Veterans Against the War w/ Brittany Ramos DeBarros

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: What’s up everybody, and welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Caden Mak. On this show, we’re building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience for the broad front that we need to win.

[00:00:25] This week on the show, I’m joined by Brittany Ramos Debarros. Interim organizing director and about face veterans against the war since 2004, about Face four, really known as Iraq. Veterans Against the War has provided a political home to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns who are opposed to us militarism and imperialism.

[00:00:42] We’ll discuss what her organization has been doing to respond to our current political conditions. But first, these headline. If it feels like the drumbeat of ICE raids has been increasing, you are not alone. While the ham-handed tactics of enforcement agents have been upsetting and outrageous, more and more communities are also getting organized to stand up to ice.

[00:01:01] Whether it’s shoppers and restaurant goers, block hating ice vehicles in San Diego, fighting back in Minneapolis, or these high schoolers in Massachusetts who walked out of classes to protest their classmate being abducted on the way to volleyball practice. Everyday people are intervening with courage and moral clarity.

[00:01:16] Taking courage, courageous action can seem like it’s spontaneous activity in these local news clips, and probably some of the people participating were spurred to sudden action. But it’s better to be ready and stay ready than to have to come up with tactics on the fly. Now is a great time to squat up, find Immigrant serving organizations in your area now to see if they’re offering upcoming Ice Watch trainings.

[00:01:38] Depending on where you are, this might be a labor union or a community organization or even a church. The more of us who are prepared to snap out of our everyday life and interrupt ice terror, the more effective we’ll be. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, we published a primer on how to defend our communities back in January, and we’ll put a link to that article in the show notes.

[00:01:56] Donald Trump has put a new travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries back on the table in response to an attack on a pro-Israel rally in Boulder, Colorado last week. There’s a lot to unpack here, so stick with me. Trump’s announcement smells to me like another layer of deflection from the real issue, which is the US’ continued blank check support for the genocide and Gaza.

[00:02:18] Look, I find the boulder attack to be aberrant. I don’t want anybody to be attacked with a flamethrower either here in the US or in Palestine. Which is the whole point of this, right? But nearly quarter century of Islamophobic, quote unquote counter-terrorism should teach us that this form of blanket punitive control by the state is often worse than useless.

[00:02:37] It’s harmful in a way that makes all of us less safe. Such racialized punishment in lieu of addressing the material conditions and grief that underlies these violent acts results in an endless cycle of escalating blowback that leads to more of the same. Back at the start of his term, people were rightly worried about the return of the Muslim ban and were preparing to mount a response like we did in 2017.

[00:02:58] Now I’m worried it’s gonna be implemented with an at best muted response because of the way that it’s being couched and fighting against antisemitism and protecting the public against very specific kinds of political violence. And let me be clear, antisemitism is alive and well in this country, and it’s very much being mobilized to suppress descent.

[00:03:17] Now, it’s also being used as a shield to implement some of the most troubling aspects of Trump’s agenda, and that should be alarming to all of us. Trump hasn’t minced his words when it comes to his stance on Palestine either, and this week has been full of heartbreak and frustration. Between horrifying accounts of Israel attacking, starving Palestinians, seeking food aid to the US being the sole, no sole, no vote against a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council.

[00:03:42] It really does feel like we’re screaming into the void in a lot of ways. The mobilization of a travel ban as a response to the boulder attack is an object lesson, and how both administrative and narrative power works in this country right now. The people who leverage that power in the mainstream are going to turn the actions of a desperate, violent fringe against anyone who might hold remotely related political opinions, even if they strongly disagree with the actions of that fringe for moral, ethical, and strategic reasons.

[00:04:09] I know how frustrating this is. Trust me, I feel it too. I wish it were possible for us to put a more broad reaching left wing spin on all of this, but if we could do that, I frankly don’t think we’d be in the position that we’re in now. In slightly brighter news center left candidate Lee J. Young won the presidential election in Korea this week, and just as a reminder, South Korea did withstand an attempted military coup last winter, and the civil resistance successfully pushed it back.

[00:04:36] Lee was part of that resistance, including live streaming. Some of his participation in protests. One election of course isn’t everything, but congratulations to our South Korean comrades and thank you for showing us what’s possible.

[00:04:52] Sound on Tape: Hi, this is Josh Stro podcast and multimedia producer for Convergence Magazine. I probably worked on the show you’re listening to right now, and if you’re enjoying it, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber of convergence. What you might not realize is that for every hour or so of convergence content you hear.

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[00:05:52] Cayden Mak: About face Veterans Against the War is an organization of post nine 11 military members and veterans who are organizing to end the US’ formal PO foreign policy of permanent war and use the use of military weapons, tactics, and values in our communities across the country.

[00:06:05] Joining me now to discuss how they’re orienting themselves towards the current disastrous political climate that we are currently finding ourselves in is Interim Organizing Director for about Face, Brittany Ramos Debarros. Brittany, thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:06:18] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.

[00:06:20] Cayden Mak: To start us out, can you tell us a little bit about the origins of, about face where the organiz, like where the organization comes from, and then the way that you found continuing relevance. In the ongoing sort of never ending war on terror. 

[00:06:32] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Absolutely. That’s well put is that unfortunately what we’re seeing right now is very relevant and hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk about that.

[00:06:40] But we were founded in 2004 by six members of the military who returned from the 2003 invasion of Iraq and were horrified. They were horrified by what they witnessed, what they participated in, but most. Sharply, the discrepancy between what they were seeing was true on the ground and what was being told to the American public.

