For the tenth and final episode of the Rings of Hell series, we have a full house of NOlympians to talk about everything that’s happened in LA and in the crumbling Olympic empire since this series started a couple months ago. This includes the release of NOlympics’ survey about the 2028 games, the LA84 Foundation’s embarrassing “social justice” summit, the fall of the Huizars, the death of the Calgary’s 2026 bid, and much, much more.

Email us at no@nolympicsla.com to stay in touch or get involved today.

We debunk the feel good fuzzies of the LA84 Foundation, often perceived as a benign altruistic youth sports non-profit but which is – after some serious scrutiny – really an unaccountable non-profit who merely claims to promote social justice and the empowering of marginalized communities. In practice, they’re more active in whitewashing LA than they are in making it more equitable. They’re massive investors in real estate giants like Blackstone and Oaktree Capital (the slumlords who led a misinformation campaign to defeat Prop 10 in November), and their work has been used to leverage the 2028 Olympics. Read more of our research on LA84 and a recap of its annual summit, which took place after the recording of this episode.

Email us at no@nolympicsla.com to stay in touch or get involved today.

The Olympics pose monumental risks to everyone unfortunate enough to be in their orbit, and this is true especially for workers – either workers who help make the games happen (construction, service industry, volunteers) to the athletes themselves. Labor exploitation and the Olympics are synonymous, and we’ve charted this history of rampant harm – everything from wage theft to psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse – in the modern Olympics, even the beloved 1984 games.

For episode 8 of the Rings of Hell podcast, we’re joined by members of DSA Los Angeles’ Labor and Healthcare committees to explore how the Olympics are always sold as being “good for labor,” while the receipts show the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

Email us at no@nolympicsla.com to stay in touch or get involved today.

Did you know that LA isn’t a sanctuary city, in name or in spirit? Even if we were a true sanctuary city with real protections, any Olympics on US soil poses huge risks for immigrants. That’s because the LA 2028 Olympics is designated a National Special Security Event (NSSE), which gives the Department of Homeland Security (ICE, CBP, NSA, all the bad dudes) the express ability to coordinate with local law enforcement. Sound like a terrible idea? It is! For this episode of Rings of Hell, we are joined by members of DSA Los Angeles’ Immigration Justice Committee to discuss all the ways our current Democrat establishment in LA already fall short of their pseudo-progressive pro-immigrant messaging and how the NSSE – compounded with our already wildly militarized local law enforcement – poses a nightmare for communities across the Southland.Email us at no@nolympicsla.com to stay in touch or get involved today.

For our sixth episode, we explore how fascists have co-opted and manipulated the platform of mega sports through the annals of history – whether it’s Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco with soccer and the Olympics – or more recent despots or power-hungry individuals who use the games to enhance their power. It turns out the pageantry and bright shiny object-ness of mega sport gives bad people a tremendous amount of cover.

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For this episode, we invited Olympic author and expert Jules Boykoff to call in and give us a broad look at how the modern Olympics came into being, how their power is structured, and how they’ve evolved over the decades, growing more insidious at every turn. The Olympic machine has been around since the late 1800s and operated as a sort of sideshow. To this day the IOC still feels like it’s being led by carnival barkers trying to hook the next gullible sucker, and this conversation tracks how they’ve managed to stay alive and where they’re potentially vulnerable.

To read more by Jules Boykoff: julesboykoff.org

Email us at no@nolympicsla.com to stay in touch or get involved today.

In this episode, we unpack LA’s occasional Mayor, Eric Michael Garcetti, who has the worst kept secret in local politics (an upcoming presidential run), and explore MEG’s privilege, his hijacking of marginalized groups’ identities for political advancement, his fear of adversarial journalism, and what his true goals are. And we bring it all together by exploring how the Olympics is the cynical vanity project Garcetti’s using to try to make you forget he works for developers, police, and other elite interests.

So turn on, tune in, and drop out; it’s time for the MEGisode.

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The movement against the Olympics is not limited to Los Angeles, of course. We’ve seen opposition organizations spring up from Denver to Hamburg, Tokyo to Turino, Calgary to Chicago and everywhere in between, as the International Olympic Committee repeats their pattern wherever find a city to reel in.

For this episode, we feature guests who were documenting the struggle in Rio in the lead up to the 2016 games and who were involved in No Boston’s successful fight to push out the 2024 bid. We reveal that, despite some local differences, we are all fighting the same fight against the IOC who helps create heightened militarization, displacement, and authoritarianism in the name of extracting profit. The struggle against this form of neoliberal lotteryism is both a hyper-local and transnational one.

To learn more about Rio: www.rioonwatch.org

To learn more about Boston: www.nobostonolympics.orgEmail us at ⁠no@nolympicsla.com⁠ to stay in touch or get involved today.