Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. Ah, welcome to it
Speaker 1: could happen here a podcast where myself, Garrison Davis and
Speaker 1: James Stout just created a new soon to be beloved
Speaker 1: fiction character, Racist Sherlock's Holmes. And don't worry, We're not
Speaker 1: done workshopping at It's not ready to go public yet.
Speaker 1: But when this bit drops you people are gonna lose
Speaker 1: your minds. Ah, how's everyone doing today?
Speaker 2: Much better after learning about Racist Shadow comes?
Speaker 1: Uh huh? After no, we didn't learn about him. He
Speaker 1: burst fully formed from our heads like Athena from the
Speaker 1: brain of Zeus. A good stuff. Speaking of the Greek
Speaker 1: and Roman pagan pantheon, James Garrison, you know who does
Speaker 1: kind of have the feel of a of a malevolent
Speaker 1: spirit in Greek mythology, is Ron DeSantis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not wrong, Sure, Ron, that's what they call him.
Speaker 3: After all my years study studying the papyrie, this is
Speaker 3: I can't confirm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Meet ball Ron, I'm gonna I have a long
Speaker 1: essay on my substack about how meet ball Ron and
Speaker 1: the Egyptian deity Maat are are really uh directly related
Speaker 1: to one another. But that that that'll, that'll you can
Speaker 1: find that on my substack, my Egyptology focused substack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's not what's his what's the god of the sun,
Speaker 2: the god of the sun disk hm, the one they
Speaker 2: tried to do a monotheism for.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that isn't that raw? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I can see seeing himself in those terms.
Speaker 3: No, Maat like I think, is more of like a
Speaker 3: Horus figure.
Speaker 1: Actually yeah, I mean no, because Matt here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Matt has wings uh and Ronda Santis is currently flying
Speaker 1: over us, uh, shading us all in the comfort of
Speaker 1: his of his mighty technicolor wingspan.
Speaker 2: I'm seeing. Let's there's too many colors in these in
Speaker 2: these in these wings.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know why we got onto it.
Speaker 1: Comparing Ronda Santis to this was a mistake. Anyway, Garrison,
Speaker 1: you just last week we closed out on two great
Speaker 1: episodes about fash wave and uh, the adoption UH and
Speaker 1: kind of reposting of a lot of these aesthetics that
Speaker 1: had become popular on the far right via you know,
Speaker 1: the dark brand and memes. And a big part of
Speaker 1: that was how Ron de Santis somehow allowed some incredibly
Speaker 1: internet poisoned zoomers to make an ad for him that
Speaker 1: was far too online for a presidential campaign ad. And
Speaker 1: I felt like it was time to kind of have
Speaker 1: a discussion about meatball Ron because obviously things in Florida
Speaker 1: are very ugly right now. As a fascist, which he
Speaker 1: definitely is, Ronda Santis is an effective administrator, yeah, which
Speaker 1: I mean he's good at twisting the administrative state that
Speaker 1: exists into a weapon to attack marginalized groups. He's been
Speaker 1: effective at that. What's happening legally, you know, in the laws,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of the anti trans laws, the
Speaker 1: anti drag laws in Florida is very frightening. What he's
Speaker 1: been doing to the Florida education system, state education system
Speaker 1: is very unsettling, And you know that is all of
Speaker 1: that is worthy of further discussion. But I think because
Speaker 1: the most immediate concern we have is like, is this
Speaker 1: guy going to be able to do that on a
Speaker 1: national scale? Right, Which is not to say that we
Speaker 1: should just let Florida, you know, sink into the abyss.
Speaker 1: I don't believe that. But at the moment, Ron de
Speaker 1: Santis is tied for second place against Donald Trump. So
Speaker 1: it kind of it behooves us to ask the questions
Speaker 1: purely for the purpose of self defense. Can Ron de
Speaker 1: Santis win? Right? Could he actually become not? Even the
Speaker 1: first question is like could he become the Republican presidential candidate?
Speaker 1: Can he beat Donald Trump? And the short good answer
Speaker 1: to that is I don't think so. It's not looking good.
Speaker 1: Not looking good for all Meatball. Ron agreed, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to get into why and kind of some of
Speaker 1: the fundamental flaws as a guy who is there was
Speaker 1: kind of this belief fear, I think a reasonable fear
Speaker 1: among a lot of liberals and folks on the left
Speaker 1: that because of how effective he's been consolidating and expanding
Speaker 1: his power in Florida, and because he's generally seemed like
Speaker 1: less of a like Donald Trump, has certain competences as
Speaker 1: an authoritarian. There's things he's very good at, but he
Speaker 1: was not good at being the president. He was not
Speaker 1: good at using power. He's not too much of a
Speaker 1: fascist in a lot, He's not an effective fascist, right Like,
Speaker 1: he wasn't good at picking people to like do things
Speaker 1: for him. He wasn't good at He was good at
Speaker 1: hurting people in a blunt way. But he was kind
Speaker 1: of incompetent at rerat like a competent fascist, like Hitler
Speaker 1: was a competent fascist, right he was not in there
Speaker 1: long in an elected position before he had effectively made
Speaker 1: it impossible to oust him without military force. And Trump
Speaker 1: was never good at doing that stuff. And the worry
Speaker 1: is that rond de Santis would be The good news
Speaker 1: is that Rondi Santis is incompetent as a politician and
Speaker 1: a political candidate. So I wanted to kind of start
Speaker 1: with why a lot of his the people who do
Speaker 1: form his base, which is quite shrinking at the moment,
Speaker 1: he's losing a lot of support, why they thought he
Speaker 1: was capable of winning the primary and the general. And
Speaker 1: when you when you look into kind of why, a
Speaker 1: lot of sort of Republican like legacy Republicans, the folks
Speaker 1: who often get called Rhinos. Why a lot of them
Speaker 1: decided to back Ron Dea Santis. The best summer you're
Speaker 1: going to get comes from Phil Huffines, who is a
Speaker 1: businessman in Texas whose car dealership ran a series of
Speaker 1: ads that are like plasted forever in the memories of
Speaker 1: everyone who lived in the DFW area in the late
Speaker 1: nineties early two thousands, and in a CNN interview a
Speaker 1: few days ago, he said this, when one looks objectively
Speaker 1: at who can beat Biden, it's going to be DeSantis.
Speaker 1: We already had a match with Biden and Trump. Trump
Speaker 1: turns out Democrats better than anybody. DeSantis will be able
Speaker 1: to articulate more clearly what Republicans stand for, and he's
Speaker 1: not going to be bogged down in other stuff that
Speaker 1: Trump brings to the election. I don't think that was
Speaker 1: a logical thing to think a year ago, right, because
Speaker 1: it is true that Trump turns out the dims. The
Speaker 1: idea that like DeSantis isn't going to get bogged down
Speaker 1: and shit has become kind of fundamentally silly. Like he's
Speaker 1: gotten bogged down in the fact that a lot of
Speaker 1: his you know, backers are invested in culture warship that
Speaker 1: does not sell well on a national level. This whole
Speaker 1: like anti trans crusade, on the anti woke shit is
Speaker 1: not a big vote getter. It just gets the base
Speaker 1: behind you, and like you're never going to beat Trump
Speaker 1: in a race to the base. You know, Trump has
Speaker 1: the core of the hard right Republican party in his
Speaker 1: pocket and they're not gonna like move on from anybody. DeSantis'
Speaker 1: hope should have been like going after independence, people on
Speaker 1: the edge, people who are like unhappy with Biden. And
Speaker 1: I think when you pick this sort of like hate crusade,
Speaker 1: it hasn't worked well. But Huffines decided that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy, this is the dude who has a shot.
Speaker 1: I think he can actually like pull it out from Trump.
Speaker 1: I think he's got the ability to like get a
Speaker 1: lot of people in the middle or close to the middle.
Speaker 1: This has been proven kind of absurd over the last
Speaker 1: couple of months of stagnating poll numbers. Huffine says that
Speaker 1: the governor recently held a meeting with about one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty Texas Republicans in Dallas, where he quote impressed
Speaker 1: them with his stamina, youth, and performance in recent Florida
Speaker 1: state elections and There's a number of reasons think that
Speaker 1: this is a bad strategy that like really laying on
Speaker 1: his performance in the last Florida election is like a
Speaker 1: good way for him to win support. One of these
Speaker 1: has to do with the fact that, like Florida is
Speaker 1: the national watchword for crazy right, like like the rest.
Speaker 4: Of their man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, even a lot of conservatives when they're talking about
Speaker 1: like madness in America, they talk about Florida like Florida
Speaker 1: man is an archetype and like, yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of right wing culture warriors who like Ron's anti immigrant
Speaker 1: and anti LGBT policies. But moderates and swing voters the
Speaker 1: people he has a chance of pulling away from Trump.
Speaker 1: Like if you tell them I want to make New
Speaker 1: Hampshire more like Florida, most swing voters are going to
Speaker 1: be like that sounds like hell, I don't want to
Speaker 1: be anything like that place. Like what a horrible What
Speaker 1: a horrible idea. This is a sentiment that you will
Speaker 1: find among Republican thought leaders. Quote. One Republican consultant who
Speaker 1: has worked on presidential campaign said DeSantis was making a
Speaker 1: classic governor's mistake by talking extensively about his past accomplishments.
Speaker 1: Put bluntly, people in Ohio or Iowa do not want
Speaker 1: to be Florida. They don't care about Florida, and they
Speaker 1: are tired of hearing about Florida.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because he's he's so reliant on the types of
Speaker 3: covered to have come out during the past two years
Speaker 3: of legislative stuff he's done in Florida, and he's I
Speaker 3: guess forgetting the overall view of that people have of
Speaker 3: Florida divorced from his own administrative changes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like people are moving in droves to
Speaker 2: Florida Bay because he's defeated the woke menace and he's
Speaker 2: created a paradise. Like, yeah, he's getting high on his
Speaker 2: own supply.
Speaker 1: He's getting high on his own supply. It's one thing.
Speaker 1: There's a degree of his campaign that's focused on like
Speaker 1: what he calls like the Florida Miracle, the fact that
Speaker 1: Florida economically weathered COVID pretty well. And again, this would
Speaker 1: be a stronger point if like Florida's economy was booming
Speaker 1: and everywhere else was bad. But the US economy overall,
Speaker 1: in terms of like the numbers that you know economists
Speaker 1: care about allies is like doing reasonably well, and like,
Speaker 1: of the shit that is bad in the US economy,
Speaker 1: it's not any better, Like inflation is not better markedly
Speaker 1: better in Florida than it is in Iowa. Right, there's
Speaker 1: just not a good case to be made because like
Speaker 1: when you're not when you can't really drive the economic
Speaker 1: point home, when you can't be like, look at how
Speaker 1: much better Flora is doing than your home. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a fucking paradise compared to the you know,
Speaker 1: shitty economy in Ohio. That's an argument you can make
Speaker 1: if there's any evidence for it. But when you're like,
Speaker 1: you can't really make the economic argument. It all comes
Speaker 1: down to culture war stuff, and most Americans don't want
Speaker 1: this culture war shit going on in their backyard because
Speaker 1: it's like a gross, weird pain in the ass. So
Speaker 1: right now, the bulk of DeSantis support comes from higher income,
Speaker 1: old guard Republicans, the kind of were lukewarm for Trump
Speaker 1: from the beginning, and the kind to point out rightfully
Speaker 1: that he didn't win against Biden and it is time
Speaker 1: for new blood. This is true, but current polling indicates
Speaker 1: it's not what most GOP voters want, which is kind
Speaker 1: of the big problem the Republicans have is that this
Speaker 1: is why Trump's definitely gonna win, you know, as the
Speaker 1: primary campaign, is that like the hardcore of the GOP
Speaker 1: cannot be overcome by the moderates because the hardcore is
Speaker 1: so in lockstep about what they want, and what they
Speaker 1: want is Trump. The moderates don't have control of the party,
Speaker 1: but the moderates are the ones who can like actually
Speaker 1: win a general election. So yeah, it's a tough situation
Speaker 1: for them to be in. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that kind of shows how fucked Ron is is that,
Speaker 1: like Ron won reelection in Florida in his last cubernatorial
Speaker 1: campaign by about twenty points a year or so ago.
Speaker 1: In Florida, Trump currently has a twenty point lead on him.
Speaker 3: Not great, not great, No.
Speaker 1: That's a disaster, like because again not only like should
Speaker 1: you be able to bring in your home state as
Speaker 1: a sitting governor, but like it shows that Ron is
Speaker 1: not popular because of his legislative achievements. He's popular because
Speaker 1: Florida is just that right wing right. Like that's like
Speaker 1: currently like the electoral state or status of Florida is
Speaker 1: very conservative, and so Ron won by an overwhelming margin,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean people love him. They definitely like
Speaker 1: Trump more than they like him. Bad situation to be in,
Speaker 1: and a number of early backers in DeSantis's orbit have
Speaker 1: begun to acknowledge this reality. I'm gonna quote from NBC
Speaker 1: News here. Yeah, there are a number of people grumbling
Speaker 1: about it, no doubt. A Desantist downer said, there is
Speaker 1: an overall sense, including with me, that he just is
Speaker 1: not ignited the way we thought he would. And I
Speaker 1: find that really interesting because you get versions of that
Speaker 1: a lot that like we were expecting him to really
Speaker 1: take off as soon as he started campaigning, and he hasn't,
Speaker 1: and that was our only strategy. You get this, and
Speaker 1: like if you read interviews with like folks who were
Speaker 1: in the DeSantis orbit and people because a number of
Speaker 1: his early backers have like peeled away and rescinded their
Speaker 1: their endorsements and given them the Trump it was this
Speaker 1: hope they had that like once as soon as he's
Speaker 1: out in front of America, Americans are going to love
Speaker 1: this guy because he's all the good stuff about Trump
Speaker 1: with none of the baggage. And that was just fundamentally
Speaker 1: disastrously wrong. And I think one of the things we're
Speaker 1: starting to see is that the Dysantis people didn't have
Speaker 1: another plan for how to get this guy elected. Like
Speaker 1: their plan was that we think that Trump's policies are popular,
Speaker 1: but everyone doesn't like Trump, and no, that's actually not accurate.
Speaker 2: The opposite of true. Almost like some of them just
Speaker 2: like Trumps as a person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of them don't care about what he's done.
Speaker 1: They like the fact that he owns the Libs, right,
Speaker 1: They're not.
Speaker 3: Thinking about he's a compelling character. Yeah, DeSantis is a
Speaker 3: void of charisma. He is he is not a compelling character.
Speaker 3: He's actually like he's good at being like an administrator
Speaker 3: and like like yeah, he's like he's very successful in
Speaker 3: doing bad things.
Speaker 1: And he's a guy you make your chief of staff
Speaker 1: if you're yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: He's not like, he's not a compelling character like the
Speaker 3: way Trump is.
Speaker 1: No, and it's it's again, it's so fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: It says a lot about like the degree of bubble
Speaker 1: all of the political class are in. And when I
Speaker 1: say the political class, I mean the people the fairly
Speaker 1: small number of people in the left and the right,
Speaker 1: liberals and conservatives who work on political campaigns, right, because
Speaker 1: it's actually a pretty small community of people, of the
Speaker 1: folks who do the different jobs that are running political
Speaker 1: campaigns and that are like working as the age and
Speaker 1: legislative assistants and all that stuff for elected leaders. And
Speaker 1: because to me, to just a guy sitting out there,
Speaker 1: like I'm worried about Ron because what he's doing in Florida.
Speaker 1: But from the moment I saw the guy speak, I
Speaker 1: was like, well, this man has no charisma whatsoever. And
Speaker 1: if you can't think about like how a guy could
Speaker 1: attract voters. If there's nothing that seems appealing about a
Speaker 1: candidate to you, if you can't understand their charisma, that's
Speaker 1: probably a good sign that they can't get elected. I
Speaker 1: am not mystified by why any president who was won
Speaker 1: in my lifetime won, right. George W. I've been in
Speaker 1: a room with George W. Bush and watched him spoke
Speaker 1: to in immediately made sense why people fucking love George W.
Speaker 4: Bush.
Speaker 1: He had an attitude, he had an air that put
Speaker 1: people at ease. He was good at putting on a
Speaker 1: character that people found appealing in that time and place.
Speaker 1: There's a reason why so many voters who loved him
Speaker 1: you know, especially after the first campaign where it was
Speaker 1: kind of a but like, there's a reason why he
Speaker 1: got re elected, Like there's And it's the same thing
Speaker 1: with like Bill Clinton. Right, you watch old videos of
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton on the campaign trail before he was president.
Speaker 1: You can see the charisma, you can see the way
Speaker 1: he connects to audiences, you can see the things about
Speaker 1: him that people find appealing. There's not a mystery. It's
Speaker 1: not mysterious why Obama got elected. He's a deeply charismatic man.
Speaker 1: And you know, Joe needed a little bit of help,
Speaker 1: that's why he lost so many presidential campaigns beforehand. But
Speaker 1: next to Donald Trump, he seems like a much more
Speaker 1: appealing person. Like, I'm not mystified, and I'm not mystified
Speaker 1: by why Trump got elected. Next to Hillary Clinton, Trump
Speaker 1: felt not like a politician, not like the same people
Speaker 1: who would let us down. There was this degree to
Speaker 1: which like, you should never be you should if you're
Speaker 1: looking at like whether or not someone can win an election,
Speaker 1: you should never be like, well, I don't get it,
Speaker 1: but I guess maybe they have. They must have some
Speaker 1: sort of charisma because everybody's talking about them as a
Speaker 1: serious candidate now Honestly, if you can't see anything about
Speaker 1: appealing about a candidate, then that might be a good
Speaker 1: sign that they're doomed. And I think DeSantis is fucking doomed.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of a thing that a lot
Speaker 1: of his early backups has started to realize. One DeSantis
Speaker 1: aligned operative told NBC, from my understanding, if we don't
Speaker 1: see a bump in the polls, we're basically going to
Speaker 1: shut down the idea of a national operation. This is
Speaker 1: really something that we're probably going to see. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be surprised if he kind of has a blowout politically
Speaker 1: pretty early in the primary season next year, because he
Speaker 1: raised a lot of money earlier in his campaign. He
Speaker 1: raised about twenty million or so between mid May and
Speaker 1: the end of June of this year, which actually put
Speaker 1: him ahead fundraising wise of Trump by about two million
Speaker 1: or so. But the Trump campaign ended last quarter with
Speaker 1: twice as much cash on hand as Wrong Alongside is
Speaker 1: still dominating lead in the poll. So Ron has raised
Speaker 1: a lot of money, which kind of speaks to the
Speaker 1: number of sort of like Republican you know, institutional backers
Speaker 1: who hoped that he could win where Trump had failed.
Speaker 1: But he blew all that shit, and it didn't get
Speaker 1: him anything right, Like he didn't raise a b Like
Speaker 1: he crept up a teeny amount in the polls, but
Speaker 1: he's still like tied for second with Donald Trump despite
Speaker 1: blowing all of that money. And I think we're going
Speaker 1: to reach a point pretty quickly where if he doesn't
Speaker 1: immediately take you know, a state or two or three
Speaker 1: from Trump in the early primaries, any kind of hope
Speaker 1: he has for further donations is going to dry up, because, like,
Speaker 1: why would you keep wasting that money. We all saw
Speaker 1: how much money he got wasted trying to take Trump
Speaker 1: out of the primaries in twenty sixteen. I do think
Speaker 1: people are going to be a little more gun shy
Speaker 1: this time. There have already been a number of recent
Speaker 1: layoffs of major staffers by DeSantis. He's kind of purged
Speaker 1: a big chunk of the people who started his campaign.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's a little interesting about him
Speaker 1: in his political career is that as a politician, he
Speaker 1: has always been kind of noted as kind of weird
Speaker 1: within Florida politics because every election he's had, he's had
Speaker 1: an entirely new team of people. He does not work
Speaker 1: with the same people twice. He does not have like
Speaker 1: bring people back for his campaigns, which is really unusual
Speaker 1: in US politics for a successful politicans. When you win,
Speaker 1: you tend to bring him back a lot of the
Speaker 1: same people who helped you win the last time. And
Speaker 1: so the fact that Ron doesn't do that, that he's
Speaker 1: got such basically one hundred percent churn in his teams
Speaker 1: suggests a couple of things. One, he's not great to
Speaker 1: work with, and two, the people who work with him
Speaker 1: and have been successful and are good don't see him
Speaker 1: as someone with national potential. Right They don't want to
Speaker 1: keep working with him because then they get kind of
Speaker 1: trapped in the loop of being a DeSantis guy. They
Speaker 1: want to move on somewhere rounse else because they think
Speaker 1: governor is as high as this guy can go. You know,
Speaker 1: Like that is kind of one of the things that
Speaker 1: you see when you note this dude has such total
Speaker 1: turnover in his fucking teams. Now again, for all of
Speaker 1: the money that he spent, Ron's polling numbers have changed
Speaker 1: basically nil from when he announced his candidacy. According to
Speaker 1: New York Magazine, kind of coalated a bunch of this
Speaker 1: together in the real clear Politics average of polls starting
Speaker 1: July first, twenty twenty two, Trump had a thirty four
Speaker 1: point lead over Ron DeSantis and fifty two point eight
Speaker 1: percent of the vote in national surveys, with DeSantis at
Speaker 1: eighteen point five At present, he's got Trump's lead over
Speaker 1: to Santas. So a year ago, Trump had a thirty
Speaker 1: four point lead over to Santis. Now he's at thirty two,
Speaker 1: which is not the speed of movement that you want
Speaker 1: to see. After a year of effectively campaigning. On the
Speaker 1: national surveys, DeSantis has gone from eighteen point five percent
Speaker 1: to about twenty one percent, which again is just kind
Speaker 1: of like a disaster rate of change. Now this is
Speaker 1: just one pole. There's probably potentially outliers here. I've seen
Speaker 1: other polls that show DeSantis at more like twelve percent
Speaker 1: and tied with Vivic Ramaswami, who is another GOP candidate.
Speaker 1: Like the fact that Vivek, who is not nearly the
Speaker 1: kind of national name that DeSantis is, is tied with
Speaker 1: him and some polls now is fucking disastrous. He and
Speaker 1: Trump are pretty close in terms of funding. Vivek has
Speaker 1: raised only a fraction of what DeSantis has raged so
Speaker 1: that's a pretty bad sign kind of a fucking disaster.
Speaker 1: One major area in which Ron lags behind Trump is
Speaker 1: his ability to draw interest and what amounts to free
Speaker 1: advertising from the media. Trump famously got about a billion
Speaker 1: dollars in free publicity in twenty sixteen thanks to relentless
Speaker 1: media coverage of his every move, gaff and speech. He
Speaker 1: understood it didn't matter if it was negative. It didn't
Speaker 1: matter that they were shit talking to me. What matters
Speaker 1: that they're keeping my face out front, right, this is
Speaker 1: a thing that will bring me support, It will bring
Speaker 1: me donors, It will make my supporters see me as
Speaker 1: like this kind of gladiator fighting for them. He leaned
Speaker 1: into this shit. On the surface, Ron and Trump are
Speaker 1: kind of the same in their approach to the media,
Speaker 1: and that if you go to a Assantis speech, you
Speaker 1: go to a Trump speech, they're going to call the
Speaker 1: media the enemy of the people or some variant thereof.
Speaker 1: They're going to talk about the need to control the press.
Speaker 1: They're going to like support authoritarian measures against like free
Speaker 1: you know, the free press. Like again, if you're kind
Speaker 1: of just looking on the surface, it seems like they
Speaker 1: have the same attitude towards the media. But the way
Speaker 1: they treat journalists is completely different, and that DeSantis has
Speaker 1: no strategy with the media. He just attacks them. If
Speaker 1: you're if you're right wing media, if you're some podcaster
Speaker 1: he likes, He'll go on your show, he'll talk to you.
Speaker 1: But he ignores the liberal media. He ignores the mainstream media.
Speaker 1: But that's that's different from having a tactic for dealing
Speaker 1: with them. Trump has a strategy with the media. He
Speaker 1: will howl that they're the enemy of the people in
Speaker 1: front of crowds. He'll talk about locking up journalists. But
Speaker 1: if you like read articles about him after a speech
Speaker 1: or whatever, he always gives the press their time. He
Speaker 1: knows a lot of these guys by name. He has
Speaker 1: relationships with reporters. He's had relationships with like Maggie Haberman
Speaker 1: of The Times. He's he's able to be like friendly
Speaker 1: with these people and social with them, which isn't like,
Speaker 1: doesn't make it's not doing that to be a good person.
Speaker 1: He's doing it because like he wants them to feel
Speaker 1: comfortable around him and cover him.
Speaker 3: And like and this is this is the thing that
Speaker 3: he's been doing longer than he's been a politician. Like
Speaker 3: Trump is primarily like a media guy like he is.
Speaker 3: He is someone who's been able to very successfully manipulate
Speaker 3: public image and manipulate media in his favor for years,
Speaker 3: especially as like he's not like a good businessman, He's like, no,
Speaker 3: he's like a con man who was like really good.