[00:07:01] And they found in themselves a kind of sense of duty that, hey, we need to let people know what’s really going on. So they started going around speaking at events. They met up with a group eventually called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which was a group of active military members. And us warned Vietnam veterans who.

[00:07:19] We who decided the same thing, right? That they needed to be instrumental and active in organizing against a war that they believed was wrong and unjust. And they mentored our founders and said, Hey, you guys need to start something for your own generation. This is a new moment that we’re in with the kind of lies and justifications that we’re seeing, even though the formula is the same.

[00:07:39] And they did, and we were originally named Iraq Veterans Against the War, in that direct legacy. And then eventually it became clear as the, War on Terror continued to sprawl to more and more nation states and regions that we needed to make it clearer that you didn’t have to deploy to Iraq.

[00:07:55] Specifically to be part of our movement. And that’s how we eventually shifted our name to become about face, which to me means to make a 180 in military commands. To turn away from the way that you were facing before. And that’s what our community and our political project is really about, is a.

[00:08:12] Commitment to the multi-generational organizing legacy of the role that US military members, veterans and military families have played in helping to end wars of profit and imperialism and cut through the noise that’s used to manufacture consent for these things. With a credibility from inside the machine that often is difficult for, elected officials to just hand wave off the way that they do the rest of the left sometimes. 

[00:08:40] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the really the ways that our sort of like popular discourse about government in general has shifted since nine 11 and like the ways that the sort of securitization of basically everything in the government, whether that’s like border enforcement or whatever, has like.

[00:09:02] Taken this like strongly militaristic turn since the early two thousands, and how also quote unquote, the troops, like whatever that means to you, has become this really powerful political lever for basically whatever it’s people wanna talk about. And so the importance of having folks leading on this who either are active service members or have served, seems like really vital and a vital voice in the fight against us imperialism.

[00:09:31] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah, we’re in a moment where you mentioned already we’re seeing this like terrifying expansion of authoritarianism, right? That we all knew there were always threads of, right? Like these agencies that are being leveraged more aggressively weren’t just created recently. And yet.

[00:09:48] The kind of tenor and level of aggression is very clearly expanding. Yeah. And the kind of like mechanisms for justifying that. And I think the reality is that there’s a lot of folks across the left who it doesn’t ever, the thought of what is going on with the military community is just not a thought that occurs to them pretty much ever.

[00:10:07] And that’s understandable. But from where I’m sitting, when I think about, the kind of authoritarian and fascist capture of the state, we. Have the kind of pillar of the military community as one of the pillars that will either prop up authoritarianism and make it a kind of intractable movement that controls our conditions for the next maybe 30 years, multiple decades, right?

[00:10:31] Or what will be a pillar that has the power to meaningfully undermine it in a way that very few are able to 

[00:10:38] Cayden Mak: Totally, yeah. Like a lot of research on the rise and sometimes collapse of attempts at authoritarian consolidation in other countries shows that very clearly. That it’s a clear pattern that like.

[00:10:51] If the military and or like civil police force doesn’t support the regime that, like the regime is a really hard time like solidifying its control across civil society. Yeah. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Which, I guess leads me to the big question is like, what are the kinds of things that your members are thinking about and talking about in this political moment?

[00:11:09] It seems like really I can imagine that in the face of a lot of the like big doge cuts and stuff like that, that people are feeling very agitated around like shifts in the balance of power within the federal government. Yeah. 

[00:11:23] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. From where we’re sitting, the biggest thing that we have to.

[00:11:28] Leverage in order to shift the tide, right? Of the way that the military community is positioned in our current landscape is people’s level of consciousness, right? Because we talked about, the kind of global war on terror. The justification then was that there’s this there are these extremist organizations and therefore he we must have a blank check.

[00:11:48] Anything is justifiable. Including like 

[00:11:50] Cayden Mak: lying to the international community. 

[00:11:52] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Including, targeting and harassing American citizens. Yeah. Including like almost anything can become justified de like putting people in sites like Guantanamo Bay Torture that was carried out right by the United States.

[00:12:07] There was so much that, that was all justified under this guise of protecting people. And the contradiction that people struggle with is yes, these extremist organizations do exist. No one’s claiming that they don’t. But the question is how much are all of these tactics actually meaningfully protecting people or creating safety?

[00:12:26] And what I saw when I deployed to Afghanistan, it was unfortunately me deploying I grew up in a. Conservative military family. I was a true believer. I had become more liberal by the time I deployed and I thought, maybe we should have never gone in the first place, but now we have to do right by the Afghan people and the Obama administration is trying to do the right thing here.

[00:12:45] And all of that. And then I found myself in Afghanistan surrounded by war profiteers who were literally impacting our ability to carry out mission critical missions for the sake of a bottom line, right? Like I was a maintenance platoon leader, and I was literally not allowed to fix an engineer.

[00:13:02] Platoon, a route clearance platoon, even though my mechanics knew how, and we had the parts because there was a corporate contract that said only corporate mechanical mechanics could work on those vehicles. And so one of our most critical life-saving assets, a route clearance platoon whose whole job is to patrol routes and remove IEDs safely improvised.

[00:13:23] Explosive devices was dead in the water for over a week for the sake of a corporate contract. It was moments like that kind of just generalized blood lust and treating the whole operation like it was a game so that people could score points for their officer valuations. I couldn’t leave that experience and without questions.

[00:13:44] Yeah. Without real fundamental questions about. What are we actually doing here? But the question I didn’t have, the thing I was very clear about was that I had not contributed to anything that was making anyone safer. And in fact, I had simply contributed to expanding the violence that existed and growing the kind of arguments that our opposition had for recruiting people into extremism.

