Arrested Beaten and Labeled a Terrorist

➡ Keith McHenry, co-founder of Food Not Bombs, has dedicated his life to feeding the homeless and advocating against war and poverty. Despite being labeled a terrorist organization and facing numerous arrests, the group continues its mission. However, McHenry highlights the irony that liberal cities, often seen as compassionate, are making it increasingly difficult to feed the homeless, while more conservative, rural communities are more supportive. He encourages individuals to help their communities rather than relying on a government that may not prioritize the needs of the homeless.
➡ A man dedicated to feeding the hungry has been arrested multiple times in various countries, including 94 times in San Francisco alone. Despite the challenges, he continues his mission, even managing to avoid trouble in Nigeria by gifting a book to a police chief. He also had a scary experience of being kidnapped in Nigeria but managed to negotiate his way out. Despite the risks and legal issues, he remains committed to his cause of feeding those in need.
➡ The text is about a person’s struggle to feed the homeless. Despite facing numerous obstacles, including arrests and legal battles, they continued their mission. They faced issues with permits and health inspections, and even had to deal with false accusations and jail time. Despite these challenges, they remained committed to their cause, refusing to stop their work even after being arrested multiple times.
➡ The speaker discusses the challenges faced by their organization, Food Not Bombs, which provides food to the homeless in various cities. They mention that cities often try to push them out of sight or make it difficult for them to operate, sometimes through permit restrictions or laws. Despite these obstacles, the organization continues to serve food daily, arguing that it’s a form of First Amendment communication and a compassionate act that shouldn’t be regulated by the government. They also highlight their efforts to maintain cleanliness and create a positive atmosphere during their meals.
➡ The text discusses the political dynamics surrounding the organization ‘Food Not Bombs’, which provides food to communities. Interestingly, they face more opposition in liberal cities, where they are often arrested, than in conservative ones. The author suggests this is because liberal politicians, who claim to support community aid, feel threatened by independent initiatives. The author also highlights the influence of corporations and military industries on political decisions, suggesting that politicians’ actions often contradict their public messages.
➡ The text discusses the issue of homelessness, particularly in liberal cities. It suggests that despite receiving large amounts of funding to combat homelessness, these cities are not using the money effectively. Instead, the funds are allegedly being misused or redirected to private accounts, with little improvement seen in the situation of the homeless. The text also criticizes the dehumanization of homeless people, comparing it to historical instances of genocide and discrimination.
➡ The text discusses the challenges faced by homeless people, including lack of support from police and fear of losing their belongings if they seek medical help. It also highlights the issue of high rents and empty luxury condos in California, suggesting that these properties are bought by investment companies as collateral, not for people to live in. The speaker mentions the work of Food Not Bombs, a group that feeds the hungry and encourages people to volunteer or start their own chapters. The speaker also criticizes the healthcare system, stating that doctors are unable to treat patients as they wish due to time constraints and paperwork.
➡ The Food Not Bombs initiative is growing rapidly, with new chapters starting daily even in small, rural communities. This group shares free food, helping communities support each other, especially those struggling to survive. Despite attempts to stop the initiative, it only seems to inspire more chapters to start. The speaker expresses gratitude for this work, emphasizing its importance in helping those in need, including many veterans.

We were declared America’s most hardcore terrorist group in August of 1988 and then the State Department was still accusing us of being a terrorist organization in, in April of 2009 and, and then I was banned from employment in the United states right after 9, 11. So but the politics of it is this, that we have a name, Food Not Bombs. And all we are trying to encourage the community is to one see the, the humanity in homeless people, that those are our neighbors, there can be our relatives, they can be, you know, they may have been our co workers and so on.

So that’s one. Thank you for listening, thank you for sharing and please subscribe below and think about joining my substack at Sarah Westall, that substack.com or my newsletter. You can sign up for that as well@Sarah Westall.com and remember to give a thumbs up and to subscribe on the platform that you’re watching. Welcome to Business Game Changers. I’m Sarah Westall. I have Keith McHenry joining the program. This guy, he’s been arrested hundreds of times simply for trying to feed the homeless. He talks about his nightmares trying to get licenses in cities and how he says that the cities that are the most liberal, like San Francisco, San Francisco is the one that’s jailed him the most.

He’s multiple years in prison, arrested many dozens and dozens of times. I think he’ll tell us in the interview, I can’t remember how many, a lot of times. And he talks about the scams and the games they’re playing and how they just are constantly working to make it illegal to feed the homeless and that cities are making it harder and harder to comply with the ordinances and to feed the homeless. They just want to get rid of them. And he says it’s worse in the most liberal cities. He says, yeah, he had a partnership with Boston, which is a liberal city and they were great to work with.

So it’s not uniformly true. So it’s important that we don’t 100% stereotype people. But generally, and he’ll explain it generally, the most liberal cities that are supposed to be compassionate for the poor are the worst. And the ones who are anti compassion for poor, apparently the conservatives are, they’re the ones who have been the most supportive about the community, helping the community and serving the poor. And he’s seeing the small communities all around. He has over a thousand chapters around the world and it’s called Food Not Bombs. And the chapters that he sees the most of these, these places, his, you know, his chapters popping up are in the smaller rural communities where it’s more conservative.

And why is that? It’s totally backwards to what they claim and what the marketing is. And you know, I think it’s as this big government, they don’t want the competition from the citizens themselves. But the sad part is even though they don’t want that competition or you doing anything, they don’t do anything either. And he talks about his philosophy about how they don’t see homeless as human beings, how there’s even a whole category of people that the police don’t help. And it’s worse in these liberal cities. And these liberal cities are like San Francisco. He’s talking about Newsom.

And there’s a journalist that have been tracking this, that this money, all this money that’s been piling in to help the homeless because the people there really do want to help people. What they’re doing is they’re funneling it to bank accounts, they’re funneling it to offshore accounts. And there’s a journalist, his last name is Lee, who’s been documenting all this. This person, Keith McHenry, looks like a traditional liberal. In fact he was even classified as, as the worst terrorist organization in the country, as like an antifa group. And he’s, he, this was in the, in 1988 and up until just 19, up until just 2008 he was still classified or 2009.