Speaker 3: He's a good promoter, so like he knows how to
Speaker 3: do this. DeSantis has none of this background, So he's
Speaker 3: just trying to copy like the hostile vibe of Trump
Speaker 3: without understanding the action like media backing that Trump puts
Speaker 3: into his UH, into his like relationship with UH, with
Speaker 3: like with like advertising and with having you know, any
Speaker 3: any amount of coverage that will get Republicans be like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is a guy that's worth voting for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And well also that will the kind of coverage
Speaker 1: that will make independence pay attention to him.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: A big thing part of how a lot of negative
Speaker 1: media coverage worked for Trump is that people would just
Speaker 1: see his name in the fucking news, and you know,
Speaker 1: so they would wind up reading and listening to a
Speaker 1: lot of what he had to say. And because like,
Speaker 1: you know, he's getting so much coverage, and because all
Speaker 1: of these media outlets have one to want to present
Speaker 1: the image of being unfair and unbiased. Like when Trump
Speaker 1: would go out and sit down with the New York Times,
Speaker 1: sit down with the Posted down, he would often get
Speaker 1: coverage that like, let him say his piece, let him
Speaker 1: make his case, like they would because they didn't want
Speaker 1: to feel like they were being biased, and he was
Speaker 1: giving them some of his time. But when you just
Speaker 1: cut the media off like the Santis has done, you
Speaker 1: don't get that from them. You don't get any of
Speaker 1: like the benefit of this sort of like idea of impartiality,
Speaker 1: which cuts down on your ability to actually like reach
Speaker 1: people who might be converted to vote for you. This
Speaker 1: is highlighted particularly well in a segment from a recent
Speaker 1: New York Times article on Dessanta's difficulty getting press coverage. Quote.
Speaker 1: Assigned to cover the reelection campaign of Governor Ron de
Speaker 1: Santis of Florida, Miles Cohen, a young ABC News reporter,
Speaker 1: found himself stymied. The governor would not grant him an interview,
Speaker 1: aids barred him from some campaign events, and interrupted his
Speaker 1: conversations with supporters. When mister Cohen was finally able to
Speaker 1: ask a question about the governor's handling of Hurricane Ian,
Speaker 1: mister DeSantis shouted him down, stop stop, stop, and scolded
Speaker 1: the media for trying to cast dispersions. The Dessanta's campaign
Speaker 1: then taunted mister Cohen on Twitter, prompting a torrent of
Speaker 1: online vitriol. So on election night, mister Cohen de camp
Speaker 1: to a friendlier environment for the news media mar A Lago,
Speaker 1: where former President Donald J. Trump greeted reporters by name.
Speaker 1: He came up to us, asked how the sandwiches were,
Speaker 1: and took twenty questions. Mister Cohen recalled mister Trump, who
Speaker 1: heckled the fake news in his speech that evening elevated
Speaker 1: media bashing into a high art for Republicans. But ahead
Speaker 1: of the next presidential race, potential candidates like mister DeSantis
Speaker 1: are taking a more radical approach, not just attacking nonpartisan
Speaker 1: news sources but out ignoring them altogether. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that kind of like gets at the core of
Speaker 1: what a bad strategy this is. And it shows all
Speaker 1: of the Republicans right now because of Trump's success in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, which we do have to remember, was not
Speaker 1: based on converting a majority of Americans. It was based
Speaker 1: in part on like the electoral system and just raw
Speaker 1: luck that shit broke the way it did. But they
Speaker 1: are looking at like his success in twenty sixteen and
Speaker 1: trying to copy that. But it's like a cargo cult thing, right,
Speaker 1: they don't actually understand what he did that work. They
Speaker 1: see him bashing the media and his speech is They're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be even harder. I'm not going to talk
Speaker 1: to the media at all. And it's like, well, you
Speaker 1: have eliminated for yourself the primary benefit that Trump true
Speaker 1: out from this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the corga cult de script is great.
Speaker 2: They're like they're trying to have the appearance of doing
Speaker 2: the Trump thing with now understanding why, yeah, the thing worked.
Speaker 3: And like also importantly, it's not like twenty sixteen anymore.
Speaker 3: As much as it feels like twenty sixteen was the
Speaker 3: here that never ended, Actually a lot has changed and
Speaker 3: also a lot of media has gotten a bit wise
Speaker 3: to the tactics that Trump did. Like they're no longer
Speaker 3: going to be blasting all of his speeches every time
Speaker 3: he says something outrageous because they know that's part of
Speaker 3: his strategy. So, yeah, the same tactics. If de Santis
Speaker 3: thinks heason to get publicity for saying some horrible thing
Speaker 3: in his speech. The media knows what's up now, like
Speaker 3: they've already seen this like playbook get played. It's not
Speaker 3: like it's you can't treat it like eight years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think a good example of this is in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, if it had come out, if Joe Biden
Speaker 1: had been the front writer, say he beats you know,
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton, but everything else is the same, So he's
Speaker 1: the he's the Democratic primary guy. Say it comes out
Speaker 1: that his son has been smoking crack with prostitutes, and
Speaker 1: like there's pictures of his hog everywhere and he was
Speaker 1: involved in So he gets charges against him for commit
Speaker 1: a couple of crimes that might sink a presidential campaign
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen, nobody gives a shit about Hunter Biden,
Speaker 1: Like zero moderate it's not a single vote is being
Speaker 1: changed as a result of the Hunter Biden situation in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty or it's a different landscape and these people haven't.
Speaker 1: This is a good thing. I am frightened for when
Speaker 1: a new you know, there's another coup in conservative politics
Speaker 1: and somebody understands that it's a different year. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: we are fortunate at this moment, and you know who
Speaker 1: else is fortunate.
Speaker 2: Who's that robot?
Speaker 1: The sponsors of this podcast, they're fortunate to have great
Speaker 1: pitchmen like James Stout. James, why don't you tell the
Speaker 1: people which meal box subscription will finally cure the gnawing
Speaker 1: pit of anxiety at the center of their life and
Speaker 1: bring them both both peace and the love of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absleutely, we're pretty gonna have to uh, we're gonna
Speaker 2: have to bleet some shit out here, but absolutely, I
Speaker 2: personally love been a big chicken wing fam my whole
Speaker 2: life until the baby's arms from the Apron arrived. They
Speaker 2: are delicious, little little fatty arms from freshly harvested babies,
Speaker 2: and I've felt better inside and out since I started
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Speaker 2: human trafficking.
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Speaker 3: Go to HelloFresh dot com use promo code children Arms
Speaker 3: for a ten percent discount.
Speaker 1: Of blue Apron. Actually cut hell afresh there. They're giving
Speaker 1: us a lot of money. It's blue Apron. We shit on. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, and we're thinking about how there's one food
Speaker 1: box company who's been accused of a lot of malfeasance
Speaker 1: and another food box company. Who are I think it's
Speaker 1: safe to say Christ like, you know, honestly and Jesus.
Speaker 3: Jesus inspired to at the very least.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, the reason Jesus actually rose from the dead
Speaker 2: was to consume a breakfast. That's right by Blue Apron.
Speaker 1: Mmmmmmmm Jesus, big omelet guy, huge omlet guy. Anyway, I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's not really a joke. So Ron DeSantis
Speaker 1: has long ignored any media not guaranteed to be fawningly
Speaker 1: indulgent of him for political reasons. This worked well in Florida.
Speaker 1: He's been able to get by by attacking centrist in
Speaker 1: liberal media and embracing a constellation of far right podcasters
Speaker 1: and Fox News. But Florida is not the United States,
Speaker 1: and a governor's race is not a federal election. He
Speaker 1: simply can't succeed against Trump with the same tactics that
Speaker 1: worked in Florida's or against Florida's anemic state Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: When he's tried to rebut the naysayers who see his
Speaker 1: cause as largely doomed, DeSantis has tried to publicly downplay
Speaker 1: the significance of national polls. It is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite things whenever people point out, like, your polls have
Speaker 1: not moved in a year, and you've spent millions and
Speaker 1: millions of dollars. He'll be like, I don't trust those polls.
Speaker 1: Those polls don't really matter. You can't trust the poll
Speaker 1: to get how wrong the polls were in twenty sixteen articles.
Speaker 3: I've seen him use that line a lot. Look, yeah,
Speaker 3: how wrong the polls were in twenty sixteen?
Speaker 1: Okay, Ron, Yeah, I don't think they were not off
Speaker 1: by thirty four points. You can see clearly how he's
Speaker 1: making his case currently to donors in private. Because a
Speaker 1: memo that he's sent out to a bunch of his
Speaker 1: high dollar donors leaked recently. There's been a number of
Speaker 1: websites that have written about it, but we have like
Speaker 1: this memo, which is fascinating. It was sent out to
Speaker 1: a bunch of big dollar donors to a superpack. So
Speaker 1: these are the people who are not limited by like
Speaker 1: campaign contributions because it's due a super pack. So these
Speaker 1: are like the thick pockets people. So we get an
Speaker 1: idea of how he is marketing his campaign right now
Speaker 1: that it's in a crisis, and it starts with a
Speaker 1: state of the race update with a subtitle, the ballot
Speaker 1: is very fluid. Early state voters are only softly committed
Speaker 1: to the candidates they select on a ballot question this
Speaker 1: far out, including many Trump supporters. Our focused group participants
Speaker 1: in the Early States even say they don't plan on
Speaker 1: making up their mind they meet the candidates or watch
Speaker 1: them debate. Well, we know Trump's flor is twenty five percent.
Speaker 1: That leaves three quarters of the electorate willing to consider
Speaker 1: other viable options. What has not changed to the candidates
Speaker 1: who are realistically being courted by the electorate. As it
Speaker 1: has been for the last year, Trump and DeSantis remain
Speaker 1: the only viable options for two thirds of the likely
Speaker 1: Republican primary electorate. While Tim Scott has earned a serious
Speaker 1: look at this stage as Bio is lacking the fight
Speaker 1: that our electorate is looking for in the next president.
Speaker 1: We expect Tim Scott to receive appropriate scrutiny. In the
Speaker 1: weeks of HEEAD. We found low to no interest in Vivek,
Speaker 1: Bergham and Nikki, while too many voters will not consider
Speaker 1: Pincer Christie for them to be remotely viable. Now I
Speaker 1: agree about pens and Christie. Neither of those people is
Speaker 1: going to be the primary candidate. But again Vivek and
Speaker 1: some polls is right up there with Ronda Santis. So yeah,
Speaker 1: note that neither of them is gonna win.
Speaker 3: Great scigncet.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The mimo goes on to note and to sort of
Speaker 1: admit that their efforts and other primary states have hit
Speaker 1: a wall, and they're basically like, we're given up in
Speaker 1: Iowa and Ohio kind of We're not going to be
Speaker 1: putting new resources into them. We're just going to throw
Speaker 1: everything we've got into New Hampshire. There's a couple of
Speaker 1: reasons for this, but I think it's largely that they
Speaker 1: don't think they can win in those other early states,
Speaker 1: and they know they desperately need an early wind to
Speaker 1: have any hope of building up momentum. Yeah. Language like
Speaker 1: this from the memo has to have experienced Republican politico's nervous.
Speaker 1: While Super Tuesday is critically important, we will not dedicate
Speaker 1: resources to Super Tuesday. That's slow our momentum in New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: We expect to revisit this investment in the fall. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you will not a great sign, guys, the memo.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you'll be revisiting a lot of things in
Speaker 3: the fall.
Speaker 1: The memo also claims Governor DeSantis and his messager thriving
Speaker 1: in town hall engagements. So basically, when Ron gets in
Speaker 1: front of people, they see his magnetic charisma. They really
Speaker 1: like him once he gets a chance to shine in
Speaker 1: front of them. Now, there's been no evidence in polling
Speaker 1: he's been in front of people quite a bit, and
Speaker 1: he's not very impressive. Most of the social media response
Speaker 1: to his public appearances have been people making fun of
Speaker 1: the way he eats in public. Like there's like six
Speaker 1: or seven different videos out that are him trying to
Speaker 1: eat something and looking like a goober and people making
Speaker 1: fun of him, Whereas like again, Trump has because he's
Speaker 1: actually charismatic. Trump can like sit in a truck and
Speaker 1: look like a dufus playing truck driver and everybody's like,
Speaker 1: look at that guy. Even people who hate him are like, well,
Speaker 1: that's kind of endearing. Look at him. He's hogging the horn.
Speaker 1: He's pretended to be a big truck driver.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Meatball Ron. I mean we call him meatball Ron because
Speaker 1: of a food related gaff. Putting Ron to putting Ron too.
Speaker 1: He's just a disaster in public. There are some useful
Speaker 1: bits in this leaked document. This is the part of
Speaker 1: the document where the Desanta's campaign is like trying to
Speaker 1: lay out what they see as his assets as a candidate.
Speaker 1: And again, the goal of this is to get big
Speaker 1: dollar donors to give him more money. So this is
Speaker 1: them making the case as to why Ron is worth
Speaker 1: further investment. We found that when voters hear about the
Speaker 1: governor's bio, principally as a dad and as a veteran,
Speaker 1: they like him and are open to hearing more about him.
Speaker 1: This is to say nothing of his successes on parental rights,
Speaker 1: his leadership bringing Florida's economy back during and after COVID,
Speaker 1: fighting illegal immigration, and ensuring Border Act security. That he's
Speaker 1: not just a fighter, but most importantly a winner. A
Speaker 1: major paid media effort featuring the governor's bio will help
Speaker 1: us to convert three big issues that you know. That's again,
Speaker 1: so the three big issues he's highlighting that he says like,
Speaker 1: these are the things that are going to get voters
Speaker 1: onto us enough of them that we can overcome Trump's
Speaker 1: twenty five percent floor. Our anti immigration stuff. Well, I'm sorry, man,
Speaker 1: Trump's got you beat there. The wall is his right.
Speaker 2: Descentist has tried to go one step further. And if
Speaker 2: you saw his press conference in Texas where he.
Speaker 1: Is the birthrights teamship thing, yeah.
Speaker 2: No to shooting people.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I think he said quite drop a few of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's trying to. But again, he just talked about
Speaker 1: what's interesting to me. He opens this memo by starting like, look,
Speaker 1: Trump's got a twenty five percent floor of support, but
Speaker 1: you know there's that other three quarters of people we
Speaker 1: can get. And yet when you are talking about gunning
Speaker 1: people down at the border, you're just trying to take
Speaker 1: that twenty five percent from Trump. You are not reaching
Speaker 1: out to like the people who are less maniac, right,
Speaker 1: he's trying. Like again, it's just bad strategy. It's a
Speaker 1: bad strategy within the context of what his people have
Speaker 1: laid out as a strategy. Right, Like, if the good
Speaker 1: strategy is go for the other seventy five percent of
Speaker 1: the voters, well you probably don't do that by promising
Speaker 1: to be even harder on the border.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he doesn't really even have like obviously Trump
Speaker 2: didn't have a coherent border policy either, but he had
Speaker 2: a thing, right, Like he had a sort of shiny
Speaker 2: thing that.
Speaker 3: He had three words that were very power build the wall.
Speaker 1: And you know, if desantists thinks Americans are ready for
Speaker 1: shoot them, all right, you can try that. But he's not.
Speaker 1: He's like trying to do this weasel thing anyway. It's
Speaker 1: just not there's just not any evidence of an actual
Speaker 1: tactic there of an understanding of like what people find
Speaker 1: appealing and how to highlight it. He's not doing it yet.
Speaker 1: He's not if you're a donor, he's not exhibiting the
Speaker 1: idea that he knows how to copy what Trump did
Speaker 1: and do it one better, like your goal here at
Speaker 1: if you're running against Trump based on kind of what
Speaker 1: they lay out, is what their strategy needs to be,
Speaker 1: which is get the other seventy five percent of people
Speaker 1: to back us instead of Trump. You need to be
Speaker 1: you don't need to be yes ending you are acknowledging
Speaker 1: by laying that out as the strategy that Trump his
Speaker 1: appeal is. He's got a dedicated base of appeal, but
Speaker 1: it's limited, and so if you are trying to make
Speaker 1: the case that you're more electable than him, you need
Speaker 1: to show how you have a wider base of like
Speaker 1: a whiter repeal than he does. And you don't do
Speaker 1: that by being like, I'm even shittier on the border
Speaker 1: like anyway, just a bad strategy since he doesn't have
Speaker 1: a strong case to make an absolute numbers. Ron's campaign
Speaker 1: has made the call to push heavily on the forgotten
Speaker 1: Man narrative, arguing a soft conspiratorial view that a cabal
Speaker 1: of shady elites is colluding to ruin American greatness. Here's
Speaker 1: another quote from that memo. Equally important, we will offer
Speaker 1: an economic message to disrupt and win economy voters. American
Speaker 1: decline was not an accident. It was a choice. Our
Speaker 1: elites do not consider themselves Americans so much as they
Speaker 1: think of themselves as citizens of the world. Their loyalty
Speaker 1: is not to a discrete nation, but to the bottom
Speaker 1: line on a balance sheet, and the decisions they made
Speaker 1: in leading this country over the past few decades has
Speaker 1: reflected that worldview. They have governed in their interests rather
Speaker 1: than ours. And I do think there's a germ of
Speaker 1: something interesting there. There's this idea of like economic populism,
Speaker 1: which was a factor in Trump's campaign. It's interesting to
Speaker 1: me how close Ron's idea is to like outright anti
Speaker 1: Semitic conspiracy theory language, like, yeah, they don't recognize borders. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're citizens of the world, which is a you know,
Speaker 1: very similar to a lot of the arguments that like
Speaker 1: the Nazis would make about the Jews, is that like
Speaker 1: they're a borderless people who exist within this like financial
Speaker 1: system rather than like our national like co citizens. Right,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me that he's got that this in
Speaker 1: that memo. Again, I don't think it's a good strategy.
Speaker 1: I think the way Trump, Trump's just better at doing
Speaker 1: this right at like he's made himself like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who consider Trump like their kind of guy,
Speaker 1: like a working class dude, even though he's a billionaire
Speaker 1: with a gold toilet. I don't see that DeSantis has
Speaker 1: the ability to like win that kind of support from
Speaker 1: working people.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 2: He tried really hard to go to push his like
Speaker 2: his military record as part of a like, yeah, sort
Speaker 2: of I'm a normal dude kind of think, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't seem to have stuck the landing at all. Again,
Speaker 2: he just yeah, I just did it in a clumsy
Speaker 2: and awkward way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, in part because like the thing he's
Speaker 1: got to hang on like that he was this fucking
Speaker 1: dude doing sketchy shit at Guantanamo. Isn't like even conservatives
Speaker 1: don't feel great about that, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he tried earlier to push like he was a leaguer,
Speaker 2: he was a JAG officer, like attached to a seal team.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he tried to call himself a seal.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think he Like, I think he flew a little
Speaker 2: bit too close to the sun on that one. And
Speaker 2: again like he fucked up and alienated the people he
Speaker 2: was trying to appeal to.
Speaker 1: And I also I do kind of wonder it was
Speaker 1: like sort of taking his red for some time that
Speaker 1: having military experience was like a positive aspect in a
Speaker 1: in a campaign that it would like win you a
Speaker 1: lot of conservative voters and whatnot. I don't know that
Speaker 1: that's really the case. Yeah, see a lot of evidence
Speaker 1: for it, Like people certainly shout it when they serve,
Speaker 1: but I don't know that it really works for them.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's more of a like a I don't
Speaker 2: know if I'm using the right phrasing here, like a
Speaker 2: traditional Republican value, not like a post Trump Republican value.
Speaker 1: Because Trump is like on record as being like, no,
Speaker 1: only idiots serve in the military. I'm a smart man,
Speaker 1: and like that didn't seem to hurt him at all.
Speaker 1: But you know who else hates veterans?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, several of the food box delivery companies. They
Speaker 2: actually they just won't give them food.
Speaker 1: They are they are actively every one of our supporters
Speaker 1: is wiping their ass with whatever flag the Navy uses.
Speaker 1: I assume they have a flag, right.
Speaker 2: Oh definitely yeah, yeaheah, especially navy flag. It works underwater too,
Speaker 2: very special.
Speaker 1: That's good. That's good. And underwater flag that's what we
Speaker 1: need to bring nationalism to the fish. We're back. So
Speaker 1: I wanted to close out by kind of looking at
Speaker 1: a segment of Desanta supporters the find people behind my
Speaker 1: favorite reliable media institution, legal insurrection dot com. Oh good, now,
Speaker 1: this is a kind of libertarian right themed news website.
Speaker 1: They're like, boy, I do want you to look up
Speaker 1: legal insurrection dot com because their website's very interesting, Like
Speaker 1: starts with this like phonetic breakdown of the phrase legal insurrection.
Speaker 1: Like that's their logo that includes like a definition a
Speaker 1: rising up against established authority, rebellion, revolt in conformity with
Speaker 1: or permitted by law. That's a nonsense phrase, because there's
Speaker 1: no such thing as a permitted legal insurrection. We had
Speaker 1: this argument actually, like back in around eighteen sixty and
Speaker 1: guess where it ended. Like, I'm not saying it's bad
Speaker 1: to have an insurrection. I think some insurrections are potentially
Speaker 1: really good, but they're never legal. Otherwise they're not an insurrection.
Speaker 1: Yet the same silly.
Speaker 2: Ideas direction is illegality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like one way or the other. I think it's
Speaker 1: this idea. These people who like pretend to be libertarians,
Speaker 1: they still have this like sacred sort of reverence for
Speaker 1: the law. They can't just say like, yeah, I believe
Speaker 1: in overthrowing the government. No, no, no, what I'm doing is
Speaker 1: actually obeying the real law. The people in charge are
Speaker 1: obeying laws that are illegal and fake. But like, I
Speaker 1: know the real law. So what I'm not. I'm not
Speaker 1: a criminal? Like, no, man, just be like yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I'm a criminal. I want to I want to overthrow
Speaker 1: the government. You know what's cool is being a criminal
Speaker 1: who wants to overthrow the government. We all love criminal
Speaker 1: This is why Star Wars is the biggest movie series.
Speaker 1: We love criminals who want to overthrow the government. That's
Speaker 1: who the founding fathers of this country.
Speaker 2: War is a very American thing to love.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't have to be like no, but ours is
Speaker 1: a legal and now fuck it, you're a criminal. You're cool,
Speaker 1: You're fucking al Capone.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, it's very very cooked.
Speaker 1: It is very cooked. Anyway. Here's an article from legal
Speaker 1: insurrection dot com who bafflingly backs Ronda Santis Florida government.
Speaker 1: Rond de Santis is serious about restoring executive branch agencies
Speaker 1: and rebuilding trust with the American people who've been shocked
Speaker 1: and appalled at the weaponization of government by the Biden
Speaker 1: administration and before that, the Obama administration. The federal government,
Speaker 1: specifically the executive branch alphabet agencies, has been completely corrupted
Speaker 1: by the Obama, Biden and now the Biden Harris administrations.
Speaker 1: We all know it, and we're all disgusted and disheartened
Speaker 1: by the myriad ways the Obama administration targeted political opponents.
Speaker 1: That's why Trump's twenty sixteen campaign to drain the swamp
Speaker 1: was so potent. We knew the depth and breadth of
Speaker 1: the corruption. The partisan Banana republic style attacks on political
Speaker 1: opponents and we wanted it stopped. Unfortunately, Trump was not
Speaker 1: able to drain the swamp at all, not even a
Speaker 1: little bit. So when Biden took office in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: he just got to work picking up Obama's attacks on
Speaker 1: ascent with a deep state still fully embedded through the
Speaker 1: executive branch, having spent the intervening years openly working as
Speaker 1: the resistance to Trump's the duly elected president's agenda. God,
Speaker 1: it's such, first off, very funny that they're trying to
Speaker 1: like make the resistance to be anything but like Twitter libs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I do find it funny that they're like fucking
Speaker 1: trying to treat this like a boogeyman.
Speaker 2: I'm just yeah, like leading the Maquis through to through
Speaker 2: that I don't know, Forester Siteorgia and blowing up fucking
Speaker 2: train tracks is extremely amusing to me.
Speaker 1: It's just sad, but it does get it something right.
Speaker 1: This attitude among a lot of Republicans, particularly the guys
Speaker 1: who really like DeSantis, that the deep state is really powerful.
Speaker 1: These federal law enforcement agencies are fundamentally like fighting against us,
Speaker 1: and we have to build an ability to compete with them.
Speaker 1: And this is I actually think we've been mostly talking
Speaker 1: about like the weaknesses and the dumb shit about DeSantis's campaign.
Speaker 1: I think a strength he has not maybe capitalized on
Speaker 1: enough is this idea, because this is something Trump proved
Speaker 1: he was unable to do, like he didn't go in
Speaker 1: there and unseat the deep state. And DeSantis has actually
Speaker 1: been kind of effective at resisting the federal government and
Speaker 1: even sidelining some FEA mineral agencies within Florida. And there's
Speaker 1: some actual like potential for strength here with Trump's base.
Speaker 1: I don't know that this gets you moderates, but like
Speaker 1: it's weird to me that he hasn't pushed this harder.
Speaker 1: Part of that maybe the fact that he's, like everything else,
Speaker 1: really bad at it. Kind of His strongest attempt to
Speaker 1: provide sort of a countervailing force to federal law enforcement
Speaker 1: was his activation of the Florida State Guard, which seventeen
Speaker 1: or so states have state guards. It's just kind of
Speaker 1: like a state version of a National Guard. Potentially, Florida's
Speaker 1: had not been active in a while, and he reactivated them,
Speaker 1: claiming that it was going to be a force of
Speaker 1: volunteers who could respond to hurricanes and other public emergencies.
Speaker 1: But what he was actually doing was trying to create
Speaker 1: a paramilitary organization. He is in the process of attempting
Speaker 1: to do this now these people are undergoing like military
Speaker 1: training and whatnot. He's trying to get them access to
Speaker 1: like weaponry. Like this is potentially kind of concerning, but
Speaker 1: he's really fucking bad at it. There was a really
Speaker 1: interesting New York Times article recently that kind of goes
Speaker 1: into the problems the Florida State Guard have had sort
Speaker 1: of spinning up. And it's a very funny read because
Speaker 1: it's like it's like a little kid's idea about how
Speaker 1: you would build a paramilitary organization. So on paper, the
Speaker 1: Governor's office has said that one of the Guard's missions
Speaker 1: would be quote to ensure FLOYDA remains fully fortified to
Speaker 1: respond not only to natural disasters, but also to protect
Speaker 1: its people in borders from illegal aliens and civil unrest.