[00:14:10] And when you fast forward to today, right? The like leveraging of antisemitism, which is a very real thing for this kind of blank check once again. To be used as the justification for any abuses of human rights, for any suspension of civil rights and due process, right? The kind of rounding up of high school students by ice, and then the justification that it’s.

[00:14:33] Sanctuary City’s fault because they didn’t cooperate, so now they’re justified to just go into the community and grab whoever they want without due process. This is the reality of the situation and the parallels are so clear when you look at those. Connections. And so what we need is for members of the military to recognize that they have a choice in this moment, right?

[00:14:54] Because everything about the military’s conditioning makes you feel like you have no options and you have no choice. I, yeah, sorry. If you wanna jump in. 

[00:15:03] Cayden Mak: No that makes a lot of sense to me that this is like part of the culture of being in like a top down like organization where frankly, like it makes sense to me that if you’re deployed that being able to follow orders and like having a chain of command is valuable. Yeah it saves people’s lives in a lot of cases. But then, like in this case where some of these orders may not be lawful right, and that like more and more active duty military might be like, this seems like this seems to be go against the reason that I may have joined the military in the first place. It’s like something that I imagine is coming up for a lot of people more in this moment. 

[00:15:40] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. And so many people these days especially join the military to just have a basic quality of life.

[00:15:46] It’s right. It’s one of the only federal scholarship programs to scale that exists. It’s one of the only, it’s one of the only things that’s easily accessible to people from rural communities to have good access. To healthcare, to a stable paycheck. And a career path that their, the Army promises them is gonna, and, put them in a better place.

[00:16:05] And many times it does. But the problem is like people then find themselves in this situation where they’re legally not allowed to say no when the government is asking them to carry out violence that they know is wrong. 

[00:16:16] Cayden Mak: Yeah.

[00:16:16] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: And so when you find yourself in that position. The question is what do people do?

[00:16:21] What are people equipped to do? Do people even pause to ask themselves like, am I gonna do this thing right that I know is wrong? And many times they do. Like you, you’re so going through the motions and your whole livelihood and ability to survive economically is at risk.

[00:16:39] And you brought up unlawful orders, but most members of the military, like most lawyers, have questions about what technically constitute a lost lawful order versus not a lawful order right now. 

[00:16:50] Cayden Mak: Sure. 

[00:16:51] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: And the entire risk is on the service member right now where you have to trust that if you refuse an unlawful order, that a court martial, which is a criminal hearing in the military right in Trump’s.

[00:17:05] Military where he’s intentionally removing as much principled leadership as he possibly can. Is gonna agree with you that order was unlawful. 

[00:17:14] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And 

[00:17:14] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: if, and if they don’t, you go to jail. 

[00:17:17] Cayden Mak: Yeah. The consequences are severe. 

[00:17:19] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah, so I, one thing we’re thinking about right now is the importance of RA one, just raising awareness about that, right?

[00:17:26] I don’t think most people who are not connected to the military community recognize that it’s not so simple as just saying that order is unlawful and I’m not following it and what’s really at stake. And so we’re building a campaign called the Right to Refuse Campaign that we’re hoping to build support amongst Congress members and, broader society around this idea.

[00:17:46] That we should be protecting military members’ to refuse participation in orders that they believe are in any operation that they believe is unjust. Unlawful or immoral, any of those three things. And right now the reality is that military members don’t have that protected,

[00:18:02] and we’ve seen Congress abdicate its responsibility to be any kind of check and balance on the use of military force for the last decades.

[00:18:11] And so if it’s not the military, if we have a defense administration, an executive administration that we can’t trust Yep. To respect the rule of law. Then what’s left? It’s literally just that the society is relying on military members to say no when they, when it’s the right thing to do.

[00:18:29] And so we have to advocate to make sure that they have the ability to do that. 

[00:18:32] Cayden Mak: Yeah, and it strikes me that there’s also this, like the thing that you’re describing is like almost creating the narrative conditions for. The, like general public to understand that as something that, that needs to happen, that there’s and that there’s a similar thing with talking about like civic courage in general that like the thing that allows people to stand up, like especially the stuff that we’ve been seeing over the past week of like folks standing up to ice and I don’t know. I was watching this video last night actually of these people in San Diego who literally like, just like regular civilians, like forming a line and like pushing back the ice agents and the ice agents who were like armed to the teeth.

[00:19:09] They had a flash bang gun and all their different tools, but were like like pushing them back down the street that like, yeah. It requires doing things that feel risky, whether it’s like standing up in your workplace whether it’s like showing up in the street, like that requires a sense that other people are gonna stand up with you and that it sounds to me like what you’re saying is that also one of the issues that you’re facing with your membership and your potential membership is people really feeling isolated and like they might be have, they might be having these questions inside, but don’t know where to.

[00:19:41] Express them or feel like if they express them, they’re gonna get into trouble. 

[00:19:44] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Most of us in the military, once we start to become conscious about recognizing, it’s actually not enough for my conscience to say, I’m just doing my job anymore. Yeah. Like I’m looking at what’s happening and I’m seeing my own contribution to this situation.

[00:19:58] Once we hit that point, most of us think we’re the only one, right? We’re the only person in the whole military, or maybe there are like five, right? Who have ever had these thoughts and yet there are. The truth is there are thousands, right? We know that military members are having these conversations. In their units.

[00:20:14] We know that people are upset about a whole range of things that, that are happening. The possibility of being used as an enforcement arm for mass deportations. The possibility of continuing to support the transport of weapons and resources that are, we know are being used to commit war crimes.

