Unify and Divide: DxE and the Future of Vegan Activism Generally.
27 August 2017 [link youtube]
Here's the link to the website mentioned @8:45, the "faction" of Direct Action Everywhere challenging the leadership of Wayne Hsiung and Priya (and challenging assumptions about leadership/inequality in principle): https://liberation.global
Youtube Automatic Transcription
words like unify and divide are really
very loaded in the English language maybe they're loaded in every language maybe in some languages they have different connotations certainly in Chinese politically to talk about factions factionalism division as opposed to unification as opposed to maintaining a mass line and that's a unique phrase in Chinese very often we don't think rationally about why it is in politics that we might break up into smaller groups and we don't think rationally or strategically or an attached way but why it is we might have centralized hierarchical organization or why we might unify into larger and larger entities right very often these things are pursued as if their ideals their pursuit idealistically and there shouldn't be anything idealistic about it the answer for why we should operate in a small group as opposed to a large group in politics is fundamentally the same as how we would ask an answer those questions in a workplace setting or in a classroom setting if we're engaged in an educational exercise right paradoxically we form ourselves into large groups for the same reason why we divide ourselves into small groups to get more done I'm currently an educator I'm currently teaching at university level in China 20 and 21 year old students why do I divide them into smaller groups into smaller classes to get more done on the other hand for some activities why unify into a larger class or even a huge theater of several hundred students at once to get more done for some types of tasks and again many of you have experienced this in the workplace different types of workplaces different types of tasks there are some tasks where you want to be in small groups there's some tasks where maybe you want people to work alone and there are some tasks where people need to get involved in large centralized organizations be they hierarchical or otherwise okay so we have to think about these things we have to think about these things tactically and strategically with detachment or a pragmatic perspective and not think that unification isn't in itself so I say this in preface to a video dealing primarily with the latest progress in the mutiny over at direct action everywhere direct action everywhere they abbreviate their own name as DX e this is the way they choose to previa their name fine direct action everywhere is a medium-sized vegan activist organization with pretensions of being both nationwide United States and indeed global international and most of their members now are based in Berkeley California in the past they were more based in Chicago within the United States one of the really interesting aspects of their current mutiny of people rising up against the leadership is that in many ways it's the idealism of direct action everywhere 1.0 rebelling against direct action everywhere 2.0 what do I mean by this the original iteration of DXE of their mode of operation of what they were trying to do and how they were going to do it they refused to admit that they had any hierarchy at all in the early days they said they were a completely horizontal network of activists and then there were some details about different chapters coordinating with other chapters and over time what emerged and they used the word emerged quite a lot themselves they talked about an emergent authority structure was that no they weren't egalitarian at all they weren't horizontal at all they were a strictly vertical hierarchical organization led by one man and his girlfriend Wayne Siong and Priya they were the self-appointed dictators for life and really all pretense of having elections and caucuses some kind of transparent democratic process was revealed to be a joke now one of the ways they did this was that on top of the older structure of authority they created a news of authority which they referred to as DXE global I was there term rather than the EXCI top layer of the layer cake and Priya and Wayne this you know couple who you know basically running control the organization then started setting up various pretexts to justify their command and control the organization and a hierarchy of chapters and their commanders and what-have-you now some people especially people in a straight political science background might just regard this as progress measures ago this is positive to say okay they had an early idealistic phase in which they were basically in denial about inequality in the organization then the organization grew and they got a budget and somebody had to control that money they decide who does and does not get paid because yes they are paying people they are putting money in people's pockets to pay for their cost of living people are getting salaries people are getting money out of this which again I'm not hating and principal just pointing out this is one of the reasons why democracy and transparency and how you define the organization how horizontal is it some people are getting paid some are not some people are getting featured on their websites and on their YouTube channel and so on and some are not you know these are the things people within the organization fight about the people have talked within DXE the issue of just recognition and promotion within the organization like somebody works really hard on some particular protest or project and then they feel they're not being recognized by the leadership whereas someone else is there's a lot of tension around that sort of thing this is a social media era and they began with DXE 1.0 pretending that dxc was completely open at and horizontal kind of anyone could define what