Speaker 1: And then the New York Times article continues, the deployment
Speaker 1: this spring has been mired in internal turmoil, with some
Speaker 1: recruits complaining that what was supposed to be a civilian
Speaker 1: disaster response organization had become heavily militarized, requiring volunteers to
Speaker 1: participate in marching drills and military style training sessions on
Speaker 1: weapons and hand to hand combat. At least twenty percent
Speaker 1: of the one hundred and fifty people initially accepted into
Speaker 1: the program dropped out or were dismissed. And if you
Speaker 1: get into this, the people dropping out are like the veterans,
Speaker 1: they're like military officers and stuff who got into this
Speaker 1: thing and then are like, I was in the military
Speaker 1: for twenty years, you know, I did deployments here and here,
Speaker 1: and I came into this thing and it's a bunch
Speaker 1: of civilians dressed as soldiers yelling at me to do
Speaker 1: push ups in march in a field and like trying
Speaker 1: to be an asshole to me because they're angry that
Speaker 1: like I have military experience that they think they know better.
Speaker 1: Like it is like the volunteers said, the training seemed
Speaker 1: poorly structured, with an order to minimum amount of time spent,
Speaker 1: as one of them described it, marching in fields. Some
Speaker 1: of the men said that as veterans with years of
Speaker 1: experience in the military, they were offended when they were
Speaker 1: yelled at by junior instructors acting like drill sergeants who
Speaker 1: disregarded their previous ranks. I find this really fucking funny
Speaker 1: if you guys seen those videos coming out about like
Speaker 1: they're these classes where if you're like a rich or
Speaker 1: you know, upper middle class dude, you can pay like
Speaker 1: ten grand to spend five days doing a fake version
Speaker 1: of the Seals hell weak like you rolling, you're like incredible,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, you're like carrying, like hitting stuff with big hammers.
Speaker 1: You're like crawling on your back through rocks. You're doing
Speaker 1: all these like shitty, painful exercises while like some dude
Speaker 1: who probably fucking got an other than honorable separation from
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps as a private second class like screams
Speaker 1: at you a lot, and it's you know, that's what
Speaker 1: you feel. Yeah, yeah, rolling around on a one wheel
Speaker 1: yelling at you that you're you know, just like making
Speaker 1: a bullshit reasons to be angry at you, because idiots
Speaker 1: honestly have it.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, it sounds like a weird mix of like
Speaker 3: expensive LARPing and like a like a repressed kink thing
Speaker 3: for these guys.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, that's.
Speaker 1: Watched the movie Full Metal Jacket and a number one
Speaker 1: didn't watch all of it because like our Lee Ermie
Speaker 1: or whatever his name was. Character they're like the really
Speaker 1: mean drill star gets murdered after like emotionally abusing one
Speaker 1: of his recruits, like kind of a big part of
Speaker 1: the movie, but just saw him like making fun like
Speaker 1: yelling at people and making up fun insults, and we're like, well,
Speaker 1: that's got to be key to teaching people how to
Speaker 1: fight Garrison. Have you seen Full Metal Jacket?
Speaker 3: I have not seen Full Metal Jacket.
Speaker 1: You'd actually probably like it's good. There's some interesting parts
Speaker 1: of that movie. Well well shot, but yeah, I do
Speaker 1: think it's really funny. Like there's potentially this is one
Speaker 1: of those things potentially very scary to have a far
Speaker 1: right elected leader building his own paramilitary force that is
Speaker 1: answerable only to him. Righteah, that is a frightening thing.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about him trying this,
Speaker 1: but he's so shitty.
Speaker 3: It it's like dictator one oh one. Yeah, yeah, Like
Speaker 3: it makes sense that he would try it. I mean, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I would never want to be a governor because I
Speaker 3: think that's an a moral thing to do. But if
Speaker 3: I if I was to be, yeah, a romitarian governor,
Speaker 3: my own hit squad.
Speaker 1: Step one, make your own army, and it says a
Speaker 1: lot about Ron number one that of all of the
Speaker 1: different things he's tried to do, this is the only
Speaker 1: one that seems like, Oh, you might actually be able
Speaker 1: to get a lot of Trump voters to switch over
Speaker 1: to you if you promise them I'm going to do
Speaker 1: this nationwide, and you, as a guy who didn't join
Speaker 1: the army but is pretty sure he would have been
Speaker 1: good at it, can like become a militant commander in
Speaker 1: your like state guard thing that I'm going to establish.
Speaker 1: You might get some votes. I don't think you'd win
Speaker 1: a lot of moderates, but you might get the base
Speaker 1: away from Trump.
Speaker 3: Right, it's just so clearly a brown Shirts rip off. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just like it's so blatant that it's like it's
Speaker 3: it's like it's like it's like he's like poorly copying
Speaker 3: someone else's homework. Yeah, Like I don't a lot of
Speaker 3: his campaign has that vibe and he's like just poorly
Speaker 3: copying someone else's homework.
Speaker 1: Like, I don't know that this would work, and I
Speaker 1: still think he would have. It would be a long
Speaker 1: shot that he would have any chance of beating Trump.
Speaker 1: But if he were to be like I'm going to
Speaker 1: establish a State Guard where conservatives can get access to
Speaker 1: military grade weaponry and the right to carry their handguns everywhere.
Speaker 1: You might get I don't again, I don't think you
Speaker 1: went a general that way, but you might get the
Speaker 1: base away from Trump with that. It's at least more
Speaker 1: creative than anything else he's tried. Anyway, this is all
Speaker 1: a bad idea. I want to close by reading one
Speaker 1: last anecdote from that New York Times article on Ron
Speaker 1: meetball Ron's attempt to make an army. A fifty one
Speaker 1: year old former Marine captain who had retired from the
Speaker 1: military with a disability and later joined the State Guard
Speaker 1: also clashed with instructors during initial boot camp last month,
Speaker 1: raising concerns about the training. In an assault complaint filed
Speaker 1: with the Clay County Sheriff's office, the man said he
Speaker 1: was accused by the State Guard commander of being the
Speaker 1: leader of the group that had been criticized in the
Speaker 1: organization and its leadership. He was then forcibly pushed into
Speaker 1: a van against his objections and driven to the command boost,
Speaker 1: where he was fired and escorted off base. Of the
Speaker 1: nine original State Guard recruiters and commanders who's months recruiting
Speaker 1: for the organization, Fewer than a third remained. The staff director,
Speaker 1: who had been a proposion of the less militarized version
Speaker 1: of the group, appointed in January, was removed from his
Speaker 1: post just two days before the inaugural graduation. The program's
Speaker 1: personnel director was fired this week. So good.
Speaker 3: Sounds like it's going great over there in Florida.
Speaker 1: Sounds like meatball. Ron knows how to make an army.
Speaker 1: I don't know, folks. That's that's my episode on on
Speaker 1: the Ron de Santis campaign, and now he's doing. I
Speaker 1: hope you all enjoyed this little update. We're done cool.
Speaker 2: Stay tuned for a vveck Ramaswani.
Speaker 1: Episode, yeah, which is just gonna be me making fart
Speaker 1: noises into the microphone. You'll get everything you need on vveck.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 1: Look, it's gonna be Trump unless he dies, in which case, boy,
Speaker 1: that could be interesting.
Speaker 3: I mean, I just like Dessantis could have waited four
Speaker 3: years and then he could have had the backing of
Speaker 3: Trump to help him. I don't he's such a he's
Speaker 3: such a weird little like power goblin because like, yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, if he was still try to do that.
Speaker 1: Trump has gone back and forth on people in the past.
Speaker 1: But it's such a weird call to like make this
Speaker 1: doomed play at it, to build like this bad, like
Speaker 1: you're gonna piss some people off. Yeah, why yeah, anyway, I.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember us doing an episode not so long
Speaker 2: ago about the Santis and being like, well, he'll just
Speaker 2: wait four years until Trump's out to the pit show.
Speaker 2: But no, he fucking defied our expectations by torpedoing his
Speaker 2: own presidential chances.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and uh, that's why I love him. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to It could Happen Here a podcast about things falling apart,
Speaker 1: and you know, when things fall apart, one of the
Speaker 1: few things that can keep you on an even keel,
Speaker 1: you know, keep you feeling like there's something that makes
Speaker 1: sense in the world. It's good TV.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree no job more important
Speaker 1: than making television because it's really, for a surprising amount
Speaker 1: of the population, the only thing keeping them on the
Speaker 1: ragged edge of sanity. And obviously, if you're at all
Speaker 1: aware of the news, both the Writers Guilt the WGA
Speaker 1: and the Actors Guild sag AFTRA have both separately, although
Speaker 1: they are now, you know, on strike. At the same
Speaker 1: time have both kind of independently announced strikes after a
Speaker 1: breakdown in negotiations with the major studios, and to talk
Speaker 1: with me today about what's going on. What's it like
Speaker 1: being a writer on strike? Is my friend and one
Speaker 1: of the people who makes a show that helps keep
Speaker 1: me on the ragged edge of sanity. Sore and Bowie sorin.
Speaker 1: How you doing woo?
Speaker 5: You're simply the best money Hey, you met of.
Speaker 4: Them all the risks.
Speaker 7: Stop it, Tina, stop it.
Speaker 1: Thank you guys, very good, very good. See you are
Speaker 1: my former colleague at cracked dot com dot net backslash aol.
Speaker 7: Don't send anyone there now.
Speaker 1: And you are also, or at least before the strike
Speaker 1: hit where a have been for the last several years,
Speaker 1: a writer on American Dad, one of the most consistently
Speaker 1: funny animated shows of like twenty years now almost it's
Speaker 1: been on the air.
Speaker 7: Stop it stop. Oh, thank you, Robert, Tina, You guys
Speaker 7: are the best.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 7: That's very nice of you. Thank you very much for
Speaker 7: saying that it did.
Speaker 1: Cost a lot of money to get her in the
Speaker 1: studio today.
Speaker 7: That's very kind of you to say. Yeah, I we
Speaker 7: try very hard, but It also has like a feel
Speaker 7: at the show of like the warden isn't watching, Like
Speaker 7: we're kind of allowed to do what we want, and it's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you love your job. It's very obvious. I think
Speaker 1: probably everyone there loves writing for that show. Most of
Speaker 1: the people I know who write for TV have the
Speaker 1: same attitude of like, wow, I can't believe I get
Speaker 1: to do this. But that attitude is great and it
Speaker 1: makes life livable. But what doesn't make life livable and
Speaker 1: what makes the enjoyment of the job harder is starving
Speaker 1: to death, which is an increasing reality for a lot
Speaker 1: of writers over the last like ten years. So a
Speaker 1: decade ago, about thirty three percent of TV writers got
Speaker 1: what was paid like the minimum rate, which is kind
Speaker 1: of the minimum rate you get paid to get staffed
Speaker 1: on a union show. And the WGA says that about
Speaker 1: half of TV writers are at that point. Now, writer
Speaker 1: pay has declined about fourteen percent over the last five years.
Speaker 1: And that's with inflation. That's like, if you kind of
Speaker 1: take out inflation, right, everybody's making a yeah with inflation,
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, about twenty three percent writer producer pay
Speaker 1: over the last decade with inflation factored in so that
Speaker 1: sucks because people aren't why twenty three percent less TV?
Speaker 1: In fact, I think we're watching more TV than we
Speaker 1: ever have before, like so it and I like, if
Speaker 1: you listen to the kind of numbers given by streaming
Speaker 1: platforms about how many people are watching it, sure doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like TV writers have have been gotten twenty three
Speaker 1: percent worse at their jobs. So anyway, there was the
Speaker 1: WGA went into negotiations earlier this year and basically to
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, shorten it, we're asking for more money,
Speaker 1: more money and residuals, more money and upfront pay changes
Speaker 1: to some policies that streamers were using to kind of avoid.
Speaker 1: There's been sort of this effort by streamers for a
Speaker 1: while now to kind of kill the concept of a
Speaker 1: writer's room in a lot of shows, and they have
Speaker 1: a couple of different sort of fucky ways to do that.
Speaker 7: I gotta say, Robert, it is a dream to come
Speaker 7: on your podcast with you, because you do your fucking homework.
Speaker 7: I usually I'm the one who has to explain all
Speaker 7: this stuff, but this is great. I'm loving where this
Speaker 7: is going.
Speaker 1: You're actually right, Can you walk us through kind of
Speaker 1: what's been happened, because that's a thing that I think
Speaker 1: is sort of you miss that on kind of the
Speaker 1: big level sort of like discussions of this is like
Speaker 1: what like what a writer's room is and sort of
Speaker 1: what streamers have been tiny tried to do to change
Speaker 1: that because fundamentally, like one thing people who know what
Speaker 1: they're talking about will point out is that like movies
Speaker 1: are you know, not that scripts don't matter, but it's
Speaker 1: like a director's medium. That's like the big sort of
Speaker 1: like guiding you know, through the vision of like what
Speaker 1: a film is going to be. And TV is a
Speaker 1: writer driven medium. More often you'll at least hear that
Speaker 1: a lot. And I kind of want to talk about
Speaker 1: like what is a writer's room and what has been
Speaker 1: changing in terms of how studios have been trying to
Speaker 1: edge that concept out?
Speaker 7: Great, great question. So so writer's room traditionally, like you
Speaker 7: think back to broadcast television and it's heyday, the way
Speaker 7: writer's room worked is you had probably first of all,
Speaker 7: you're going to have like twenty to twenty two episodes
Speaker 7: a season, and then within that you've got a block
Speaker 7: of anywhere from like ten to almost sometimes twenty writers.
Speaker 7: And the reason that you have so many writers on
Speaker 7: a show like that is because while you're working on it,
Speaker 7: it's also in production, so as stories are being broken,
Speaker 7: and that means that there are rooms where people are
Speaker 7: creating a story together. As that's going on, there's like
Speaker 7: six other things going on, like you're going to have
Speaker 7: they're probably filming during that time. And if that's your
Speaker 7: particular written by episode, like that's the episode with your
Speaker 7: name on it, you might be on set for that
Speaker 7: because you're going to be having to make changes on
Speaker 7: the fly. While that's going on. There's table reads happening,
Speaker 7: there's joke punch ups happening, So there's generally a separate
Speaker 7: room for that. And so you need like a pretty
Speaker 7: big group of people to just make a show, to
Speaker 7: just write a show. And that's that's to keep the
Speaker 7: hours within like to keep them bearable. I mean, it
Speaker 7: doesn't even you wouldn't even turn that into a nine
Speaker 7: to five. Generally, that's still a lot of hours with
Speaker 7: a lot of people, but at least it's bearable for everybody. Now,
Speaker 7: streaming has tried to change that because they're tired of
Speaker 7: hiring so many writers and they're tired of paying writers
Speaker 7: and so with streaming, there's different loopholes that they can
Speaker 7: get into, which is, if you start creating a show
Speaker 7: before it's even technically green lit, you can start having
Speaker 7: writers write episodes, but because it's not green lit, you're
Speaker 7: not beholden to the same rules through the WGA. You
Speaker 7: can start hiring people at their at a minimum even
Speaker 7: if they are should be making more than that. And
Speaker 7: depending on what your position is at as a writer,
Speaker 7: like you start as a staff writer, then you move
Speaker 7: up to story editor, then executive story editor, and you
Speaker 7: move up and up and up from there. Generally, what
Speaker 7: happens is if you leave a show as as an
Speaker 7: executive story editor, you don't then go to another show
Speaker 7: and drop back down to staff writer. You maintain the
Speaker 7: position that you have because you've now learned the trade
Speaker 7: enough that usually you have a skill set that's valuable
Speaker 7: enough that you should be being paid for being an
Speaker 7: executive story editor. So what they're doing is they're making
Speaker 7: sure that people are not being paid for the roles
Speaker 7: that they generally have because they can do that before
Speaker 7: show has been green lit. And then they will say
Speaker 7: we're going to write, like, let's just write twelve episodes
Speaker 7: and that's a lot, like that's a whole season of time,
Speaker 7: but they're doing it before it's green lit. And then
Speaker 7: what happens is you will have these writers who are
Speaker 7: burning the midnight oil trying to get this thing done
Speaker 7: and calling in a lot of favors from friends because
Speaker 7: you have such a small group of writers. You have
Speaker 7: maybe like in a pre green lit room, you've got
Speaker 7: like three or four people trying to write an entire
Speaker 7: season of a show, and as they're writing it, they're
Speaker 7: like they're calling in favors from friends and be like
Speaker 7: will you come edit this and stuff? Because you don't
Speaker 7: have enough people for everything. You have to break all
Speaker 7: these stories simultaneously. You have to know what's going on
Speaker 7: in each individual room, but you don't have enough bandwidth
Speaker 7: for all of that. So you're calling in favors from
Speaker 7: other people. Do we just come and like look at this?
Speaker 7: Will you just take a look? Like we need like
Speaker 7: eyes on this, And so you're calling in favors from friends.
Speaker 7: Students have figured out that they can they can you
Speaker 7: can ask people to do this. Essentially, it's like they
Speaker 7: get a natural part of the writing process. Every writer,
Speaker 7: in every form of writing does a version of this,
Speaker 7: and they're like, what if we did this to help
Speaker 7: to make it easier to starve ye, Yeah exactly, and
Speaker 7: then and then what they would do. There's different tactics
Speaker 7: beyond that, which is like once those are appen, once
Speaker 7: those episodes are written, then maybe the studio will will uh.
Speaker 7: They can kind of pick and choose when they want
Speaker 7: to release that. They don't have like a it's not
Speaker 7: like in broadcast television where everything gets released in the fall.
Speaker 7: It's just like you can choose when you want to
Speaker 7: release it, So maybe you wait a year or whatever,
Speaker 7: you release it, and then you can release it in
Speaker 7: two seasons. So if you have twelve episodes, you can
Speaker 7: cut those into six six six.
Speaker 1: I fucking hate I think this is a little bit
Speaker 1: of a distraction, Like we miss by because we're not
Speaker 1: doing seasons the way they used to. There's so much
Speaker 1: good shit we miss think like half the best episodes
Speaker 1: are star trek. We're just like, we have forty dollars
Speaker 1: to shoot this episode on, Like what can we do
Speaker 1: with like three guys in a room?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 4: I know?
Speaker 7: Like you yeah, you're like you miss out on those
Speaker 7: bottle episodes, those like little ones where you're just like
Speaker 7: or like that. If you think back to Breaking Bad,
Speaker 7: like there's the fly episode episode Yeah, oh, it's like
Speaker 7: the best episode of the show because you've got room
Speaker 7: to stop and breathe and like they'll just characters. Yeah anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 7: it's like you lose out on all that. Then you
Speaker 7: can also because you're breaking it up, you don't have
Speaker 7: to pay people to like advance them to the next
Speaker 7: the next season, and then that would also be released
Speaker 7: over the course of like two years. And so you
Speaker 7: have a writer who's written for maybe like eleven weeks
Speaker 7: on something on a show, and then they don't know
Speaker 7: that they have that job again for another two and
Speaker 7: a half years, and so there's no consistency, there's no
Speaker 7: and nothing is stable, and that makes it very very
Speaker 7: difficult for writers to keep their jobs and maintain a
Speaker 7: writing job.
Speaker 1: It's this really fucked up situation in which I think
Speaker 1: the streaming era in freeing sort of television from some
Speaker 1: of like the way that sweeps used to work, the
Speaker 1: way that a lot of like kind of the way
Speaker 1: that you would have to like run shows and the
Speaker 1: way that they aired when you were you were doing
Speaker 1: it on like fucking cable and they're hand supported. Has
Speaker 1: allowed for kinds of TV shows and structures of shows
Speaker 1: that you never could have had, Right, it was just
Speaker 1: we just watched and The Bear. Probably the standout episode
Speaker 1: of The Bear from season two is this like episode
Speaker 1: about a family Christmas party that's just this absolute, like
Speaker 1: anxious nightmare. That's an hour long episode, twice the length
Speaker 1: of a normal episode, And oftentimes that's kind of a
Speaker 1: mixed thing with TVs, but it works in this one,
Speaker 1: and the fact that it's so much longer actually like
Speaker 1: helps with like trans you could you can only do
Speaker 1: that with shows that work the way they do in streaming.
Speaker 1: That wouldn't have been a thing that you would have
Speaker 1: gotten to do in nineteen ninety three probably. But while
Speaker 1: I think like there's a lot of cool stuff structurally
Speaker 1: that's gotten to come out of that, it's also it's
Speaker 1: it's made the compensation so much worse. It's made the
Speaker 1: job so much less reliable. Like it's it's like it's
Speaker 1: really stark how much more difficult it's become to make
Speaker 1: a living in TV. Yeah, well TV is more popular
Speaker 1: than ever.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Yeah, that's like it's making more money than it
Speaker 7: ever possibly has. In the fast and certainly through streaming.
Speaker 7: Like they're not, these these studios not moving to streaming
Speaker 7: because like they're early adopters of technology, the money is there,
Speaker 7: so they're going to streaming. It's like they're making way
Speaker 7: more through streaming, but writers are getting paid les and
Speaker 7: less because they're finding these like wild West loopholes in streaming.
Speaker 7: Residuals is another one that's like it. The way that
Speaker 7: residuals work is if you have a show that then
Speaker 7: gets played again through syndication or through streaming, you should
Speaker 7: then get a residual check for every time that the
Speaker 7: episode that you wrote shows up on television. And it
Speaker 7: was very easy to track that as it would show
Speaker 7: up on like our show on American Dad. Yeah, I
Speaker 7: know that it's going to get played on Cartoon Network.
Speaker 7: I know that it's going to get played at these
Speaker 7: other spots. The TBS will rerun it at some point,
Speaker 7: and I can I know when those are coming in.
Speaker 7: With streaming, it's much more difficult to determine when somebody
Speaker 7: watched something, not because those numbers don't exist, but because
Speaker 7: all these platforms that are created by studios will not
Speaker 7: give out that information. That information is like in a
Speaker 7: black box where you have no idea how often a
Speaker 7: show gets streamed. There's a couple of reasons, like people
Speaker 7: are speculating as to why that might be. One is
Speaker 7: that either shows are getting watched way more often and
Speaker 7: people are not getting the proper residuals that they should be,
Speaker 7: or that the whole business model doesn't quite work. Yeah,
Speaker 7: it's all yeah, yeah, And if you found out how
Speaker 7: little people were actually watching television, this whole all investors, everything,
Speaker 7: the whole thing would collapse. I don't know which is true.
Speaker 7: I don't care. I just want to know what the
Speaker 7: numbers are. So like a big part of a big
Speaker 7: part of this is is the WJA asking different streaming platforms.
Speaker 7: You got to you got to be more transparent. You
Speaker 7: got to tell us how well our show is doing,
Speaker 7: so that we know if people are getting paid properly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's again, it would be one thing if
Speaker 1: like writers were getting less than ever and TV was
Speaker 1: just like dying as a as a thing, as a
Speaker 1: as a creative thing that people want. But there is
Speaker 1: the money. We know where the money is going. The
Speaker 1: eight major Hollywood studio CEOs in twenty twenty one made
Speaker 1: nearly three quarters of a billion dollars an annual salary,
Speaker 1: which is more than the value of what the WGA
Speaker 1: and sag AFTRA want to take out of them and
Speaker 1: increase compensation for their members. For those eight guys, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guarantee you Ari Emmanuel the highest compensated of these
Speaker 1: CEOs over at Endeavor three hundred and eight million dollars.
Speaker 1: And like, I don't think he made any of your
Speaker 1: He's not responsible for any of your favorite shows whatever,
Speaker 1: like lying in the Great you know made you made
Speaker 1: you laugh or cry or like whatever, whatever joke from
Speaker 1: American Dad keeps you uh, you know, makes you suddenly
Speaker 1: start like bawling out laughing while you're driving down the highway.
Speaker 1: That was not Ari am manual. Ye, neither the shows
Speaker 1: were Endeavor whatever. You know what I you know what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to do here, right, Yeah, Yeah, Ted Sarandos
Speaker 1: whatever fucking you know, Bob Eiger, all these guys like
Speaker 1: they're they're I mean fundamentally like Bob Iger. One of
Speaker 1: the big things he did was pushed the The Flash
Speaker 1: movie out into theaters, really put a lot of money
Speaker 1: into that thought it was going to be important for
Speaker 1: the brand going forward. Lost so much money lost, like
Speaker 1: probably about as much money as like the Writer's Guild
Speaker 1: is asking for it increased compensation this year, like if
Speaker 1: they just hadn't made that movie. So let's talk you
Speaker 1: guys went on strike. What it's been like two months
Speaker 1: now already.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's like day eighty four or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so a little more than two months. How are
Speaker 1: you feeling, Like, what does it mean like physically to
Speaker 1: be on strike, like going out and picketing and stuff.
Speaker 7: Great questions, Robert, Uh, It's it's actually really nice. I
Speaker 7: don't want to say like it's I enjoy it because
Speaker 7: I would rather be getting paid and not being freaking
Speaker 7: out about the fact that I don't have my job.
Speaker 7: But going out it gives me gives me a sense
Speaker 7: of purpose first of all, each day to like get
Speaker 7: up and go out of this to the picket lines. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and you're out there, you're marching around it. You choose
Speaker 7: your studio, like from the majority of the time I
Speaker 7: go to Sony or I go to Amazon, and I
Speaker 7: know the people there. Now it's like going to the
Speaker 7: gym every day where you get to know the people
Speaker 7: there and then you build your community, and so I've
Speaker 7: got this group of people that, like I go there.
