 Actually, my host privileges have been taken away, but that's okay. Welcome, regardless, everyone, to the Code Pink and On Earth Peace webinar that we are co-hosting together where we're going to explore the STEM to military pipeline. And for people who may not be aware, STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We'll begin the webinar shortly. So while you wait, it'd be really great if people could introduce themselves in the chat box, or if you're watching on YouTube or also on our Facebook page, you can introduce yourself in the comment section. We always love to see where people are zooming in from and who's with us on the call today. So we'll wait while people stream in. Also, it looks like people are already introducing themselves a little bit in the chat box. That's really great to see. Welcome, everyone. Again, we're going to get started in just a second. This is the Code Pink and On Earth Peace webinar exploring the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to military pipeline. I know that's a mouthful, but I'm really excited to get started pretty soon here. We're going to talk to some great panelists about this topic. So while we wait for people to join us, please go ahead and introduce yourself in the chat box, or if you're watching on YouTube or on our Facebook page, you can introduce yourself in the comment section. We'd love to know who you are and where you're zooming in from. Wonderful. It looks like we have people from around the country, from California to Indiana, Iowa. It's great to see you all here. Hey, to the person from San Jose. I'm in Mountain View. So maybe we'll connect. But we have someone from Canada as well. Great to see. Wisconsin. Oh, Fresno. Very cool. Wonderful, wonderful. Green Party. Nice. I met Jill Stein in 2016. Wonderful. Well, I think we can probably go ahead and get started as we wait for more people to join us on YouTube as well. So I want to welcome everyone again to the Code Pink and On Earth Peace webinar, exploring the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to military pipeline. As I said, I'm really excited to see people from around the country on with us today and also from Canada. My name is Carly Town. I'm the co-director of Code Pink and most of my work focuses primarily on our Divest from the War Machine campaign, which also encompasses our campaign to defund the Pentagon. So just a little bit about that, our Divest from the War Machine campaign works to divest our schools, our cities, our politicians, and any other financial institution from the War Machine. And at the federal level, we work to defund the Pentagon. The Divest from the War Machine campaign operates under a very simple premise, which is if we're going to end war, we need to stop allowing companies who profit from going, sorry, we need to stop allowing companies that profit from going to war. So our campaign focuses on exposing the companies that profit from going to war for really what they truly are and how they operate in our society at different levels. So today, I'm really excited to have co-organized this webinar with Charis Murphy, who works on the Stop Recruiting Kids campaign. And that campaign really seems to draw the crucial connections between military recruitment and our education system. So today, I'm really excited that we have three speakers with us who will help us kind of expand the conversation about military recruitment and education to also include a conversation about the ways in which students and workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are also recruited to work for and support the military industrial complex by working for the same companies like Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman. We could go on, right? These same companies that receive billions of dollars in contracts with the Department of Defense every year. So I'd like to welcome all three of our speakers who are with us today. I'm just going to go around and welcome everyone. So we're going to start off with Seth Kirschner, who's an author and current graduate student. So welcome to the webinar today, Seth. It's really great to have you here. Thank you. And I'm also going to introduce Sari Siddisi, who's a head chef and tech manager, who will speak more about their experience as a STEM major and really speak to finding a job outside of the military industrial complex. Welcome, Sari. Hi, everybody. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining us. And then finally, we'll also hear from Avery McAlide, who founded the STEM Strikes for Peace campaign, which I'm really excited for you all to hear more about. So welcome, Avery. Hello. Thanks, Avery. So just quickly, before we get started, I just wanted to address some important info for the audience. And then we'll get started with talking to all of our guests. So the first part of our webinar, we'll hear from our three speakers in the order that I introduced them. And then at the end, we'll have about five to 10 minutes for Q&A. So if you're joining us on Zoom or on YouTube, you can type any questions you have in the chat box or the comment section throughout our conversation. And we'll have a chance to answer some of the questions at the end of the webinar after we hear from all of the speakers. So if you have a question for any of the speakers, type them in the chat box whenever you have that question, and we'll have people collecting those for the end. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome our first speaker, Seth Kirschner, who will start our conversation off by helping us contextualize our conversation with more information about how the U.S. military has become intertwined with public education. So, Seth, go ahead and kick us off. Thanks, Carly. Thanks also to Libby Frank for kind of connecting us and great opportunity here to talk and share information about what I think is a really important topic. And so delighted that on the call are people who've been doing counter recruitment and know a ton about school militarism like Libby Frank outside Chicago, Rick John Cal, Gary Gerardi. So I think the Q&A and the discussion that we're going to have after is going to be really rich and fruitful. Let me just share my screen real quick. Oh, Carly, I need you to give me permission to do that. I see that. Yeah, I'm so sorry. I'm working on it. And I'm wondering, I'm wondering, Emily, if you can make Seth co-host allow Seth to share their screen? Sorry, I should have checked. Okay, you should. No, no worries. You should be able to. Yeah. All right, great. Okay, here we go. All right. Okay, so thank you all for bearing with me. So I'm Seth Kirschner. I'm currently in grad school, but I have been researching this topic for a while with my colleague Scott Harding who's at the University of Connecticut. And for about 10 years, a little bit more, we started doing interviews and just like just really brief kind of bio background, not that it's that important, but I got interested in counter recruitment first as an activist around the Iraq war when I was an undergrad and quickly found that, you know, my kind of passion and my maybe my skills were more and just learning about this. At the time in the Iraq war, not much was known about counter recruitment, even though this type of activism really has been with us since the 70s. And even before then, if we use a more sort of flexible definition of counter recruitment, which is just opposing military presence in civilian public education. So counter recruiters do not argue against military academies, West point things like that. It's that it's not appropriate in a civilian educational venue. So yeah, I came out with a book in 2017. What are counter recruiters doing? How are they organizing? How effective have they been? And for that book, we interviewed folks like Rick and Libby were on this call right now and they shared their wisdom and insights. Scott and I are joined with another colleague with this forthcoming book that's really going to have more of a historical look. We