the organization was that anyone could just start up their own chapter and start up their own activism but in reality in practice some people are more DXE than others some people are making those decisions even if it is literally the decision of who gets their link posted on Facebook who gets their link gets their video posted on YouTube who gets some kind of wreck regulation from the higher levels the organization and who does not a lot of those struggles are really keenly felt by people now why I mean some of you might just be laughing and saying hey this is petty well it's a lot less petty when one there's time involved two there's money involved and three there were criminal charges involved there are legal fees involved people are getting lawyers people getting put in prison even if just overnight people are engaging in forms of activism to have these kinds of consequences in their life in terms of time effort money and you're in an organization where some people are getting paid other people are getting nothing and those people who are getting nothing may be dealing with lawyers fees and legal charges consequence of the same activism the other people were engaged so those inequalities can be very keenly felt beyond this mere social media a question of whose video is on the official YouTube channel whose is not right and there have been other problems I'm not really gonna get into in this video there have been problems of misconduct put it that way and then how does this hierarchical organization deal with misconduct is it really democratic or transparent is it really responsible is it really able to hold their own people to account and in the last video I did on protection everywhere we talked about the extent to which reportedly I you know ostensibly and I think I believe actually their own process of Elections their own process of selecting leaders has really been co-opted and corrupted and controlled by the two people on top so that they can remain on top forever so here what does it all come down to there was a new video put on Facebook and on Facebook only by Wayne and Priya the self-appointed dictators for life that video is really very dishonest it suggests that their problem is just with one person who's in charge of one Facebook group you know somehow connected to the recognition everywhere I can give you a link below this video to a web page from liberation global and these people they they openly describe themselves as a faction of direct action everywhere you know they get an A+ for honesty direct action everywhere has now split into factions that's the honest direct way to say it and this faction really is representing the ideals of 1.0 saying no they want to go back to the situation I'm quoting the website directly or they say quote a grassroots network doesn't need top-down leadership it needs collective control over its identity and its means of communication so they want to go back to a situation where there are no dictators and maybe there are no elections where this is a horizontal network of aspiring vegan activists and where nobody is the star leader or the dictator or what-have-you they want to get rid of the top-down form of leadership that Wayne and pre have imposed it says I can I can quote this directly they want a consensus driven collectively controlled basically internet presence that connects these different groups of activists so that was back in the day couple years ago whenever you asked direct action everywhere about their organization or hierarchy who was in charge they used to reply nobody is in charge direct action everywhere is just a network uniting groups of activists as equals horizontally and then more recently they slipped into the era of DXE 2.0 of so-called emergent leadership where they were admitting openly and even promoting themselves as led by Wayne Siong and Priya and indeed Wayne's young and Priya controlled the money ultimately there's a bank account and some people have the legal ability to sign a cheque drawing in that bank account and others do not that's the ultimate inequality right so the about parole equal it's all horizontal wheel corporate it got in somewhere and it ends here the buck stops here it ends with fundraising and ends with money now there's another important corrupting influence of money on this movement which is that dxc 1.0 was really not about so-called open rescue it really was about disruption and they had this whole complex philosophy to justify why disruption which is a form of public protests barely legal and slightly illegal public protests disrupting the normal lives of meat-eaters why disruption was their method of activism and they justified this through a very complex set of allusions to Mahatma Gandhi in India and the civil rights movement in its states and the abolition of slavery in the u.s. civil war I mean I have videos criticizing that period of their rhetoric I think it is but that was their mantra that was their modus operandi they were this horizontal organization that just did disruption and they had a whole complex philosophical rationale for that well over time the problem is people don't really want to donate money to you for disruption right where does the donor support come from I think everybody in the game figured this out pretty quickly you get a lot of donor support you get a lot of interest you get a lot of money from so-called open rescue and videos featuring open rescue ok so this means things like them break DXE members breaking into a chicken farm and stealing the chickens at one point it was a turkey farm it basically includes cattle rustling if repeat blunt and yeah that is criminal that is considered from you're stealing someone's property because legally all these animals are the property of the farm or what have you but it's very dramatic it looks dramatic on video it's something you can post to the donors about a lot of the donors are themselves elderly soft hearted