He’ll explain it as a terrorist group. And he said we all we do is go and feed the homeless. You got to hear his story and how everything is flipped on its head and that the idea that anybody actually cares about the homeless people who claim they do in this class struggle. What’s this class? So you will learn a lot from this, I think. Let me read his bio really quick to you so you get a little bit of an idea who this guy is. And I just think that we’re lucky to have people like him in our society because so many of us are not dedicating their lives to helping those that are less fortunate.

Keith McHenry is the Co founder of Food Not Bombs, the global grassroots movement that has shared free vegetarian meals as a protest against war and poverty in thousands of cities since 1980. His new memoir, Soup street tells a story of that movement and extraordinary life behind it. From a free roaming boyhood in the America’s national parks to hundreds of hundreds of arrests and a lifetime spent feeding the hungry. He’s al also the author of Hungry for Peace and a co author of the 2015 edition of the Anarchist Cookbook. Learn more at Keith mchenry.net I want you to listen to it.

Tell me what you think. I think what we do need to get out of this is to pause for a moment and realize that what we’re hearing in the media and how people are portrayed are not quite accurate. And that small government and people and communities helping each other and not having the government do everything for us, but we can do things ourselves and we can help people ourselves. And maybe we’ll be better off that way if we all start chipping in and help people instead of relying on a government who doesn’t care about you anyways.

And he’s going to share stories proving to you the government is we don’t want bigger government. And what they’re doing in California and what Newsom is doing and what some of these politicians are doing, it’s not a good idea to give them more power and more money and more resources when this is what they’re doing. Especially more resources to feed the homeless when all is going as a bank accounts and offshore accounts. So I hope you learned something about how messed up the paradigms are. And if you are interested in getting involved or setting up your own chapter or donating, you can go to foodnotbombs.net and you can learn how you can help as well.

And maybe that’s your way of giving back and starting to create community and and resources outside of the system. I mean, this is one great solution. And according to him, chapters are popping up everywhere. So that’s a really good sign. That means people want to help. And he’s seeing it in the rural communities even more than the big cities. So that’s fantastic. So again, foodsnotbombs.net and before we get into that, I had a show with Joe Lombardi and he came on my program to share with you some of the tricks of the trade that the wealthy do to make more money from their investments and that many of us are completely unaware of what those processes are, how you can more leverage what you have.

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Go to sw hawk.com fill out that form and they will get back to you. They’re very professional. They’re going to treat you with respect. I won’t work with anybody that’s not going to treat you with respect and give you the information that can help you and not scam you. So SW Hawk.com okay, let’s get into this really eye openening conversation with Keith McHenry, the founder of Foods Not Bombs that has over a thousand chapters all over the world. Feeding the Hungry hi Keith. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. It was exciting. Well, first I need to thank you for spending your life feeding, you know, the homeless.

I just dedicating your life to feeding hungry people is such a noble cause. So first I want to thank you for that because I know that it takes a special person to just dedicate their their lives to other people. Thank you so much. So beautiful. Wow. Well, I was really caught off guard when I saw your story and that you’ve spent years in prison and you’ve been in prison in many countries for simply feeding the hungry and that the western world has become more and more difficult to feed the homeless or to feed hungry people than it has ever in our history.

Can you talk first about your story? I mean, how did you get yourself in a situation where you found yourself arrested so many how many first, how many times were you arrested and how many years have you spent in prison and how many countries for simply feeding people who are hungry? Well, so I’ve been been arrested in San Francisco 94 times and the district attorney said I had done 500 days in jail there. Then I was arrested also in Orlando, Florida for feeding the homeless. And I did 18 days there and then I was temporarily arrested in Nigeria.

But I got out of it by holding a press conference with the head of the police department for that state and gifting him one of my books. And that was. So he freed me as a direct result of that. And I was traveling with a filmmaker that was working on a documentary about food not bomb. So we had a nice high end video camera and everything for the press conference. And he was so cute at the end. He wrote down all these cell numbers. Oh, if you can’t get me at this cell, this cell. So I still have that business card and has like six cell numbers on the back, plus his official police phone on the front.

He said, if you have any trouble in Nigeria, give me a call. It was so beautiful. But I did get kidnapped there with that filmmaker. But that only lasted a. A part of a day. And I was able to get out of it, out of being kidnapped by promising the person who hijacked the carjacked our van that look at, I can give you 200 naira for that little tiny key. You know, look at the key. So small. And here’s like a equivalent of $20. And wouldn’t that be fair? But they were all yelling, Give us 25 million.

Give us 25 million. All these people had come out of this building screaming that they want 25 million. I’m like, no one’s going to send 25 million to you people to get me out. I don’t have 25 million. Sorry, guys. Yeah, so that was really, that was pretty chilling. And there actually had been a massacre the, the night before at the intersection where we were kidnapped. So it was very frightening because you know, you go, well, 100 people had just been killed at that intersection probably by these people that were now demanding money from us. And, and so that was really chilling.

And then later on, and we, that day we almost got kidnapped the second time. But. So I jumped out of the van and ran up to these guys who had all these vlogs and these huge spiked two by fours and stuff and said, oh, we’re on our way to Abuja. Which was true, we’re going to the capital. And we were on tv, which was true. But the reality was they lived in a part of the jungle where there was no electricity or tv. So they had no idea. And I gave them some fun up bombs, flyers and they were all pleased and moved the barricade and shook our hands, let us go.

So that was quite the day. And then that night the head of the public works gave me $1,000 in color Xerox dollar bills that he just printed on his Xerox machine right there in his basement of his Mansion in the capital. So how interesting. So you’ve been in many countries and. But it doesn’t sound like how often were you feeding the homeless or feeding the hungry in San Francisco compared to other countries and other cities? And because it seems like San Francisco has been the harshest to you, but have you been there more often? Is that where you do most of your feeding? So what had happened was I was happily doing Food not bombs in Boston for eight years, and we were friends with both Boston City Council and Cambridge City Council was very supportive.