go back to the 1920s from the very origins of high school militarism in a big way. Jay Rothstein was founded in 1916. And activism against it happened happened very shortly after that. And it was people like John Dewey was considered one of the founding fathers of progressive education. Education as we know it today, he was very actively involved in the struggle against junior ROTC in high schools. I think it's a fascinating topic because it's so comprehensive there's so many aspects of school militarism. It can be intimidating and overwhelming to consider how much how many millions of dollars go into this complex. But it's not surprising when you consider the recruiting needs of this all volunteer military which requires 200,000 new signups every year, roughly 200,000 new people every year. But it's an enormous undertaking. The U.S. military, you know, is spread all over the globe. And it's all done by volunteers. So how does that work? Well, I mean, if you look back in the 1970s, once the draft ended, that's when junior ROTC in high school really had dramatic rise. And the military came up with all sorts of new and innovative ways of increasing their presence in high schools to compensate for the loss of the draft. They had to market themselves more effectively with the children, people who are under 18 years old. So today what that looks like is some high schools have visits from recruiters more than 100 times out of a school year, which should be surprising to some people. I think to a lot of people, when you talk to them about this issue, sometimes it just leaves them scratching their head. They're not even aware that some schools are this inundated with military recruiting. And of course, there's racial and class dimensions to this. That shouldn't surprise us either. With data I've gotten through the Freedom of Information Act, I've found that the schools in Massachusetts and Western Mass, again, very narrowly focused, Western Mass schools that have the most recruiting visits, 90, 100 visits just by the army every year, those are the schools that have the most black and brown students. So there are those issues as well. That is also something that I think allows counter recruiting to kind of intersect with other social justice movements. And junior ROTC, which we'll learn about briefly in just a second, is present in one in four urban high schools. And along with all these dimensions of school militarism, there's STEM outreach programming, which again, when you think about it, there is a reason. There is a kind of easy to understand reason why STEM is so important to the military. It's a very high-tech military these days. They want to ensure that their enlistees have the skills needed to pilot drones and that sort of thing. But it's also, you can see that since STEM is so sexy now and so kind of popular, the military takes advantage of that and packages marketing programs in ways that make it seem it's educational and it's opportunities to learn about science and engineering. And so how can you oppose that? It's a challenge for organizers, and this is a theme I'll come back to later, a challenge for organizers and counter recruiters to confront structures like this, which seem to offer opportunities to youth. And so how do you be, how can you be against something like that? That's something I think we have to kind of grapple with. I won't, I will not assume everyone knows about Jay Rotsy. I think it's very important to just touch on this briefly, even though it's not specifically STEM related, although if you're doing, so each branch of the military has a junior ROTC program. In total, 500,000 students roughly are enrolled in this paramilitary high school program. You attend school in a uniform, you take classes. If you're doing the Navy version, there is quite a bit of engineering and sort of science related curriculum involved. But as you can see, you also learn to fire weapons. You might have a marksmanship range in your high school. And it sucks up $384 million a year of federal budget. Not that that's the most important thing. The most important thing I think should be for peace people like us is, huh, 14 year olds were dressing them up and enacting that and having them play war as part of the public school curriculum. That should be something that people on the left and peace people should be more concerned about, I think. So Jay Rotsy is something that I think everyone associates, everyone who maybe knows about this issue, school militarism, thinks about when they think about recruiting in schools, this is a very sort of visually compelling image, right? So Jay Rotsy is more familiar to people than something like this. These are tractor trailers, large trucks that have been retrofitted so that they are now traveling exhibits with interactive immersive video game experiences that have a storyline. This one in particular, when I first wrote about it five years ago, I think, it was called the Army STEM experience. And there was a scenario that you were immersed in as a student. It goes around to high schools and county fairs and things like that. It visits hundreds of sites per year, this particular vehicle. And anyway, when you go in there, you have to, as a student, 15, 16 years old, you give them your contact information. And then that gets funneled into the appropriate channels and you get recruiting calls and so forth. But at the time I was writing about it, and the link to the articles in the chat, one of the scenarios, the scenario that was played out when you entered this vehicle and played the game had to do with drone reward fair. I think since then it's been tweaked. I certainly won't take credit for it, but I don't think it's not, I don't think it's as militaristic and obnoxious as it had been. Still, this is a major way for the Army in particular to market itself to youth through STEM. And if you read the trade journals that recruiters use when they talk about what they do, they say that this particular vehicle is very helpful in penetrating, they use that kind of language, in penetrating schools that have kind of restrictive recruiting policies. So if a school district has something on the books that says, we don't want recruiters on campus more than twice a year, this does not count as a recruiting visit. This is educational. This is a great thing and it doesn't count as a recruiting visit. So it's extra time for the military on campus. But it's checking a lot of boxes for the military. And I think it's important to broaden our lens here. And the bigger issue is that it's making war fun. It's promoting this view that war can be antiseptic and bloodless. So that's a problem. And a great book on this, actually, he has a terrific YouTube video, Roger Stahl, but I think it's that University of Georgia has this concept of militainment, which really gets at what this whole project is about, this Army project. And the militainment thing is great. So I would encourage you to do that, looks at sports and video games and so forth. I want to make sure everyone has a chance to Avery and Zari has a chance to talk to them. This is my last slide. So, Carly, give me a sense of how much time I have left, if you could. Yeah, you're good on time. You're good on time. You can speak for definitely like... Sweet, thanks. So, I mean, I just want to point out that I don't want to overwhelm people. I could have selected many, many different types of STEM outreach initiatives that various branches of the military conduct. I just selected these two in particular because I think they're probably the most compelling. They're both from the Army, but I'm happy to connect with people or talk about in the discussion later about what the other branches of the military are doing. Obviously, the Navy and the Air Force are very active on this front, too, but I just don't have time to get into it all. This slide just has this image and that's open source stuff. The Army website has a page like this for each one of its various tractor trailers. There's a whole