people who just love animals and you can imagine these people the people who are writing checks the people are giving donations maybe they do not respond positively to direct action ever we're going into a Chipotle fast-food restaurant and just screaming at people that Meat Is Murder which is what they do they go into restaurants scribbled it that does not sell the donors oh but he put together an emotional tear-jerking video that shows you breaking into this farm at night you know and rescuing this chicken and then filming the chicken and how supposedly happy it is now that it's living in someone's backyard in Berkeley California this pulls at the heartstrings of donors including non vegan donors including meat-eaters who want to just give to the cause because their animal lovers this stuff sells and I notice both the rebel group the new faction trying to take over the leadership of the recognized Network and Wayne and Priya they've both gone over in a huge way to this this mode of activism so-called open rescue rescue based activism rescue and sanctuary based a tourism which wasn't what their movement was founded on their movement was founded on back at 1.0 the fundamental conviction that social science research would guide us to more and more effective methods of activism and that those methods of activism could should and would resemble the most effective methods from the United States civil rights movement now whether that's intelligence are stupid stick with it for a minute why aren't they putting together folk bands why aren't they putting together groups of gospel singers and going from church to church if you want to talk about effective methods of galvanizing public support in the civil rights movement anybody who knows anything knows that music was a huge part of it and specifically gospel singers and folk singers going from church to church from town to town vegans the United States have never done anything like that so my point here is there's not some simple leap of inference from saying learn the lessons of history learn the lessons from social sciences learn the lessons from the civil rights movement jumping from that to disruption ie standing in a restaurant and screaming at people that Meat Is Murder it's not food it's violence these other slogans there's no simple way to jump from that premise of DXE 1.0 to open rescue to cattle rustling like okay so you can rob cattle from a farm and then take them and put them in your backyard you're now guilty of a crime cows probably worth a lot of money it's probably a pretty serious level of theft you can go to jail for but you make this tear-jerking video and then people donate money to you how is that justified by social science research how is that justified by the history of the civil rights drone the United States and of course there were deeper questions here of why would civil rights struggle you know how how useful is it compared to any other historical example for being still there are a lot of questions and I've had a lot of videos in this channel in the past already discussing those questions but this new video from Wayne and Priya it is really being dishonest with us in stating that the problem is just a rebellion from one person controlling one Facebook group if you click on the link below this video they have a running list of all the Facebook groups that are now led by the rebel faction I could call them the egalitarian faction the faction that doesn't want hierarchy that doesn't want the dictatorship of Wayne and Priya and it's a long list of direct action everywhere websites that they've taken over so sorry you might as well click on it yourself and see but includes their medium page their Twitter page DXE everywhere that is the Twitter for divided attention everywhere their Instagram page a whole bunch of other official direct action everywhere pages like direct action every word dot or the website the rebels the the rebel faction wanting equality they have taken away a large part of direct action everywhere web presence from Wayne and Priya from the nail resented dictators and as I say I said in earlier video I've read quite a bit of the details about what happened with the last elections and how they've really they've really shut down and cut off most of the sources of free speech and I don't know debate within direct action everywhere which really mattered to people who were committed that organization committed that cause however when I click on the rebel medium page mediums a website for articles I notice they're still talking as if they control the bank account that Wayne controls and I talked to someone inside direct action everywhere and I said look it seems to me like these guys are of two minds that they're a bit you know they haven't admitted to themselves the situation is yeah you guys have taken over a bunch of websites but you haven't taken over that bank account you guys are gonna have to start your own bank account and I got a message back saying yes that's true the reality is that nail the egalitarian DXE they are more and more interested in doing open rescue cattle-rustling chicken-stealing etc precisely because they're having to get started with collecting their own donations for their own bank account so that's what it all comes down to folks the idea of a horizontal Network open to all doesn't work for a couple of reasons one is that there's a brand name here that ultimately some people have executive control over what if a group of right-wingers set up their own chapter within DXE let's not they don't even have to be neo-nazis enough extremist let's just say you have people who are hardline conservative libertarians members of the Republican Party and they also care about ecology and animal rights and veganism and they set up a chapter I guarantee you the leadership in direct action everywhere whether it's 1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0 they're gonna find some