And that Mayor Alvolucci told at city council meetings he’d go, well, we’re the one city in America where no one has to go hungry because we have food, not bombs. And in fact, they signed a proclamation in my honor that they sent to the mayor of San Francisco after we were arrested. So what? I assume that San Francisco, because my grandparents were from out here, and I’ve been in San Francisco on and off my whole life. And so I figured, oh, it’s a very liberal town. They’ll welcome us. So we found out in the Golden Gate park area in the Haight Asbury, that there was a soup kitchen, the Hat Ashbury Soup Kitchen, that served Tuesday through Fridays, and then a church did Saturday and the church did Sunday, but nobody on Monday.

And a lot of people, as you can imagine, were very poor in that neighborhood at that time. And homeless people lived in the park. So we felt like, oh, they really need our help. So we set up at the entrance to Golden Gate park at Hayden’s Danyon. And this man, who I didn’t know at the time, but turned out to be with the Haight Ashbury Soup Kitchen, goes, oh, you can get a permit for this. And we had a street performance permit in Cambridge, which basically was our name and phone number. And then if we left our equipment on the street, the police could call us up and we can go to City hall and get what we left behind.

That was the entire thing for eight years, my experience of a permit. So I applied for a permit, and then the police would come by on Monday and say, oh, did you get a permit? And I go, oh, wow. Yeah. No one ever got back to me about that. So I go to the Parks Department. Nobody there knew about a permit. And then on August 15, 1988, riot police came out of Golden Gate park and arrested me, me and eight others. And there was a person who lived in the hate, who was a really great photographer.

Greg Garr took this photo that ended up with riot police guarding the Food that was in the San Francisco Chronicle page three, across the whole top. And so people started calling me, going, oh, my God, we can’t. We let that stand. We want to help you. And so we organized a march down Haight street where we banged on pots and pans and we. We brought our food down there and our signs and so on. We set up again, and then 24 people were arrested on that day. And oddly enough, the FBI, Joint Terrorism. I want to hear about the FBI, but now that’s important.

But were you still trying to get your permit at this point? Because. Are they arresting you? Yeah, we’re still trying to get the permit. They just. Were they slow? Well, it turned out that. Go ahead. Yeah, there was no permit that turned out. So after the end of. So there was a. You know, on the second Monday, they arrest 24 people. FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force is there. But I don’t learn that until about three years ago. And they filed a report to the FBI home office in San Francisco saying, or field office in San Francisco saying that we are credible national security threat.

Which is very strange because we’re serving vegan meals at Golden Gate park. And there’s like 10 of us in San Francisco that we had 10 friends. The people I left in Boston who I’d been doing it with there for eight years, and then a new chapter who had called themselves Breadnut Bombs. Well, we convinced them to change their name to Food Not Bombs down in Long beach. So there’s 30 people in the United States feeding people with vegan food with the slogan Food Not Bombs. So it’s kind of shocking that they claimed we were a national security threat.

Years later, I discovered State Department in April of 2009, had a lecture at Medford, at Fletcher School of Diplomacy, comparing us to Al Qaeda, who’s more dangerous. And their claim was that we were trying to convince the American public that money should be diverted from military spending to health care, education, and other social services. But back to the permit thing. At the end of Labor Day, 55 people were arrested. Thankfully, we chose a Monday to be the service because we had a day off, you know, with labor day, and about 2,000 people came to risk arrest.

And the police stopped after the first, like, 55, I believe maybe 54 people. And then the mayor. I’ve been trying to reach the mayor. In fact, I’d gone in a bunch of times. I even offered to bribe the secretary, say, hey, I need a meeting with this mayor. You know, that’s of how we did it in Boston. You know you wanted, you know. And so she said, no, I’m not taking your $20 or whatever little money I had. And then. But I did get the meeting. So we wrote this little permit thing, and that was, you know, and they stopped the arrests.

And there’s a documentary called the Art of Being Mayor that ends with. With the mayor, Art Agnos, like, patting me on the shoulders because I’m sitting in his chair. So don’t get too comfortable in that chair. I think they were thinking I might run for mayor or something at some point, because a reporter asked me once, oh, are you running for mayor? And I go, no, but if I’m elected, I’ll abolish the office because I don’t want to spend my time being a mayor. I want to spend my time feeding people. So anyway, did you end up getting a permit then at that point, or did it still become a problem? So we had a permit for a while, but we were needed.

Environmental health permit. And so every Monday, Al Chin from Environmental Health would say, oh, now you just need this, this, and this. And so the list they were kept giving us a list of things we needed to buy and get, which we would get. And then the next Monday, give us a new list. So I actually, a person that was eating with us who had been in San Quentin and who got out due to his own civil rights lawsuit that he filed while in prison, helped me write a lawsuit. So I. You. So I end up meeting with the.

The judge. Judge Peckham and the city attorney. And the funny thing was, I had no ide to get pleading paper, so I typed everything up on a computer, printed it out, and I went to Hastings Law School and found some old, you know, legal documents in there and cut off the sides and taped them on to my piece of paper and then made copies of that. And then the judge Peckham was like, first thing he says is, where’d you get this cleaning paper? And I go, I made it. And he smiled. He really laughed. So he ended up, in the end, he said, look, you give food up bombs one final list, and if they complete this list, you have to give them an environmental health permit.

And so we did, and. And we complied. But then they had a trick where we took true trucks to bring all the equipment. And this is before easy UPS and all that. We had to design an easy up. We had to do all these things to. To. To do this. And. And like, if you owned a restaurant, you would have your environmental health permit on the wall because you have your renting or Owning a physical building. In our case, we’re building the field kitchen, the food service location. Every time we served, which in those days was twice a day, lunch and dinner.

And so we were assembled. I’m trying to assemble this. And the health inspector said, oh, yeah, we’re here for this health inspection. And of course, if you have a restaurant, there should be a surprise health inspection, but you should have your kitchen clean and everything like you would anticipate. In my case, I’m building my facility. And so he, like, asked me a question like, where’s the fire extinguisher? So I’m looking for it, and somebody donated a sheet cake from Safeway that was already cut up in slices and put it on this one table I’d set up because I had to put all the corners to make my food facility.