battalion of them that travel across the country to convince youths to sign up. Okay, and that's just the last one I wanted to focus on because, again, it's quite latent and should trouble us is the Starbase program. And I won't be able to, unfortunately, I won't be able to tell you what this stands for, but government agencies, Pentagon is no exception, they love to have these crazy acronyms. So, Starbase actually stands for something and maybe Rick or Libby can tell us what it is. But this is a $20 million a year program that mainly works with state National Guard units, and it targets fourth through seventh graders. And it is some of us on the call might have had experiences growing up where you had a week at a camp during the school year. It's kind of a similar experience, so it takes fourth to seventh grade students. Most of them are fifth graders, takes them out of their regular school one week per year, and it plops them on a National Guard base or Air National Guard base. And civilian educators who work on the base teach them. So for four days, they have a kind of regular STEM instructional experience. You know, they might use that thing where there's a volcano and you have baking soda and vinegar and it blows up. You know, just you can read about it online. I have the link to this program in the chat. So it's very garden variety instruction around STEM. On the fifth day of the program, they bring in uniformed military personnel National Guard people. And the children on that day they just hear about how great it is to be in the military. And then there's a pre-test and a post-test. You know, education today, it's very obsessed with assessment and measuring and how effective are you. So in this case, the pre and the post-test to measure the effectiveness of this program, it covers a lot of ground. They're trying to see if the five days of instruction changes youth attitudes around science and makes them more comfortable and interested in math. But in other key pieces, how are we changing military attitudes? And for whatever reason, this particular program is often threatened with budget cuts. And just so you can read online as well about how people who want to save it and keep funding it, point to this piece. Well, it's promoting positive military attitudes. And that's important among fifth graders. So it is a kind of trickle down thing where this again points to just this desperate search for bodies. It is so important and so difficult for the military to recruit. It's an incredibly expensive undertaking. And it gets so desperate, they have to, you know, try to talk to fifth graders. And again, this is a yet another instance of how it is promoting a and the idea that military service is just stripped of any kind of human consequence, never involved empire building. It's just, you know, playing with science equipment and beakers and stuff like that. So it's problematic for those reasons as well. Starbase is one of the biggest in terms of funding and reach, one of the biggest stem military outreach initiatives in the country. 69 locations right now. Again, this is all pre COVID. I don't know how COVID has affected this program. So what are activists to do? I mean, I just want to sort of close by offering some of my thoughts. And I'm sure Zari and Avery and people on on the call like Rick and Libby can add to this and give it some texture. But again, I just wanted to point out that it's difficult to oppose things like Jay Rotsy because of this issue that Jay Rotsy provides opportunities for youth. And it's difficult to oppose Starbase for the same reason. Part of the Starbase mission is actually to be installed. They seek out new locations for this program Starbase in underserved communities. So if there's like a very under resourced school district with lots of African American and Latino students, I mean, that's going to be where Starbase might be planted. And so activists who have good intentions will have difficulty opposing something like that because it will be seen as taking opportunities away from communities. That's something that the activists need to address. So we can talk about that. But one of the possibilities here is that usually as with Jay Rotsy, when Starbase is discussed as maybe being brought into a community, that's a decision that a school board will in theory have some say over. And but education's, I meant to write that locally controlled, sorry, it's a locally controlled issue in the US. It's incredibly decentralized, which creates frustration, right? There's a lot of downsides to that. But it creates openings and opportunities for activists who can speak and present evidence at school board meetings, for instance, and talk about how, hey, this thing that that purports to be just a STEM educational enrichment program. Actually, it's funneling youth into the military in ways that that need to be pointed out. And as for the military recruiting trucks, this is the last point here. Using the Freedom of Information Act is something I wish activists would do more. In the 1990s, there was a group, I think it was Rick and maybe fill me in here, but I think that they were a part of a group called CCCO. And they were able to find and they targeted the army, which had the largest fleet of these trucks. And they were able to get the schedule where these trucks were going. And so they would, activists would show up at the schools on the day that these trucks arrived and they'd have picket signs and they would just be reminding students and teachers of the purpose of that vehicle and talking about the realities of military service and doing all these things that counter recruiters do and do so well. So using a FOIA, the FOIA request is a way to ship away at that aspect of it. In fact, in the 1990s, activists were so successful using FOIA to harass and kind of interfere with those recruiting visits by trucks that soon the military, the army was saying they couldn't release their scheduled visit information because it was a national security issue. So something like that, I think also reveals just how sensitive the military is about these recruiting issues. Youth access is so important that they often will, that anyway, youth access for the military is so important that any organized attempt to interfere with it is seen as a real threat. So it reveals that recruiting is really the soft underbelly of the military recruiting complex. And I look forward to having more discussion with folks about this later on, but I want to turn it over to our next speaker. Thank you. Thank you so much for that, Seth. I think that was a really great way to kind of open up our conversation and discussion for contextualizing and also giving us a little bit of background in history. It sounds like people on the call have some knowledge as well. So I'm looking forward to the discussion in a little while. And just to say, I think that point about FOIA is really important. Actually, we're using it on our divest campaign all the time FOIA requests to understand the ways that our cities and governments are financed. So that's really important. Thank you. So, yeah, next, I wanted to welcome, sorry, Sissy, who is currently a head chef and tech manager who will speak about their experience as a STEM major. And, you know, the difficulty of trying to find a job that doesn't take part in or work for the military industrial complex. So sorry, welcome. Hello, thanks for having me. Yes, I I unfortunately am like the prime like recruit for the military industrial complex as well. Like I, my family's low income. I'm half black. I'm a gender nonconforming person. My parents are immigrants also, and they don't know a lot of the systems and things like that. And that put me at a big disadvantage. And so honestly, like the military, we was looking like more and more good because of all those benefits. You know, like in the sixth grade, I had like a science fair that was technically like funded and put on by the army in high school when you were looking at like getting like an aptitude