excuse to close ranks against these people and say no no no you don't get to use our name you can't call yourself the right to action everywhere cuz all the members the founding members rotated for their extremely left-wing and they're extremely into you know intersectional feminism intersectional anti racism race politics gender politics in general they'll never walk with those guys what if you get a group of people and they're a bit conservative they're the kind of guys who own rifles and they start getting into veganism animal rights and you know they used to be involved in duck hunting they're into conservation and forest habitat they're the kind of people who own four-wheel off-road vehicles and rifles and go out there just let's just say they're moderately conservative guys like that and they set up their own chapter they set up DX EE Tennessee from the backwoods of Tennessee just the brand identity alone is already exclusive and exclusionary and there are going to be power struggles hierarchical or horizontal for who is in and who is out and as I've already mentioned their power struggles over who gets on the front page of Facebook and who doesn't who gets on the YouTube page who doesn't there are power struggles for recognition of that kind within it and then beyond that there are going to be power struggles over money over prison sentences over legal consequences and who deals with them there are going to be power struggles over who gets to make those decisions so long as you pretend that nobody's in charge and if you admit that there's a hierarchy then there are also going to power struggles over who is in charge okay so to wrap this up I want to say I've got a very intelligent set of messages from a patreon supporter if you guys want to talk to me pay $1 to join patreon $1.00 is nothing better the cause cup of coffee on my patreon a guy named Richard sent me some messages and I may make more videos actually responding to this this statement from Richard because it is really addressing me um I got this statement from Richard saying that at this stage vegans should not be forming more and more fragmentary and fractious groups they should not be dividing themselves into factions or into small unique organizations tackling specific issues that instead vegans should be uniting with large organizations like peda People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that have millions of dollars in infrastructure and centralized organization now you know when he has reasons for this and they're intelligent reasons they just have to be reasons that I disagree with in practice so we started this dialogue but for this video I'm again I may talk about that more I may make another video within 24 hours about it because it's a really interesting topic it's a teep talking topic we cannot look at unity as an ideal or as an end in itself and we cannot look at independence you know or factional ization splitting into small independent groups as an itself these are not ideals the fundamental reason for working with larger groups is to get things done paradoxically the reason for dividing into smaller groups is exactly the same to get things done
very loaded in the English language maybe they're loaded in every language maybe in some languages they have different connotations certainly in Chinese politically to talk about factions factionalism division as opposed to unification as opposed to maintaining a mass line and that's a unique phrase in Chinese very often we don't think rationally about why it is in politics that we might break up into smaller groups and we don't think rationally or strategically or an attached way but why it is we might have centralized hierarchical organization or why we might unify into larger and larger entities right very often these things are pursued as if their ideals their pursuit idealistically and there shouldn't be anything idealistic about it the answer for why we should operate in a small group as opposed to a large group in politics is fundamentally the same as how we would ask an answer those questions in a workplace setting or in a classroom setting if we're engaged in an educational exercise right paradoxically we form ourselves into large groups for the same reason why we divide ourselves into small groups to get more done I'm currently an educator I'm currently teaching at university level in China 20 and 21 year old students why do I divide them into smaller groups into smaller classes to get more done on the other hand for some activities why unify into a larger class or even a huge theater of several hundred students at once to get more done for some types of tasks and again many of you have experienced this in the workplace different types of workplaces different types of tasks there are some tasks where you want to be in small groups there's some tasks where maybe you want people to work alone and there are some tasks where people need to get involved in large centralized organizations be they hierarchical or otherwise okay so we have to think about these things we have to think about these things tactically and strategically with detachment or a pragmatic perspective and not think that unification isn't in itself so I say this in preface to a video dealing primarily with the latest progress in the mutiny over at direct action everywhere direct action everywhere they abbreviate their own name as DX e this is the way they choose to previa their name fine direct action everywhere is a medium-sized vegan activist organization with pretensions of being both nationwide United States and indeed global international and most of their members now are based in Berkeley California in the past they were more based in Chicago within the United States one of the really interesting aspects of their current mutiny of people rising up against the leadership is that in many ways it's the idealism of direct action everywhere 1.0 rebelling against direct