Speaker 7: Those are just people that like I happen to talk
Speaker 7: to because like we'd see a truck going and we're like, oh,
Speaker 7: hope that's not teams or truck or whatever. And then
Speaker 7: and then you just like strike up a conversation with somebody.
Speaker 7: You start talking, and then you find out that this
Speaker 7: person like ran Malcolm in the Middle for eight years,
Speaker 7: and you're like, oh, okay, cool.
Speaker 1: You know, people talk a lot about how the last
Speaker 1: writers Strike, which was kind of like right when I
Speaker 1: was getting out of fuck in high school. They're not
Speaker 1: far from that point, like a year or two later. Uh,
Speaker 1: how the last writers Strike was kind of what gave
Speaker 1: us the birth of like a lot of reality TV.
Speaker 1: You could almost argue there was a degree to which
Speaker 1: it like was part of Trump's rise to prominence, right,
Speaker 1: because that's why The Apprentice gets on air, because that's
Speaker 1: the way the studios can get around paying writers. But
Speaker 1: I also wonder on the opposite and like, how many
Speaker 1: shows do we get because of connections people make out
Speaker 1: of the picket line, because like folks meet each other
Speaker 1: and get talking, and like I do I do wonder
Speaker 1: if that's like a thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I guarantee it is. I mean it is shocking
Speaker 7: how like how quickly you just chum up with people
Speaker 7: and like, yeah, the the contact I shouldn't call. It's
Speaker 7: like it's not supposed to be a networkating experience, but
Speaker 7: it just ends up being that, Like you can't help it.
Speaker 7: Like you're just talking to people and then all of
Speaker 7: a sudden your jobs come up and you start talking
Speaker 7: about your work and then people are like after li while,
Speaker 7: like well, like send me something, like send me some
Speaker 7: of your writing, and then you just become buddies and
Speaker 7: like you start working on stuff accidentally together. And I
Speaker 7: guarantee that, like by the end of this, there'll be
Speaker 7: writing teams that didn't exist before, and there'll be people
Speaker 7: who want to make stuff together. Plus the studio pipeline
Speaker 7: will be empty, so like they're gonna want to like
Speaker 7: fill it with They're gonna want to fill it. Yeah,
Speaker 7: when the strike ends, And guarantee, there's gonna be people
Speaker 7: from the lines who came up with stuff on the
Speaker 7: lines who are gonna be like we've got lots, like
Speaker 7: there's what about this and be like yes that buy it.
Speaker 1: We'll take that, and I like just kind of in general,
Speaker 1: the fact that like that's sort of the the hope, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's actually the thing that can defeat these giant
Speaker 1: industry colossuses, not just like writing TV shows with other people,
Speaker 1: but like the solidarity, like the fact that you're building
Speaker 1: connections with people, the fact that you there's an understanding
Speaker 1: of shared interest. You're seeing this especially like now that
Speaker 1: like sag After has joined the strike. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of people who are very famous and
Speaker 1: prominent talking about issues that go well beyond Hollywood.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: The the incredible amount that executive pay and compensation has
Speaker 1: increased over the years, The fact that a lot of
Speaker 1: companies that used to do things of value and employee
Speaker 1: people and good jobs have been hollowed out for the
Speaker 1: short term profits of you know, vulture capitalists whose job
Speaker 1: is to you know, fucking suck money out and hand
Speaker 1: it to shareholders, and shit like this is not just
Speaker 1: a you know, a lot of this started in the
Speaker 1: fucking nineties. We've talked about like Jack Welch and ge
Speaker 1: and kind of like how that company was turned from
Speaker 1: something that made stuff to something that produced stock value
Speaker 1: and fired people and you're you're getting that all across
Speaker 1: entertainment right now. And I think this is I think,
Speaker 1: and this is something I think kind of everyone knows
Speaker 1: on some level, this is an inflection point, right, you know.
Speaker 1: AI is a part of it, the fact that we're
Speaker 1: about to see them try to use this technology to
Speaker 1: cut down the number of people they have to pay
Speaker 1: even further. But it's like this is bigger than Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Hollywood is just getting a lot of attention because actors
Speaker 1: know how to get attention.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is the job.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, that's yeah. Writers are good at building the
Speaker 7: narrative and ractors are very good at getting attention.
Speaker 1: Then exactly.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's like it was a it's a worst case scenario,
Speaker 7: want to say, for like for the studios, and just
Speaker 7: because it's no coincidence the UPS is going on strike
Speaker 7: that all these companies are going on strike right now,
Speaker 7: because the same thing's happening across the board where it's
Speaker 7: like this consolidation of power and then consolidation of money,
Speaker 7: and then it's just like all that you are behold
Speaker 7: to when you are at the top of these companies
Speaker 7: is the shareholders and like getting them money and so
Speaker 7: whatevery way you can do that, you do it, and
Speaker 7: a lot of times the way you do that is
Speaker 7: that you just fuck everybody at the bottom and figure
Speaker 7: out how to carve out money from them and bring
Speaker 7: it rise it to the top. And so yes, I
Speaker 7: think that it's what happened was the WGA went on strike.
Speaker 7: The WGA is a very strong, good guild, good union
Speaker 7: that like does not blink, and and everyone saw that,
Speaker 7: and immediately people were on the side of the WGA
Speaker 7: in a way that I think no one anticipated that.
Speaker 7: All everybody else in unions is like, no, this is wrong,
Speaker 7: like we should. We were dealing with the exact same stuff,
Speaker 7: and universally everyone seems to be on the side of
Speaker 7: unions right now. Then that's like we should use that,
Speaker 7: like we should, we should ride that wave a little bit.
Speaker 7: And absolutely they should, because there's there's so many things
Speaker 7: that are systemically broken right now just happens to be
Speaker 7: the entertainment industry is the only one that I have it. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I have skin in the game on.
Speaker 1: We had this moment about a week or so ago where,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of weeks ago that it came
Speaker 1: out that like some anonymous UH Studio executive told a
Speaker 1: writer at I think it was Deadline that their plan
Speaker 1: was to the wja's demands were unreasonable and we're just
Speaker 1: going to kind of wait out until they lose their homes,
Speaker 1: right until we're on the street, and then well then
Speaker 1: we can get them to accept it. And you know,
Speaker 1: this is right around when SAG was, you know, deciding
Speaker 1: to strike and Ron Pearlman gets on and makes a
Speaker 1: little video where he basically says, you know, we can
Speaker 1: burn your houses down, Like there's more than one way
Speaker 1: to lose a house. And I thought the important thing
Speaker 1: about sharing that because one of the ways you know,
Speaker 1: media works is that there's people let the things that
Speaker 1: people are willing to listen to and that can like
Speaker 1: affect them and change their minds is partly dependent on
Speaker 1: the situational context at the time. This is why so
Speaker 1: many of like the journalist, much of the journalism have
Speaker 1: done the far right, Like has been articles that I
Speaker 1: felt like I had to get out within an hour
Speaker 1: or two of a shooting because people will pay attention
Speaker 1: to these these things that are problems that are important.
Speaker 1: They won't lead if I do a deep dive on
Speaker 1: how this specific kind of radicalization works normally, but if
Speaker 1: somebody has just been shot, they'll listen, you know, And
Speaker 1: that's like a fortunate but that's the way people are.
Speaker 1: And there's this I thought. What I thought was important
Speaker 1: about that is that not that you know, Ron Pearlman
Speaker 1: threatened to burn down a guy's house, that's just kind
Speaker 1: of funny, but what he was doing there that's really
Speaker 1: valuable that I think more people need to think about
Speaker 1: is accepting that when you're saying something like, well we
Speaker 1: just need to wait for writers to lose their homes,
Speaker 1: that's a violent threat. That is a threat to harm
Speaker 1: somebody for your own personal gain, and we shouldn't view
Speaker 1: that as like fundamentally morally different than saying I want
Speaker 1: to go rob a guy with a thirty eight, right
Speaker 1: like I don't. I don't feel like there's a big
Speaker 1: moral gap between them. And you can get people to
Speaker 1: actually kind of who maybe wouldn't think about that, to
Speaker 1: think about that this way. And I think that's an
Speaker 1: important thing to transmit in this time.
Speaker 7: Oh Man, one hundred percent. Yeah, the fact that that
Speaker 7: what it gives you real context for what they're actually
Speaker 7: saying when they say we just got to wait them
Speaker 7: out till they don't have any more money, and like
Speaker 7: it really starts to hurt their health and well being,
Speaker 7: Like yeah, you have somebody else being like, oh I
Speaker 7: can hurt your health and well being and be like okay,
Speaker 7: I get how those are the same thing, but but
Speaker 7: but that's not what the way I was saying it was.
Speaker 7: It was more removed, you see, And so you're absolutely right,
Speaker 7: like having hell Boy come out and be like there's
Speaker 7: lots of ways to lose a house, it's like, oh.
Speaker 1: Shit, yeah, yeah, it's a it's a there's like potential
Speaker 1: right now that I'm glad to see recognized. How are
Speaker 1: you doing, like just in general with this because it
Speaker 1: is you know, we've talked about all the good parts.
Speaker 1: There's a lot that's good. This is like, this is
Speaker 1: a stressful time, Like I'm wondering like when you wake
Speaker 1: up and like you hear.
Speaker 7: For acknowledging that, Yeah, that's it's like how you be.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 7: It sucks. It sucks really bad. It sucks particularly badly
Speaker 7: because I loved my job. Yeah, I when I talk
Speaker 7: about all these things, a lot of this wasn't happening
Speaker 7: at my job. My job was a I had working
Speaker 7: for an animated show that ran twenty two episodes a
Speaker 7: season that was it would get We knew when we
Speaker 7: were getting our pickups generally, uh. And it was a
Speaker 7: system that worked. And I was really really enjoying it
Speaker 7: and very happy at my job. I was getting paid well,
Speaker 7: like I liked everything about it. I felt like it
Speaker 7: was financially stable and I was getting what I deserved,
Speaker 7: and I was just happy. And that's not what's happening
Speaker 7: across like eighty percent of other shows right now. And
Speaker 7: so like we left, we left our show in solidarity
Speaker 7: of other writers because at some point, you know this,
Speaker 7: I maybe won't have this job anymore and I'll have
Speaker 7: to go get another job. And also for all the
Speaker 7: people who are working those other jobs, and it's really
Speaker 7: really struggling right now to even make ends meet. We
Speaker 7: know they're watching, they're working on three different shows a year,
Speaker 7: like they came and pay their rent, like we're working
Speaker 7: on behalf of them, but more importantly, like we're striking
Speaker 7: on behalf of all of the other writers who are
Speaker 7: going to come along after this, Like the fact that
Speaker 7: the two thousand and eight strike happened was the reason
Speaker 7: that my show is so good and has such good
Speaker 7: benefits and like why the show is is comfortable for
Speaker 7: writers because they fucking went to work and like they
Speaker 7: got what they needed from the studios even though it
Speaker 7: was hard and it was bitter and a lot of
Speaker 7: them lost their jobs over it. And so now it's
Speaker 7: just like even though it sucks and I'm not happy
Speaker 7: about it, it's it's our turn to do it. It's
Speaker 7: like our turn to make sure that everything works.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's such an important detail that like a lot
Speaker 1: of the people striking, there's been this kind of like
Speaker 1: bad faith theme I've seen. I've seen some people on
Speaker 1: the left do it online where like they'll post some
Speaker 1: video of like an actor, you know, talking about why
Speaker 1: they're doing the striking, like this person's net worth is
Speaker 1: this many millions of dollars And it's like, yeah, well
Speaker 1: they're not striking for them, Like Ron Peerlman is going
Speaker 1: to be okay. Ron Pearlman is not going to be
Speaker 1: forced out of his home. Like that's not why they're
Speaker 1: doing this, because I mean, yeah, that.
Speaker 7: You can have a you can you can have a
Speaker 7: good job, but also have a sense of the bigger
Speaker 7: picture and like a greater a greater good.
Speaker 1: You can just like care about the art form. You know,
Speaker 1: we're watching journalism get fucking eaten alive right now, and
Speaker 1: AI is gonna has been a part of like people
Speaker 1: have already lost their jobs because they and like the
Speaker 1: thing that keeps getting brought up to me when I'll
Speaker 1: I'll talk about it to like family or whatever, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, they're using it to replace these low level jobs,
Speaker 1: you know, summing up sports articles or like you know
Speaker 1: this kind of coverage or that kind of coverage. Like
Speaker 1: it's not the kind of stuff you do. It's not
Speaker 1: like investigation. You can't have a machine do that. And
Speaker 1: it's like we have, but how do you think people
Speaker 1: learn to do what I do? Like part of it
Speaker 1: is like doing the like that's the feed or right,
Speaker 1: it's part of what you're saying about like TV writing.
Speaker 1: It's like they're trying to kill the way in which
Speaker 1: people learn how to continue this art for Yeah.
Speaker 7: No, it's there's so many parallels between this and what's
Speaker 7: happening with journalism in terms of like is turning it
Speaker 7: essentially into a gig economy, which is exactly what destroyed
Speaker 7: the news yeah, or is destroying the news, but like, yeah,
Speaker 7: it's it's the same thing. And when you talk about AI,
Speaker 7: like you if you were to write an episode of
Speaker 7: a show and you ever written by credit on it,
Speaker 7: you get a script fee for that, and ultimately, like
Speaker 7: what the studios want is to just have a piece
Speaker 7: of shit AI written script to begin with, and then
Speaker 7: they're not paying a script fee to anybody, and then
Speaker 7: writers just fix that and so like, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 7: all these differently cost saving measures then ensure that no
Speaker 7: one will ever come up through this industry again and
Speaker 7: learn all the things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there will still be people who become writers, but
Speaker 1: there'll be people whose parents are rich and so they
Speaker 1: can afford to work for free for forever. And then
Speaker 1: and then you know what, we don't get the bear? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the bear and it's curiously jacked leading man, Where's where's
Speaker 1: he get the time? When's he putting down the protein?
Speaker 1: We're not saying him jug a protein shake every twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: You complained about this on Twitter, and I agree with you.
Speaker 7: The structure that requires the like to get a body
Speaker 7: like that, the structure you need in your life, and
Speaker 7: like the regiments that you need to follow, need to
Speaker 7: be like to a tee every single day. And there's
Speaker 7: just he's too spontaneous. There's too much going on in
Speaker 7: his life. He doesn't have tis enough two hours to
Speaker 7: carve out to go to the gym every day.
Speaker 1: No, this is my only issue, Like, this is what's
Speaker 1: really threatening my support of the WGA. I just needed
Speaker 1: an episode of the Bear where all it is is
Speaker 1: going through his workout routine. He's in the back room.
Speaker 1: He's doing some pearls, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he's got bags of rice back there and he's
Speaker 7: doing squats with him on his shoulders. I even I
Speaker 7: want to see him at three am in the morning
Speaker 7: and I'll buy it. I'll be a five at three
Speaker 7: am in the morning and he's like going to it anytime,
Speaker 7: fitness or fucking whatever, and he's like work it out
Speaker 7: a little bit. I could be like, Okay, there it is,
Speaker 7: that's what he's doing it there, we got tonefits it in.
Speaker 1: Let me see him get his BCAAs you know, have
Speaker 1: fucking ritchie, be like you've taken your pre workout today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: give it, give me a little bit, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, Soren, you got it out here. Do you
Speaker 1: have anything you want to plug before like perhaps a
Speaker 1: podcast with our with our other former colleague, Dan O'Brien.
Speaker 7: No, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, I got a show called
Speaker 7: a Quick Question with Dan and Soorn No, Soren and Dan,
Speaker 7: oh got him a headliner. Uh yeah, Quick Question with
Speaker 7: Soren and Daniel. You can check that out anywhere you
Speaker 7: listen to podcasts. It's basically just Dan and I catching
Speaker 7: up because we live on opposite coasts and we're good buddies,
Speaker 7: and uh that's about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, excellent, check out Quick Questions with Soren and Dan
Speaker 1: special show. Just a thank you. It's a wonderful time. Soren,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, and you know, good luck out
Speaker 1: there on the picket line. To you, to all of
Speaker 1: the other writers, and to everybody at SAG after it.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 4: This is Mia from the very very Near Future. We
Speaker 4: found out as we were live recording this episode that
Speaker 4: Teamster's leadership has cut a tentative agreement with UPS to
Speaker 4: try to revert the strike. So we've we've decided to
Speaker 4: leave this in and you're gonna hear us find this
Speaker 4: shit out. Literally in the middle of an interview of
Speaker 4: what we thought was going to be a really, really
Speaker 4: really large strike starting so enjoy it. Strike season here
Speaker 4: at I could happen here the podcast where things fall
Speaker 4: apart and sometimes you put them back together again. And
Speaker 4: as you probably have noticed, presumably from the last interview,
Speaker 4: maybe from reading the news, maybe from like talking to
Speaker 4: people who are in unions, we are in a genuinely
Speaker 4: historic period of labor militancy in this country. That is
Speaker 4: effectively we are now we are. We are now entering
Speaker 4: the second phase of the hot Summer of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: We used to have hot summers all the time. People
Speaker 4: do what that meant, so now it just means like
Speaker 4: global warming. But long ago in the galaxy, far far away,
Speaker 4: there are these things called hot summers when everyone would
Speaker 4: fucking go on strike and there'd be you know, sort
Speaker 4: of masters just as a capital estate. And yeah, we're
Speaker 4: fucking going back. There's talk with me about the next
Speaker 4: series of massive private sector strikes that we're about to get.
Speaker 4: Is Rehee Smith and Oliver Rose, who are rank and
Speaker 4: file ups workers and teamsters doing the standard disclaimer. These
Speaker 4: individuals do not represent the union or the positions of
Speaker 4: the union. They are speaking as individuals. Yeah, we have
Speaker 4: this is this is the disclaimer for the lawyers, it
Speaker 4: is also true. Yeah, but recent Oliver, welcome to the show.
Speaker 9: Hey, yeah, thanks for having us.
Speaker 10: Yeah, thank you much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm really really glad we can talk to you. So,
Speaker 4: all right, the day this is going out, it'll be
Speaker 4: six days before the teamsters are potentially going to go
Speaker 4: on strike and the current contract runs out. Can I yeah,
Speaker 4: can we talk a little bit about what? Okay, who
Speaker 4: is who is going on strike and what do they do?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so there's going to be three hundred and forty
Speaker 6: thousand UPS workers going on strike, and that's going to
Speaker 6: be you know, the inside warehouse workers, and that's going
Speaker 6: to be the delivery drivers and also the theater drivers
Speaker 6: and the twenty two fours, like all of them.
Speaker 4: Could you explain what oh are?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 6: Yeah, So twenty two four's is a classification of worker
Speaker 6: where they're kind of half inside and half driving.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 6: Something that the union has told us is that there's
Speaker 6: already been a tentative agreement that that classification is not
Speaker 6: going to exist anymore.
Speaker 9: It was kind of.
Speaker 6: A really raw deal for people that found themselves in
Speaker 6: that position. Shit, what was the other one that I mentioned? Twos?
Speaker 9: I think theater drivers?
Speaker 6: Yes, so feter drivers are not your regular package delivery drivers.
Speaker 6: They drive the big semis that you see from like
Speaker 6: hub to hub and whatnot, and that's how they deliver.
Speaker 6: Uh So those are the last two classifications that I mentioned.
Speaker 6: And yeah, we're all going to be going on strike,
Speaker 6: and well, we are potentially going to be on strike,
Speaker 6: and if we are, UPS is kind of going to
Speaker 6: be in a world of hurt because it is very
Speaker 6: hard to replace three hundred and forty thousand workers and
Speaker 6: what economists have told me is a tight labor market.
Speaker 9: So yeah, it's going to be very exciting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's I'm excited, like I don't know, you know.
Speaker 4: It was funny so when when SAG officially walked off
Speaker 4: and joined the WGA strike, that was that was the
Speaker 4: largest strike since hilariously, the team Stirs went on strike
Speaker 4: in the like the year I was born, like ninety seven,
Speaker 4: And hilariously, that is a title that if this happens,
Speaker 4: they're going to hold that title for like one month
Speaker 4: before this, UPS striker places is the largest strike in
Speaker 4: the US is the nineties.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be wild if we go on strike.
Speaker 6: While you know, sag Afra is on strike, and while
Speaker 6: the Writers Guilder are on strike, that's going to be
Speaker 6: over half a million workers on strike in this country
Speaker 6: at this time, and that is just going to you know,
Speaker 6: it's gonna be fucking historic.
Speaker 4: Right yeah. And there's and there's a chance, depending on
Speaker 4: how long these strikes drag out, that we get to
Speaker 4: like September, the big the Big three Auto, the UAW
Speaker 4: goes on strike, and if that happens, that that will
Speaker 4: be like the most number of people who've been on
Speaker 4: a strike in this country since like the fifties, which
Speaker 4: is wild especially, you know, because this is supposed to
Speaker 4: be a sort of like, I don't know, I think
Speaker 4: that's sort of the especially interesting thing about this, right
Speaker 4: is that actual union density is really low and hasn't
Speaker 4: been increasing that much. On the other hand, like everyone
Speaker 4: seems to lake unions and everyone wants to go on strike,
Speaker 4: and I don't know, it's a it's a really interesting
Speaker 4: sort of set of conditions right now.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I'm very heartened by, you know,
Speaker 6: the support that unions have garnered, because, as you mentioned,
Speaker 6: you know, we are at a low union density. There
Speaker 6: was like that labor decline that happened, you know, since
Speaker 6: the fucking like seventies and eighties, right, like the backlash
Speaker 6: to org nice labor. I am very hopeful that this uh,
Speaker 6: this strike wave can kind of turn that around, right Uh.
Speaker 6: You know something that I've been thinking about a lot
Speaker 6: is uh you know, it's like ups is A is
Speaker 6: a major, major company in a whole logistics sector, right yeah,
Speaker 6: and like we can set that standard for that logistics
Speaker 6: company or like a piece of shit company like Amazon can.
Speaker 6: So if we win, and we win big, that could
Speaker 6: absolutely encourage more organizing in those other sectors, leading to
Speaker 6: an increase of union density. So hopefully that's like the
Speaker 6: way forward past all these strikes.
Speaker 9: It'd be great. It's sorely needed, sorely.
Speaker 10: Needed, absolutely, and and even beyond you know, the logistics industry,
Speaker 10: you know, I think we can show that you know,
Speaker 10: any you know company or corporation that you know, a
Speaker 10: year after years making these record break and profits, you know,
Speaker 10: while meanwhile there's poor wear conditions or even unsafe ware conditions.
Speaker 10: You know, there's hey that does not you know allow
Speaker 10: you know us to pay rent but food on the table.
Speaker 10: You know that we can just show that. Okay, you know,
Speaker 10: we're done. You know, with giving all of the wealth
Speaker 10: that we're creating to the company and now it's going
Speaker 10: back into our hands.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And UPS fucking created thirteen billion dollars in profits last year.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, and that's up from I was just reading
Speaker 6: an article this morning and U and Jacobin written by
Speaker 6: a fellow UPS team star, and that's up from six
Speaker 6: point five billion in uh twenty nineteen.
Speaker 9: And they're also giving.
Speaker 4: Doubled the profit. They've over doubled the profits in like Tree,
Speaker 4: they were.
Speaker 9: Doubled their profits.
Speaker 6: And they keep trying to tell the union that, oh, no,
Speaker 6: I'm just a poor popper. We don't have money for
Speaker 6: your demands, Like we're just we're just so poor, and
Speaker 6: it's like there. Meanwhile, you know, they're given their fucking
Speaker 6: like CEO and shareholders like dividends and stock buybacks and
Speaker 6: all of that in addition to the profits that they
Speaker 6: are reaping, right, because profits is just the cream of
Speaker 6: the crop, right, Like that's everything past business expenses, what
Speaker 6: they're paying out like salary, so that's not even being touched.
Speaker 6: And yeah, no, it's time for us to say we
Speaker 6: want that.
Speaker 9: We created that.
Speaker 4: So I think that leads it to sort of the
Speaker 4: next thing I want to ask about, which is, can
Speaker 4: you talk a little bit about what the sort of
Speaker 4: specific grievances were that kicked this off. I'm assuming there
Speaker 4: are a lot, because you know, this sucks, you.
Speaker 10: Know, and there is a wide range of conditions because
Speaker 10: you know, for a long time, you know, the contract
Speaker 10: hasn't kept up with both like economic and non economic
Speaker 10: side of things, you know, and we have kind of
Speaker 10: two two dynamics where there's you know, well over a
Speaker 10: majority of like part time workers who aren't getting enough
Speaker 10: payer hours you know, to afford to live. And then
Speaker 10: we also have you know, the full time workers who
Speaker 10: inside warehouse could be working you know, ten twelve hour shifts.
Speaker 10: You know, we have drivers who are doing you know,
Speaker 10: twelve hour shifts and you know even up to like
Speaker 10: fourteen hours you know, every day, and then also getting
Speaker 10: you know, uh contacted to come in you know on
Speaker 10: their day off, have to do six day weeks.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 10: Of course on the driver's side, you know, we have
Speaker 10: these escalating temperatures and meanwhile there's you know, no air
Speaker 10: conditioners in the vehicles and same you know thing in
Speaker 10: the warehouse because personally, you know, I work in side
Speaker 10: warehouse as a loader. So I'm spending you know, virtually
Speaker 10: all my shift in the trailer loading boxes. You know,
Speaker 10: there's no airflow, those things, you know, can you know,
Speaker 10: be five to ten degrees hotter, you know, like at
Speaker 10: a minimum than the yeah, ambient temperature last summer, like
Speaker 10: on a mid ninety day, I recorded one hundred and
Speaker 10: eight degrees you know inside the trailer. So you know,
Speaker 10: there's not necessarily any kind of protections currently for that.