So then he asked me where my. My environmental health permit is. And while I’m looking through my pile of things for that, a man comes up and takes a slice of cake. And the health inspector goes, look it. You just served a slice of cake without your environmental health permit being displayed on your food facility. We’re shutting you down. So that’s how they got rid of our ability to share food with permission. And then we end up having a world gathering in 1992, that was in 1988. And we decided we would never apply for a permit again after that.

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So where is it now in. In our culture? Because more and more people are saying it’s harder to feed the homeless now than it ever has been. So what are we seeing now? Yeah, there are more and more cities making more and more laws against sharing food with the homeless now. Our most recent. So we in Fort Lauderdale, we were arrested a bunch of times serving food in the park in front of the library. We serve. And that would have been about 10 years ago or so and we maybe a little longer than that. But we won that lawsuit.

We sued them in federal court and we won in the, they appealed it the city. We won in the appellate court and the judgment. We couldn’t have written a better flyer about Funat bonds and Judge Jordan wrote his ruling. And so the city had to ultimately pay $750,000 to our legal team. And they were originally supposed to pay $2 million, but they fought that and they got it down to 750,000. And so then about two months ago, three months ago, West Palm beach was going to make a law against sharing free food and threatening to arrest food on bombs there.

And the reason I tell you this Fort Lauderdale story is that the young people that spoke spoken city council to stop the law pointed that out that probably the people of West Palm beach do not really want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to, you know, defend their logic of banning someone, a group from serving vegan meals. So we essentially, every time they’re like in Tampa, they were arrested us in a series of four different times with four different mayors. The last one was probably about three or four years ago. And then they. People either mention what happened in San Francisco.

So we were arrested a thousand times over a course of eight years. And we had a whole, we never missed one meal. We served twice a week through that whole time, even with the arrests. And so that’s how I ended up doing 500 days in jail. I was framed on the California three strikes law four days after the law came into effect. And then six months later I was framed on my second and third strikes and face 25 to life in prison. And but I ended up sadly, because they brought riot police into my courtroom every single hearing.

It didn’t seem like it was likely I could get a very fair trial. So even though I was the victim where I was attacked by the mayor’s film commissioner and while making a phone call to find out where he had had my. I didn’t even know who he Was, but he had my truck towed from in legal parking space in front of city hall. So he attacked me and I ended up pleading they. It became a strike felony because they claimed I stole the beeper. Many viewers may not know what that is, but a pager. And it turned out if it was 180, 98 beeper, it would not be a strike felony, but it was that he bought a beeper for 99, you know, dollars or whatever the amount was that you had to make it a strike.

So it’s so clear the whole thing was just ridiculous. And so that kind of, you know, every time we had these waves of arrests or I have these court appearances and so on, I finally pled out to assault, battery, strong, armed robbery, you know, claiming that I attacked him and took his beeper. But they never found a beeper. The whole thing was just completely ludicrous. But I just didn’t feel like I could get a fair trial. So that’s why I put out. Why are they. Okay, let’s. Let’s unwind this a little bit. So we’re seeing this in cities all across the country.

San Francisco was the one that you had the worst efforts with or situation with. Boston was very supportive. But now recently, Florida is where you’re camped out and you’re finding problems there. Is it that the cities just don’t want homeless around? Is that what we’re seeing? Or are they claiming that you aren’t getting the permits and you are putting people at risk or what? What are we seeing here? Well, this is what seems to be the pattern. And every. Like even in Houston recently, which we were ticketed like numerous times, but they couldn’t find a jury to convict, so they had to stop bothering us.

But is that they want us to be out of sight and, and out of mind, basically. And part of our strategy is to try to be in the public’s eye to make it so that the American public goes, oh yeah. I mean, we have, you know, there are people that are able to help. They don’t even have resources. They’re just like volunteers. We recover food from grocery stores and so on. And we have no paid staff anywhere in nearly 1500 cities that we are active in. And so it’s an embarrassment to the local city. That’s one area of concern for cities.

So they try to. Usually they’ll have us go to the edge of the city or they’ll make a permit that makes it almost impossible to actually comply and successfully feed people. So like the Orlando one, you had to Go. You could only serve in a park twice in a year. And there was. But there was like not enough parks for that to be every weekend for, you know, for the whole year. And many of the parks were like not accessible by homeless people. You would have to walk between McMansions and some neighborhood which. And find like a little pond.

And then that would be fun up bombs would be serving. So thankfully, the city ended up was so embarrassed by the world news about arresting us that they said, oh, we’ll just set up in front of city hall and you can just serve in front of city hall. And it worked and they stopped arresting us. So. So. So it’s really like they want you out of sight and out of mind. That’s one angle of it. And then the other is they don’t like the. The name Food Not Bombs. But now the other people. The other thing is that, that the church groups that are getting forced to shut down and that’s like the most common thing right now is well meaning churches going out.

They’re committed parishioners trying to hand out food and being told they have to stop. But they are kind of in a different situation than us because they do have property, which is the church. And they also don’t have necessarily a worldwide network like we do. So when the Tulsa Food Not Bombs people were arrested about a month and a half on my birthday actually in May, we were able to mobilize a worldwide campaign where people from food op bombs in the Philippines and, you know, and Poland and Tel Aviv and everything just started writing letters, emails, bombarding the city government with like, hey, you know, you can’t be bothering people for feeding people.

And so they ended up stopping their arrests and I believe they just dropped their charges so that the. But the poor churches that are getting stopped, they really, you know, it’s really tragic because in San Francisco, I live in Santa Cruz right now, they’re one of the main allies for us are these, you know, local churches that come out and, and all, you know, because we. We were doing it every day of the week for three years for. During COVID Because the indoor food locations were shut down. But the other people that did help us during that time were churches because they, they would come out and set up in the streets and serve food and, and.

And the police would try to get them to stop and everything, and they would be intimidated. And then they, they would. But we just kept doing it every day. So they tried to stop us, they smeared us and the media and so on. But, you know, we Were not going to let these several hundred homeless people in Santa Cruz go without any food, without any access to hand washing, without any access to survival gear and so on. So we just hung in there and ignored the government’s like cease and desist orders. And they made a new law banning us that we’re only allowed to serve twice a week, that kind of thing.