action everywhere 2.0 what do I mean by this the original iteration of DXE of their mode of operation of what they were trying to do and how they were going to do it they refused to admit that they had any hierarchy at all in the early days they said they were a completely horizontal network of activists and then there were some details about different chapters coordinating with other chapters and over time what emerged and they used the word emerged quite a lot themselves they talked about an emergent authority structure was that no they weren't egalitarian at all they weren't horizontal at all they were a strictly vertical hierarchical organization led by one man and his girlfriend Wayne Siong and Priya they were the self-appointed dictators for life and really all pretense of having elections and caucuses some kind of transparent democratic process was revealed to be a joke now one of the ways they did this was that on top of the older structure of authority they created a news of authority which they referred to as DXE global I was there term rather than the EXCI top layer of the layer cake and Priya and Wayne this you know couple who you know basically running control the organization then started setting up various pretexts to justify their command and control the organization and a hierarchy of chapters and their commanders and what-have-you now some people especially people in a straight political science background might just regard this as progress measures ago this is positive to say okay they had an early idealistic phase in which they were basically in denial about inequality in the organization then the organization grew and they got a budget and somebody had to control that money they decide who does and does not get paid because yes they are paying people they are putting money in people's pockets to pay for their cost of living people are getting salaries people are getting money out of this which again I'm not hating and principal just pointing out this is one of the reasons why democracy and transparency and how you define the organization how horizontal is it some people are getting paid some are not some people are getting featured on their websites and on their YouTube channel and so on and some are not you know these are the things people within the organization fight about the people have talked within DXE the issue of just recognition and promotion within the organization like somebody works really hard on some particular protest or project and then they feel they're not being recognized by the leadership whereas someone else is there's a lot of tension around that sort of thing this is a social media era and they began with DXE 1.0 pretending that dxc was completely open at and horizontal kind of anyone could define what the organization was that anyone could just start up their own chapter and start up their own activism but in reality in practice some people are more DXE than others some people are making those decisions even if it is literally the decision of who gets their link posted on Facebook who gets their link gets their video posted on YouTube who gets some kind of wreck regulation from the higher levels the organization and who does not a lot of those struggles are really keenly felt by people now why I mean some of you might just be laughing and saying hey this is petty well it's a lot less petty when one there's time involved two there's money involved and three there were criminal charges involved there are legal fees involved people are getting lawyers people getting put in prison even if just overnight people are engaging in forms of activism to have these kinds of consequences in their life in terms of time effort money and you're in an organization where some people are getting paid other people are getting nothing and those people who are getting nothing may be dealing with lawyers fees and legal charges consequence of the same activism the other people were engaged so those inequalities can be very keenly felt beyond this mere social media a question of whose video is on the official YouTube channel whose is not right and there have been other problems I'm not really gonna get into in this video there have been problems of misconduct put it that way and then how does this hierarchical organization deal with misconduct is it really democratic or transparent is it really responsible is it really able to hold their own people to account and in the last video I did on protection everywhere we talked about the extent to which reportedly I you know ostensibly and I think I believe actually their own process of Elections their own process of selecting leaders has really been co-opted and corrupted and controlled by the two people on top so that they can remain on top forever so here what does it all come down to there was a new video put on Facebook and on Facebook only by Wayne and Priya the self-appointed dictators for life that video is really very dishonest it suggests that their problem is just with one person who's in charge of one Facebook group you know somehow connected to the recognition everywhere I can give you a link below this video to a web page from liberation global and these people they they openly describe themselves as a faction of direct action everywhere you know they get an A+ for honesty direct action everywhere has now split into factions that's the honest direct way to say it and this faction really is representing the ideals of 1.0 saying no they want to go back to the situation I'm quoting the website directly or they say quote a grassroots network doesn't need top-down leadership it needs collective control over its identity and its means of communication so they want to go back to a situation where there are no dictators and maybe there are no elections where this is a horizontal network of aspiring vegan activists and where nobody is the star leader or the dictator or what-have-you they want to get rid of the top-down