test to figure out like what college should you go to, what you should you major in and stuff like that. That's administered by the military. And that score would be used to see if you could get into a certain branch of the military or something like that. And then later when I'm like, I need scholarships, I need opportunities so I can get through college because my family didn't have that kind of like funds because back in Europe, it wasn't so expensive to send your kid to a university and they didn't realize that it'd be so expensive for us when they moved here. But most of the like really good scholarships that would take care of a lot of things and really make it easy for me to go through school are funded by like the CIA, the FBI and other like military contractors and organizations. And so it made it really hard for me at first to even like get to college because most of the things that would allow me to get there like really well and safely and all that kind of stuff would have been from those kind of organizations. And so the influence was already everywhere before I even had like the mindset to say like, hey, you know, that's kind of weird. Like why are they everywhere? Why is this like my best option, you know, to go into the CIA, even though I don't really like them that much, you know, and things like that, I applied and I didn't get in so worked out for me. But that was kind of like my first experience. And it kind of helped that throughout my life. I've already made like a conscious effort to kind of like not push away humanities too. So I think that's a common STEM thing where it's like, we feel like we're the good the logical like side of school. And so kind of people kind of forget that's like the humanities aren't frivolous or like fruity or things like that are just like useless. It's honestly really important to learn about things like history, politics, current events, like social justice. And since my parents are immigrants, too, they were very quick. Every time I came back from school and said, I learned about this to give like the opposite side and be like, no way, like, don't take that at face value. Like coming in after the fourth grade learning about Christopher Columbus and them immediately giving me the child version of Howard Zinn's people history of the United States. So I could learn about like the mass genocide and things like that. Safe to say I was not a fan of Christopher Columbus after that. And things like that. So making that kind of effort was also really key for me to kind of understand like, oh, wait, this is everywhere for a reason, because it's really easy for people to be like, no, that's a separate issue for me going to school, for me learning, for me wanting to do STEM. Or like, that's a separate issue that I don't have to worry about because I'm not X, Y, or Z, or I don't live here, or I didn't go to JRTC, where it's like, that really helps me to understand it's like everything is interconnected, like everything that you see, whether it be like even like climate change or other issues that you may like love, and like really be excited about, that's going to be interconnected with the war machine, the military industrial complex, and things like that. It may be in different ways, but they're all connected. And so from that point, me kind of realizing it's me making an effort to not take internships or scholarships from like those kinds of companies like the CIA, the FBI, or like other organizations, but also realize that it's like I shouldn't take those internships or scholarships or things like that from big tech companies either. So it's like, I shouldn't go to Google, to YouTube, to Twitter, to other things like that, even though they're one of the people that are giving the most opportunities, the most like help honestly out there, because it's like, yeah, is there like primary thing, the social media or like the search engine or stuff like that, like tied to the military industrial complex? You wouldn't think so, but they all have side projects that they're doing. They all use their technology that they're developing for their social media or whatever their product is to then go sell it to the police, to the military, and the things like that, without sometimes telling the people who work there. So that was my big issue where it's like, okay, maybe I could be on Google's team and not be doing those projects. But there was like a case recently where it's like a group of scientists at Google found out that what they were working on was to like sell to the police and to the military and to like track people and things like that. And they're like, whoa, wait, I didn't sign up for that, but they wouldn't tell them because they knew that that that might be a conflict of interest for certain people. And so that's why it's like, okay, I have to pass up a lot of these opportunities that may be great for me, really open doors, because they're trying to market to me. They're trying to be like, oh, yes, black one, please, you know, sign up for this. Oh, yes, like, if you're a woman, you're your minority, like, we're going to help you break in, you know. But in reality, what I learned from not taking these scholarships is that they don't, that's not true. Because it should be that even though I didn't take their scholarships, I didn't take their internships, they should still look at me and be like, oh, yes, we're gonna, we're gonna try to help her break in, right? But the minute that I didn't do those things, I realized it's like, now no one will hire me, because I'm automatically seen as less desirable, even though there's like a really big outcry for like, we need more women and minorities and STEM, and all that kind of stuff where it's like, you would think that everyone would want to help me, you know, to try to like get in and like stay in and not be discouraged and stuff like that. But it's like, the minute you pass up their little like setups for like kind of like recruiting into that military industrial complex or making them look good on paper, they're like, oh, no, we don't want you anymore. You know, there was one of the former employee of Google as well, who was a black woman and was trying to like, was like head recruiter. And she recently posted like a lot of articles explaining that it's like, you know, while she was there, she was really trying to push Google to like, let's recruit at HBCUs, you know, and other places like that. And let's hear some ideas that I have to make the recruiting process less racist and all that kind of stuff and Google was routinely like, nah, I don't want to. And eventually she had to leave because it's like, you know what, I have all these like ideas that wouldn't be like too costly or too difficult, but they really just like at every step of the way made it so hard for her to even implement those simple ideas. So it's clear that they don't really care about STEM or women in STEM or minorities or whatever they're kind of like posturing for. They're really just looking like we want to be, we want to be seen as cool, hip and progressive so that behind the scenes without telling anybody, we're going to do all the other stuff like again, funding the military, funding the police, giving them like really high tech gadgets to monitor us and like really hurt the people that they're supposed to be like trying to help, you know. And so now it's like now I'm faced with like as a STEM student where it's like, okay, well, if I want financial stability, I want to work for Google, I want to work for Twitter, I want to work for YouTube, I want to work for Facebook, you know, because the other half of it is like, yeah, I could work for a nonprofit, I could work for all those kinds of stuff. But it's like the issue is that they're usually underfunded. So I wouldn't be as financially stable. And there's also a really big culture of, you know, kind of like overwork where it's like, well, the thing that we're doing is really important. So you should want to put in 60 hours a week, you