voluntarily because of some electoral process, you know, and the political system has never really been there to reflect the interests of everybody.
[01:15:31]  So once you understand that and you're in a world that's in a level of upheaval and struggle with success is happening.
[01:15:41]  It's not irrational to think that some people would risk their well-being and become part of something that can function in a more challenging way.
[01:15:53]  And that's kind of what I want to say about it.
[01:15:56]  So those are choices that are affirmative and based on trying to develop a more successful political strategy to win behind a different set of values,
[01:16:11]  behind a level of, you know, commitment to humanitarianism, to socialism, which does not allow for some people to be wealthy and powerful and other people to be barely functioning.
[01:16:29]  Well, I think just in general now, the popular history of the anti-war movement and associated radical political movements in the 1960s and 1970s is that people who went underground or became militants even in an above-ground way, but it was like it was bored middle-class kids who were rebelling against their parents.
[01:16:52]  And I think once you dig into the history, it's obviously not true.
[01:16:55]  I mean, oftentimes it was a, I mean, clearly there are examples of that, but like that became the dominant narrative of the underground movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
[01:17:08]  Well, and a lot of these movements, you know, the black movement had an underground.
[01:17:13]  You know, the Chicano movement had an underground.
[01:17:16]  The Puerto Rican movement had an underground.
[01:17:19]  Yeah.
[01:17:19]  You know, I mean, this wasn't just middle-class white kids.
[01:17:23]  Yeah.
[01:17:23]  I mean, that's an easy way to write off, you know, and take away from the seriousness of people who actually thought that building some capacity among North Americans in conjunction with, you know, and recognizing the leadership of people of color engaged in serious struggle.
[01:17:54]  I mean, that's not so crazy, really, to me.
[01:17:58]  Yeah, no, I mean, I think what you're saying at the beginning there is completely right.
[01:18:02]  I think it's just a way to be able to write that off and to view it as like, you know, the entire political movement is like an unserious, like...
[01:18:11]  Well, yeah, I mean, it's much easier to be dismissive.
[01:18:15]  Exactly.
[01:18:15]  Especially in hindsight and as a way to justify your level of, you know, violent repression.
[01:18:22]  Yeah.
[01:18:23]  Or mass imprisonment or political imprisonment.
[01:18:26]  Yeah.
[01:18:26]  You know.
[01:18:28]  So, you know, it's just like saying, you know, 32,000 people dying in Gaza is, you know, they were either militants in Hamas or were being used as human shields.
[01:18:43]  You know, it's like, okay, that's pretty callous.
[01:18:45]  Yeah.
[01:18:46]  But that is the line of the Western media.
[01:18:51]  Yeah.
[01:18:52]  And, you know, fortunately, fewer people are accepting it.
[01:18:56]  Yeah.
[01:18:57]  But, you know, there were versions of this happening around Vietnam also, right?
[01:19:03]  Yeah, a lot of that's been lost to history too.
[01:19:05]  So there's another reason not to teach it.
[01:19:08]  Yeah.
[01:19:09]  Yeah.
[01:19:09]  You know, why take this history seriously?
[01:19:12]  You know, how many people know that Ho Chi Minh worked as a stevedore in the United States?
[01:19:20]  And as at a hotel in Boston that we once stayed at.
[01:19:25]  Right.
[01:19:26]  Or how many people know that he wrote an essay on lynching?
[01:19:29]  I actually didn't know that.
[01:19:31]  Look it up.
[01:19:32]  I mean, it's easy.
[01:19:33]  Take a browser, go Ho Chi Minh and lynching, and you'll find it in a lickety split.
[01:19:39]  Yeah.
[01:19:40]  But I mean, he understood something about the nature of the enemy as a colonial power.
[01:19:47]  Once the U.S. abrogated the 1954 agreement that ceased hostility between the Vietnamese and the French, the U.S. decided, well, we're not having this shit, you know, and stepped in.
[01:20:01]  He says, I know something about these people.
[01:20:04]  They're not that nice.
[01:20:05]  You know, we better expect some rough shit coming up because, you know, look at what they do to the black population.
[01:20:15]  Look what they do to their workers.
[01:20:16]  Yeah.
[01:20:17]  You know, I mean, he had experienced that.
[01:20:20]  So it's like, okay, that's a how do you integrate that lesson into figuring out how to succeed in defeating this larger colonial power that's stepping in?
[01:20:33]  You know, interesting, right?
[01:20:35]  Another reason not to teach Vietnam.
[01:20:37]  You know, it's like if people were studying people's war and its success, that would give them the wrong idea, of course, because that means maybe that could be replicated.
[01:20:52]  God forbid.

=== Underground Lives (11:55) ===

[01:21:04]  I want to, I want to just briefly also touch on, so, you know, you spent, you spent some years underground and then you spent some years on the run also underground.
[01:21:14]  Um, And I think even just from like a more personal point of view, you know, following a sting operation in 1984, I believe, you lived under an assumed identity in Pittsburgh.