Speaker 10: So you know, that's one big lack in the contract
Speaker 10: is having those kind of you know heat heat protection
Speaker 10: and you know that is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that could just kill people. And we've
Speaker 4: talked about on the show before people who've died like
Speaker 4: working conditions like that because you know it was it
Speaker 4: was too hot. But their bosses were like, fuck you,
Speaker 4: we don't care, like keep uploading this stuff.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it's absolutely tragic. I know we had a
Speaker 10: you know, ups teamster I believe in California who died
Speaker 10: due to the extreme heat conditions last summer. And also no,
Speaker 10: you know, there was another case where I think a
Speaker 10: driver stopped at like a convenience store to buy a
Speaker 10: drink and you know was fire for making you know,
Speaker 10: an off route stop, even though they tell us, you know,
Speaker 10: take breaks when you need it, but they don't actually
Speaker 10: mean it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, because obviously, you know, you want to be being
Speaker 10: disciplined or fired.
Speaker 4: One of the things that I saw was part of
Speaker 4: the negotiations that UPS had offered to be like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: put in air conditionings in all new vehicles. And I
Speaker 4: was looking at this and I was like, this is
Speaker 4: this is the Clean Air Act loophole. I remember this.
Speaker 4: If you only specify new vehicles, I'll just never replace
Speaker 4: the old ones. Mm.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, And you know with these companies, they're going to
Speaker 6: be looking for those loopholes, right Yeah.
Speaker 9: And like, I don't know.
Speaker 6: That I've seen a vehicle that looked new when I'm
Speaker 6: at my hub. I'm also inside worker and yeah, they
Speaker 6: all look like they've been around, been around a while,
Speaker 6: and I don't know that they've been spending the capital
Speaker 6: to get those new vehicles. So that's absolutely something that
Speaker 6: we're gonna, you know, keep their feet to the fire on,
Speaker 6: so to speak.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And then in terms of other conditions that are like
Speaker 6: really leading up to this right now, there is a
Speaker 6: big problem with MRAs and no, not the MRAs, you
Speaker 6: all might be thinking of, this is a market rate adjustment,
Speaker 6: and both are bad. Both are bad. We are staunchly
Speaker 6: against both MRAs. And essentially what an MRA does is
Speaker 6: it sounds good at first, you know, it gives the
Speaker 6: company leeway to, you know, potentially increase our pay right
Speaker 6: beyond what's just stipulated in the contract. However, when you
Speaker 6: kind of get late into the contract, like you know,
Speaker 6: towards the expiration date, the base pay that was agreed
Speaker 6: on for the last contract is no longer acceptable. And
Speaker 6: while it gives them the leeway to increase our rate wage,
Speaker 6: they can always go back down to the lower wage
Speaker 6: should they choose to. And last year at the hub
Speaker 6: that I worked at, it was right after peak, in
Speaker 6: peak season. We were hired on at twenty seven dollars
Speaker 6: an hour. And come February, you know, we're all walking
Speaker 6: into the job and there's one of the supervisors there
Speaker 6: who is frankly looking like she's not having a good
Speaker 6: time having to stop to talk to each of us
Speaker 6: to explain, oh, yeah, so we are going to be
Speaker 6: bringing your pay down to fifteen fifty an hour.
Speaker 4: Jesus, But don't.
Speaker 9: I know, I know but don't worry. Don't worry. There's
Speaker 9: an attendance bonus.
Speaker 6: There's an attendance bonus of one hundred and twenty dollars
Speaker 6: if you make all your shifts, and that really fucking sucked,
Speaker 6: like if you get like if you get sick, like okay,
Speaker 6: So like at this hub that I work at, I
Speaker 6: work at one of the few hubs that don't have
Speaker 6: what's called the hourly guarantee.
Speaker 9: Most hubs have an hourly guaran.
Speaker 6: If you're a part time worker, you have an hourly
Speaker 6: guarantee of three and a half hours a day. So
Speaker 6: if they say that there's no work to be done,
Speaker 6: you can say I want that hourly guarantee, and they
Speaker 6: either find you more work to do or they pay
Speaker 6: that out. And then for full time workers, that's eight hours.
Speaker 6: I work at one of the few hubs that doesn't.
Speaker 6: It's a classification related to the type of hub that
Speaker 6: I am at, And so I'm only like at this hub,
Speaker 6: I work maybe twelve hours a week if I'm lucky,
Speaker 6: So this is twelve hours a week at fifteen fifty
Speaker 6: an hour with an attendance bonus. But if I get
Speaker 6: sick one of those days, that means I have a paycheck,
Speaker 6: a weekly paycheck that is going from roughly two hundred
Speaker 6: dollars to like maybe roughly eighty and that is just
Speaker 6: it's totally totally unacceptable the way that they can kind
Speaker 6: of like, yeah, with the plague going on, yes, being
Speaker 6: sick is highly likely right now. And yeah, no, they're
Speaker 6: just kind of able to like yo yo us around
Speaker 6: on these ages like whenever they want. And so a
Speaker 6: demand that is being circulated in the grassroots of the union.
Speaker 6: Leadership hasn't really talked about it to my knowledge, but
Speaker 6: there is, you know, a petition going around to have
Speaker 6: a starting wage of twenty five dollars an hour, and
Speaker 6: you know, right now that would only be because right
Speaker 6: now this year, I'm making twenty four and they didn't
Speaker 6: do that bullshit. I think kind of an anticipation of
Speaker 6: the strike coming. They didn't want to make us, you know,
Speaker 6: more angry, and so that would only be a dollar
Speaker 6: increase for me, but also it would prevent them from
Speaker 6: doing that in the future, right Yeah.
Speaker 10: So yeah, I like Reese, you know, also was affected
Speaker 10: by the MRA, but luckily not as severe. You know,
Speaker 10: my pay went from twenty six down to twenty three
Speaker 10: an hour, and of course, you know what ten eleven
Speaker 10: percent pay cut also same time goes up, you know,
Speaker 10: ten percent. Uh, that was very difficult enough, let alone
Speaker 10: having you know, your pay getting dropped almost by fifty percent.
Speaker 10: You know, there's multiple hubs in the area, and they're
Speaker 10: all just on different pay scales, you know, for the
Speaker 10: same kind of you know, same same area, doing the
Speaker 10: same work, and we had just have these like fluctuating
Speaker 10: pay scales, you know, I know for us, it was
Speaker 10: you know, right after peak season, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 10: thanks so much for the most successful peak season ever.
Speaker 10: We made record breaking profits. We couldn't have done this
Speaker 10: without you. By the way, we're cutting all of your
Speaker 10: pay and now, of course you know we're getting paid
Speaker 10: above twenty five and hey, that helped their profits. So
Speaker 10: you know, it's absolutely absurd to say, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 10: we can't afford you know, these higher wages when they can't.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they don't, exactly, they do hold their fucking profits,
Speaker 6: Like are you kidding me? Like Jesus Christ, it's like
Speaker 6: they think we're fucking dumb. It's like, no, like our
Speaker 6: work bar exceeded what you're paying us, Like an unimaginable amount. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and you guys like it was earlier on in the complo,
Speaker 6: not earlier on. I think this happened maybe late June
Speaker 6: early July. It was they leaked, it got leaked their
Speaker 6: economic proposals for us, and they had the part timers
Speaker 6: starting at seventeen dollars an hour seventeen and like, I
Speaker 6: just I don't think that's affordable anywhere.
Speaker 4: That's just think I'm going to mention that I think
Speaker 4: is I think it's really important, but isn't particularly well nursed.
Speaker 4: So you know, if you go back to like the
Speaker 4: original fifteen campaign, right wage like that wage which was
Speaker 4: already like kind of nonsense in like twenty twelve, like
Speaker 4: with inflation that's like nineteen thirty now, Yeah, so this
Speaker 4: is you know, this is this is how much like
Speaker 4: inflation has sort of deteriorated wages and that, and that's
Speaker 4: just sort of like you know, the economic terms, like
Speaker 4: inflation is like the bundle of goods, right, and that
Speaker 4: that's not accounting for the fact that, for example, the
Speaker 4: increase in housing prices has been way higher for the
Speaker 4: sort of like avig rated inflation. Right. Healthcare costs are
Speaker 4: increasing higher from the sort of quote unquote Aviatrade inflation,
Speaker 4: and so like, yeah, it's like, yeah, this sounds like
Speaker 4: a lot of money. It's fucking not like no, simply
Speaker 4: is not.
Speaker 6: Like Yeah, I heard at a at a rally not
Speaker 6: too long ago from one of the speakers for you know,
Speaker 6: it was a it was a team's rally that you know,
Speaker 6: we're getting our members hyped and all that, and one
Speaker 6: of the speakers mentioned that for our city, a minimum
Speaker 6: wage that could be livable would be twenty six dollars
Speaker 6: an hour. And I'm just like, yeah, that seems about right,
Speaker 6: and that's like the bare minimum. That's like, Okay, I
Speaker 6: can eat enough, I can pay my rent, and I
Speaker 6: probably don't have a whole lot leftover.
Speaker 10: So yeah, especially when we have you now, like average
Speaker 10: rent you know for one bedroom you know, around like
Speaker 10: fifteen hundred dollars you know these days, and so many
Speaker 10: landlords want, you know, want three times you know that
Speaker 10: rent and income. So you know, I was actually just
Speaker 10: kind of yeah, writing you know or you know, doing
Speaker 10: the math last night, I was just like, oh, okay,
Speaker 10: so in my hours, I would actually need forty three
Speaker 10: dollars an hour.
Speaker 3: Just to.
Speaker 10: You know, be making three times the average monthly rent.
Speaker 4: Yep. Yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 10: That's definitely why you know, twenty five dollars you know
Speaker 10: an hour is the minimum. You know that, you know,
Speaker 10: I think we can settle for. I would love to
Speaker 10: see it higher, but I also recognize, you know, well,
Speaker 10: you know, maybe twenty five is still not quite cutting it,
Speaker 10: you know, in a more urban area. But you know,
Speaker 10: there's going to be a lot of people that's you know,
Speaker 10: significant gains are going to help so much, you know,
Speaker 10: to meet their material needs. You know, definitely have to
Speaker 10: you know, consider this as you know, big picture, this
Speaker 10: is a national agreement, and you know, we got to
Speaker 10: get that really solid foundation and then we can expand
Speaker 10: from there.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, what the sorry as as as you were talking,
Speaker 4: I got a thing saying that the teamsters have settled.
Speaker 7: What all right?
Speaker 4: Think?
Speaker 9: Oh my gosh, what the fuck.
Speaker 10: They're they're back at the table.
Speaker 9: At the negotiation table.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 6: They've only been at the negotiation table for like four hours.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, okay, I signal shots here, Yeah, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Well all right, I don't know if we're gonna leave
Speaker 4: this in, but yeah, we've discovered live on air that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, teamsters win historic ups contract. Uh oh, we'll see.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I'm also looking at this and see what.
Speaker 6: I'm Yeah, I'm at the teamster dot org website where
Speaker 6: they have an update on it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and at least, you know, speaking of wages, at
Speaker 10: least the first thing that I'm seeing is existing part
Speaker 10: timers will be raised up to no less than twenty
Speaker 10: one dollars per hour immediately. Part time seniority workers earning
Speaker 10: more under a market right adjustment would still receive all
Speaker 10: new general wage increases.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, this is uh, I'm not stoked on those wages.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, No, I'm definitely I am twenty five or bust
Speaker 6: on this.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: All right, so that does that will change things.
Speaker 6: That definitely changes the timeline because this still has to
Speaker 6: be sent out to be voted on and approved by membership.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and what we learned.
Speaker 6: At the there was a call not too long ago
Speaker 6: where they kind of explained the process of it. So
Speaker 6: in the event that they would reach at tentative agreement
Speaker 6: that gets sent out to us, we vote from home
Speaker 6: and it takes about three weeks for it to ratify.
Speaker 6: There is still a possibility that membership could vote to
Speaker 6: reject it, in which case they would be going back
Speaker 6: to the bargaining table and we could potentially be going
Speaker 6: on strike then. But this does set it back by
Speaker 6: now three weeks. It'll be interesting to see what the TDU,
Speaker 6: which is the Team Service for a Democratic Union, which
Speaker 6: is a reform caucus inside our union. It'll be interesting
Speaker 6: to see what their line is on this. So, oh
Speaker 6: my gosh, what a what a bomb drop to get
Speaker 6: in the middle of a podcast about this.
Speaker 10: Yeah, unfortunately can't even speak to it since gimmed a
Speaker 10: little bit of it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 4: Do they actually have the full agreement out or are
Speaker 4: they just do they just have this stuff?
Speaker 6: They will not have the full agreement out. Something that
Speaker 6: we've been having a little bit of frustrations with within
Speaker 6: our union is that we do not have open bargaining.
Speaker 9: So bargaining happens. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, bargaining happens behind closed doors, and they occasionally give
Speaker 6: us updates about what's happening, but we don't really get
Speaker 6: to see the full picture until we're going to be
Speaker 6: voting on it.
Speaker 9: And uh, I obviously think this is bad for a
Speaker 9: number of reasons.
Speaker 6: Yeah, one and a big primary one is these contracts
Speaker 6: that are negotiated. I was about to go get my
Speaker 6: copy of the contract I could show you, and then
Speaker 6: I remember this is a podcas asked, and that's not
Speaker 6: actually going to be helpful for Hey.
Speaker 4: We do, we do. We do visual bits on this
Speaker 4: podcast all the time. It's fine.
Speaker 6: So the size of our pok our contract is about
Speaker 6: the size of a pocket Bible Jesus it is. It
Speaker 6: is very very big, and it's you know, it's written
Speaker 6: in that legal ease and stuff like that, and so
Speaker 6: it's not very accessible to most of our most of
Speaker 6: our members. And so you know, if we had open
Speaker 6: and bargaining, if we had consistent like updates where like
Speaker 6: you know, our union leadership would be like, all right,
Speaker 6: so this is what we've agreed upon so far, this
Speaker 6: is what we've rejected.
Speaker 9: This is what it all means.
Speaker 6: You know, in the lead up to like whether or
Speaker 6: not you vote no, membership could have a far more
Speaker 6: comprehensive understanding of what is in the contract instead of
Speaker 6: waiting until the very end as we got little bits
Speaker 6: pieces and snippets and then being like, okay, well read
Speaker 6: this and decide how you feel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, that's just I don't know if if
Speaker 4: it feels like it's just a much just kind of
Speaker 4: designed to like railroad people into signing whatever contract negotiators
Speaker 4: agree to. Yeah, it's kind of a disaster.
Speaker 10: And without that transparency, I mean, you know, you know,
Speaker 10: all of us rank and file members are you know,
Speaker 10: essentially being removed from the process, you know, being involved
Speaker 10: in the decision making, uh, you know, stipulating what's going
Speaker 10: to do it, you know, to meet our needs? What
Speaker 10: what do we need? You know out of these you know,
Speaker 10: five year contracts, and you know, I think it was
Speaker 10: just you know, a few days ago, got you know,
Speaker 10: get an update from the local you know, basically a
Speaker 10: week before you know the contract ends, you know, and
Speaker 10: they're you know, talking about this is like one of
Speaker 10: the most transparent contracts there's ever been. There's all these
Speaker 10: updates and you know, there's more rank and file, all
Speaker 10: you know, members involved in the bargaining. And it's like, well,
Speaker 10: that's great, you know that shows you know how far
Speaker 10: you know, we've come, I guess, but also it's still
Speaker 10: just it's kind of sad to think that you know, this,
Speaker 10: this process that's all banned by NDA is the most
Speaker 10: transparent transparent it's been.
Speaker 4: And and also the fact the fact that you're fighting
Speaker 4: this out live on air from like their press release
Speaker 4: that they put out on Twitter, it's like.
Speaker 6: What yeah, yeah, oh my gosh, absolutely absolutely absurd. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so it seems like this is a this is an
Speaker 6: agreement that is going to be pushed by union leadership
Speaker 6: as a vote to vote yes on UH, which is
Speaker 6: a kind of a.
Speaker 9: Far cry from earlier in UH in July.
Speaker 6: When you know, you when the team stories were telling
Speaker 6: ups you need to present us with either an agreement
Speaker 6: that we like actually agree with or present your life
Speaker 6: best final offer by July fifth.
Speaker 9: Right, Yeah, and yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we'll we'll see how how the rank and file react.
Speaker 6: In the twenty eighteen contract. I know that the TDU
Speaker 6: tried to UH organize a vote no campaign and they
Speaker 6: did get a simple majority of the membership to vote no. However,
Speaker 6: at the time and this has now been changed, but
Speaker 6: at the time, in our constitution, it would require a
Speaker 6: two thirds majority to have rejected it, and goes to
Speaker 6: strike Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Was it was? It was?
Speaker 3: That?
Speaker 2: Was that?
Speaker 4: Because it was was that? Because it has one of
Speaker 4: those weird like electoral college systems or was it like
Speaker 4: you need two thirds to project?
Speaker 9: It was a it was a you need two thirds.
Speaker 6: That has been changed when when Sean, when the Reform
Speaker 6: slate was elected and they had their Teamsters convention, they
Speaker 6: changed the constitution so that it would be a simple majority.
Speaker 6: So yeah, well we'll see what TD the line that
Speaker 6: TDU wants to take, and yeah, yeah, we'll see. This
Speaker 6: certainly puts a wrinkle in things. I'm gonna be honest,
Speaker 6: I was actually really looking forward to strike pay because
Speaker 6: my strike pay would have paid more than my.
Speaker 4: Actual job does. Yeah, And I mean, I think there's like,
Speaker 4: I think there's a few things that we can sort
Speaker 4: of immediately talk about from this. One is that it
Speaker 4: doesn't like nothing they've put out here from what I've
Speaker 4: read so far, I'm reading, I mean literally, I'm reading
Speaker 4: from the Teamsters website says you're doing anything about market
Speaker 4: rate adjustments at all.
Speaker 9: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: And the second thing is that you know, we we
Speaker 4: you know, we were talking earlier before we knew that
Speaker 4: there was a strike about sort of the impact of
Speaker 4: this on the entire class. And it really looks like
Speaker 4: both the Teamsters and ups, like you know, really wanted
Speaker 4: to cut a deal as you know, part of part
Speaker 4: of this attempt to keep everything going and to keep
Speaker 4: this stuff from happening, which I mean I think makes sense,
Speaker 4: right if you're you know, if if you're UPS, you
Speaker 4: don't act like we're we're having an actual sort of
Speaker 4: like workers and surgaency like having having having a summer
Speaker 4: this hot like isn't good for like, it isn't good
Speaker 4: for UPS. It's arguably not good for some of the
Speaker 4: more sort of like some of the more sort of
Speaker 4: conservative union leaderships either who do who unlike a lot
Speaker 4: of workers do not want to be on strike because
Speaker 4: that like that cut that cuts into the sort of
Speaker 4: war chest of capital that they have to manage.
Speaker 9: Mm hmmm hmm.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, Uh, they're you know, they're just recently
Speaker 6: on Twitter or excuse me, x it's now, but just
Speaker 6: recently on Twitter there was a fair amount of a
Speaker 6: strike discourse, and there was like you know, labor activists
Speaker 6: and stuff saying that, you know, like it's good, it's
Speaker 6: good for you know, if they reach a tentative agreement
Speaker 6: that you know, so yeah, yeah, if they reach a
Speaker 6: tentative agreement that you know, makes those material gains, it's
Speaker 6: better to not go on strike. And like, I I know,
Speaker 6: I know, like and to me that's like a little
Speaker 6: bit wild because one there is so much and we
Speaker 6: could demand so much more. But also like you know,
Speaker 6: collective action, you know, in order to be consistent, to
Speaker 6: be good at it, it requires you to undertake it,
Speaker 6: right Like, and you know, when I think about like
Speaker 6: how our local is, they have a very service model
Speaker 6: orientation to unionism as opposed to an organizing model, and I,
Speaker 6: you know, I was really under the impression that this
Speaker 6: potential strike could have kind of like you know, lit
Speaker 6: a fire under their ass and like kind of got
Speaker 6: back into like the organizing aspect of unionism, right uh.
Speaker 9: And like they weren't that great at that.
Speaker 6: I swear sometimes we would talk to them about like, hey, so,
Speaker 6: like have you tried like mobilizing members.
Speaker 9: Have you tried like showing up the gates? Have you?
Speaker 6: Like you know you can like there's like programs out
Speaker 6: there where you can text your entire membership about like
Speaker 6: you know, come to this like contract update. And it's
Speaker 6: like we were just speaking a different language. Like they
Speaker 6: just had no idea, Like they had no idea, and
Speaker 6: they would look at our union meetings where like you know,
Speaker 6: we represent like I think over like a like I
Speaker 6: think well over like one thousand workers. I don't have
Speaker 6: the numbers on that, so I'm not going to get
Speaker 6: more specific, uh, but like well over that. And they
Speaker 6: would look at our union meetings where we have maybe
Speaker 6: fifty to seventy people, and they're just kind of like, well,
Speaker 6: this is just as good as it's going to get.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's nonsense, Like it's nonsense.
Speaker 6: It's nonsense, like you know, like back in the fucking
Speaker 6: like you know, from like the tens to the fifties,
Speaker 6: union meetings would bring in just so many people and
Speaker 6: they don't have anywhere near the like technological advance advantages
Speaker 6: that we have now. And it was just it's very
Speaker 6: much like, yes, you tell us about your grievances, we
Speaker 6: get those filed, and we do make those like wins
Speaker 6: for you, and like that's that's good. Like you know,
Speaker 6: there are some unions that barely do that much, and
Speaker 6: the fact that they do that is great.
Speaker 9: But like you know, at my hub, I.
Speaker 6: Remember I was I was talking to my carpool and
Speaker 6: he didn't even know who his steward was. And I'm
Speaker 6: like the only person that gives him updates about what's
Speaker 6: going on in the union. Yeah, and that's just because
Speaker 6: like when I started working at UPS, I was just like, yeah,
Speaker 6: I'm going to go to these fucking union meetings. I'm
Speaker 6: gonna find out what's going on. I want to be
Speaker 6: in involved. And most people, you know, it's just a
Speaker 6: job for them, and they don't know all the things
Speaker 6: that a union can provide for them or how a
Speaker 6: union can back them up. And part of that's because
Speaker 6: you know, union leadership, you know, has decided that that's
Speaker 6: not something they really they don't need to be as
Speaker 6: engaged with the members as they could be.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, and there's there's a second thing there too, which
Speaker 4: is like, okay, if you are like you know, if
Speaker 4: if if if, if you are someone you know, if
Speaker 4: you were in a position of leadership, and you're in
Speaker 4: your position of leadership. Because there's incredible base, there's like
Speaker 4: really really lowd attendance for union elections, right, really load turnout,
Speaker 4: which is which is usually true, right like union union
Speaker 4: election turnout tends to be just atrocious. You don't actually
Speaker 4: want more people being involved because the more people that
Speaker 4: are involved, the more likely is it a bunch of
Speaker 4: people are going to show up in the election. Someone's
Speaker 4: good and you know when someone's gonna look at one
Speaker 4: of the deals you cut and it's gonna be like,
Speaker 4: what the fuck are you doing? Right, So there's there's
Speaker 4: there's a lot of sort of perverse intensive structures in
Speaker 4: terms of like just to sort of the basic organizational
Speaker 4: electoral structure that gets you, you know, like people cutting
Speaker 4: deals and culling and you know, like trying to cut
Speaker 4: off the sort of like hot summer and its knees.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I have something funny that's kind of related to that.
Speaker 6: So when we were voting to authorize a to authorize
Speaker 6: a strike, right, you know, we did it and all
Speaker 6: of that, and you know, Sean O'Brien announced that there
Speaker 6: was going to be voting at the gates and our local.
Speaker 6: Initially it was like, oh no, we're just going to
Speaker 6: have people come to the hall between the hours of
Speaker 6: eight and ten on two specific days and we'll do
Speaker 6: voting that way. Eventually they did change it after they
Speaker 6: got pressure I think probably from up top and below.
Speaker 6: But one of the members who is involved was like,
Speaker 6: oh no, no, no, no, like it'll be better if it's
Speaker 6: just the people that are motivated enough to go, because
Speaker 6: they're the ones that are going to like vote the
Speaker 6: thing on through. And that was just that was wild too,
Speaker 6: seeing that sort of perspective, because if we you know,
Speaker 6: if the union is there, if like you know, our
Speaker 6: union reps, our business agents, if they're there, if they're
Speaker 6: constantly engaging membership, then we will all be on the
Speaker 6: same page. Like they're the ones that have all of
Speaker 6: the like you know, the like technical information. They're the
Speaker 6: ones that can really talk to they can talk to
Speaker 6: people about you know, like this is how much UPS
Speaker 6: is making and profits, this is like what they're paying
Speaker 6: our CEO, this is.
Speaker 9: All of this. You deserve more and we're going to
Speaker 9: fight for it.
Speaker 6: And if they had those constant interactions, you would all
Speaker 6: be on the same page and we wouldn't have to
Speaker 6: worry about, well, if there's increased voter turnout, it might
Speaker 6: make the vote kind of iffy, you.