should want to do all this extra stuff for like no work for no extra pay or like things like that where it's like, you know what, I do. But that's not also sustainable. And so that's like where like a lot of like the burnout comes from. So it's like, okay, do I burn out and nonprofit doing something I care about, something that I think will actually help. Or do I go and like sell out. And like I go to like the one of the big companies so that I am financially stable, I can take care of my family and I could maybe volunteer on the side for a lot of other the like all these things, which kind of brings into mind where it's like you're kind of in this kind of like structural trap, you know, like the military industrial complex and the society that we've kind of set up makes it so the people who are most vulnerable to this like structure, the people who are going to be hurt the most have no resources or avenues to exist outside the system, you know, people will be like, Oh, well, if you don't like Walmart, if you don't like big tech, okay, don't use their stuff where it's like, it's kind of hard for me to not be able to use their stuff and actually live a good and productive life and get jobs, and get the items that I need at the prices that I can afford, you know. So it doesn't really always help to be like, okay, well, we need to boycott because it's like, you know what, for a lot of those people in those underprivileged communities, maybe the military is their only way to get to college, you know, which really sucks because it's like, instead of saying like, okay, like, get rid of it, maybe it's like, maybe the conversation can be like, okay, well, fund the military less and then fund those like schools to get those kids to colleges more, you know, where it's like, they're like, oh, well, who else is going to give them opportunities where it's like, why are we giving all the money to the military so that they're the monopoly on saving us from our lower communities and our like disadvantaged states, you know, like all that money could come from someone else, it doesn't have to come from the military, that doesn't have to be our only way in. But it's also like really important to remember it's like, okay, don't hate on the person who's still eating at Chick-fil-A or don't hate out the person who's still shopping at Walmart or things like that, because it's like that might be their only real option because again, the structural trap is there because the minute you try to do something else, you don't have the money, the economy tanks the minute you think about something relating to socialism, you know, like the point is to punish you the minute you think I'm going to do something better and I'm going to do something outside of this and so it's that's why it's like what I do is kind of like I take the small steps, you know, like I support the companies where I buy out Walmart that are like fair trade that are workers co-ops or like things like that when I have the money or things I was like, I try to take the jobs that are the least connected, you know, maybe not completely de-separate because everything's interconnected, but the least like I work it up bakery right now like my pastries are not going to the military, fortunately enough. So, you know, you try to do small things, I support what I can, I do what I can, you know, and it's important not to let yourself also get burned out by the like, well, I'm not living the perfect, you know, like anti-military lifestyle, you know, I'm a bad person where it's like, okay, we can't. That's the point. We can't. And so it's like, how do we work around it while we're changing the structure so that you can actually do what you believe in and it's morally ethical? Sorry for talking so long. I should have made a PowerPoint. I apologize. I have a joke. I said the only thing that the government should be funding is these guns, not the militaries. I wanted to put that out there for everybody. Sorry, that was fantastic. No, thank you so much. No, I really, I really appreciate that. And I'm sure as you can see, people have really enjoyed that conversation. I think you've touched on a lot of great themes that maybe we can also get back to when we go back to our full panel discussion at the end here. That was that was really great. Thank you so much. So I do want to make sure we have plenty of time for Avery to also speak. I'm really excited to welcome Avery to speak because, you know, talking about the STEM Strikes for Peace program is so important. So Avery, would you like to kick us off with your talk about that? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for inviting me and organizing this, Carly, along with other folks. You know, I'm going to go turn on another light and just pause for you a few seconds to let the messages. We've already heard some really good stuff. So I'm going to let that land for a second while I go turn the light on. Sure, no problem. Thanks, Avery. Yeah, and seeing people posting in the chat box. And, you know, this is just I'll just use this with a time to remind people after Avery speaks, we'll have time for a Q&A. So if you have any questions or if you want any of the panelists to talk more about a specific topic, post in the chat box and on YouTube and we'll get to that soon. Okay, Avery. All right. Hello, everybody. Okay, so I'll jump right in. Yeah, if you read my bio, which was posted on the website, you might have noticed that it's kind of weird. And that was on purpose, because part of the reason I organize is I want to create a world in which we can express our true authentic bizarre selves. And so I feel like inactivism is the place where I really want to model that. I firmly believe that the world we'll find ourselves in after organizing is the one we model while we're organizing. So just a pre note there. Let's see. And I'm going to post in the chat a little agenda here items one through four. So you can follow along if you like, I find that often helps. Okay, so sure, I'll start off with how was the STEM strikes for peace campaign formed? Well, I find I've been on an anti-war streak for a long time. That started in college. And, you know, I mean, why be anti-war? It's, you know, it's almost how can you even ask the question? It's a colossal waste of resources and of life, you know, it sucks up. It's a demonic suction tube as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it. And what's the end result of all this work? It's just colossal suffering. So it's bad on both ends. It's obviously terrible. Why wouldn't you be anti-war? Um, okay. And then I'm also there's another sort of further nuance to my anti-war in that I see the climate change problem. And it's very clear that we're going to need some serious international cooperation in order to solve this. You know, it's going to take all nations, and they're going to have to act in faith with each other. You know, we can't dominate each other into an ecologically sound society. And I don't see how countries are going to be able to cooperate while they have nuclear weapons aimed at each other. And while they're torturing each other's citizens, it just it's I don't see how it can happen. So there's many reasons, of course, to oppose the war machine. Now on to STEM strikes for peace specifically. I'll explain exactly what it is in a moment. But yeah, so you know, STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, I completed a PhD in physics in 2019. And I would find this was sort of the tipping point for me. I was, you know, talking about all these things about the military, and you know, to one of my friends in the program. And I felt like we were really agreeing, right? I felt like it was like, yes, you know, we're kindred souls, he sees the problems, I see the problems like, we're good, we're going to make something happen here. And then the next day, I found out that last summer, he had taken an internship at Sandia, one of these nuclear weapons companies. And so I was like, you know, what the hell man, like, don't you