[00:20:30] That go against everything that most of us. Thought that we were fighting for, that’s righteous when we sign up, right? Those are just two, right? Yeah. The kind of leveraging, there’s so many more and we know that people are concerned and are having real conversations about this.

[00:20:44] And the reality is that, they will need support, right? They, we can’t wait for people to have the protected right to refuse, right? We need to fight for it, but the reality is we are in a moment where people are gonna have to make these decisions, where there are these moments that come in your life where you decide who you are in that moment.

[00:21:03] In that moment, you decide, am I a person who’s gonna what side am I on of this fight, right? And am I a person who’s gonna side with this family who’s screaming and crying and being kidnapped without any kind of due process, let alone empathy or compassion? Or am I gonna be a person who says.

[00:21:22] Oh it was just my job, right? And tries to act like you’re not implicated. And the reality is that you’re gonna have to be the one who lives with that. And that’s the most important thing. I want people, if there are any people in that position out there listening, I want people to know that they’re not alone.

[00:21:36] That there are thousands of people who have taken action to resist unjust things that the military, the US military has been doing for generations. And that there are thousands of people out there who feel the same way that you are you do, and that you are gonna have to be the one who is able to look yourself in the mirror for the rest of your life and know that you either chose to do the right thing when it could cost you, or that you chose to fall in line and keep your mouth shut.

[00:22:04] And what I, from where I’m sitting, I risked. Court martial and jail and all of those things to speak out when I was a captain in the army. Because once I, once the I realized what I had participated in and the fact that it was based on like public officials were literally lying to our faces, which was later proved by the Afghanistan papers.

[00:22:22] Once that became clear, I knew that even if I wasn’t directly contributing to what was happening in Afghanistan anymore, I couldn’t just stand by and continue to act as if that was normal and if that was okay. And so I started speaking out even when I was on orders and I knew what that could cost me.

[00:22:37] I sat down with my husband and I said, Hey, I like, they might make an example of me. This is what could happen. I could lose all my benefits. I could end up in jail even, but I have to do this. ’cause I know that I won’t be able to look myself in the mirror for the rest of my life if I kept my mouth shut.

[00:22:52] And it’s unfortunate that’s the position that so many of our military members are gonna be in. But this is a time where, we have the opportunity to model the courage that many of us thought that we would be. We would be modeling when we signed up in the first place. 

[00:23:07] Cayden Mak: Yeah, no, I think that’s a, I think it’s one, it’s very, first of all, thank you for sharing more of your story and your journey.

[00:23:13] It was like, I can’t, I cannot imagine how difficult a position that probably was for you and your family to think about really taking some real material risks to do the thing that you knew was right. And I think it really highlights how challenging. The, the conditions are for the organizing that you’re doing now that yeah, and that when I think about what the goal of all organizing is really like making people feel like they can take risks that they didn’t feel like they could take alone.

[00:23:41] And that providing people the support for, to find the moral courage to do the right thing. Which is, I dunno, it feels like there’s a lot of stuff that is on the horizon that like it makes sense that. Y’all are throwing down pretty hard right now. I’m also curious, like in general, what kind of preparation and political and other education you might be doing with your members, what are the things that like, have really been resonating with folks that have been helpful in preparing people mentally, emotionally for the tumultuous times that we’re in and the tumultuous times that are certainly ahead.

[00:24:15] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. One of the things I think is that we really start with every single person that comes into the organization. We make sure that they have a frame to understand the relationships between issues. Because when we started out, we were just our politics were just like, as long as you’re against the wars, you can get down with us, right?

[00:24:34] And that was like the only point of unity. And that created problems as the kind of war on terror continued to. Fan out into so many other issues, including police militarization, including all of these other issues. Because then we had situations who were like I don’t see what Black Lives Matter and supporting Black Lives Matter has to do with ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[00:24:54] And so we had to re, like play catch up and doing some of that work to lay that foundation for people. The model that we use is in our new member orientation, we talk about the House of Oppression. And we describe, the roof of the house as the purpose of the house and the purpose of the house of oppression that we’re all living in is economic exploitation.

[00:25:12] And if we understand the kind of driving purpose to be the exploitation of labor, of resources, of geographies, right? Then we, understand that is like the driving force and the thing that’s propping up that, that house is we talk about the kind of pillars of racial oppression and gender oppression.

[00:25:32] And that both of those pillars create social stratification, right? Social hierarchies based on your proximity to a political definition of whiteness and a political definition of manhood that are then used to create. The conditions to pit people in the working class against each other so that our exploiters can still exploit us effectively.

[00:25:53] And then we talk about the foundation of the house. The thing that had to be used to establish the house in the first place that had to be laid down. And then the thing that keeps it standing as militarism and militarism as this kind of. Cultural and structural force that creates both the justifications and the mechanisms for state violence.

[00:26:11] And that those pieces all work together, right? That like to create the house. And I think when you, when our folks already come into the organization having that. Model, that mental model to work with, it makes it a lot easier for people to be primed, to see the relationships between things, and to be able to step back and say, actually, if we don’t care about what’s happening to trans people in the military, that’s a loss for us still.

[00:26:37] There’s, 

[00:26:38] Cayden Mak: there’s 

[00:26:38] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: a temptation to, there’s a temptation by some anti-war folks to be like I don’t care about the trans ban because I don’t want more people in the military. Sure. And my goal is to have less people in the military overall. And whereas of course, I also share that goal and agree.