form of leadership that Wayne and pre have imposed it says I can I can quote this directly they want a consensus driven collectively controlled basically internet presence that connects these different groups of activists so that was back in the day couple years ago whenever you asked direct action everywhere about their organization or hierarchy who was in charge they used to reply nobody is in charge direct action everywhere is just a network uniting groups of activists as equals horizontally and then more recently they slipped into the era of DXE 2.0 of so-called emergent leadership where they were admitting openly and even promoting themselves as led by Wayne Siong and Priya and indeed Wayne's young and Priya controlled the money ultimately there's a bank account and some people have the legal ability to sign a cheque drawing in that bank account and others do not that's the ultimate inequality right so the about parole equal it's all horizontal wheel corporate it got in somewhere and it ends here the buck stops here it ends with fundraising and ends with money now there's another important corrupting influence of money on this movement which is that dxc 1.0 was really not about so-called open rescue it really was about disruption and they had this whole complex philosophy to justify why disruption which is a form of public protests barely legal and slightly illegal public protests disrupting the normal lives of meat-eaters why disruption was their method of activism and they justified this through a very complex set of allusions to Mahatma Gandhi in India and the civil rights movement in its states and the abolition of slavery in the u.s. civil war I mean I have videos criticizing that period of their rhetoric I think it is but that was their mantra that was their modus operandi they were this horizontal organization that just did disruption and they had a whole complex philosophical rationale for that well over time the problem is people don't really want to donate money to you for disruption right where does the donor support come from I think everybody in the game figured this out pretty quickly you get a lot of donor support you get a lot of interest you get a lot of money from so-called open rescue and videos featuring open rescue ok so this means things like them break DXE members breaking into a chicken farm and stealing the chickens at one point it was a turkey farm it basically includes cattle rustling if repeat blunt and yeah that is criminal that is considered from you're stealing someone's property because legally all these animals are the property of the farm or what have you but it's very dramatic it looks dramatic on video it's something you can post to the donors about a lot of the donors are themselves elderly soft hearted people who just love animals and you can imagine these people the people who are writing checks the people are giving donations maybe they do not respond positively to direct action ever we're going into a Chipotle fast-food restaurant and just screaming at people that Meat Is Murder which is what they do they go into restaurants scribbled it that does not sell the donors oh but he put together an emotional tear-jerking video that shows you breaking into this farm at night you know and rescuing this chicken and then filming the chicken and how supposedly happy it is now that it's living in someone's backyard in Berkeley California this pulls at the heartstrings of donors including non vegan donors including meat-eaters who want to just give to the cause because their animal lovers this stuff sells and I notice both the rebel group the new faction trying to take over the leadership of the recognized Network and Wayne and Priya they've both gone over in a huge way to this this mode of activism so-called open rescue rescue based activism rescue and sanctuary based a tourism which wasn't what their movement was founded on their movement was founded on back at 1.0 the fundamental conviction that social science research would guide us to more and more effective methods of activism and that those methods of activism could should and would resemble the most effective methods from the United States civil rights movement now whether that's intelligence are stupid stick with it for a minute why aren't they putting together folk bands why aren't they putting together groups of gospel singers and going from church to church if you want to talk about effective methods of galvanizing public support in the civil rights movement anybody who knows anything knows that music was a huge part of it and specifically gospel singers and folk singers going from church to church from town to town vegans the United States have never done anything like that so my point here is there's not some simple leap of inference from saying learn the lessons of history learn the lessons from social sciences learn the lessons from the civil rights movement jumping from that to disruption ie standing in a restaurant and screaming at people that Meat Is Murder it's not food it's violence these other slogans there's no simple way to jump from that premise of DXE 1.0 to open rescue to cattle rustling like okay so you can rob cattle from a farm and then take them and put them in your backyard you're now guilty of a crime cows probably worth a lot of money it's probably a pretty serious level of theft you can go to jail for but you make this tear-jerking video and then people donate money to you how is that justified by social science research how is that justified by the history of the civil rights drone the United States and of course there were deeper questions here of why would civil rights struggle you know how how useful is it compared to any other historical example for being still there are a lot of questions and I've had a lot of videos in this channel in the past already discussing those questions but this new video from Wayne and Priya it is really being dishonest with us in