see the connection and just the string of rationalizations I was bombarded with after that. It just like, I was like, okay, I see there's a problem here, there's some serious moral ambiguity. I have to find some way to take a stand, as they say. Okay. Yeah. And so then I founded STEM strikes for peace. STEM strikes for peace, I guess there's really two aspects to it. There's the goal. And there's the strategy. The goal is STEM strikes for peace is to have a worldwide military spending on science and technology cut by 90%. The tactic or strategy is a strike. I'm asking or we, STEM strikes for peace are asking for people with STEM experience to pledge not to work for any military or defense company. So it's, it is a strike, it's a labor movement, you know, it's the demand plus the withholding of labor. And that's the idea there, you know, and from there, it's like, let's just grow this as high and as far as we can, we're at 100 signatures now. I am, you know, I've been sort of keeping us on the back burner and just kind of like asking people around to be in my personal life, but I would like to ramp up organizing methods with this campaign. Okay, that's STEM strikes for peace onto the second agenda item. What is the connection between STEM and the military? Well, of course, STEM is where the arms race takes place. It was physicists who created nuclear weapons who have never in a meaningful way apologized for doing so on anything resembling an institutional scale. And now scientists are, you know, racing as fast as they can to weaponize AI, you know, to create the next, you know, unbelievable super weapon, I don't have to convince you of the dystopic possibilities that exist there. And yeah, you know, as I said, you know, STEM has not really, has not really reckoned with its history, creating these weapons and the impact they've had on the world. In America now, we're just, you know, finally starting to see the heroes fall, right, we're starting to see the Confederate statues come down as our nation finally recognizes this racist history. But the analogous process, it's not it has not quite started in science. You know, you take the two biggest heroes of 20th century physics, Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, both of them contributed to the nuclear weapons program. And so, in my opinion, that means they're not heroes. As much as I admire their intellects, you know, they're not worth worshiping. And, you know, that's I would love to see, you know, I would love to see analogous process happen in STEM with a real reckoning there because there's some serious moral ambiguity. And one more connection between STEM and the military is that, so of course, STEM helps the military, but then the military also distorts, also distorts science. You know, you can't find a field in science where there aren't grants from the military. And having been through the academic machine, I see that labs, you know, cater their research to where they can get grants, you have to. And, you know, I was working in, I had a physics degree, strangely enough, it was really microbial ecology that I was working on. And my professor worked, you know, worked his ass off to apply for a DOD grant for our research. So it's distorting the very soul, the very direction of science. What should be, or in my opinion, could be, one of the great noble pursuits of humanity. Okay, on to point three, why is this a potent field for organizing? Why is the STEM military connection, you know, why is there opportunity for us here as activists and organors to really make a difference? Well, as I said before, it's ubiquitous, you know, there's DOD grants in every field. You know, I picked a random place here in Mountain View and my roommate works for Northrop Grumman, you know, it's everywhere. So, but at the same time, this is the important part, there is a spirit of resistance. You know, if you talk to people about this, you'll find half the people I bring this campaign up to, they're like, yes, of course, yes, absolutely, I totally agree. You know, yeah, show me where to sign, I'll sign, of course. So the spirit is there. And just as further evidence for that, I was once at a panel, and the panelists, they were making speeches about, you know, what STEM should be, what it should do, and they were saying, you know, we have some ethical responsibilities here. Like, you know, we should make sure that when we're building a product, we should program it so that it can't be used for violence. And then so I asked this question, like, okay, does that mean that when it comes to products which are explicitly designed to be violence, such as nuclear weapons and stuff like that, does that mean we have the ethical obligation to just not build them or not work on them at all? And it's just like applause, just like erupted around me. So the spirit is there, people really do care about this in STEM and do want to stop the STEM military connection. So we just have to organize it. The spirit is there, it just needs to be organized. And that's what I'm trying to do with STEM Strikes for Peace. Yeah. And so now I'll just, this is sort of still part of agenda item three. Why is this a potent field for organizing? But I'll just talk about some of my visions for, like, where I could see this going. You know, STEM Strikes for Peace is a worldwide campaign. It's not just about defunding the US military science machine, though, of course, that is the largest, but it is about worldwide demilitarization. And one of the things which I think would be absolutely beautiful to accomplish is to get, like, these sort of joint declarations to have, like, I mean, you don't even have to start with a coalition, we could just start with two. If we could get one, you know, one physics program, one department from any one college in, say, the US and one from a college in China, and both jointly declared to not accept grants from their countries' militaries. I think actions like that would be just like, would be amazing and would be so powerful. Partly because, you know, when we talk about wanting to demilitarize, we get hit with these just boneheaded arguments like, well, you think US military is bad? What do you think China would do if they were the most powerful country? It's like, I don't have to wonder because the US already is genocidal. So it's like, it's already awful, you know? So, I mean, but anyway, if we could get, you know, joint actions, then that argument wouldn't even be valid anymore, anyway, because then both countries wouldn't be militarizing. So, you know, that's just one dream for where this could go. STEM strikes for peace. And now the call to action. So I've been using the word, I, a lot, as I've been speaking, and that's because right now STEM strikes for peace, it's just me, it's just me asking people to sign the pledge. In the past, I have, with other people organized events, we did a little bit of direct action. You know, we went to a quad day at the university and, you know, spread the word. But I am looking at this point to, to ramp back up into activism and grow the organization. So let's see. Here, I'll just, once again, post to the chat. Here's just so you can see it with your eyes. Here are just some ideas of what we could do together. So, you know, there are of course the lower labor asks, you know, there's a follow on Twitter at STEM for peace. If you're in STEM, you know, check out STEM strikes for peace. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Carly. You know, check it out and, you know, really consider if you would sign it. And please, if you feel called, you know, check it out and sign it. And then our action item three, I feel like this is where organizing really the real heart of organizing is if you have a friend who you think would sign the pledge, you know, buck up, get the courage up and go ask them. That's my ask for you. And then beyond those, I, you know, I'm open to ideas. I have a bunch of ideas. I'm sure you do too. Reach out to me. Yeah, at info. Yeah, Carly, if you can hit them with the email address, reach out to me the email, you know, I'm down to collaborate, issue joint solidarity statements between organizations, you know, email blasts, professors at universities, whatever we can think of to, to spread the word for both of our causes. And yeah, number five, this is so sorry you brought this up. And I really wanted to mention it because right now I feel like one of the weaknesses of this campaign is that we're just asking people to limit their options to contract when, you know, so many people are already at a point where like my options are like this already. So how can you ask me to take one away? I would really like to implement like a job help, like a career search, some kind of network like that resources to help with the job search so that like you get something out of it as well. You're not just giving something up. So if anybody feels like they have ideas on what to do there, you know, also hit me up around those kinds of things. And finally, I'd also just like to say that, you know, in the end, it's immaterial. If this organization or if your organization is the one that deals the final death blow to the military industrial complex. So I also offer myself up to help with other people's campaigns. I feel like my greatest strengths are writing. And I can be pretty calm during direct actions, like, you know, I feel like I can contribute during those sort of high pressure events pretty well. So yeah, reach out to me in solidarity and in peace. Thank you so much, Avery. That was wonderful. And really great to hear. And thank you also, Seth, and sorry for all of your contributions as well. I think this has been just a really excellent panel so far and just hearing all of your different perspectives has been really helpful. So we do have a couple of questions that I kind of wanted to field. And so I'm going to start off with a couple. And some of them, I think, are for everyone. Some I think are a little bit more directed at a couple of panelists, but I'll let you know. So we have I'll go to them, maybe not in order, but we have one in the chat box. So it says, with the attraction of science fiction to young people in the interest and excitement that might exist within STEM students. Oh, about the Mars landing and the space force, how do we approach a counter narrative to youth about how militarism is made acceptable or invisible? That was from Gary in the chat box. And I think this is for anyone. As a young person, I'll take the lead. Great. So I definitely think that it's really insidious, you know, like how like, if you will, subliminal messages are kind of pushed through where it's like, okay, yeah, you know, like people really like NASA, but it's like also like unfortunately with like space force and things like that, even just like something as cool as space is also used for militarization and force and things like that. And I also think that this is a bigger issue with also just like capitalism as an economic structure, where it's like, we assume where it's like, okay, well, without capitalism or without the military or things like that, like how would we have the drive to actually invent anything? You know, like we would never have anything new if we didn't have the push of capitalism or the military and trying to defend ourselves where it's like, that's not true. We could do a lot of cool things and people have tried to invent and create a lot of cool things that are not necessarily to be used for the military because they had the capitalistic incentive of becoming a billionaire. There's a lot of things that we use every day that it's like, you know what, they thought of this because they thought it would be cool and they thought it would be nice and they wanted to do it. You know, I think we're also really like limiting like our view of people as people where it's like, we think like, okay, well, they only want a billionaire and if they lose that incentive, they'll just be lazy and visitate on the couch for two weeks or whatever at a time. And things like that where it's like, there are other cool things we can do, like the fact that it's like, okay, the Mars rover is has landed where it's like, okay, well, maybe the the goal isn't to now colonize Mars, but it's like, now we can learn about another solar system. It could be just for like science and say like, we can build this to now help people like build this new technology to help caption videos like accurately, you know, like there's a lot of other things that we could do that our science fiction could point to where it's like, well, instead of trying to defeat the new enemy or to just get to be a billionaire, it could be like, oh, well, for the good of people, we could do this, or wouldn't it be cool if we had like a real Harry Potter wand that was like a laser tag game? You know, like, there's a bunch of things we could do, but because we have these like two systems, we have a hard time of like, it's like thinking of a new color, you know, where it's like, you haven't seen it before. So it's really hard to think of something new because it's like your framework doesn't involve that. But if we could like get kind of education out there where it's like, no, there's a lot of things we could do, it has to do two things, then people can now finally think of a new color and think of a new way to use STEM and to do these kinds of things. Wonderful. I'd like to just real quick question as well, which is that. Yeah, I think the answer is to find that those rare cases of science fiction, which is really, really good and has a really good message and tell everyone about them. So I'm just entering in the chat right now. Steven Universe is fantastic, it's science fiction, and it's so emotionally brilliant. Octavia Butler has written some fantastic science fiction as well as Ursula K. Le Guin. And also the activist magician right now, Adrienne Marie Brown. I know it does like a lot of work on imagining futures. So I mean, I think just taking these and just spreading them as much as we can is what I would advise. That's wonderful. Thank you, both Avery and Sorry, I think that's great. And I think also, talking to and thinking through how actually we need, we do need scientists to address real problems that we have, for example, climate change. Like last week or a couple weeks ago, we had a conversation about economic conversion, where we're talking about how we actually could use the skill sets of scientists who maybe are now working on building military weapons or military, any kind of technology, they could actually be, you know, transfer their skills to actually work on the issue of climate change. So I think that's brilliant. So thank you so much for those suggestions as well. I have a couple of questions. Let's see, I have a question for Seth. Can parents have their children opt out of these classes in some jurisdictions? So I think they're referring to like some of the STEM the STEM programs that you were discussing. Right. Well, of course, Jay Rotsy is in theory voluntary, although there are reports of students being encouraged slash forced by guidance counselors to to sign up to Jay Rotsy. But it's basically a voluntary thing. Starbase. Yeah, yeah, these are all voluntary. I mean, there's going to be some input from guidance counselors. But it's something that I think parents can get involved with as people of influence in a school district, they can, you know, register their complaints with the school board if their child is going to a school, which has this program, I think that means that's where parents have real power. In fact, well, you know, one of the things that is challenging for counter recruiters, if they do not have children currently in a school district, they just don't have that kind of clout with a school administration with the school board that parents do parents really can can make things happen. So they they ought to use that power with lobbying against school militarism. That's what I would say about that. I think we need to recognize that power that parents have. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And I would agree, you know, my mom was also a teacher and she she made sure that we didn't take the as that because she knew exactly what it was. So I think that's really important talking to more people about their rights as well. Let's see, I have a question for Avery. The question was, is this in schools? I'm a teacher and would promote to the science department and would you consider hosting a job board? So I think they're referencing the STEM strike for peace. Yeah, I'm highly interested. Yeah, reach out to me for details. But yeah, I'm definitely interested in getting out there and getting some good messages out there. So yeah, info at STEM strikes for peace.org hit me up. Yeah, let's talk. Awesome. And as I've said in the chat box, but also say here, I'll make sure everyone who's attended an RCP, you'll get all this information via email. So don't worry about having to remember it either. And then I think the last question, which is fairly general. But I think, you know, it'd be a good way to kind of close out today is anyone who wants to talk more a little bit more about the broader implications of allowing the militarization of schools, how the lessons and values taught by militarism can negatively impact social change organizing in the future. So anyone who wants to answer that, and I think that'll wrap up our questions for today. Well, it's a great question. It's, it's challenging. I think we all need to think about that. Anytime we're encouraged to think about some of the broader issues involved, we should take, take advantage of that. And I think one thing I would say is, you know, Jay Rotsy, I know this isn't really about Jay Rotsy in particular, but I'm going to pull that out because one of the things that does that parents and school stakeholders appreciate is the students who participate gain confidence, public speaking skills, particularly, and leadership skills and so forth. So, you know, those are, those are some positive things. Now, it's unfortunate. And this gets to that question, Carly, that they're learning, you know, those skills, putting themselves out there, public speaking, all within this militarized context. I mean, imagine what you could have if instead there's an organization like STEM Strike for Peace in schools, mentoring young activists, giving them training in public speaking so that they can become social change advocates in the future. That's what I think we're missing. And I think it kind of gets to that question about the negative impact on future movements for social change, because we're channeling all this youthful energy and dynamism into a military direction. That's, that's something we need to not decide on. That's wonderful. Yeah, I can't, couldn't agree more. Avery and sorry, any, any last thoughts? We are going to wrap up pretty soon here, but I just wanted to offer you the option for any last words. Sorry. I do have many words because I speak to more people and I'm cooped up in my own house. So yeah, mostly words where it's like, instead of thinking about like, oh, well, we can't do away with certain things because they help think about like, well, maybe if we funded less of this and more of that, maybe we could have the same programs. Like we don't have to lose a program that provides discipline, confidence, public speaking, where it's like the schools can't provide it because they're underfunded, but the military can because they're overfunded. Think about the funding question where it's like, we can have all the same things that you like from all of these programs. They don't have to go away. It's just that like other people can't provide them because they're not being funded as much. They don't have the ability to. You know, and again, I do want to like emphasize where it's like, okay, yes, don't beat yourself up for not being a perfect peace person, but do look at what you can do personally, where it's like, if you cannot take that internship because you have another internship, it's not as cool, you know, but like it gets the job done, like go ahead and take it. But if that's your only way to get into your like job field that you would really love to, you know, it'd be like that, like make sure you hit the streets when we're protesting, but you know, like you do what you can. And like, don't don't count yourself out because you can't be the perfect model of like, I've done everything I can to, you know, combat climate change, combat, anti-militarism, you know, and things like that. I really do want everyone to know that you can do what you can because the primary reason that we're not as good as organizing as the right and other things like that is because we're all burnt out and we can't sustain like the protests and the things like the movement going because like all the people who were in it at the first time had to drop out two months in because they put so much of themselves without taking care of themselves or worrying that they're not good enough, you know, to be part of the protesting and part of the movement and part of the solutions. So you are good enough, you can do it. Don't let yourself burn out so that you can be helping in the future. Great. That's awesome. Sorry. Carly, if I could just mention one other thing that if anyone is interested in learning more about kind of recruitment efforts to oppose school militarism, they should go to the website of National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth. Put that into Google or go to N-M-O-M-Y dot org and learn more. It's a great resource. Thanks, Seth. Yeah, I can agree. I can agree more and make sure everyone here gets that in and puts it on YouTube. Yes, thanks. And Kair has also put it in the chat. Avery, any last words before you wrap up today? Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. Great to hear from everybody. I'll make two quick last points. They're both kind of just vibing off the two things. Sorry, Seth. One, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Nothing's pure here on earth. So yeah, you know, we ain't going to be perfect. We're going to shop at Walmart sometimes. And, you know, point two is, yeah, on this issue of like, yeah, you know, it's not the military, which is doing all these great things. It's taxpayer money, which is going through the middleman of the military and then going to these things. So yeah, STEM strikes for peace. It's about reinvesting that money into science for the social good. You know, how many, how many like incredible, you know, renewable agricultural farms could we could we fund through just like one the worth of one fighter jet? You know, we're going to get more out of this once we defund these terrible programs and reinvest them. That's all. That's that's a perfect way to kind of close us out. You know, I think both with you and sorry, Seth Avery makes so much sense, right? I mean, we do have to talk about the fact that actually spending on the military and the Pentagon budget every year is incredibly harmful in many ways. And one of them is because spending half of that money goes directly to private defense contractors. And they're certainly not interested in, you know, making any kind of societal change or good, right? They're interested in their bottom line. So that's really important. And I really appreciate that point that you brought up. And with that, you know, I want to thank again, everyone here who attended the webinar on zoom and on YouTube. And of course, that's sorry, Avery. Thank you so much for a really great conversation. And some excellent questions. And I think this has really started some good points of collaboration and ways that we can continue to work together moving forward, which is exactly what we need to do. So as a reminder, we'll be sending everyone who are speaking of recording of our conversation. And you'll also be able to find it on our code pink YouTube channel. So with that, thank you everyone so much and have a good rest of your night.