[00:26:52] I recognize that the leveraging of gender oppression right, to pit communities against each other and the ways that trans people are being scapegoated as a part of that system is actually just a function of this machine overall. Yeah. And that if we ignore that. Our other strategies will be undermined and undercut in the long run.

[00:27:10] Cayden Mak: Totally. No, that’s really awesome. And I think like such a useful framework. And it’s it’s helpful to hear also this thinking about these like interleaved issues that like we’re seeing in the news with the way that the Trump administration is like intervening on military policy, whether that is about.

[00:27:29] Trans military members and veterans and like the benefits that they get that I know that certainly in trans advocacy spaces I’ve been in, there has been a sense that there is sometimes a disconnect between the experiences trans people and then this sort of like military policy, which seems like.

[00:27:48] Again, this goes back to I think the fact that so much of like who serves in the military is very classed and very raced right now. Yeah. But that feels very removed from a lot of things. But that Yeah. It’s it, I think people may feel that it’s easy to dismiss in the way that you’re saying, but that being able to weave those things together is actually makes our movement stronger. Yeah. 

[00:28:12] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: And to be able to sit with the contradictions, which feels messy and gross sometimes. That’s the reality is it does, like it’s so much easier to have these, this kind of like ideological clarity when these things are not playing out in material ways in our communities.

[00:28:27] But what a lot of people don’t realize is. For better or for worse, the mil, the US military is the largest employer of trans people in the United States. Yeah, most people don’t recognize that. And so if we are committed to the L, the love of the working class and building power amongst the working class, which is where our movements, I think have to derive from.

[00:28:48] I love the Fred Hampton quote, to lead the people, you have to love the people. That’s right. And that means love people in the messiness. And so that means as trans military members are losing everything right now because of a homophobic policy that is scapegoating them right, and is being used to try to set industry standards outside of the military, we cannot abandon them because we’re also working against us militarism and an anti imperialism.

[00:29:14] It actually doesn’t. Serve us or the working class to do that, even though it feels ideologically more comfortable, we have to lean into holding those folks and raising the consciousness, but first starting with the material support that meaningfully can transform people. 

[00:29:28] And the other thing is veteran, like same thing, veterans. Because of those statistics about the military, right? Like veterans have had gender affirming care from the VA for years now, and many of them are at risk of losing access to meds. And they’re just basic healthcare almost overnight, right?

[00:29:45] Yeah. Which is a horrifying thing. And our infrastructure isn’t set up to support people in the ways that they needed need to support need to be supported. And yeah I think it’s a moment where that’s another thing we’re having to do, with our members, is just really support people in community to be able to navigate these contradictions and to not shy away from them.

[00:30:04] I think we have to face them head on. We have to acknowledge when it’s. When we’re put in shitty, lose loose positions. Which we often are because we have to build the power to not be in those positions. 

[00:30:15] Cayden Mak: Totally. Yeah. And the contradiction reveal reveals something about how power works.

[00:30:21] Yeah. And I think that, the insight that the scapegoating of trans people is about pitting us against one another is like the important insight to learn from sitting in the shitty contradiction

[00:30:32] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: right. Trump’s rhetoric is so clear. Even both what he’s doing to trans people in the military and the military policies.

[00:30:38] But then you look at his birthday parade that he’s throwing himself next weekend for what’s likely gonna be a hundred million dollars of taxpayer money while he’s directly, while he’s cutting benefits and he’s, veteran benefits and he’s scapegoating trans people and he is doing all of this under the guise of efficiency and effectiveness.

[00:30:54] Right? 

[00:30:54] Cayden Mak: And 

[00:30:54] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: those things are really connected, right? He’s putting forward this like hyper masculine imagery of what it means to create safety. That’s what it still really comes down to, right? Is like the only way that safety can be created is through these hyper masculine, violent, aggressive ways of approaching.

[00:31:13] Security. Yeah. Despite the fact that evidence for decades has proven to the contrary, right? Like even I’ll never forget when I was in the military, I was researching this and I found CIA and FBI like a study that they had done that was that came to the conclusion that at every location where we had carried out the war on terror and we had done operations there.

[00:31:35] Recruitment to organizations that we designated as extremist organizations had at least doubled. Got it. And in some places, multiplied. Multiplied by up to 1600 times. What they had been before we did any of those things. Yeah. This isn’t, I, I just want people to be armed with those facts.

[00:31:52] I like the data is on our side here, but it’s in these subtleties, right? Like our opponents are not. They’re not, they don’t, they’re not concerned with having the facts on their side, right? Because they have all of these distractions that they’re leveraging to keep people fixated on those kinds of individual things that are happening and debating.

[00:32:14] I had members who responded and were like, I don’t care about what’s happening to trans people when we EI just care about ending what’s happening in Palestine, or I just care about, and I’m just like. You can’t once you see the connections, you can’t unsee them. Totally. And that’s why we’re organizing veterans.

[00:32:30] Also this weekend to to protest Trump’s parade because I think that it’s in these kind of subtle I don’t know if a hundred million dollar parade with 7,000 military members in 

[00:32:41] Cayden Mak: Texas, subtle Trump is not known for subtlety. Not subtle, 

[00:32:44] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: subtle is not the right word. But it’s in these kind of what some people would see as harmless, right?

[00:32:50] Yeah. Oh why is it bad for members of the military to celebrate? The 250th anniversary of the Army or whatever, when it’s not really about that. It’s clearly not about that. It’s about these kind of grotesque displays of authoritarian military imagery and we cannot allow those things to be normalized.

[00:33:09] And similarly, it’s about Trump’s effort to consolidate the military community behind him. Because if he successfully does that, it makes it easier for him to completely disregard rule of law. 