stating that the problem is just a rebellion from one person controlling one Facebook group if you click on the link below this video they have a running list of all the Facebook groups that are now led by the rebel faction I could call them the egalitarian faction the faction that doesn't want hierarchy that doesn't want the dictatorship of Wayne and Priya and it's a long list of direct action everywhere websites that they've taken over so sorry you might as well click on it yourself and see but includes their medium page their Twitter page DXE everywhere that is the Twitter for divided attention everywhere their Instagram page a whole bunch of other official direct action everywhere pages like direct action every word dot or the website the rebels the the rebel faction wanting equality they have taken away a large part of direct action everywhere web presence from Wayne and Priya from the nail resented dictators and as I say I said in earlier video I've read quite a bit of the details about what happened with the last elections and how they've really they've really shut down and cut off most of the sources of free speech and I don't know debate within direct action everywhere which really mattered to people who were committed that organization committed that cause however when I click on the rebel medium page mediums a website for articles I notice they're still talking as if they control the bank account that Wayne controls and I talked to someone inside direct action everywhere and I said look it seems to me like these guys are of two minds that they're a bit you know they haven't admitted to themselves the situation is yeah you guys have taken over a bunch of websites but you haven't taken over that bank account you guys are gonna have to start your own bank account and I got a message back saying yes that's true the reality is that nail the egalitarian DXE they are more and more interested in doing open rescue cattle-rustling chicken-stealing etc precisely because they're having to get started with collecting their own donations for their own bank account so that's what it all comes down to folks the idea of a horizontal Network open to all doesn't work for a couple of reasons one is that there's a brand name here that ultimately some people have executive control over what if a group of right-wingers set up their own chapter within DXE let's not they don't even have to be neo-nazis enough extremist let's just say you have people who are hardline conservative libertarians members of the Republican Party and they also care about ecology and animal rights and veganism and they set up a chapter I guarantee you the leadership in direct action everywhere whether it's 1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0 they're gonna find some excuse to close ranks against these people and say no no no you don't get to use our name you can't call yourself the right to action everywhere cuz all the members the founding members rotated for their extremely left-wing and they're extremely into you know intersectional feminism intersectional anti racism race politics gender politics in general they'll never walk with those guys what if you get a group of people and they're a bit conservative they're the kind of guys who own rifles and they start getting into veganism animal rights and you know they used to be involved in duck hunting they're into conservation and forest habitat they're the kind of people who own four-wheel off-road vehicles and rifles and go out there just let's just say they're moderately conservative guys like that and they set up their own chapter they set up DX EE Tennessee from the backwoods of Tennessee just the brand identity alone is already exclusive and exclusionary and there are going to be power struggles hierarchical or horizontal for who is in and who is out and as I've already mentioned their power struggles over who gets on the front page of Facebook and who doesn't who gets on the YouTube page who doesn't there are power struggles for recognition of that kind within it and then beyond that there are going to be power struggles over money over prison sentences over legal consequences and who deals with them there are going to be power struggles over who gets to make those decisions so long as you pretend that nobody's in charge and if you admit that there's a hierarchy then there are also going to power struggles over who is in charge okay so to wrap this up I want to say I've got a very intelligent set of messages from a patreon supporter if you guys want to talk to me pay $1 to join patreon $1.00 is nothing better the cause cup of coffee on my patreon a guy named Richard sent me some messages and I may make more videos actually responding to this this statement from Richard because it is really addressing me um I got this statement from Richard saying that at this stage vegans should not be forming more and more fragmentary and fractious groups they should not be dividing themselves into factions or into small unique organizations tackling specific issues that instead vegans should be uniting with large organizations like peda People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that have millions of dollars in infrastructure and centralized organization now you know when he has reasons for this and they're intelligent reasons they just have to be reasons that I disagree with in practice so we started this dialogue but for this video I'm again I may talk about that more I may make another video within 24 hours about it because it's a really interesting topic it's a teep talking topic we cannot look at unity as an ideal or as an end in itself and we cannot look at independence you know or factional ization splitting into small independent groups as an itself these are not ideals the fundamental reason for working with larger groups is to get things done paradoxically the reason for dividing into smaller groups is exactly the same to get things done