RevolutionZ

Episode 374 of RevolutionZ starts with a snowfall and notices forecast overshoot. Then it asks why so many reporting, predicting, and evaluating “mistakes” lean the same way? It unpacks one‑sided errors—how weather hype, skewed invoices, and media framing teach the public to accept bias as normal. And then, via The Wind Cries Freedom's oral history it connects such patterns to the sports arenas and fields where bodies, money, and myth collide, and connects sports to larger surrounding movements as well.. Miguel Guevara introduces us to interviewee Peter Cabral, himself an athlete and revolutionary. Then Peter describes his own transition into activism and the shift from star‑driven gestures to athlete‑led organizing. He describes the pressures that keep players quiet—family expectations, early pedestal treatment, and career‑long dependence on gatekeepers—and how physical harm, perverse pay, community harm, and desires for actual dignity and rational life forced athletes to break with business as usual. From Colin Kaepernik’s kneel to coordinated boycotts and especially campus organizing, Peter takes us to the moment when Revolutionary Participatory Society's solidarity turned into structure and its isolated individual courage became collective strategic activism. The conversation digs into college athletes organizing and how their methods not only learned from but also taught the pros. It explores seeking and then winning Olympic reforms: moving events across multiple cities, reusing facilities, redirecting revenue to athletes and neighborhoods, and refusing to play when hosting means displacement. It describes practical programs Peter was part of to protect communities, honor but not unduly enrich competitors, and to move the drama and excellence of sports back to the field from stock markets and media madness. Peter also wrestles with pay schedules: should luck-born athletic gifts command outsized wealth? He argues in the RPS mode instead for pay to be anchored in duration, intensity, and onerousness—and for celebrating excellence but without creating hierarchies. He describes how such desires for sensible equity and real respect emerged and began to dominate athletes' aims in place of owning mansions on a hill.  Threaded throughout Miguel's questions and Peter's replies is a call for media literacy and especially institutional redesign across all domains. When incentives reward spectacle and bargaining power with owners on top, “errors” keep tilting one way. Peter's response: When we organized from pressrooms to locker rooms we helped advance athlete activism, Olympic accountability, equitable pay, and the fight against creeping authoritarianism, WE became part of something much larger. Peter describes the kind of personal feelings and collective actions and programs that, in his time and in his experience, fueled concrete wins that pointed toward an unfolding next American Revolution. Finally, Miguel elicits from Peter how he expects sports to change in a fully developed participatory society, both for the athletes and for fans. Support the show