Speaker 10: Know, like, yeah, there's definitely you know, that's been one
Speaker 10: of my biggest scripes is around uh, you know, communications,
Speaker 10: particularly you know from the local which is kind of
Speaker 10: practically non existent, and you know, it's there's so many
Speaker 10: even like between new hires and you know, even people
Speaker 10: have been there a few years. A part timers like
Speaker 10: don't know their rights under our contract and you know
Speaker 10: it was only because of organizing and you know, talking
Speaker 10: with people that I know those rights and can you
Speaker 10: know then share that you know knowledge with other you know, teamsters.
Speaker 10: But it's kind of like, well, why why are we
Speaker 10: having to do this? And I mean, of course internal organizing,
Speaker 10: you know, knowledge is super important, but it'd be nice,
Speaker 10: you know why, you know, why isn't there a you know,
Speaker 10: like a welcome packet. Why are there you know, not
Speaker 10: more maybe not like full meetings, but at least something
Speaker 10: where you know, our union officials can meet with rank
Speaker 10: and file members. And I think I'm partly you know,
Speaker 10: speaking to that because you know, the shift I work
Speaker 10: is during union meetings, so you know, attending those is
Speaker 10: not you know, not quite feasible, uh, you know for
Speaker 10: me or other people on my shift. And I know
Speaker 10: that's also kind of seems like it's led to this
Speaker 10: like some contempt for part timers like oh, we're not involved,
Speaker 10: you know, we don't care, but it's like we don't
Speaker 10: you know, we don't necessarily know you know about the meetings,
Speaker 10: or that you know, there's the scheduling conflict, or you know,
Speaker 10: again talking about like we don't even know what our
Speaker 10: you know, basic rights are you know under our contract.
Speaker 4: Well, it's like a like you can't you can't not
Speaker 4: explain to people. You can't not onboard people and then
Speaker 4: complain that they're not onboarded, Like come on, this.
Speaker 10: Is a sad self fulfilling prophecy there. You know, you're
Speaker 10: creating the outcome that you think you know already exists
Speaker 10: because you're not engaging members.
Speaker 4: So there was no other thing that I wanted to
Speaker 4: talk about, which is that there's been a lot of
Speaker 4: like I don't know, I've been seeing this in sort
Speaker 4: of various places in the discourse talking about the strike,
Speaker 4: which is that there's a lot of people who basically
Speaker 4: are holding onto the notion that a people don't want
Speaker 4: to strike and b that like striking is bad and
Speaker 4: that you should want to do it as little as possible.
Speaker 4: And you know, this pisses me off for like a
Speaker 4: lot of reasons, one of which is that, like my
Speaker 4: grandma was a teamster and she was a she was
Speaker 4: a union punch card operator. Like back in like the
Speaker 4: seventies and eighties, and you know, my grandma is like
Speaker 4: like not like a leftist, right like, we have to
Speaker 4: stop her from giving money to the Fallen Gong. Like
Speaker 4: she's so you know, this is this is the kind
Speaker 4: of thing super dealing with you, right, But like she
Speaker 4: loved going on strike, right like. And that's the thing
Speaker 4: that like my family who's not like particularly sort of
Speaker 4: labor friendly or like, oh yeah, no, we love going
Speaker 4: on strike. Because that's that's why she has insurance, right
Speaker 4: because because the team shirts were going with any eighties
Speaker 4: teams just go on shrike, and I you know, and
Speaker 4: I think I think that's an everything that's like this,
Speaker 4: you know, this kind of well okay, then there's two
Speaker 4: ways to look of it at it. One is that
Speaker 4: it's a fundamental misreading of the situation that's happening right now,
Speaker 4: which is, no, people absolutely love going on strike. People
Speaker 4: are really excited to go on strike. People who people
Speaker 4: whose politics are not like, you know, people whose polities
Speaker 4: are not aligned with the left, really like going on
Speaker 4: strike and are really excited about it. And this is
Speaker 4: something that's happening sort of irrespective of this, there's been
Speaker 4: a bunch of wildcat strikes. This is something that's been
Speaker 4: happening sort of irrespective of like actual union membership, as
Speaker 4: people want to do this. We've also seen sort of
Speaker 4: the great resignation over the last few years of you know,
Speaker 4: what is effectively a massive like part of the reason
Speaker 4: the conditions for labor are like this strong right now
Speaker 4: is because there's been this massive informal strike of people
Speaker 4: just sort of of people, you know, walking off the job,
Speaker 4: like deciding their job fucking sucks and quitting, and that's
Speaker 4: been putting a lot of pressure on employers and you know,
Speaker 4: and as simultaneous this, you know, I think I think
Speaker 4: the reading of this that's more sort of cynical is that, like,
Speaker 4: these people know this, right, they know that people want
Speaker 4: to go on strike, and they're looking at it and
Speaker 4: they're terrified, and their conclusion is like, we have to
Speaker 4: fucking stop, you know, we have to stop with this
Speaker 4: wave of labor militancy before it gets going. Because if
Speaker 4: it gets going, and you know, if you're like, if
Speaker 4: you're you know, like a sort of centrist liberal politician,
Speaker 4: or if you're like a conservative union bureaucrat, like that's
Speaker 4: terrifying for you, then there's you know, there's there's a
Speaker 4: lot of people who have a lot to lose if
Speaker 4: if you know, like if really sort of a president
Speaker 4: wave of labor militancy gets going.
Speaker 9: Yeah, absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 6: You know, when I think of, you know, people in
Speaker 6: wanting to go on strike, I guess I'll touch on
Speaker 6: two things here, which is that you know, at my hub,
Speaker 6: whenever we talk about going on strike there, you know,
Speaker 6: there is a sense that, yes, people really want it,
Speaker 6: and also they're really worried that they aren't going to
Speaker 6: be able to that. Like, you know, we're going to
Speaker 6: get this kind of agreement that most people will want,
Speaker 6: and it's not going to happen, and we've had all
Speaker 6: of this build up and you know, it's kind of
Speaker 6: kind of you know, fall flat. And then you know,
Speaker 6: also I've a fair amount of time on picket lines
Speaker 6: as like a community supporter, and you know, there is
Speaker 6: something incredibly magical about being on strike, you know, like
Speaker 6: there's often just this outpouring of community support for the workers,
Speaker 6: right and workers get to see that their labor is
Speaker 6: extremely valued by the larger community, and I think that
Speaker 6: is really important. I think that builds bonds of solidarity,
Speaker 6: and you get to see the other unions who come
Speaker 6: out and support of your strike, and then you know,
Speaker 6: you go and support them, and then it creates Yeah,
Speaker 6: it creates these bonds that you know aren't really they
Speaker 6: can be achieved without it, but it's just so much
Speaker 6: more bonding. I guess I'm going to use the term
Speaker 6: bonds a lot, but and there really isn't a substitute
Speaker 6: for it. And you know, and then people also they
Speaker 6: get to experience the power that they have as you know,
Speaker 6: as labor right like they be can they realize it's
Speaker 6: like oh wait, no, Like I'm on strike and this
Speaker 6: company is like the shit is hitting the fan for
Speaker 6: them because they don't have us who know how to
Speaker 6: do our jobs in there doing them right. Like you know,
Speaker 6: I was at a picket line for this other company
Speaker 6: a few years back, and like the workers there on
Speaker 6: the line were constantly giving the updates. They'd be like, yeah, man,
Speaker 6: it's wild I heard in there that like, you know,
Speaker 6: the managers are trying to do our jobs and like
Speaker 6: none of what they make is edible and they're throwing
Speaker 6: it all away and like breaking the machines are breaking
Speaker 6: like yep, and so they're one they're seeing that, yes,
Speaker 6: their labor is specific, it has value, it is necessary
Speaker 6: and crucial, and they are getting that community support and
Speaker 6: you know, there's not a lot of other opportunities for
Speaker 6: those realizations to happen.
Speaker 4: So yeah, and I mean this is something that like
Speaker 4: I've literally seen this, like our teachers union. We've talked
Speaker 4: about this a bit on the show, but like our
Speaker 4: local teachers union in Chicago, like got you know, they
Speaker 4: got to reform caucussy and they're not perfect, but you know,
Speaker 4: they're they're much better than what was happening before. And
Speaker 4: you know, and one of the things they do is
Speaker 4: they've they've been on strike a lot of times. Go
Speaker 4: to last about Deck, like decade, a decade, bit over
Speaker 4: a decade, and it changed the city. Like Chicago is
Speaker 4: a you know, was for i mean decades, decades and decades.
Speaker 4: This just like interminable machine run like neoliberal hellhole. And
Speaker 4: you know, I mean I'm not going to say like
Speaker 4: Chicago's like some kind of like you know, like beacon
Speaker 4: of the Left or whatever, but like the city is
Speaker 4: just different after it. And it was just the one
Speaker 4: truck they kept they kept going on Shrek and they
Speaker 4: kept going on the Shrek, and you know, you can
Speaker 4: you can look at the quality of their wins and
Speaker 4: you can sort of like you know, like I mean
Speaker 4: there's a like I know, I mean, like I know
Speaker 4: people who like have quipbals with sort of like exactly
Speaker 4: what happened in the contract negotiations, but like you know,
Speaker 4: they they went on strike multiple times and they won
Speaker 4: and that really and then you know, the every thing
Speaker 4: happened is the thing you were talking about, right, is
Speaker 4: like suddenly you're at these pickets and like the entire
Speaker 4: community is showing up, like everyone's showing up with food,
Speaker 4: Like it changed, it changed the city, and you know,
Speaker 4: and I think this guess is an everything I think
Speaker 4: is important here about and what's you know, sort of
Speaker 4: the potential that being averted is. The interesting thing about
Speaker 4: this strike wave is that we've had a number you know,
Speaker 4: we've we had like the whole we had sort of
Speaker 4: the wildcat teacher strikes in twenty seventeen. We've had a
Speaker 4: couple of a couple of waves of teacher strikes, but
Speaker 4: like most of the strikes that have been happening at
Speaker 4: public sector unions, we haven't had these giant strikes other
Speaker 4: than basically, I mean there's been some right, there's there's
Speaker 4: there's been a lot of strikes in the healthcare sector.
Speaker 4: We haven't had a strike like at this scale in
Speaker 4: the private sector in you know outside basically like the
Speaker 4: Team series and is like the Team Series and like
Speaker 4: the Guild are like the only two big unions on
Speaker 4: that who go on strike like even kind of regularly.
Speaker 4: Even that's like that's like a once in like twenty
Speaker 4: year thing, right, And so I don't know, like I think,
Speaker 4: I think just sort of the the potential of what's
Speaker 4: being lost here is enormous if if what happens is
Speaker 4: that this deal, which is like I'm not great from
Speaker 4: when I've seen it from the initial things. Although again,
Speaker 4: like we still don't fucking know what's in this deal,
Speaker 4: and we're not going to for like a bit at
Speaker 4: like at least until they fucking release the thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean obviously, you know, we'll we'll we'll have
Speaker 10: to see, you know, what's what's in that agreement. Yeah,
Speaker 10: but you know, at least just you know, for you know,
Speaker 10: my own views, you know, it's any you know company
Speaker 10: you know that's paying you poverty wages, or you know,
Speaker 10: there's unsafe work conditions and just seems like, well, on principle,
Speaker 10: there needs to be a work stoppage, like that's you know,
Speaker 10: if you're going to treat people that way, that's just
Speaker 10: the result.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 6: Something that I'm like kind of thinking about right now
Speaker 6: is like, so, like the twenty one uh seventy five
Speaker 6: I believe it is for part time workers. You know,
Speaker 6: that is a significant increase from the fifteen fifty, but
Speaker 6: we're just at the beginning of our five year contract.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you know, like I.
Speaker 6: Feel like, you know, like it's being viewed as like, oh, well,
Speaker 6: that's like okay for right now. It's you know, kind
Speaker 6: of not but it's really just not going to be
Speaker 6: okay in five years when we have to have these
Speaker 6: contract negotiations again. And because we're not starting out with
Speaker 6: a solid twenty five dollars an hour, we're going to
Speaker 6: be playing catch up to what is not really okay
Speaker 6: right now. Like it's just gonna like it's like it's
Speaker 6: just going to keep happening. You know, by the time
Speaker 6: we get to twenty twenty eight, you know, probably get
Speaker 6: up to twenty five dollars an hour. Maybe, but by
Speaker 6: that time, you know, who knows what we're actually going
Speaker 6: to need in order to survive in this economy. Yeah, so,
Speaker 6: you know, I feel like that wage is just not
Speaker 6: it's not proactive enough for what we're going to need
Speaker 6: in the coming years. And you know, in there there
Speaker 6: is stuff about like, you know, wage increases for like
Speaker 6: you know, however long you've been there and stuff like that.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I you know, you know, like I graduated
Speaker 6: from high school in like two thousand and eight, and
Speaker 6: I just feel like the my entire life, the economy
Speaker 6: has just been fucking shitty. And when they tell me
Speaker 6: the economy is great, my finances are still fucking shitty.
Speaker 4: And you know, this is one of the old twenty
Speaker 4: eleven slogans that like, well don't I guess it's also
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight slogan that like, people need to
Speaker 4: fucking remember that when the bank takes your house. GDP
Speaker 4: goes up. The economic indicators that we have are are
Speaker 4: you know, they're they're bushw economic indicators right like they
Speaker 4: are they are. They are designed to measure how well
Speaker 4: capital is being extracted from you.
Speaker 9: Mm hmm, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 10: Definitely no reflection on our actual you know, day to
Speaker 10: day lives, you know what what our needs are. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and hey, some people made money off of your labor,
Speaker 10: so things are good unless you know you're the labor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And like you know, I think, I think, and
Speaker 4: everything that happens a lot is like yeah, like you know,
Speaker 4: it is entirely possible that a bunch of people who
Speaker 4: are you know, making like seventy thousand dollars a year
Speaker 4: are fucking doing.
Speaker 7: Great right now, and it's like, well, bully for them,
Speaker 7: like we're fucking not.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, and speaking to you know,
Speaker 11: to the you know what the things you know, look
Speaker 11: five years out, which you know, it seems like, you know,
Speaker 11: things just kind of get exponentially worse.
Speaker 10: You know, I don't know what you know, the environment,
Speaker 10: you know what our climate's going to be. I don't
Speaker 10: know what you know, inflation or food costs, you know
Speaker 10: it's going to be and you know so far, you know,
Speaker 10: i'd need to see the you know what the Tenet
Speaker 10: Agreement has on that market rate adjustment. And then there's
Speaker 10: also the cost of living adjustment too, which at least
Speaker 10: what I believe is, you know it doesn't kick into
Speaker 10: like you've been there for five years, so I guess
Speaker 10: you just aren't living for those first five years. I
Speaker 10: don't know.
Speaker 6: You know that my utilities and my rent waives my
Speaker 6: bills for the first five years that I worked for UPS.
Speaker 4: Someone someone someone, So someone also like, go find the
Speaker 4: statistics on how many people get fired at four years
Speaker 4: and eleven months, Like yeah.
Speaker 10: And that's yeah. I mean that's also when the pension
Speaker 10: uh minimum investment investment time is five years. You know,
Speaker 10: that's also something I've thought about, Well, what happens on
Speaker 10: a four years and eleven months is that when you know,
Speaker 10: now even got a bigger target on my back, it's
Speaker 10: like already a thorn on their side.
Speaker 4: They did the thing I said they were going to do,
Speaker 4: where it says UPS will equip in cab a c
Speaker 4: in all large delivery vehicles, sprinter vans and packaged cars
Speaker 4: purchased after January first, oh, twenty twenty four. Fans are
Speaker 4: getting cars getting two fans in an induction event in
Speaker 4: the cargo compartment, which is good, but also not air conditioning.
Speaker 6: It's not air conditioning and it gets very hot in
Speaker 6: those trailers. And yeah, no, it's like yeah, and all
Speaker 6: large except you know, all things purchased after January first,
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it's just like, you know, yeah, it's like
Speaker 4: they will start purchasing cars again in like twenty ninety four.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, nothing in there about retrofitting those cars.
Speaker 9: Well I think interesting cars.
Speaker 4: I think they're well, okay, I don't know. This is
Speaker 4: another thing, like it's it's unclear to me exactly what
Speaker 4: a lot of this means because we you know, like
Speaker 4: we we were like we we can't get the actual contract,
Speaker 4: which is yeah, like yeah, so this is we need
Speaker 4: to I guess also like prefaces like this is what
Speaker 4: we're not doing legal analysis of this. This is our
Speaker 4: speculation based on what we're reading. This is this none
Speaker 4: of this constanity's finding legal advice. Yeah, but yeah yeah,
Speaker 4: hey I.
Speaker 1: Just work here.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Another thing that I'm like noticing in this contract. So
Speaker 6: another big grievance that was had was the lack of
Speaker 6: full time positions and so like if you want to
Speaker 6: get a full time inside job, you know there is
Speaker 6: a seven to ten year wait list for that, right.
Speaker 9: So this us, this tenetive.
Speaker 6: Agreement stipulates that there will be a creation of seventy
Speaker 6: five hundred new full time teams or jobs that ups
Speaker 6: and the fulfillment of twenty two thousand, five hundred open positions,
Speaker 6: but it doesn't specify if that's going to be for
Speaker 6: inside work or for uh, you know, more more drivers.
Speaker 6: And you know, I have I have epilepsy, So I
Speaker 6: Am not going to be a driver. That's just doesn't
Speaker 6: seem ideal for me. And yeah, I would I would
Speaker 6: like to see some numbers on so that wait list
Speaker 6: is that going down, like, because that's like what I'm
Speaker 6: waiting for is to be able to you know, snag
Speaker 6: one of those full time inside positions, but I don't know.
Speaker 6: And like when you think about, you know, seventy five
Speaker 6: hundred full time positions, it's also worth to keep in
Speaker 6: mind that ups employees three hundred and forty thousand people.
Speaker 4: So it's like yeah, wait, so yeah, so that's a
Speaker 4: two percent.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like two percent. And like admittedly,
Speaker 6: like you know, forty percent of that workforce is already
Speaker 6: like they're full time drivers, but so that's like sixty
Speaker 6: percent of that is part timers. And you know, I'm
Speaker 6: not going to make anyone do more math but seventy
Speaker 6: five hundred for sixty percent of three hundred and forty
Speaker 6: thousand people.
Speaker 5: Is.
Speaker 9: It's not as exciting as just seeing that number.
Speaker 7: Yeah, right, which is like a shook, Like.
Speaker 10: And this goes into something you know I've noticed, you know,
Speaker 10: with you know, coworkers, which is always talking about you know,
Speaker 10: like you know, we need more hours and that you
Speaker 10: know that that is true to a degree. You know,
Speaker 10: really though it's like, well we need more pay, you know,
Speaker 10: I you know, I think that's you know, would be
Speaker 10: a sign you know, when it can be you know,
Speaker 10: like a really strong union is that you know, we
Speaker 10: can even to say, yeah, you know what, maybe people
Speaker 10: shouldn't be working seventy hour weeks. Yeah no, maybe we
Speaker 10: should cap that at thirty with you know PT pay
Speaker 10: that you know pays like full time. But of course
Speaker 10: you know we're not there. You know, we need these
Speaker 10: jobs that can actually provide you know, definitely not going
Speaker 10: to knock that, but you know, would definitely like to
Speaker 10: see that overall shift kind of just you know in
Speaker 10: our culture of you know, we don't need to work
Speaker 10: more to have our needs met.
Speaker 4: I think it's also sort of important to understand about
Speaker 4: ups jobs. It's like you're fucking destroying your body. So
Speaker 4: especially if you're like if you're if you're if you're
Speaker 4: one of the people shorting packages like you are lifting,
Speaker 4: like you were lifting like thousands of packages a day.
Speaker 4: These things can weigh up to like eighty fucking pounds.
Speaker 9: They can weigh up to one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 4: One hundred fifty Jesus Christ, never.
Speaker 10: Mind, Okay, one fifty is the other limit. Seventy pounds
Speaker 10: is where you know you can do team lift. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: I know. Talking to a feeder driver recently was talking
Speaker 10: about having a you know, two of those trailers hooked
Speaker 10: up and weighing in at something like seventeen thousand pounds
Speaker 10: on the scale. Jesus Obviously you know that's the cabin
Speaker 10: engine included, I believe, but you know, that's not my world.
Speaker 10: I'm kind of completely unfamiliar with that side of things.
Speaker 10: But still, yeah, it's like a lot of weight, you know,
Speaker 10: because we're carrying so many packages every day. Yeah, it's
Speaker 10: a lot of wear and tear on the body.
Speaker 6: And management is always pushing you to move faster too. Yeah,
Speaker 6: Like I had a u a worker who is a
Speaker 6: feeder driver for another hub, and she was telling me
Speaker 6: that a supervisor there was telling newly hired part time
Speaker 6: employees that it's actually safer to work faster.
Speaker 9: Instead of slower.
Speaker 6: What. Yes, Yeah, that makes no fucking sense, no fucking
Speaker 6: sense at all. And like one of the reasons they
Speaker 6: have an incentive to make us work really fast, which
Speaker 6: is that the full time soups get a parts per
Speaker 6: hour bonus, uh, depending on how fast we go. So
Speaker 6: you know, they will harass you into working faster even
Speaker 6: though you know we're moving these thousands of fucking packages.
Speaker 6: They'll harass us to move faster so that they get
Speaker 6: a bonus off of the packages that we handled and moved.
Speaker 10: I mean, like this last week in the you know,
Speaker 10: I think it was like mid nineties outside or something.
Speaker 10: You know, we're not getting Oh do you need water?
Speaker 10: Do you need to rest? It was, oh, you're not
Speaker 10: working fast enough. Like your packages per hours you know,
Speaker 10: too low. You know, it's that kind of constant you know,
Speaker 10: harassment or you know maybe sometimes like you know, I know,
Speaker 10: my supervisor is a little bit more subtle about it,
Speaker 10: you know, versus you know outright being like, oh, you
Speaker 10: need to work faster because That's the thing is in
Speaker 10: our contract. You know, there's no kind of productivity quota.
Speaker 10: You know, we work safe, we follow the methods. That's
Speaker 10: something I really try and you know, really focus on
Speaker 10: because you know, ideally, yeah, I want to you know,
Speaker 10: I would like to be here longer. Yeah, silly enough
Speaker 10: as that is for a job with terrible conditions, but
Speaker 10: you know, also it's a job that and that Yeah,
Speaker 10: that's the big thing. And it's like, I don't you know,
Speaker 10: what's a pinch you're going to do if you know,
Speaker 10: I'm you know, have some kind of you know, grave
Speaker 10: injury from from the job pension but still, yeah, you're
Speaker 10: dead with heat exhaustion.
Speaker 4: Like's like, well a pension doesn't pay out, Like.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's just it's just yeah, it's wild. It's wild, man.
Speaker 6: I am going to be really excited to see how this,
Speaker 6: how this smoke goes.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting day at work.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm sure that I'll have those people
Speaker 6: that know that I know about the union come up
Speaker 6: and talk to me to ask me what I think
Speaker 6: about it U because I'm the only person they know
Speaker 6: that knows anything about the union. Because as we talked
Speaker 6: about earlier. Union reps just are barely ever there. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and yeah, we'll see, we'll see. Man, that's I'm just
Speaker 6: now really thinking about that. Seventy five hundred full time
Speaker 6: jobs three percent, two or three percent, depending on the
Speaker 6: metric that you're looking at.
Speaker 10: Yeah, absolutely, I mean not enough.
Speaker 6: No, no, no, wild wild, And now that addis is
Speaker 6: a at best, a delayed opportunity for a strike to
Speaker 6: build those as we talked about earlier, those necessary, necessary
Speaker 6: muscles that need to be exercised.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and that's at best. You know, we might have
Speaker 9: we might have missed it. Yeah, yeah, well we'll see,
Speaker 9: we'll see.
Speaker 4: Yeah that that fucking sucks.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what a curveball to get for the podcast.
Speaker 4: Well, honestly, unless you have anything else you want to
Speaker 4: talk about. Yeah, I actually going to wrap up this
Speaker 4: incredibly chaotic episode that it could happen here, in which
Speaker 4: we discovered the chaos of a not open bargaining process
Speaker 4: and what that looks like life what air?
Speaker 9: Yeah? Yeah, exciting times.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I think I think I'm good. I feel
Speaker 6: like I hit all my notes and some that I
Speaker 6: wasn't even planning on hitting because we had this new information.
Speaker 4: So right, good lord.
Speaker 10: I was like, it couldn't have been like an hour earlier,
Speaker 10: so I could have at least oh my gosh, Well,
Speaker 10: you know you can join us next for the live
Speaker 10: analysis of the over three hundred page contract.
Speaker 9: That we got, like just the highlights of Oh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but thank you to you both for thank you
Speaker 4: both for coming on. And yeah, I guess I guess
Speaker 4: if the strike happens, we can talk to you again
Speaker 4: or maybe also if it doesn't, I don't know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely thank you for having us on. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I love to stay in contact to talk about if
Speaker 6: we do go on strike or you know, if we don't,
Speaker 6: would love I would absolutely be open to a follow
Speaker 6: up on that.
Speaker 4: And yeah, okay, so where can people go if they
Speaker 4: want to support like the strike or also potentially the
Speaker 4: rake and file workers who are trying to like make
Speaker 4: sure it happens. Yeah, I would say.
Speaker 6: That a good place to follow, or like a good
Speaker 6: source I guess to follow would be to follow the
Speaker 6: Team Service for a Democratic Union. If there is going
Speaker 6: to be any movement that is in the union that's organized,
Speaker 6: it's going to be coming from them most likely, So
Speaker 6: they are the better version. I would say to follow
Speaker 6: on that front. And of course you can still follow
Speaker 6: the regular uh teamsters page and stuff like that to
Speaker 6: see what's going on. But yeah, yeah, it's gonna be weird.