But we just ignored it and kept doing it every day. Is there any constitutional rights that we have here? Is this a violation of our rights to not be able to feed people? I mean, I’m just wondering where the Constitution comes in here. Judge Jordan in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in this beautiful 20 page explanation of why it is not a violation of the First Amendment to share food. And he pointed out that it is communication. Even if you don’t have a sign or banner saying food not bonsai, which are. We always do because we’re trying to get people to think why is our resources going to all these wars when we have Americans living on the streets and, and having to eat at soup kitchens to, to get their meals.

But he, you know, he pointed out that even if, you know, like, he pointed all these like experiences in over history, like Jesus feeding people and you know, you know, Mother Teresa feeding people and all these people feeding people and it’s a form of First Amendment communication also. Assembly, right to assembly. And this was the appellate court Judge Jordan in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Florida district, which also might include Georgia and some of the other southeastern states. It was a very passionate, beautiful order. So when we get into these situations like in Tulsa, we point out that we have already had an appellate court ruling that this is a First Amendment right to, of free expression to.

And also just it’s logical. You know, one example I said like imagine if you come across a, a person with a flat tire and they seem to be struggling, they can’t change their tire and you get out to help them, right? That should not be, you should not need a permit to do that. We’re just, you know, sharing free food is a unregulated gift of compassion and the government has no say. And if you’re going to help one another in your, in your community and you know, they will sometimes will try to say, oh well, they left trash.

Well, we, we don’t leave trash. In fact, often when, you know, you come back later, there’s McDonald’s wrappers and stuff maybe around the, the plaza where you were serving, but not our materials because we are trying to be, you know, the Best citizens possible. I mean we are not going to spend our days going around recovering food from bakeries and produce markets and stuff and cooking all this food and going out and you know, meeting these people who have no off and no other way to get food and often don’t have like a lot of interaction with house people and so on.

And, and, and it’s sort of like a two hour celebration at every one of our meals. And like in Santa Cruz we actually often will bring out a solar powered generator and have a little concert, you know, on like Valentine’s Day or you know, things like that. They’re accusing you. We want to have it be a good atmosphere. Well, yeah, of course. Okay, so they’re accusing you of being antifa. Like but antifa is a pretty violent. Right. They want to accuse you of being probably far left lunatics. How. There are some lunatics in this country. How do you.

But you guys aren’t like that. How are you any different than a church group or anybody else just trying to help people? Are you, do you have political, are you always out there talking about your politics at the same time? I mean what, what is triggering people? Well, I mean, so the federal government is, you know, we were declared America’s most hardcore terrorist group in August of 1988 and then the State Department was still accusing us of being a terrorist organization in, in April of 2009 and, and then I was banned from employment in the United states right after 9, 11.

So but the politics of it is this, that we have a name Food Not Bombs. And all we are trying to encourage the community is to one see the, the humanity and homeless people that those are our neighbors. There can be our relatives, they can be of, you know, they may have been our co workers and so on. So that’s one aspect of our, of our political work, so to speak. And the other one is that we should really be using our resources to help the community and not spend them on these giant wars. You know, here we have the largest defense budget ever, over a trillion dollars.

Right now they’re asking for another billions of dollars to continue the war against Iran. But here’s the interesting thing. Now we have never been arrested or even confronted in even the the slightest way by a city where the mayor and the city council is predominantly Republican. Every single city where we have been arrested or they’ve threatened to arrest us are like San Francisco, that was at the time the most liberal city in America. Art Agnes, who was the first mayor to have us arrested, had been a social worker Buddy Dyer and the people in Orlando were probably the most liberal politicians in the state of Florida, and yet that’s where we got arrested.

Same with Fort Lauderdale, with Tampa. But in cities where the Republicans are, the mayor and majority of the city council, they never discuss anything with us. I think their ideology and their reason for supporting us is that, look at. The government isn’t paying for this service. Citizens are doing it on their own initiative, and that’s what we’re encouraging. So I think it’s really fascinating that it’s the most liberal cities in the United States, states that have targeted food, not bombs, and. And that the other communities that are. Are conservative that, you know, don’t ever bother us at all.

And the only exception to that would have been Boston, but in Cambridge, which we’re very liberal, but, oh, Boston was very liberal. They liked you. So we should learn from that, is that not all liberals are. Are nutty like this, but the ones who claim to be the ones that are the most caring and are out there act like this. It’s hip if it’s hypocrisy, right? And things are just flipped on its head. But learning from the Boston, it doesn’t mean they’re all like that. But what is going on here, people? This is not what you, Your marketing says about yourself, right? It’s not the marketing you say against the conservatives either.

It’s. It’s not accurate. And this is a really good indication of that. I think. Think the. The people who want smaller government and want citizen involvement are the ones that encourage you the most. It sounds like. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We’ve never had a. And sometimes they do even come out and help us. You know, it’s. It’s really, really. In fact, we were one city. I forget which city it was. We were being arrested. And the only Republican on the city council, I think this was down in. Or down in. Outside. It was in San Diego, near San Diego.

It was a city near there and San Die County. And she came out and said, you can arrest me. I’m not. I’m not gonna. You know, this is crazy. And the rest of the city council, you know, we’re trying to get this law passed to, to stop us. And so, yeah, it is very, very fascinating that there is this, like. Well, it’s small government, it’s citizens helping each other. This is sort of our. Our ideology. But I think also you can see in. In the. Currently there is this whole online argument that’s happening where the mainstream Democrats are very angry that the Democratic socialists of America are ruining them and so on and so forth.

So it tends to be that the, that perceived threats from the left are the most dangerous things to the Democratic Party. That’s like in California they were able to get the Green Party off the ballot for governor, but they didn’t bother trying to get rid of any of the Libertarian Party off the ballot or anybody like that, just the Green Party. So there’s an interesting thing where the Democratic Party wants to perceive that they’re the caring, helpful people and that, but that, that anything from the left of them is a danger. And so that’s, I find that, find that really, really interesting.