[00:33:19] Cayden Mak: Correct. 

[00:33:20] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. And so we have to be paying attention to that as a real red line scenario.

[00:33:23] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Tell us about this the military parade protest. ’cause I think that a lot of people I definitely see a lot of people in my sort of like lefty internet space being like, ugh, who’s even paying attention to this? It’s just like popping circumstance and frankly bullshit, but 

[00:33:36] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: yeah.

[00:33:37] Yeah. Which honestly, I think, there are distributed protests happening around the country, a kind of no King’s day. And that’s something that people can and should plug into and the. The mindset of that was like, let’s pull attention to our people and we want the kind of imagery of people protesting all across the country to be side by side with this like disgusting display of er taxpayer wasted dollars.

[00:33:59] And I think that strategy makes sense, but for us, we were like military community in particular though, has a different stake and a different. Strategic opportunity to, I think, demonstrate that not everybody supports this and that there’s actually many of us who find this to be salt in the wound as the Trump administration is actively cutting Medicaid and veteran veterans benefits and these other programs that are lifesaving for people across our commun.

[00:34:25] While like claiming that this parade is for us when it’s very much clearly his, him acting out his dictator fantasies. And so yeah. Be, yeah. It’s like him. Cause playing as a dictator. Yeah, exactly. And so veterans and military families and, we’ll see maybe some brave military members will be Mo mobilizing the 13th through the 15th to dc.

[00:34:48] We are still recruiting for that action. That’s gonna be one where I can’t share the specific details in order to make sure that we can pull off what we’re hoping to pull off. But, we will be taking direct action and we will be making it clear that we are the military community and that we exist too, and that we don’t want these things carried out in our name and normalized in our name, and certainly not under the guise of benefiting the military community or our communities more broadly in any form or fashion.

[00:35:17] Cayden Mak: Amazing. Yeah. That’s great. I think, yeah, I think it, it feels like the kind of the, like the narrative framing of that kind of direct action intervention seems really powerful right now too. That like the there’s so much in the tide of the way that like. Trump and his sort of like hangups around masculinity are being expressed through the way that he uses the military and the Department of Defense in general is a like he, he wants to perform this like muscular.

[00:35:49] Authoritarian masculinity and like finding ways to undermine that is it’s very satisfying for me personally, also, I’m just like that’s delicious. It’s very good. 

[00:35:58] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. It’s embarrassed. It’s so cringe. Like it’s so cringe, 

[00:36:02] Cayden Mak: dude. 

[00:36:03] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Military members fucking hate dog and pony shows too. So I like, I feel bad for the like 7,000 people who are being roped into being away from their families or doing something productive with their time.

[00:36:15] Cayden Mak: Yeah.

[00:36:16] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: To march in Trump’s birthday parade. And then it’s on top of that, it’s just like last time around he wanted, he tried to do this last time he was elected, if you remember, and. Last time the Pentagon pushed back and they rightly were like, this is too politicizing of the military.

[00:36:32] Because the military also likes to cosplay like it’s apolitical.

[00:36:35] Cayden Mak: Right. 

[00:36:36] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: But like to some degree they like they were right. They were right to say we are not your political prop to be used in these. Dictator fantasies that you have to act out this fantasy that you have.

[00:36:46] That’s not what we’re for. And I think that was actually a, an a good example of them having leaders that had the courage to stand up for what was actually right for the troops and for the military. And just our country in general. And it’s un it’s unfortunate that this time around we don’t have leadership in the Pentagon that’s willing to stand up to Trump.

[00:37:06] Because, it’s our communities broadly as well, including the military members who have to participate in this under threat of like loss of job and benefits and all of these things. For what? Yeah. For Trump’s ego. 

[00:37:19] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I, this also brings up something for me. In addition to thinking about the ways that the political conditions have shifted since the first Trump administration was also thinking about, as you were talking, the amount of like far right politicization that happens within, especially like rank and file military members and if you all have run into that.

[00:37:40] And if conditions are shifting from where you sit on that. Just because I don’t know, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that we haven’t heard a lot about the sort of like more like extremist, paramilitary like elements of the far right movement in this country lately and I don’t know. I hypothesize that maybe like some of those folks are being absorbed into some of these, like some of the like ice enforcement stuff that we’re seeing. But yeah. I’m curious what the mood is that your members are seeing in that way. Is the sort of ascendancy of authoritarianism changing the vibe for folks?

[00:38:14] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: What I see that frustrates me as an organizer every day is that the far right and particularly people who are organized into these organi, organized far, right? So I’m not talking about like your regular neighbor friend who has like ridiculous beliefs and is, but I’m talking about people who have been absorbed into organization.

[00:38:33] On the right. Like they have been clear for decades now that their goal was to capture the state. 

[00:38:38] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:38:39] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: And they were aligned and clear about that. And they agitated from the outside with a clear goal of capturing the state. And right now they’re celebrating because for all intents and purposes, they have mostly captured the state.

[00:38:53] And so like literally the chatter from our Intel networks that like track what they’re talking about in their chats and what’s going on with them, right? And what they’re planning. The Oath Keepers, the proud Boy, right? Like some of these networks, they’re all mobilizing to DC and they’re treating this as a day of like MAGA celebration and to rally the troops for this next phase of implementation.

[00:39:15] And that’s very much how they’re thinking about it and talking about it. And the reason that frustrate, I, I say that frustrates me every day as an organizer is because I think that we as people who are. Left broadly right, just anti-authoritarian broadly are still debating amongst ourselves whether it’s worthwhile to con to try to build the power that is necessary to capture state power.