[01:21:31]  At the end of that.
[01:21:32]  At the end of that, okay.
[01:21:33]  I just want to know what it was like just personally, sort of having to, from what I understand, from the reporting around it at least, which I'm sure is not the whole story, you essentially had to assume the life of what, for lack of a better word, would be like a normal person.
[01:21:55]  And I just want to know what that was like.
[01:21:59]  Well, I want to back up for a second, which is that, you know, the thinking going into it, you know, also was impacted by the fact that there was a successful level of repression against other forces that had made, you know, similar decision.
[01:22:27]  So, you know, you had North Americans who were busted.
[01:22:30]  You had a lot of black folks that were busted.
[01:22:33]  You had Puerto Ricans that were busted.
[01:22:35]  You know, and we were clandestine at that point.
[01:22:38]  Yeah.
[01:22:39]  And, you know, yes, we got wrapped up in an FBI sting thing, but it's also true that the idea going into this,
[01:23:00]  you know, clearly we were far more isolated in the face of the repression and couldn't figure out a way to stay relevant.
[01:23:12]  Yeah.
[01:23:13]  And so that was frustrating politically, but it also, because of charges, made us vulnerable.
[01:23:23]  And had we been picked up like other people that were busted by the cops, we were looking at some serious time.
[01:23:31]  Yeah.
[01:23:32]  So, and in realizing that we were under surveillance and in getting away from them, despite the massive amount of human energy that was put into surveilling us,
[01:23:53]  was An important victory in the sense of putting a stop to their intent of developing intelligence, wrapping up more people and all that stuff.
[01:24:09]  So, you know, it's a way to look at it.
[01:24:13]  Yeah, well, it's a victory to extricate yourself from that because that way they can't use their surveillance of you to entrap other people or to like, yeah.
[01:24:22]  Yes, that's true.
[01:24:25]  And ultimately, it gave us some leverage when we were negotiating a return to public life, which we wanted to do with the idea of minimizing the impact on our grouping,
[01:24:43]  minimizing the amount of prison time for whatever individuals would have to do time, including myself, and ultimately getting back to rejoining a public struggle to continue to do a level of impactful organizing against the very state that we chose to face off with in the first place.
[01:25:11]  Yeah, I mean, that's what I was wondering.
[01:25:13]  When you were living on the run during those years, was it like a sudden shift from like, well, I can't really be overtly political now and have to sort of inhabit this other identity?
[01:25:25]  Well, when you're doing clandestine work, you don't go to mass stuff.
[01:25:29]  Of course, where your picture is going to be taken and blah, Yeah.
[01:25:35]  So, I mean, you know, maybe I should tell a little bit of a story.
[01:25:46]  You know, my in my thinking, I still wanted to keep my hand in doing media work.
[01:25:55]  Yeah.
[01:25:55]  Which is somewhat ironic because there are real limits to how much you could be out there doing media work.
[01:26:03]  You know, so what did I do?
[01:26:05]  I mean, I decided to, you know, branch out, learn something about video, and started creating political but not in your face kind of video documentary stuff.
[01:26:23]  And I'll give an example of during the Iraq war, we were living in Pittsburgh, and somebody was doing a huge job in wheat pasting various things.
[01:26:42]  Some of it was poetry, some of it was visual, some of it had some kind of contentful screed attached to it.
[01:26:52]  And all this stuff was going up, but nobody knew who it was because it was being signed off as public enema.
[01:27:02]  So very 1990s sort of non-degree.
[01:27:06]  Being the nut that I am, I decide to put up things near their stuff saying, if you're interested in doing an interview, I will maintain your anonymity.
[01:27:23]  Which is very phony.
[01:27:28]  So one day I get a phone call.
[01:27:33]  It turns out these are some high school aged folks who are running around doing this stuff.
[01:27:44]  And they agree, three of them agree to meet me late at night in a park, audio only.
[01:27:52]  I say, cool.
[01:27:54]  You know, there I go.
[01:27:56]  And I go and I say, hey, you know, like, I really want to know what's going on in your head, you know, and why you're doing this stuff.
[01:28:04]  Totally fascinating.
[01:28:05]  You know, bunch of young people I can totally relate.
[01:28:09]  I mean, I'm older by now, but you know, I can dig it.
[01:28:12]  Yeah.
[01:28:13]  They had no idea who the hell I was.
[01:28:15]  Yeah.
[01:28:15]  You know.
[01:28:16]  So that was kind of cool.
[01:28:20]  Yeah.
[01:28:21]  And I say, look, let me pull a crew together and we'll film without showing your faces.
[01:28:33]  We will videotape you creating the art, reproducing it at a copy center and wheat pasting so that we can add something visual to this.
[01:28:48]  And so they agreed and we spent, you know, time running around, you know, shooting through the window of a coffee shop.
[01:28:57]  And the only lighting is the flash of the copy machine.