Instead of embracing. Oh yeah, you know, that’s our philosophy. We want to make sure everyone has food, food because we are the liberals and the liberal Democrats and that’s our heritage and so on. But that is not the case then. And I think that’s an interesting thing about the arrest of Funa bombs and this fact that it is the most liberal cities in America that, that do that. And it kind of shows that, you know, essentially, you know, there’s no, no logic. You know, they’re basically embarrassed that they aren’t, aren’t feeding everybody. See, like San Francisco had a billion dollar a year budget at the time they first arrested us.

But with a billion dollar a year budget, you could have actually set up your own soup kitchen in front of city hall or rented a building nearby and had meals twice a day every day. If your whole thing was, you know, that you, you know, you supported feeding people, but you just didn’t want to. Yeah, but they didn’t do that. None of these cities, Santa Cruz, same thing. We’re like a hugely wealthy town. But they didn’t and they threatened us. And, and I keep telling, well, go, you know, have better food than us. If you don’t like what we’re doing, you can open our own restaurant.

Well, this is where the marketing, the perceptions are wrong. You, you say the most support comes from some of the conservatives. And I, I would say it comes from the people who want the people to rise up and smaller government and the people rise up and help each other. That’s more of a small government idea. And the people who want big government. So what I don’t understand is that they tend to want bigger government. Right, they tend to support that. But. So they don’t want you to do it. But they don’t want to do it themselves either, is what you were just saying.

So I don’t even understand what their goals are. Yeah, I think their goals are to maintain financial support from the wealthy corporations that are funding them. They’re just not their public messaging and what they actually do is completely off. And then they spin it and make it look like their opposition is what they are. Exactly. It is really insanity. So when I serve food in front of City Hall, I would see the mayors would be with like the president of the bank of America would go in after, you know, after lunch. They’d all rot. You know, you would see them going in.

So there was not like regular poor people or even like union people or anybody that were going to have meetings with the mayor. It was the top, you know, the head of Bechtel Corporation or the head of bank of America or Chevron. These were the people that were, that would get out of limos in front of City hall after lunch and go in with the mayor and you didn’t. And so this is, that’s who they’re, they’re, they’re working for. In fact, early on it’s probably in the arc in the archives at the, at this San Francisco Public Library.

I hope it’s not destroyed, but I can’t find it online because these events happened before the Internet. But, but they, there was a pressure apparently on the city of San Francisco by Chevron, by Bechtel Corporation and by the bank of America because of the slogan food not bombs, because their money was coming from bombs and not food. And so that’s where the money for the, for the Democratic Party often comes from, is from, you know, Raytheon, Lockheed, when I lived in Tucson and we were being harassed there, which at the time was very. That’s the most liberal county in, in Pima county in Arizona.

But it’s also home to Raytheon Missile Systems. The, the, the Tomahawk missiles that we are now running out of are made in Tucson. And, and so, you know, they tried to, to, to pressure us there and stop us there because the principal money for running mayor’s campaign and the city council campaign and for the board of Supervisors for the county came from, from missile systems and their allies, you know, other tech companies related to them in the county and from, you know, so that’s where they’re getting their support from and also raising money from the military personnel at David Maffin Air Base.

So they don’t want to be like, oh, you know, cutting their throats because like, and that’s why they, you know, like, oh, allowing Funa bombs to serve, serve food in our city in public and have this conversation about whether our Priorities should to fund the military and let people live on the streets or not. And so that’s why they are so aggro about attacking food, not bombs. People assume the financial system is safe, but then banks fail, governments freeze assets, inflation quietly steals purchasing power, and then many people realize they don’t actually own what they thought they own.

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Okay, so but you haven’t seen a shift since like in the last five years or anything. It’s the same old, almost worse now. The liberal cities are getting worse as far as keeping people out, out. And the conservative cities are actually supporting you. Or is it not that? I, I just. No, the liberal cities are still going after it. But the other thing that’s happening is that a lot of the liberal cities are adopting very harsh anti homeless laws like we have here. So you know, Gavin Newsom, you know, was very involved in trying to make it illegal to camp outside and in California.

But during the period of time where he was at this executive order against encampments and started providing funding to clear the encampments, he, in fact he did a photo op where he’s throwing this poor person’s all this worldly belongings in a garbage truck and did that as his PR stunt when he signed the executive order. But at the same time they spent $24 billion between 2019 and 2024 on homelessness. But you don’t see anything happening with that. No, where it went to was. Yeah, yeah, they just said, in fact the, the, the liberal mayor of San Diego got hundreds of millions of dollars some Newsom for supposedly affordable housing.

He ended up like his main con campaign con contributor, got the contract to build the affordable housing. He builds the affordable housing but by the time it’s built, there’s no affordable housing there. And journalists named James Lee found that the money was in a Cayman island bank account. That that is what is going on Is that basically here in Santa Cruz, for instance, that the city, the, the Housing Matters, which is our homeless industrial complex hub, basically they get millions of dollars and for instance, Bezos gave them $2 million and then 30 days later they shut down the, the family shelter.

And then when I questioned, they said, look at you just got $2 million, but now you’re shutting down the shelter. Oh, well, that’s because the Bezos would only give us money if we spend it on this and not on that. That was always their excuse. But you, you can see that, you know, like every Saturday, every twice a week, the city comes out and they throw everybody’s belongings away. People skirt, try to scurry away and set up somewhere with their, you know, get their, their tents and sleeping bags moved to some safe location. But you know, we had one friend that was trying to help them move their belongings last week who ended up getting ticketed and then.

And his family harassed for, just for trying to help people get their belongings to safety so that they wouldn’t have to buy new sleeping bags and new tents and so on. And then here they spent. They have $2.5 million to get rid of the homeless in front of the homeless shelter. But they shut, they shut down the day services. There’s no mail service anymore, so unhoused people can’t get their mail. And imagine if you’re on a waiting list and you’re trying to get like a notice from HUD that you’re going to get housing and your family’s all eager to get housing, which is very common, but you can’t get mail from HUD that tells you you are now been approved.