Speaker 6: I don't know what the TDU line is going to
Speaker 6: is going to be on this, so it's like.
Speaker 10: We'll see and you know, hopefully, you know, if we
Speaker 10: can strike obviously, Yeah, come out to yeah, support your
Speaker 10: fellow workers, and you too will also be able to coordinate,
Speaker 10: you know with rank and file on union reps. You
Speaker 10: know what kind of needs there might be out on
Speaker 10: the picket line.
Speaker 9: Yep.
Speaker 10: Yeah, also, and yeah, thank you very much for for
Speaker 10: having us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you for coming on. Yeah, this has been
Speaker 4: nicking happen here, go on strike. Don't let your leadership
Speaker 4: tell you not to go and strike. Simply do the
Speaker 4: thing and organize so you could do it again.
Speaker 1: Ah, it could happen here. A podcast that is right
Speaker 1: now happening in your ear. It could happen a year.
Speaker 1: That's what we should call it. Garrison. We're changing the name.
Speaker 1: We're rebranding our valuable valuable titles, uh completely moving moving
Speaker 1: overnight to a whole new thing based on a whim you.
Speaker 3: Know, gam bitzer.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, this is a this has been a fun week.
Speaker 1: We're all laughing a little bit at Elon Musk. But
Speaker 1: we have something serious to talk about today, and that
Speaker 1: is everybody's favorite fascist governor, Ron DeSantis. Garrison. You and
Speaker 1: I spent just way too much time last week talking
Speaker 1: about meetball Ron, and now now we're back. Now we're
Speaker 1: back because he's he keeps meatballing meetball. Ron is is
Speaker 1: ballin and meeting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we wrapped up like a like a two
Speaker 3: part episode on Ron Desandres's use of Fashi rave asthetics,
Speaker 3: and then like two days later, the funniest thing happened,
Speaker 3: uh where he just decided to basically basically post Son
Speaker 3: and Rounds. So we're gonna we're gonna get to that.
Speaker 3: But first there's a whole bunch of other information that's
Speaker 3: come out these these past like really three days that
Speaker 3: have kind of that are actually giving more context to
Speaker 3: what's going on at the DeSantis campaign because stuff doesn't
Speaker 3: look too good. Actually, you know, he he kind of
Speaker 3: looks like he's losing everything as he slowly watches it
Speaker 3: all crumble. So let's see, let's start by talking about
Speaker 3: everyone's favorite topic campaign finances. I know this is what
Speaker 3: everyone tunes in to listen to.
Speaker 1: Yes, we love campaign finances.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so last week the public finally got a glimpse
Speaker 3: at DeSantis's campaign finances. The financial disclosures showed that DeSantis
Speaker 3: had about twice as much staff as Donald Trump and
Speaker 3: as of last week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Morrison, you just said that, and I imagine in
Speaker 1: my head for a second that you were referring to
Speaker 1: the amount of staff infections he's had versus Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: That's not true, though, Trump's definitely had more staff.
Speaker 1: There's almost no way, yeah, that Trump is not leading
Speaker 1: in the staff infections category. Please, I'm sorry to itterrrupt.
Speaker 3: But as of last week, the Florida governor had already
Speaker 3: spent about forty percent of the twenty million dollars fundraised
Speaker 3: from April to June of twenty twenty three, So the
Speaker 3: campaign's suspending rate was averaging more than two hundred hundred
Speaker 3: and twelve thousand dollars per day, which is an astronomical
Speaker 3: cost for a campaign for someone like running for president.
Speaker 3: Basically for the first.
Speaker 1: Time this far out too from the season proper hit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's absolutely absurd. The inflated number of staff heavy
Speaker 3: use of private jets and luxury event venues has his
Speaker 3: campaign essentially just burning through cash and with very little
Speaker 3: seeming to come of it in terms of positive poll numbers.
Speaker 3: So another thing that they've.
Speaker 1: Gained maybe a point or so on Trump over the
Speaker 1: last year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, after spending two hundred thousand dollars per day for
Speaker 3: the past like four months. Another thing that these financial
Speaker 3: disclosures exposed is DeSantis's heavy dependence on high contributors. So
Speaker 3: just just about fifteen percent of fundraising contributions came from
Speaker 3: donors who gave less than two hundred dollars, and the vast,
Speaker 3: vast majority of DeSantis's money has come from donors who
Speaker 3: gave the legal maximum of three three hundred dollars in
Speaker 3: the primary, which also means that those who gave that
Speaker 3: can cannot contribute any more money either. So he's running
Speaker 3: out of people that are actually able to fund his operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's worth noting he does have a super pack.
Speaker 1: You are not limited in how much you can donate
Speaker 1: to a super pack, but super packs cannot spend money
Speaker 1: on the same things as general campaign funds, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there are limitations in what you can use that on.
Speaker 1: So this is actually a logistical problem for him that
Speaker 1: he has maxed out his donor base.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and The New York Times has reported that future
Speaker 3: like large prospective donors have been spooked by DeSantis' sliding
Speaker 3: poll numbers and they may be less willing to invest
Speaker 3: in what's looking like a losing battle. So to combat
Speaker 3: these swelling campaign expenses, including two hundred and seventy nine
Speaker 3: thousand dollars at the four seasons in Miami, DeSantis's Tallahassee
Speaker 3: based campaign has began undercoing massive cuts to campaign staff
Speaker 3: this past week. Previously, DeSantis had upwards of ninety people
Speaker 3: on payroll, but just this month they've eliminated thirty eight
Speaker 3: jobs in a variety of departments, cutting more than one
Speaker 3: third of his payroll. DeSantis' cutbacks are nearly equal to
Speaker 3: the size of Trump's entire twenty twenty four campaign staff. Dessentus'
Speaker 3: campaign manager Grenera Pek said in a statement I believe
Speaker 3: late last week quote following a top to bottom review
Speaker 3: of our organization, we've taken additional aggressive steps to streamline
Speaker 3: operations and put Ron DeSantis in the strongest position to
Speaker 3: win this primary and defeat Joe Biden. So that was
Speaker 3: their little statement accompanying the news of firing almost forty
Speaker 3: people from their campaign. According to The New York Times,
Speaker 3: advertisers are quote promising to reorient the DeSantis candidacy as
Speaker 3: a quote unquote insurgent run and remake it into a
Speaker 3: quote unquote leaner, meaner operation. So this is the new
Speaker 3: strategy that they're trying to do, is instead of having
Speaker 3: ninety people on staff in a largely ineffectual strategy, have
Speaker 3: a more insurgent run with a smaller number of people.
Speaker 3: But in addition to the dozens of staff members who've
Speaker 3: been let go this July, to senior advisors have also
Speaker 3: departed this month to work for an outside pro DeSantis nonprofit.
Speaker 3: One of these senior advisors, who was supposed to oversee
Speaker 3: the campaign's television messaging, voluntarily left quote as the reality
Speaker 3: of a disappearing advertising budget set in. So these these
Speaker 3: two more more kind of seasoned Republican advisors saw what
Speaker 3: was happening in the campaign, and they're still pro DeSantis,
Speaker 3: but they believe they can be more effective by working
Speaker 3: from outside of the actual campaign. That's so funny, which
Speaker 3: is not a great sign for DeSantis's internal internal team
Speaker 3: here if you have people like who's still like you,
Speaker 3: but they just can't work for you because you're doing such.
Speaker 4: A bad job.
Speaker 3: Uh so decidus. His team is now telegraphing a plan
Speaker 3: to engage with mainstream media that in the way that
Speaker 3: they have not previously done because they've he's so far
Speaker 3: kind of scornfully avoided it, as we've talked about previously.
Speaker 3: And they're calling this new strategy the DeSantis is Everywhere approach,
Speaker 3: which is a good Jesus Christ bad name for strategy.
Speaker 1: The part of the problem, Garrison, I don't know how to, like,
Speaker 1: I can't like prove this the way that we prove,
Speaker 1: you know, when we're when we're tracing back the ideological
Speaker 1: roots of like a lot of our modern fascists. But
Speaker 1: what I what I believe in my heart is that
Speaker 1: so many of these very young people on the extreme
Speaker 1: right who are who are driving this campaign like just
Speaker 1: want to be villains from a bad late nineties early
Speaker 1: two thousands movie. They want to be they want to
Speaker 1: be the bad guy in like the fucking super villain
Speaker 1: hero movie. Right, Like that's you don't you don't say
Speaker 1: that about a guy who's good like this. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: like the Biden campaign. If they came to Joe and
Speaker 1: we're like, we want to do a Biden is everywhere thing,
Speaker 1: he'd be like, now that sounds kind of creepy. Guys
Speaker 1: like I already got a little bit of a problem
Speaker 1: with that, what with a hair sniff, and I don't
Speaker 1: really want to really want to jump on that train.
Speaker 3: You know, Like it definitely has the vibes of like
Speaker 3: zoomers who grew up watching like late nineties animated and
Speaker 3: superhero cartoons who are trying to like it.
Speaker 4: Yes, we're trying.
Speaker 3: To emulate that for some reason. There is one one
Speaker 3: really funny quote from The Times that that I will
Speaker 3: read because because it quotes like internal sources that that
Speaker 3: I don't have access to. But anyway, quote one person
Speaker 3: close to mister DeSantis, who requested anonymity to speak candidly
Speaker 3: about a candidate whom the person still supports, said the
Speaker 3: governor had experienced quote unquote a challenging learning curve that
Speaker 3: has left him quote unquote a little bit jarred.
Speaker 1: So does sound like a six year old who's like
Speaker 1: not quite progressing fast enough. In the reading where they're
Speaker 1: like maybe we need to try teaching him another way,
Speaker 1: Like we'll get out the different colored books.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, so's he seems to have a rough adjustment
Speaker 3: period to campaigning in just more than one state and
Speaker 3: having an actual like opponent to go up against. Also
Speaker 3: like an opponent who's like actually a good who's like
Speaker 3: good at being like a politician. Yeah, so yeah, a
Speaker 3: challenging learning curve.
Speaker 4: Indeed, I might I.
Speaker 1: Might specify I think actually DeSantis is a lot better
Speaker 1: as being a politician than Donald Trump. But that's not
Speaker 1: what the competition is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Destus is better at being like an effective like governor.
Speaker 5: H He's better.
Speaker 1: He's better at the machinery of politics, yes, whereas Trump
Speaker 1: is better at holding power within the GOP.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and being like a showman.
Speaker 1: Yea, we will.
Speaker 3: We will talk more about some uh some actually relatively
Speaker 3: breaking news regarding the de Santas campaign.
Speaker 1: Shortly for this, I just saw this before we got.
Speaker 3: On short shortly after this at break. Okay, we are
Speaker 3: we are back. So a lot has happened the past
Speaker 3: two days, A lot has happened the past two hours actually,
Speaker 3: but we're we're gonna have to work our way there.
Speaker 3: The first bit of news that was kind of both
Speaker 3: It was both confirming my suspicions and in very a
Speaker 3: very interesting piece of news in the first place, is
Speaker 3: that that fast Wave inspired kind of homophobic Pride Month
Speaker 3: video that we talked about in our last Dysantis fash
Speaker 3: Wave episode. It turns out to be slightly more self
Speaker 3: inflicted than what than what at least I said in
Speaker 3: the episode, because I didn't want to make claims that
Speaker 3: I couldn't back up. Because we have we have some
Speaker 3: new new information regarding this video. I'm gonna I'm going
Speaker 3: to quote from this this article in the Times quote
Speaker 3: a Dissanta's campaign aid had originally produced the video internally,
Speaker 3: passing it off to an outside supporter to post it
Speaker 3: first and making it appear as if it was generated independently.
Speaker 3: According to a person with knowledge of the incident, so
Speaker 3: this video turned out to be actually be made in house.
Speaker 3: This actually was made by someone who was working for
Speaker 3: Rondasantis as as we speculated it initially, but we couldn't
Speaker 3: really like say for sure because it was it was
Speaker 3: posted first on a third party account.
Speaker 1: Specifically the guy who was the one who shared it
Speaker 1: as the dude who made it.
Speaker 3: No, that is that is for this next video we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about. Yeah, the the homophobic one was
Speaker 3: was shared by this this this proto Santas account called
Speaker 3: Proud Elephant, who had a corresponding telegram channel. This was
Speaker 3: the guy who posted the first homophobic meme one. But yeah,
Speaker 3: so we found out Sunday night that it was actually
Speaker 3: made by someone at the Dasantas campaign, which kind of
Speaker 3: justified a lot of our suspicions about DeSantis employing staff
Speaker 3: of zoomers who don't actually understand how to win a
Speaker 3: political election and are more interested in just creating fascist memes,
Speaker 3: which is seems to be not a very effective strategy
Speaker 3: for DeSantis so far. So again, just the day that
Speaker 3: this news broke that that the video was actually made
Speaker 3: in a house, another fash wave of inspired video, but
Speaker 3: with much much more overt Nazi imagery, was shared online
Speaker 3: by a Dysantis campaign staffer. I'm Robert. Have you seen
Speaker 3: this video?
Speaker 1: Yes? Okay, so I'm the Sun and Rad video.
Speaker 3: Yes, so we don't. We don't have to watch it here,
Speaker 3: but I will. I will give a description of it
Speaker 3: for for the people listening, because also we should probably
Speaker 3: shouldn't be sharing these things like everywhere on on like
Speaker 3: Twitter and stuff anyway, Like it's not it's not a
Speaker 3: great idea.
Speaker 6: But.
Speaker 1: It's not going to make you happier help you in
Speaker 1: any way. To see this, it's just like it's surprising.
Speaker 1: I will say that I was surprised to see how
Speaker 1: fascy it was, to see how like explicitly accelerationist mash
Speaker 1: shooter fascy it was. Yes, this is like christ Church
Speaker 1: kind of Yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we're not going to share it, but it
Speaker 3: is useful to know what's in it. So I did
Speaker 3: write a pretty in depth description of this video here.
Speaker 3: So this video was posted on Sunday, July twenty third.
Speaker 3: It's about seventy seconds long. It plays over a Meg
Speaker 3: Myers cover of the song Running Up the Hill, which was.
Speaker 1: Made you know recent Wait, isn't that the one that
Speaker 1: was the one that the new season of Stranger Things
Speaker 1: a while back, like it brought back to the main.
Speaker 3: Possibly it's it is It is a Kate Bush original.
Speaker 3: This one is is a more like electronic cover of
Speaker 3: the song. Yes, it's talking about like you know, like
Speaker 3: a like a trying to like ask God to help
Speaker 3: you with certain things. Blah bla blah blah blah blah blah. Anyway,
Speaker 3: it starts with the doomer wojack sitting at a computer
Speaker 3: looking at headlines about the ineffectiveness of Trump's border wall,
Speaker 3: unfulfilled anti immigration policies, and Trump's pro COVID vaccine statements.
Speaker 3: So I guess we should probably talk about what a
Speaker 3: wojack is in case someone is unfamiliar. If you've ever
Speaker 3: spent any amount of time on the Internet, you've probably
Speaker 3: seen memes with kind of crudely drawn like human faces
Speaker 3: and heads. These are called wojack memes. They're very popular
Speaker 3: in like political spheres. They kind of kind of rose
Speaker 3: to prominence on four Chat and spread spread out from there.
Speaker 3: Everyone kind of uses them. Nowadays they're pretty common, but
Speaker 3: there's a few specific like wojack characters, like the chad
Speaker 3: is one. One of the more popular ones is the
Speaker 3: doomer wojack, which is someone who has taken the black pill,
Speaker 3: so to speak. They've they've they've looked at modern society
Speaker 3: and have decided that it's not worth engaging in. Now
Speaker 3: there's this. There's doomers on the right, there's dumers on
Speaker 3: the left. There's doomers who look at like climate change
Speaker 3: and the acceleration of like of of of capitalism and
Speaker 3: just decide, hey, this is this is too far gone.
Speaker 3: So they become a doomer, and they're on the left.
Speaker 3: There's also doomers on the right who are like looking
Speaker 3: at gay marriage and the acceptance of trans people, being like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is so socially degenerate. It's the society is too
Speaker 3: far gone, and then they become a doomer. But they're
Speaker 3: on the right. So it's it's it happens on. It
Speaker 3: happens on both sides, and both both sides use doomer memes.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, this one is because we're talking about it
Speaker 3: in this context of fash wave. This is obviously a
Speaker 3: fascist doomer meme. But that's that's kind of what I
Speaker 3: mean when I say there's there's a doomer wojack sitting
Speaker 3: sitting at a computer. It's like it's like a guy
Speaker 3: with a beanie, like a scruffy beard. He looks like
Speaker 3: very depressed and tired, that sort of thing. So as
Speaker 3: as these kind of headlines about Trump's not conservative enoughness
Speaker 3: are flashing on this computer, the dumer Rojack is looking
Speaker 3: increasingly disillusioned and apathetic. Then there's the clip of Trump
Speaker 3: holding up a Pride flag that plays right before we
Speaker 3: see Trump signing the First Step Act, the twenty eighteen
Speaker 3: Criminal Justice Reform Bill. Then headlines flash about violent criminals
Speaker 3: being released into the streets, that sort of thing. So
Speaker 3: the dumer BoJack is looking at all these things about Trump,
Speaker 3: looking more and more depressed, when suddenly a doorway appears
Speaker 3: with an almost angelic light pouring in from behind, and
Speaker 3: as the door opens, we see a silhouette of Ron DeSantis.
Speaker 3: More short clips of Ron play, and now the wojack
Speaker 3: is looking happy, almost like exuberant, seemingly kind of random.
Speaker 3: Images of outer space, volcanoes, rocket launches, surfing and the
Speaker 3: beach flash quickly on screen with with like glitchy silhouettes
Speaker 3: of Ronda Santis looming above coastal ocean side cities that
Speaker 3: are lit up by a sunset. A don't tread on
Speaker 3: Florida Alligator flag spins onto screen like it's a fucking
Speaker 3: like MS paint like edit, and then the the video
Speaker 3: flashes more clips of DeSantis wearing sunglasses standing in front
Speaker 3: of American flags as the sunset. Happy Woejack fades in.
Speaker 3: So this is another wo shack meme of somebody almost
Speaker 3: like tearied eyed with like contentment, staring into the horizon
Speaker 3: as like a sunset is behind their head. It kind
Speaker 3: of it kind of reminds me of like the that
Speaker 3: guy who who stole that plane in Seattle.
Speaker 2: And yeah, crash it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very sad story if you're not aware of it.
Speaker 1: A man hijacked I believe it was an Alaska Airs
Speaker 1: flight a couple of years back. It was empty, like
Speaker 1: he he worked at the airport. He just took the
Speaker 1: plane and he got up into the sky and then
Speaker 1: like he was just kind kind of a dude who
Speaker 1: was sort of suicidal. There's very sad audio of him
Speaker 1: talking too, because he gets on with air traffic control
Speaker 1: and he makes sure that he's not going to hurt
Speaker 1: anyone else, and like then the plane goes down, you know,
Speaker 1: he goes down in it, and it's it's very bleak.
Speaker 1: He was not a man who wanted to hurt anybody.
Speaker 1: It's just this kind of like exist. I found it
Speaker 1: set to a lot of vapor wave tracks. Actually, like
Speaker 1: the audio the conversation between them, because he's kind of
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people identify with his sense
Speaker 1: of like I don't really know why I was ever here.
Speaker 1: I don't really know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's someone who was dealing with like postmodern absurdity,
Speaker 3: but in a way that like he doesn't want to
Speaker 3: hurt anybody about it, but he just doesn't know what
Speaker 3: to do with existence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had part of he had like the ten
Speaker 1: percent of what a mass shooter has, which is exactly
Speaker 1: go out and I want to do something. But thankfully
Speaker 1: he was also a good person and didn't want to
Speaker 1: like murder strangers.
Speaker 3: So this became very popular on the Internet, including on
Speaker 3: redda and four chan. This he was he was dubbed
Speaker 3: sky King, and there's there's footage of him basically crashing
Speaker 3: this plane as the sun is setting, and there's there's
Speaker 3: footage of him flying around in sunset played often played
Speaker 3: with vapor Wave with his conversation with attracktic control that
Speaker 3: this is very popular. The sunset happy Roe Jack is
Speaker 3: very similar. I've seen people post this image in threads
Speaker 3: about sky King before, and I think a lot a
Speaker 3: lot of people to understand it's like this this act,
Speaker 3: that this this Skyking thing, that this has more in
Speaker 3: common with like accelerationist like terrorism than what most people
Speaker 3: can like really understand about like between like shooting a
Speaker 3: random person for like violent crime and this like this,
Speaker 3: this is more this, This is closer to why people
Speaker 3: do accelerationist like terroristic acts. But this guy was like
Speaker 3: not actually a monster, so he didn't do that. He
Speaker 3: like explicitly didn't want to hurt anybody. He explicitly didn't
Speaker 3: want to try to land the plane at the airport
Speaker 3: because he thought he might hurt somebody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and presumably since he worked at an airport, he
Speaker 1: had some knowledge of how easily that could go wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this anyway, these two images are kind of
Speaker 3: linked often on the Internet. So anyway, we we we
Speaker 3: see we see the video getting like more hopeful with
Speaker 3: with with Rona Santis, you know, having stupid fash wave,
Speaker 3: having stupid fashwave imagery. Is this sunset happy Woejack fades
Speaker 3: in as like as the dumer is now has like
Speaker 3: contentment and then this this, then this is followed by
Speaker 3: very quick flashes of dysantis and more.
Speaker 4: More more beach imagery.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of beach in this video. Yeah, there's
Speaker 3: like this like rotating sheet of stickers that read make
Speaker 3: America Florida. Then we get this shot of a small
Speaker 3: yacht zooming through the water with DeSantis campaign events played
Speaker 3: over top of the water. And during this shot we
Speaker 3: have another jack holding a rifle wearing Camo military fatigues
Speaker 3: that slides onto screen. He has a patch of the
Speaker 3: flag of Florida on his plate carrier and his helmet.
Speaker 3: We get more shots of beachfront cities and rocket launches,
Speaker 3: followed by headlines about Dysantis on a variety of topics,
Speaker 3: including his anti immigration actions, his use of Florida's National
Speaker 3: Guard in other states, DeSantis's anti diversity initiatives, his anti
Speaker 3: education bills, his anti drag bills, the cancelation of pride
Speaker 3: parades in Florida, and in general just kind of how
Speaker 3: DeSantis has been pushing Florida further right. So after this
Speaker 3: barrage of headlines, we get to the most mask off
Speaker 3: from a moment of the video. The flag of Florida
Speaker 3: fills the screen with two lines of armed troops at
Speaker 3: either side marching towards the flag. A still photo of
Speaker 3: Dysantis is center frame, with his head right in the
Speaker 3: middle of the seal of Florida, which is on the
Speaker 3: center of their state flag. The head in front of
Speaker 3: the seal creates this almost like halo effect around Desantas's head,
Speaker 3: and then the seal turns into a spinning son and
Speaker 3: rad as we zoom into the symbol as troops march
Speaker 3: into center, and then the video ends. The sun and
Speaker 3: Rad is on screen for about ten seconds. So this
Speaker 3: was a pretty upsetting thing to see on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Yes, upsetting is one way to phrase it. Yeah, and again.
Speaker 1: The son and Rad has a long history. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a specifically a cultic version of the swastika it reached.
Speaker 1: It has been around for quite a while, but it's
Speaker 1: most recent. The kind of thing that brought it into
Speaker 1: modern prominence was the christ Church shooter chose it as
Speaker 1: the cover of his manifesto and also wore a son
Speaker 1: and rad. I believe it was on the chest of
Speaker 1: his plate carrier when he carried out his massacre. He
Speaker 1: also had a couple on his gun.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, so it's very clearly Nazi symbol. I
Speaker 3: know there's some people of making it make jokes about
Speaker 3: how this must have just been an azof Battalion reference.
Speaker 3: Deeply unserious.
Speaker 1: No, you can see some of these on a I
Speaker 1: mean again, this is a Nazi thing. They wear this too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: azof uses it.
Speaker 3: There's people trying to excuse the use of the sun
Speaker 3: and rad by saying, oh, it's just an azof simple
Speaker 3: it's not a hot sea thing, which is bad, which
Speaker 3: is a deeply unserious thing to say. So Yeah, this
Speaker 3: video was shared by at least one campaign staffer. It's
Speaker 3: a very short video, but it plays into a strain
Speaker 3: of like accelerationist propaganda tropes that even the previous Fashionay
Speaker 3: video didn't didn't even really have in many of the
Speaker 3: same ways, like like all of all of like the
Speaker 3: dooomer wojack slowly becoming like happy and content than putting
Speaker 3: on military fatigues to go fight for Ron de Santis,
Speaker 3: who's now in the center of like a haloed son
Speaker 3: and rad like it's it's it is emulating a type
Speaker 3: of meme that both gained popular in order to specifically
Speaker 3: like inspire mass shootings to happen, and also to like
Speaker 3: to get young depressed males to channel their depression into
Speaker 3: like fascism. It has a whole bunch of tropes like
Speaker 3: it's it's it's it's really just like playing by the playbook.