[01:29:01]  So we're not really seeing who these people are.
[01:29:05]  And, you know, and doing some wheat pasting.
[01:29:10]  So we finish our last shot.
[01:29:13]  They're wheat pasting in front of the Carnegie Mellon Museum in Pittsburgh.
[01:29:19]  And we're about to rap.
[01:29:21]  And this burly cop comes over and starts pulling the shit down.
[01:29:28]  And we're shooting all this, you know, from afar.
[01:29:31]  I mean, we're not in that cop's face.
[01:29:33]  Yeah.
[01:29:34]  He doesn't realize that we're there.
[01:29:38]  And so it's a way for us to include the role of the state in wanting to destroy the very messaging that these young people are trying to put up, right?
[01:29:51]  Yeah.
[01:29:52]  And so that's the tension becomes the point of tension that this little 15 minute or 20 minute documentary ends with.
[01:30:02]  Yeah.
[01:30:04]  And because I was a member of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, it gets aired on the local station as this little cute video about public enema who will remain anonymous.
[01:30:19]  There's a secret safe with me, but I just, what's I'm curious about is like when you're listening, if I'm on the run, even however good my documents are, any kind of interaction with a force of the state, whether it be a fucking DMV, which not like I have a lot of interaction with to begin with, or a policeman, for me, that like I would feel very tense.
[01:30:45]  And was there a way to like compartmentalize that?
[01:30:52]  I wasn't thinking in those terms.
[01:30:54]  Interesting.
[01:30:55]  I was really thinking, you know, the journalist part of me is like, this is part of our story.
[01:31:00]  We're getting it.
[01:31:01]  Yeah.
[01:31:03]  It's like, we're just some folks with a camera across the street.
[01:31:07]  He didn't even know we were there.
[01:31:08]  Yeah.
[01:31:09]  Yeah.
[01:31:09]  So it's not like I didn't want to interview the guy and ask him why he draw the posters down.
[01:31:14]  Here's my idea.
[01:31:14]  You know, that would be silly, right?
[01:31:17]  But it was just sort of to me, this is also an example that whenever you do undertake doing something, there's always some magic.
[01:31:27]  Yeah.
[01:31:28]  You know, and that burly dude was the magic for this film.
[01:31:32]  Yeah.
[01:31:33]  Because, first of all, these young people were presented in a very cool way.
[01:31:39]  And obviously the role of the state is oppositional.
[01:31:42]  So there you have it.
[01:31:43]  Yeah.
[01:31:43]  You don't have to say it.
[01:31:45]  Yeah.
[01:31:45]  Yeah.
[01:31:45]  You watch it happen.
[01:31:47]  Yeah.
[01:31:48]  And so, you know, they're putting shit up against the war in Iraq and he's taking it down.
[01:31:55]  Yeah.
[01:31:55]  Is that his job?
[01:31:56]  Yeah, it's his job.
[01:31:58]  Because, you know, he's a cop.
[01:32:01]  He's a cop.
[01:32:02]  So you don't have to say it.
[01:32:04]  You can just show it, right?
[01:32:06]  Yeah.
[01:32:06]  And he wasn't beating up on them.
[01:32:08]  He was just taking their, what they were producing, their art, and destroying it so that other people couldn't see it.
[01:32:16]  Yeah.
[01:32:17]  You know, which is the role of the state on a tepid level.
[01:32:22]  But the, you know, it's, it's a metaphor, right?
[01:32:26]  That just kind of happens.
[01:32:29]  And you got to roll with it.
[01:32:31]  Yeah.
[01:32:31]  You know?
[01:32:33]  So that's my story about how you can do a dance, right?
[01:32:42]  You know, I was on the 10 most wanted list of the FBI.
[01:32:45]  Yeah.
[01:32:47]  But I still wanted to create something that would challenge, you know, the normative politics of the United States in my own kind of way.

=== Thankfully Young Risks (01:33) ===

[01:33:00]  Yeah.
[01:33:01]  Thankfully, through these young people who were, you know, taking risks too in doing what they did, you know.
[01:33:08]  Yeah.
[01:33:09]  And I mean, you know, that's what keeps you sane.
[01:33:14]  That's what kept me sane, you know, doing things like that.
[01:33:42]  Well, shout out to my dear old dad.
[01:33:45]  Yes.
[01:33:45]  I love you.
[01:33:47]  Hi, Joe.
[01:33:48]  My name is Brace.
[01:33:50]  I'm Liz.
[01:33:51]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:33:54]  And this has been Trunon.
[01:33:56]  We'll see you next time.
[01:33:57]  Bye-bye.
[01:34:02]  Could you please give us your name?
[01:34:06]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:34:11]  Could you please give us your name?
[01:34:15]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:34:17]  Jeffrey Epwood.
[01:34:20]  It never casts.
[01:34:24]  Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:34:28]  It never casts.
[01:34:31]  Jeffrey Epwood.
[01:34:32]  Jeffrey Epstein.