And so that’s causing a lot of chaos in our community. And they used to have showers. They got rid of them. They used to have meals for homeless people at the shelter. They got rid of that. That. So it’s. But they still take in all this money. And then the other thing they’ve been doing is they’ve been. And you said when they take in all this money, it never goes to the homeless. You’re saying it’s going to Cayman Islands bank accounts and things. And do you have evidence of this? Do we know that all these donations are going to the Cayman Islands or other private bank accounts? It was it.

Where’s the documentation for it? I don’t, I totally believe it. But where is the documentation for that? That. Well, in the one case with, with in San Diego, there was a journalist named James Lee who lives down there, and he provided that evidence. I Don’t have it with me right this second. But he fought trail trades the money. He traced it. You said that earlier. Okay, so he traced it. We can find that. It’s out there. And the FBI knows it. It’s all known. Yeah, well, and actually, oddly enough, the. There was the homeless industrial complex in Los Angeles.

The Justice Department did recently go after them because they were. They were running. You know, in one case, what happened was that one relative was in the homeless services department of la, and then another relative got the job as, you know, you know, taking care of like a shelter. And they did a thing where they sold their own building to themselves at a million dollar profit. Profit, you know, so they. That’s the kind of. Kind of that ha. This is, you know, that’s the other trick that they do. So like, you know, the way they can launder the money is that they will hire consultants and give them money, which is their friends, or they will, you know, hire, you know, basically, they just, you know, we had a city manager in Santa Cruz who had relatives that had a temporary fence company, you know, would put up fences.

So he loved that. So he was fencing off any homeless person’s thing. And when Covid happened, he got his buddies to put what he called triage centers in all the parking lots downtown. And he was ordering. Tried to get me to lure the homeless into these triage camps where you would get. They. You would just be sitting in this parking lot with a portable toilet and in bottled water, and you’d have to stay there for days, you know, and. And that was their solution to, you know, to. To the COVID crisis. And I refused to do it.

So instead I just said, I’ve gotten an award for being a vegan. And I’d sold the farmland I had in New Mexico and I bought hotel rooms for. For 180 people for like a week to, you know, to show the city. Look at, you know, if I’m just a random person and I can take my money and get homeless people. And boy, you should have seen how happy, you know, there’s a lot of these people haven’t had a shower. Plus, imagine, Imagine, you know, the whole world is like locked down and you’re out there. You can’t be quarantining because you’re quarantining in the, in the public space and they’re not providing you with anything but a.

But a. Asphalt parking lot and a. And a bottle of water and a portable toilet. So eventually, you know, Newsom said he had $500 million to rent hotels. And I was saying, look at, you know, sick Cruz. You got, you know, maybe you don’t have the millions of dollars right this second, but he’s promising you this money, maybe open, well put people in it. But they, the other, that’s the other thing. These are liberal Democrats here in Santa Cruz or in San Francisco and so on. And they don’t perceive the homeless as real people. They believe that they’re just, they, it’s all drug addict, mentally ill, and it’s just like the Palestinians, you know, like, you know, in fact, the same language that was used to justify the genocide is used to justify not doing anything for homeless people.

People, you know, human animals, you know, all that. And it’s just the same kind of dehumanization. I’ve been writing for years about the fear that, that this dehumanization of the homeless, which really got underway in the mid, in about 85 under the Clinton administration, actually had created this concept to call the homeless are not people like you and I. That was a big study that he was using to justify his reign of anti homeless terrorism. And, and so like, you know, I remember my wife and I when they were like trying to get rid of the homeless.

I’m saying, this is terrible. This is like Nazi Germany dehumanizing the homeless people. That was in 1985. I wrote that letter to the local authorities. Let me ask you, my understanding is there’s actually a list that if you are on those, if you’re the untouchables. I don’t know about a list officially, but if you’re in like the untouchable community, and I don’t know if that’s the right word, but the police and stuff are just like, they’re in that group and so they don’t even bother helping them. Whereas if you’re part of the other community where you, you know, have a house and you’re paying taxes and you’re trying to, I don’t know about paint, but you’re a good person with family and trying to contribute to society.

They actually give you services, but they don’t give you services. If you’re a person who’s homeless or a druggie or, you know, that girl group. Is that true? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s definitely true. One of the most horrible things is like say if there’s a crime against a homeless person, which is, you know, homeless people are vulnerable, they’re outside, particularly the, you know, women in their 60s and 70s living in a puff tent along the river here in San, you know, Santa Cruz, you know that just like horrible and that they’re subject to violence. But the thing that happens if the, is, if the, if it’s two homeless people that are involved in an altercation, you know, you’re likely to be arrested just as much as the person that attacked you, you know, so people don’t call the police for that reason.

It’s. People don’t even go to the hospital. We have one friend, he was so ill from boils and problems and he wouldn’t go to the hospital. And we’re like, you got to go to the hospital. And he said, I’ll lose all my belongings if I go to the hospital. So then we realized you have to. People that are in emergency medical situations, you have to, to at least save their, you know, their, their documentation and everything or it’ll be gone and they just throw you out in the street after your. Whatever the emergency room does for you.

Occasionally they do provide, you know, like a relief where you get, you know, you can get into a care place for a short while. But homeless people are afraid to go to the hospital for fear they’ll lose all their belongings, which only makes their health conditions worse. And it’s also worse for our community because by the time that the one person I’m talking about, about got there, you know, he had to be in the hospital for a month on antibiotics and stuff. Where is he gone when he first had a problem, he might have been in like for three hours, four hours, got help and then left.

And it would have saved the county thousands and thousands of dollars. And it’s actually cheaper to provide housing to homeless people. That’s the other thing is here in California we have this. Yes. In my backyard movement, which is, I think Scott Wiener, the senator for the state of, you know, for a state senator, he’s been pushing this construction programs like crazy. That with this idea. What they’re selling is that the rents will go down if we build massive amounts of buildings. But there was already three or four. No, I think there’s 25 empty units for every homeless person in California.

But they built like all these high rise luxury condos with the theory that, you know, supply and demand, it will make the rents go down. Down. Our rents in Sam, we have 38 high rise construction sites happening in Santa Cruz. We were a city of 63,000 people. If people actually were owned and lived all these luxury condos, you know, we would have 30,000 more people living in our community. But we just have lost like roughly two dozen Doctors have walked away from the hospital because of, you know, whatever mismanagement or. It’s too expensive to live here even for a doctor.