[00:39:39] And for me, I am just like, look at what’s happening. Yeah. Look at what happens. And imagine if the left for the last 50 years was very clear. That our mandate was to put our people in power so that they could advance an entire agenda. 

[00:39:56] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:39:57] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: And the kind of scale of transformational change that could lead to the kind of political revolution of values that we need in this country.

[00:40:05] And the kind of structural transformation that we need. And so I think that we have to be having a real reckoning with ourselves about what we’re watching play out. And I think to that end, I wake up every day thinking about the fact that like some fascist is trying to organize some mil 18-year-old member of the military or some vulnerable vet who just got out and is suffering from like the shocking lock loss of kind of like your entire world and community.

[00:40:30] And social network. And they’re vulnerable to being recruited into these spaces. But they’re also vulnerable because. Many people from within the machine can see that the whole system is broken, right? They have this kind of like revolutionary consciousness actually that is just like this.

[00:40:47] Both parties, this whole machine, everything is backwards. Everything’s fucked up, and the only people who have been meeting them in that and saying, I have a way to make sense of this. Welcome into my community, and let me get you involved in a way to transform that, for the most part has been the right.

[00:41:03] The right is waking up every day trying to organize members of community that’s deep of the military community. Yeah, 

[00:41:09] Cayden Mak: no, and I think that that’s such a deep insight about like why, like one of the ways in which they’ve been so effective. And I think that in, in the Biden years, I remember I don’t remember what year it was this, there was some report that came out about like how many.

[00:41:27] Service members have been contacted by somebody who is like, affiliated with one of these organized right wing? Yeah. Like some of them. We can call them paramilitary organizations. Yeah. I think and like the prevalence of that, I think. It was like one of these things that I remember seeing the headline, reading the article, and there was very little discussion about it.

[00:41:48] And I remember reading it and being like, God, we are so cooked. Because it is like an example of this thing that you’re describing that it’s like the author and like the authoritarian solution to a lot of this, the like fissures and the dysfunction and the contradictions is in a lot of ways is like easy and comforting, right?

[00:42:07] Because it’s like hearkening back to a past that never existed, but that is, I think. Some of the ways that we’ve been propagandized since we were little kids about what the United States is supposed to be. And yeah it does feel like such a missed opportunity to be doing this kind of work at scale for things that would be like transformational and liberatory for a society that like it’s yeah and we don’t like, we as a broader movement.

[00:42:35] I think like we in this room probably have a lot of story that like, you and I are probably aligned on, but I think we as a broader movement struggle to get our story straight. And that that’s that’s urgent work that needs to be done, like rapidly iterated on right now. 

[00:42:50] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: And like I think we, we have a tendency to sometimes have. Very understandable, but what are ultimately still reactionary responses to state power.

[00:43:03] Cayden Mak: That’s great. And 

[00:43:03] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: so and when the state is kicking our ass around, like whether it’s elections or whether it’s in the streets and in our communities.

[00:43:12] Our tendency. Has been in many cases to just with, to withdraw from those arenas in ways that from an emotional and like self-righteousness perspective. I’ve been guilty and I agree with, yeah. And also, one of my favorite sayings, which like smacks me across the head every now and then too, when I get guilty of losing my perspective, is just like, emotions aren’t a strategy.

[00:43:36] Righteousness isn’t a strategy. 

[00:43:38] Cayden Mak: And 

[00:43:38] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: so my question, I think that the question we have to be really grappling with in a humble way right now is yes, the two party oligarchy. The system is is rigged against us, right? It’s rigged to keep control in the hands of a very fa, small number of people who have meaningful disagreements between them.

[00:43:59] The kind of fascist neofascist movement and classical republicanism. Yeah. And neoliberalism. And the democrats and classical Republicans are both neoliberals diff different flavors, right? Like those, they have meaningful differences and they are enemies of each other. And also, like many people rightly point out in movement, that they work together to, to maintain this kind of static status quo reality because the neoliberals wanna continue to have the fascists to point to as a fear mongering tactic.

[00:44:28] All of that is true, I think, right? Yeah. All of those assessments are true. None of that o, none of that offers us an inherent, so what about what to do about that reality? And I think people say those things, they’re like, fascism is here, right? Like during election cycle and things like that.

[00:44:42] And I’m just like, yes. There’s an assumed conclusion that I think people are putting forward that’s because we’re getting our ass kicked in these arenas, that it means that it’s pointless and we should withdraw completely. Yeah. And I would argue that we have never, in my lifetime, we’ve never actually in my lifetime, had a meaningful, organized, coordinated effort to capture state power from the left.

[00:45:07] Cayden Mak: Yes. We have not I align with that also. 

[00:45:09] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. Like we’ve had isolated. Projects and pilots, which have been effective and uneffective to different degrees. And those are, have been so important. And they give us information about what’s possible and how the machine will respond when it’s challenged. 

[00:45:23] Cayden Mak: And also what regular people have an appetite for as well. 

[00:45:26] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. A hundred percent. Like how are we doing on our ability to capture the like hopes and trust and and build enough credibility with the working class. But I think that there’s this conclusion that’s oh, this person got elected and then disappointed us, or this project tried this and failed.

[00:45:42] And then people’s takeaway is no kind of engagement with state power in these, in an effort to wrestle the reins of control away are useful. And I didn’t come on today planning for this to be my soapbox, but it’s just I feel like when you’re engaging with the profound violence of Yeah.

[00:46:00] The system. You can’t not be a materialist. 

[00:46:03] Cayden Mak: That’s No, absolutely no. And this is absolutely our shit. I’m like, so here for this because yeah. I, I agree with you and I also think that I also think that like the other thing that you’re highlighting in this when we see one person getting elected to a legislative body, it’s like that itself is not governing power, right?

[00:46:21] No. That is a beachhead. To use a like unnecessarily militaristic metaphor. But it is that is the start. That is not the end of the campaign. And I think that thinking about ways that we can model what governing looks like in this time from the left actually is that’s what is exciting to me right now is that I do think that there’s there is a both a, like a narrative and a material opening where people are like.

[00:46:48] Looking at the horrible governance. Like not even bad governance, but just abject gov, like governing practices of the right, right now and yeah. To tie it back to your organizing with active duty military and veterans that like, I think that. We are seeing an opportunity to have some of these conversations because the contradictions are so loud for people.

[00:47:12] Yeah. And they’re so like in your face and it’s like very clear. But it also, I feel like it continues, one of the things that we’ve been talking about a lot internally here is thinking about. These like individual acts of political violence and like the way in which the far right is able to, and the right wing media machine is able to spin these things almost immediately.

[00:47:33] Yeah. And how there’s a link here between, a sense of hope, opportunity and like things actually being able to shift and then the sort of like narrative power we need to explain the world to people who are like, something here is not right. And that I don’t know. There’s a lot of work for us to do.

[00:47:51] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah. There together 

[00:47:53] Cayden Mak: is, 

[00:47:54] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: there is. And I think that what you’re speaking to is the the way that the right is so effective about getting us on our, on defense. Yeah. 

[00:48:01] And I think that now is a time where I’m hearing a lot of organizers understandably be in we just have to hunker down and protect our own defense mode.

[00:48:09] And that’s to some extent Yeah. That’s real. And also like we don’t. I don’t know how many PE of our people, we can actually protect that way without some kind of offensive strategy. Because of what you’re naming. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we have a responsibility to be thinking about what are the places and lever levers that allow us to put the right on their back foot.

[00:48:29] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:48:29] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Organizing. Military communities is one, organizing labor is another. Organizing communities in really like pointed specific ways and building strong bases that are prepared to take political risk together. Yeah. That’s the moment we’re in. But I think the optimistic thing I see in this moment is that what I see, like canvassing last year.

[00:48:50] What I felt profoundly moved by was that 10 years ago, the average like kitchen table conversation I was having with working class people did not have the level of acknowledgement that we need a whole new political system that it does now. People have a revolutionary orientation right now in a way that is.

[00:49:14] Unprecedented, I think in the last several decades at least. Yeah. 

[00:49:17] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:49:17] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: And that’s an opportunity, right? Huge opportunity. And that’s an opportunity that the right is capitalizing on more effectively than we are. But I think that there’s such hope in that, right? That progress was in large part due to our work, right?

[00:49:32] Because of Occupy, it was because of the movement for Black Lives. It was because of all of these, like his. Historic moments where people have been forced to confront the kind of utter violence and just wrongness of the system in a way that can no longer be papered over. 

[00:49:48] And so people want a revolutionary vision right now.

[00:49:51] Yeah. And people wanna way to, to to realize that in concrete ways in their life. And I think our task is to figure out how to offer that in a cohesive and concrete way to people. And I think when we think about it that way, I feel like I see so much potential ahead of us for like real groundbreaking change.

[00:50:11] That could happen in the next several decades. 

[00:50:13] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I, that’s, this is I tell my friends who are like less immediately involved in social movements, I like, they’re always shocked at how optimistic I am. But it is exactly this thing that you’re describing and they’re just like.

[00:50:27] Some of them don’t see it yet, so I’m always like, you guys look at this. But yeah, no, I agree with you that there’s a, we are at a sort of it feels like in a lot of ways we’re at a global because this is not just a United States phenomenon, right? Yeah. Like the rise of authoritarianism globally, I think is an indicator of the fact that like the global system is experiencing these sort of like shocks and crises that, our ability to make sense of them to people and translate them into material transformations that like uplift. Working class people and people of color and trans people and women that like this is huge. Like we are living in a huge historical moment. And it is simultaneously terrifying and also so exciting.

[00:51:11] And I’m also glad that we’re a movement together. I, yeah, me too. It’s been absolutely delightful to talk to you today. Where can folks find your work? Keep up with about face and plug into some of your upcoming campaigns. 

[00:51:25] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Yeah, the best place right now I think is probably Instagram or social media.

[00:51:30] Our handle across all social media platforms is at vets about face. And if not, we’re working on updating our website to make it a little snazzier right now. And for future reference. You can check us out [email protected]. 

[00:51:43] Cayden Mak: Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk today.

[00:51:46] It is absolute delight. And I’m also really glad to learn more about all the like soon to come stuff that you all are working on. So 

[00:51:52] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: thank you. Thank you. Likewise, Kayden. I appreciate you and all of the work that you’re doing to have us hold the space to be reflective about what’s needed even in these dark times.

[00:52:02] Cayden Mak: Hell yeah. Let’s talk again soon. 

[00:52:03] Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Absolutely take care. 

[00:52:05] Cayden Mak: My thanks again to Brittany Ramos Debarros of about face for joining me today. This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. I’m Caden Mak, and our producer is Josh Stro. Kimmy David designed our cover art and a warm welcome this week to Logan Ross, our summer intern.

[00:52:21] If you have something to say. Please drop me a line. You can send me an email that we’ll consider running on an upcoming episode at [email protected]. And if you’d like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bringing our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment, you can become a [email protected] slash donate.

[00:52:39] Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure that our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements. I hope this helps.