A doctor. Well, doctors, yes, I know how to treat their patients. That’s what’s going on the medical field. Yeah, that’s a lot of it. Yeah, there’s a lot. Yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of doctors. See them for four minutes and then you’re gone and you’re filling out paper. It’s awful. Well, they’re not able to treat them the way that they want to. So the mental health amongst doctors is really low, especially in these, these liberal cities. It’s amazing how much they talk about caring about people, but their policies are 180° opposite, opposite. Now supply, demand does make sense.

That guy who’s trying to do that, that does make sense. It’s interesting that the rents are still so high. It sounds like there’s maybe collusion in pricing and that’s something that people need to look into because collusion pricing is illegal and I wouldn’t put it past them to be doing that either. Well, part of the thing that’s happening and that keeps the. So Santa Cruz is still the most expensive rental community in the United States. And yet we just built these, we’re building and have completed many of the 30 create large condo projects. But the thing that happens is that hedge funds and investments, agency companies buy all the units because they have no, it’s too expensive to manage them and actually have people living in them and collecting rent or, or, or, or, or that kind of thing.

They’re using it as collateral for other projects and they have no intention of putting people in these properties. So that’s what, and that’s what’s happening across all, all of California. It’s basically, you know, people are needing to park their profits somewhere that makes sense and they just, but yeah, it’s just sad. Well, that means they have a lot of money where they can do that and they don’t have to generate cash flow off of those assets. Okay. Where can people follow you and support you? Obviously you still supporting, you’re still feeding the hungry. You’re out there doing the best to try to educate and inform people on what’s really going on.

It’s just incredible that, you know, every, no matter what religion you are, every religion believes, you know, as Jesus says, that there will always be the homeless, there will always be people in need, no matter what you do. I’m paraphrasing what he said, but no matter what you do you. There will always be those in need that you need to help. And every, every great religion in the world believes that. So I, I don’t know where, where this is going. I don’t know how this came to be part of our country where this was accepted, but it’s another rot that we have to take care of.

Where can people follow you and maybe help you contribute to your cause? Yeah, well, they can go to Food Not Bomb. Yeah, they can go to foodnotbombs.net yeah, because we have the website foodnaboms.net and if you go across the top, you can see we have a locations page and you can see where our 1500 Funaboms chapters are located. And you can volunteer with your local chapter. Also on the volunteer tab, you could either see what kinds of work we need help doing in your local chapter, but you can actually start your own Fun Up Bombs chapter as well.

So there’s the seven Steps to Starting a Fun Up Bombs, which is a. Something that I originally wrote when we first got arrested in San Francisco in 88. Yeah, they were so angry that they were arresting us in San Francisco that I would mail them a flyer. I wrote a flyer on how to start a group. Seven Steps to Starting a Food Not Bombs. Originally, the very first flyer I wrote that you could even get an answering machine so you never miss a call. Can you imagine that? That’s how far back it was. And I wrote that flyer.

And then eventually I said, oh, you could get a MySpace and that way communicate with the world. And now I think I just say social media media, but, but so that the online version of that is. Is on foodnotbombs.net as well. And then my book, my memoir, Soup street can be. You can either read it for free. All my books, I have three, three books. And you can read the PDFs for free. Because a lot of my audience is actually people living in the, in the, you know, the, you know, like Philippines and you know, Latin America and so on.

So they often don’t have the resources to buy my book, so I let them read it for free. And I sell more books if it is available for free online. So you can read Soup street, my memoir. That’s my first memoir that is on foodnotbombs.net as well. And then you can find out all the way. I have a book on how to start a Food Not Bombs Hungry for Peace. And it has all kinds of diagrams and so on, and all of that is on foodnotbombs.net and that’s where you can call me at the toll free number 18888841136 or you could email me, email me menuoodnotbombs.net but all of that is on on funotbombs.net and that’s how you can get involved.

And the main thing is that you know you can donate money to us. We have like a PayPal account, Venmo account. You could do that. But the most important thing is is is volunteering with our, our local chapters. Starting a chapter. I mean we, when SNAP was shut down, I might have gotten three or four requests for information on how to start a new Food Up Bombs group every single day. And then I’m the one that updates the map. So I’ve been busy as can be updating the Funa Bombs map with either updates of additions of more males in the local chat meals in the local chapter or people starting new chapters.

And it’s now to the point like for instance, Victoria, Texas has a seriously active Funa Bombs chapter. That’s a pretty rural community. Roswell, New Mexico, that’s a pretty rural community. They’re busy as can be sharing free food. So it’s become this. Instead of being in the big city or in the moderately sized cities, it’s now like even small communities are starting their own Food Not Bombs chapters. If you go along the Panhandle of Florida, you can basically drive for like four hours and stop off and eat at a Food Not Bombs chapter because they’re all along the Panhandle, Pensacola and and so on.

There’s new chapters that have started up along this so people are not intimidated by, you know, this effort to stop Food Not Bombs. And in fact, oddly enough it inspires like when Fort Lauderdale got arrested, a whole bunch of new Food up arms chapters started. When Tulsa got arrested, a few in May, more do as you get arrested. Yeah, it’s crazy. Yeah. Well, but this is probably what we need. Yeah, there’s people are struggling to eat, they’re struggling to survive. So this is our community helping each other. And so it’s, it’s what we should be doing.

And that’s why I said at the beginning, thank you so much for your life work. You know, you’re an inspiration to be doing this and to dedicate your life to this. So thank you so much for what you do. And hopefully people will who are motivated will start their own chapter. I know when I was growing up, my mom and dad ran food shelter feed the homeless every Sunday out of our church. We would be feeding the homeless. And so that’s something that I just remember we always did. And so it’s, it’s so great that, that you’re doing that.

I just, it’s what we need to be doing. And, and so many of the people who were on the streets, a lot of them were veterans. It’s not, people aren’t, it’s not what people think. And if we have a heart and empathy, we need to, and we care about our communities, this is what we need to be doing. So thank you so much for joining the program, Sa.
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