Speaker 3: So the video was first posted on the Twitter account
Speaker 3: Ron DeSantis fancams, which is a horrible sentence. Yeah, the
Speaker 3: account is a few months old, but its visible posts
Speaker 3: only go back to June. They post a lot of videos,
Speaker 3: all in a very similar style, which leads you to
Speaker 3: believe that whoever operates the account must be making the
Speaker 3: videos themselves. One video from the account plays clips of
Speaker 3: people describing Dasantis as fascist, edited together with clips of
Speaker 3: DeSantis deploying National Guard and calling for civilian state military
Speaker 3: force under his control, all sliced together next to footage
Speaker 3: of Nazis and Mussolini played over an upbeat e d
Speaker 3: M track. So it's all like explicitly fascist stuff like
Speaker 3: like like it's people like rev like it's like a proud,
Speaker 3: proudly embracing the fascist label. So this style of video
Speaker 3: is almost identical to the homophobic Pride Months video that
Speaker 3: we discussed last week. And considering the recent news that
Speaker 3: the other video shared by the Dasantas Warham account was
Speaker 3: secretly made by a campaign staffer, that led myself and
Speaker 3: others to assume that this son and Red video was
Speaker 3: most likely made by the same person inside DeSantis's campaign
Speaker 3: and was operating this DeSantis fancam account as a sock puppet.
Speaker 3: But you know, I could not prove this myself, really,
Speaker 3: I it's just it's it's a it's a hard thing
Speaker 3: to kind of backtrack this. I this account was pretty
Speaker 3: clean in terms of like I tried to like, you know,
Speaker 3: do do pretty pretty basic osin on this account, But
Speaker 3: it's it was, it was I could not find out
Speaker 3: much about it. But the campaign staff member that first
Speaker 3: shared this sun and Red video to his own Twitter
Speaker 3: account was former National Review writer Nate Hakman. We will
Speaker 3: we will talk about Nate Hawkman's exploits shortly shortly after
Speaker 3: this this hat break. All right, we are back and
Speaker 3: in a much better position currently than twenty five year
Speaker 3: old Nate Hawkman.
Speaker 1: Yes, so really was a tragically was a promising career.
Speaker 1: You know what, Let's give them another chance. Garrison, reach
Speaker 1: out to Nate. We can bring him on the team,
Speaker 1: you know, have him start making some videos for us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll build an invoice to Nate Hawkman's address. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'll see where he lives. So, twenty five year old
Speaker 3: Nate Hawkman has been working as a speech writer for
Speaker 3: DeSantis's campaign. After rising to prominence among young conservatives for
Speaker 3: his online references and willingness to entertain outside the Overton window.
Speaker 3: Uh Hawkman hosted a Twitter space late last year centered
Speaker 3: around the question of if white supremacists like a Nick
Speaker 3: Fuentes should have a place in the modern conservative movement.
Speaker 3: Funtes himself appeared in the Twitter space, and Hawkman thanked
Speaker 3: him for radicalizing children by saying, quote, You've gotten a
Speaker 3: lot of kids based and we respect you for that.
Speaker 3: And he also said that Fuentes quote is probably a
Speaker 3: better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men who might
Speaker 3: otherwise be conservative unquote. So Hawkman has retweeted the Dysantis
Speaker 3: fancam account at least six times before he shared this
Speaker 3: on and rata video this past Sunday. But he's not
Speaker 3: the only Dysantis linked account to share these videos. The
Speaker 3: campaign's war room Twitter account and the pro DeSantis Never
Speaker 3: Back Down superpack have also shared videos from this Rond
Speaker 3: Dessanta's fancam Twitter account. By using this fancam account to
Speaker 3: post videos and then by retweeting on Nate's account, someone
Speaker 3: was certainly testing the waters to see how close the
Speaker 3: Dysantas campaign can get to just doing explicit Nazi shit,
Speaker 3: and considering the New York Times, who Hawkman has written for,
Speaker 3: by the way, basically confirming that the person who made
Speaker 3: the Pride Month video was secretly employed by Dysantis and
Speaker 3: posted the a third party to get some distance from
Speaker 3: the official campaign. This led many to suspect that Hawkman
Speaker 3: was secretly the person behind this fancam account due to
Speaker 3: the similarities in video styles and his frequent boosting of
Speaker 3: the account. The sun and Ride video was deleted the
Speaker 3: same day was posted, and the fancam account has not
Speaker 3: posted since then. But then suddenly, just a few hours
Speaker 3: ago as of time of recording, news dropped that Nick
Speaker 3: Hachman has been fired from the Dasantis campaign, and the
Speaker 3: sources at Axios confirmed that he has in fact secretly
Speaker 3: been making these Fashway videos. So it was it was
Speaker 3: Hawkman on all along. This is what happens when you
Speaker 3: hire a twenty five year old Groypewer to work on
Speaker 3: your to work on your presidential bid.
Speaker 1: Your very serious presidential campaign.
Speaker 4: Yeah so uh.
Speaker 3: The Dessentant's campaign officially has only said a few words
Speaker 3: on the subject quote, Nate Hawkman is no longer with
Speaker 3: the campaign and we will not be commenting on him further.
Speaker 1: Not that easy, guys, But other.
Speaker 3: Anonymous sources have confirmed to news outlets that it was
Speaker 3: Hawkman who was making these videos. So this is weird
Speaker 3: because like this hasn't been a great move for DeSantis
Speaker 3: hiring Hawkman, having Hawkman do all this like behind the
Speaker 3: scenes like Scooby Doo shit of like you're posting fasci
Speaker 3: fascist videos on sock wepons to then get reboosted by
Speaker 3: Desanta's campaign like it's it's all. It's all very like
Speaker 3: dark but like comical, like it's it's silly, like uh,
Speaker 3: similar to the Descentus video we talked about in the
Speaker 3: last Adventures in Fashionate episode. This video it was not
Speaker 3: meant to like convince older Trump supporters to vote for Dissantis, right,
Speaker 3: like that, that's not the intention of posting this video.
Speaker 1: No, this new bid trying. They are first off, going
Speaker 1: for the zoomer vote. Always a mixed bag anytime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anytime you're going for the youth vote. This is like
Speaker 1: famously a difficult thing. It kind of sometimes works for
Speaker 1: the dims because the youth tend to be pretty progressive
Speaker 1: and the Republicans are terrifying. Yeah, but going for the
Speaker 1: trying to base your campaign as a Republican presidential candidate
Speaker 1: on the youths is uh quite a move. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: it's let's see how it pays off for him gotten.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because like this new video is almost more chronically
Speaker 3: online than the last one, Like, not even considering the
Speaker 3: Nazi imagery, it's it's heavy use of BoJack memes is
Speaker 3: just like cartoonish to the median voter. What this video
Speaker 3: is trying to do is signal to self describe fascists
Speaker 3: that Dysantis is their guy, and trying extremely desperately to
Speaker 3: create another like meme magic moment like we had in
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen to recruit a slew of teenage Nazis to
Speaker 3: try and meme another based president into office, which isn't
Speaker 3: gonna work this time around, because it's not twenty sixteen anymore.
Speaker 3: Like we we've we've already been we've already been inoculated
Speaker 3: to some degree to this, to this style of of
Speaker 3: campaign tactics, all of all of the all the people
Speaker 3: in like like four chan. Isn't the thing that it
Speaker 3: used to be. It is, it is, It is a
Speaker 3: shell of its of its former self. But like what
Speaker 3: we have here on like the DeSantis side is like
Speaker 3: in terms of hiring people like hackmen. Right, these are
Speaker 3: like seasoned gropers who grew up and are now like
Speaker 3: getting into their twenties. Uh, you know, they're taking jobs
Speaker 3: at National Review and as and as campaign staffers. But
Speaker 3: due to their isolated, niche political upbringing, they have deluded
Speaker 3: themselves into thinking that there's like a mythical far right
Speaker 3: youth voting block that just like quite simply doesn't exist.
Speaker 3: So you can spend all day making and retweeting these
Speaker 3: meme heavy videos with Nazi imagery that really only succeed
Speaker 3: in turning off the reliable boomer Republican voters. Now, like,
Speaker 3: there's a few other you know, future scenarios here. If
Speaker 3: these if these like up and coming gropers continue to
Speaker 3: like grow up, polish their act, take more jobs as
Speaker 3: staffers or on Capitol Hill, and like slowly grow in
Speaker 3: numbers as they learn to like hide their power level
Speaker 3: like hea like hide their amount of racism, then we
Speaker 3: might have a problem. If they like actually like put
Speaker 3: like intentionality into a long term strategy to like put
Speaker 3: more of these young freaks into positions in Washington, but
Speaker 3: we're simply not there yet. Like in the case of Hawkman,
Speaker 3: he kind of just like he blew up the spot
Speaker 3: right like he went like he went too hard, too fast,
Speaker 3: and then he got fired because they don't want that shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the olds are going to watch this and go like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck is this? This does not look serious,
Speaker 1: This is not speaking to my issues. This is just
Speaker 1: like off putting, in strange, and most young people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's some brain poisoned four channer. That's who this guy's
Speaker 1: running as the four chan candidate. Yep, all right now.
Speaker 3: Like so the other fear is that they'll shift from
Speaker 3: like this electoral focus and try to just use this
Speaker 3: type of video propaganda to initiate another wave of like
Speaker 3: Nazi mass shootings like in twenty eighteen. The halo effect
Speaker 3: around DeSantis's head is certainly cause for concern, but there's
Speaker 3: a lot of other factors that go into that sort
Speaker 3: of thing, and that is kind of just more of
Speaker 3: like an ever present fear that anti fascists have, and
Speaker 3: you know, people do a lot of work and trying
Speaker 3: to catch these guys before they actually do mass shootings
Speaker 3: and try to try to isolate the spread of this
Speaker 3: style of propaganda for that very reason. So yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: it's it's certainly an interesting trajectory. When I started, like
Speaker 3: finishing this episode earlier today, I had no idea that
Speaker 3: Hawkman was going to get fired, had no idea that
Speaker 3: it was going to be confirmed that Hawkman was the
Speaker 3: one making making these videos. So that's kind of some
Speaker 3: breaking news on our side. It's it's been a few days.
Speaker 3: If you're if you're listening to this, at the end
Speaker 3: of the week, I'm going to read out one tweet
Speaker 3: from this guy, a double Doink, who is a stupid,
Speaker 3: stupid handle no offense, but he made a made a
Speaker 3: made a made a pretty good point here I quote.
Speaker 3: I think DeSantis's real problem isn't just that he's racist,
Speaker 3: It's that his campaign is racist in the same way
Speaker 3: a really annoying teenager is your average xenophobic suburbanite dad
Speaker 3: looks at a son and rad roejack ad like his
Speaker 3: son crack his car. A lot of people are arguing
Speaker 3: that your average fifty six year old Trump supporter isn't
Speaker 3: as racist as your average DeSantis supporting Zoomer, but that's
Speaker 3: not the point. Putting weird blood and soil shit in
Speaker 3: your ads smells it's deeply uncool to the exact people
Speaker 3: that you want to impress unquote, and I'll add it's
Speaker 3: it's it's deeply uncol to the exact people you want
Speaker 3: to impress if you want to win at being president
Speaker 3: and like are trying to move over Trump voters. It's
Speaker 3: just it's just it's just not going to play. So
Speaker 3: this is this is the state of the de Santa's campaign. Now,
Speaker 3: they've they've shed almost forty people from their staff. The
Speaker 3: guy that was supposed to lead their television ads has left.
Speaker 3: They seemingly just have no idea what the fuck to
Speaker 3: do They They tried to have this guy do this
Speaker 3: like backdoor nazi video sock puppet strategy that has also
Speaker 3: resulted in not very good things for this for the
Speaker 3: Desanta's campaign. So I guess we'll we'll see how their
Speaker 3: how their campaign develops, if they if they continue this
Speaker 3: sort of like fash wave rhetoric and style. I kind
Speaker 3: of doubt it now that now that now that Hawkman
Speaker 3: is out. But yeah, it's been a certainly certainly an
Speaker 3: interesting interesting few months here, or a few weeks here
Speaker 3: rather in terms of in fashwave videos resurfacing again for
Speaker 3: the first time in quite a while. In terms of
Speaker 3: like mainstream of political use.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm kind of suspecting that this might be the
Speaker 1: death knell of that as a at least for a spell,
Speaker 1: as a as a relevant form of propaganda.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's it's been in some ways, like
Speaker 3: internally rejected at the Disanta's campaign, and he is arguably
Speaker 3: the most fascist mainstream candidate that they that we like
Speaker 3: have right now, nothing.
Speaker 1: Puts a stink on stuff like this like failure, right,
Speaker 1: you know, these guys, these guys are not anarchists, and
Speaker 1: the anarchists are we nearly always lose, So there's this
Speaker 1: like because things fail, you know that, Like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of Spanish Civil War, you know, iconography and stuff
Speaker 1: that's still very relevant on that chunk of the left.
Speaker 1: But with the right, it is all about power, and
Speaker 1: when something like this fails, when it actually weakens a campaign,
Speaker 1: when it weakens the insurgent right, when it makes them
Speaker 1: less able to exert power. Yeah, I kind of feel
Speaker 1: like we may have seen the last of this, as
Speaker 1: a thing that matters. Right, Yeah, I'll.
Speaker 3: Definitely be watching these next few months. But I think
Speaker 3: that's that's definitely a very a very fair assessment at
Speaker 3: this point. Lastly, I just want to clarify one thing
Speaker 3: about our last episode due to some viewer feedback. So
Speaker 3: last time we were talking about how the Biden administration's use
Speaker 3: of dark branded memes had like inadvertently led to fast
Speaker 3: way of taking a big body blow. Now, I think
Speaker 3: some people misinterpreted our discussion as downplaying anti fascists and
Speaker 3: leftists attempt to disrupt dark Mega and fash wave in
Speaker 3: general by like proliferating the satirical dark branded memes. So
Speaker 3: in the episode, we talked about the methodology behind this,
Speaker 3: this this strategy of like normies seizing onto memes and aesthetics,
Speaker 3: thus making them cringe and unattractive to the niche groups
Speaker 3: that they that that once enjoyed using them with Dark
Speaker 3: brand And there were certainly an attempt from anti fascists
Speaker 3: and leftist posters to appropriate fash waves aesthetics with the
Speaker 3: hope that if spread widely enough, it would disarm some
Speaker 3: of fashwaves more dangerous and inspirational aspects. But you can't
Speaker 3: really force mainstream like virality. This kind of thing works
Speaker 3: best when it appears natural, and for the majority of
Speaker 3: Dark Branded posters, they were just doing this shit for
Speaker 3: like shits and giggles like that. That was the primary factor,
Speaker 3: is that it was funny, and no effort to damage
Speaker 3: fash waves legibility would really be successful without mainstream spread.
Speaker 3: A small group of leftists could mean like eternally, but
Speaker 3: until it breaks through that bubble, it would have little
Speaker 3: to no effect. Now, because of how Twitter's algorithm worked
Speaker 3: during the summer of last year, after a few months,
Speaker 3: Dark Branded did in fact break through to the liberal mainstream.
Speaker 3: But I've seen nothing to suggest that the White House
Speaker 3: staff had any intention of trying to damage fash Wave's
Speaker 3: legibility by sharing laser I memes in August to twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two.
Speaker 1: I think the key here is that you were not
Speaker 1: saying this was purely the result of liberals accidentally like
Speaker 1: jumping on to this, but that the primary like success
Speaker 1: was achieved, Like, the part of the success that was
Speaker 1: achieved as a result of this going like mainstream among
Speaker 1: Biden supporters was accidental. Yeah, it was the part that
Speaker 1: was key, not saying that the people who recognize this,
Speaker 1: and we're putting in the background work to try to
Speaker 1: push this stuff and make it, you know, eventually go viral.
Speaker 1: That was certainly not accidental, but correct. The part that
Speaker 1: the liberals played was an accidental part in killing this
Speaker 1: That's that's the point.
Speaker 3: Yes, Because what I mean by accidental is that when
Speaker 3: dark Brandon started in March of twenty twenty two, there
Speaker 3: was no way to guarantee that four months later the
Speaker 3: White and like the White House and blue Wave liberals
Speaker 3: would be sharing these memes on mass Like I remember
Speaker 3: conversations I had like last August when liberals were seemingly
Speaker 3: like ruining the funny dark branded memes. But like me,
Speaker 3: like myself and research colleagues during this time, like that
Speaker 3: was when we realized that if, like if liberals keep
Speaker 3: sharing these cringy memes, we might actually have a shot
Speaker 3: at killing off a fash wave. So yes, this was
Speaker 3: to not discount the efforts of anti fascists or others
Speaker 3: who pioneered the spread of dark Brandon and their attempts
Speaker 3: to insert it into greater public consciousness. But I think
Speaker 3: to frame this as like a meticulously planned siop from
Speaker 3: the very start, is also kind of inaccurate in like
Speaker 3: a very like spotlighted way like this was. This was
Speaker 3: a collaborative effort with with the with the liberals not
Speaker 3: realizing the degree that their collaboration played in this larger
Speaker 3: game of trying to disarm fascist aesthetics and like meme styles.
Speaker 3: So yeah, that's one one clarifying note as we hopefully
Speaker 3: wrap up this dysantis fashwave sega for the time being,
Speaker 3: because I definitely did not plan on making this episode
Speaker 3: when I when I finished recording last week with you.
Speaker 1: So here we are cool, all right, that's the episode.
Speaker 5: That's the episode.
Speaker 4: It's happening here. The thing that's happening here is fucking
Speaker 4: child labor.
Speaker 5: I am.
Speaker 4: I am deeply angry this episode. This is see get
Speaker 4: up here. I'm your host, Mio Wong and with me
Speaker 4: Sharen Hi Mia.
Speaker 12: I'm so glad to join you on this really uplifting episode.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's gonna be great. So yes, all right, as
Speaker 4: anyone who studied like even a little bit of labor
Speaker 4: history dos, the fight over child labor is very very old.
Speaker 4: It is. It's one of the first causes that sort
Speaker 4: of liberal reformers to capitalism took up nearly eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: Like it's like in the Communist Manifesto is one of
Speaker 4: the things. It's actually it's one of the things people
Speaker 4: point out. It's like, oh, we've done all the things
Speaker 4: that was in the original Communist Manifesto, and it's like, no, no,
Speaker 4: we never got rid of this, you know. It's it's
Speaker 4: also one of the things that like you get these
Speaker 4: sort of like capitalist triumphalist accounts that like, oh, we
Speaker 4: eliminated child labor. This is like this is proof the
Speaker 4: system works. No, this, the battle over child labor is
Speaker 4: a battle that we are in the middle of losing,
Speaker 4: and we are losing it in worse and worse ways
Speaker 4: every day. So okay, so why why are we Why
Speaker 4: are we dealing with a new resurgence of child labor
Speaker 4: in this country. There's there's a lot of reasons. One
Speaker 4: of the big problems is that vast swaths of the
Speaker 4: US sees child labor is morally good. You know, they
Speaker 4: see something like oh, this is like you teach your kids.
Speaker 4: It's like how you yeah.
Speaker 12: Like how they grow up and get responsible and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then this and this is true in a
Speaker 4: lot of parts of the world. It's also completely and
Speaker 4: absolutely bonkers. It is just it's just nuts, Like people
Speaker 4: shouldn't think like this. It's incredibly weird. And the other
Speaker 4: thing that you get a lot is like there's you know,
Speaker 4: there's sort of like different versions of like more or
Speaker 4: less socially acceptable child labor. Right, So, like I think
Speaker 4: most people agree if you're not running the business that
Speaker 4: like children shouldn't be working in like slaughterhouses or whatever.
Speaker 4: But you know, there's like lots of things that people
Speaker 4: are like, oh, no, kid working in a restaurant, like
Speaker 4: that's completely fine. Like oh, it's like a like a
Speaker 4: fourteen year old is like doing farm work on a farm,
Speaker 4: Like that's fine.
Speaker 12: But it's a slippery slope, right because it's starting to
Speaker 12: farm work and then down.
Speaker 4: Also, like I would argue that that's also not fine,
Speaker 4: because what's what's essentially happening here is that there's this
Speaker 4: basically like this sort of family loophole to people's understanding
Speaker 4: if child labor were like as long as child labor
Speaker 4: is being done by like the family is an economic
Speaker 4: unit instead of like capitalists directly, yes, it's fine. It's
Speaker 4: like no, no, it's not. It's actually not fine, to
Speaker 4: be working people like be a child and then working
Speaker 4: for a living for your family, Like that's not.
Speaker 12: I think there's a difference between. I think there's a
Speaker 12: difference between like child labor and like working in a
Speaker 12: field for your family versus like a chore, you know
Speaker 12: what I mean, Like, yeah, yeah, it's I think I
Speaker 12: think that line gets blurred and people see their kids
Speaker 12: as much more mature than they are and like able
Speaker 12: to like no, I don't understand what you're saying. And
Speaker 12: I think I agree that I.
Speaker 4: Agree, yeah, and it's I don't know it. It sucks.
Speaker 4: This has a lot of sort of knock on effects.
Speaker 4: One of the big knock on effects his house. And
Speaker 4: this is this has been a thing for like the
Speaker 4: entire history of child labor, right, is that like capitalists
Speaker 4: use children as a way to write down wages for
Speaker 4: everyone else. And this is you know, if you ever
Speaker 4: listened to argue to someone about the minimum wage, right,
Speaker 4: one of the big arguments about the minimum wage is
Speaker 4: that like, oh, well, it's like it's like kids get
Speaker 4: the minimum wage, so like it's fine. It's like one,
Speaker 4: it's not like children are not morally worth less and
Speaker 4: their labor is also not worth less than an adult,
Speaker 4: like like if if you're gonna exploin them like this.
Speaker 12: Like, yeah, things are the same price for everybody. It's
Speaker 12: not like less for a child.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not. It's not like like a kid is
Speaker 4: like somehow less of a human being than an adult,
Speaker 4: right like this is this is this sucks, but you
Speaker 4: know it's used to sort of hold down wages directly
Speaker 4: through things like like opposing minimum wage increases. Used to
Speaker 4: hold you know, hold down wages sort of indirectly because
Speaker 4: and this is another reason like capitalists love child labor
Speaker 4: is that children are you know, like they're physically smaller
Speaker 4: than adults, they're easier to control, they have less social power,
Speaker 4: and because you know, because of that, you can pay
Speaker 4: them less. And because of you know, because because people
Speaker 4: just in our society don't fucking like kids, and because
Speaker 4: of that, it's so it's just socially accessible to just
Speaker 4: pay them less.
Speaker 12: All those reasons you listed are absolutely terrifying though, like
Speaker 12: oh they will listen, Oh they're smaller, Oh they're like
Speaker 12: cheap or whatever it is that they're all like terrible
Speaker 12: reasons to justify child labor.
Speaker 4: No, they're not good. They're not good. And yet however, Comma,
Speaker 4: it still persists, it has resisted. It's very old. I'm
Speaker 4: going to read something from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Speaker 4: about this fucking kid who was working in a mine.
Speaker 2: What okay?
Speaker 4: This is from the early nineteen hundreds. One boy touchingly
Speaker 4: recounted his attitude towards facing the day at the mind
Speaker 4: this way. I'll always think of my poor blind father
Speaker 4: and my mother at home, but I won't never play
Speaker 4: with the boys at all, and then the cracker boss
Speaker 4: won't have to beat me like he does the others.
Speaker 4: This boy was nine years old. While stories like these
Speaker 4: produced outrage in many quarters, in the cold producing regions,
Speaker 4: there is no such concern the view that quote the
Speaker 4: little devils like it, as one cold boss put it,
Speaker 4: seemed to be the prevailing sentiments. Child labor wasn't discussed
Speaker 4: these regions because it wasn't seen as an issue. So
Speaker 4: this is like nineteen hundreds of American view, like early
Speaker 4: nieten hundreds of American view on this right, like people,
Speaker 4: my people, I mean capitalists, and also people who are
Speaker 4: incredibly desperate and don't have enough money to get by
Speaker 4: like love child labor. There's you know, it takes a
Speaker 4: long time for like an actual series anti child labor
Speaker 4: campaign to like get started in the US. And of
Speaker 4: course the exact people who you would expect to oppose
Speaker 4: banning child or posed banning child labor. I'm gonna read
Speaker 4: this from the also from the bar laboristics. The chairman
Speaker 4: of the National Association of Manufacturers said about a law
Speaker 4: to abolish child labor. Quote this union, this labor union
Speaker 4: plot against the advancements and happiness of the American boy,
Speaker 4: is a ploy. Is also a ploy against individual industrial
Speaker 4: expansion and prosperity in this country. So this is what
Speaker 4: their thing is. Their argument is that is that children
Speaker 4: don't oppose child labor. This is this is being foisted
Speaker 4: upon them by outside agitated labor unions. And also if
Speaker 4: we're not allowed to use child labor, and if we're
Speaker 4: not allowed to have a nine year old be put
Speaker 4: in a mine, the entire American economy will collapse and
Speaker 4: every manufacturer will go broke.
Speaker 12: It's like making you like being like child labor because patriotism,
Speaker 12: Like that's basically what that means.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's it's it's genu widely terrible. Like I I
Speaker 8: I don't know, it's so ghoulish.
Speaker 4: Like companies today have figured out how to do this
Speaker 4: pr thing of like, oh, we don't condone child labor.
Speaker 4: We crack down on it very seriously. We also hire
Speaker 4: children literally all the time. But it's fine, We're just
Speaker 4: we're gonna like you know, but back in like nine hundreds,
Speaker 4: they hadn't really figured that out yet, and so you know,
Speaker 4: there's there's this sort of reform movement that happens. And
Speaker 4: one of the sort of key moments of this reform
Speaker 4: thing is the Laurence Textile Strike. And this strike is
Speaker 4: probably most famous today for popularizing the slogan we want
Speaker 4: bread and roses too, which is, you know, like wrung
Speaker 4: down the halls of labor and socialist histories, like the
Speaker 4: names of newspapers, songs, poems, and also like being the
Speaker 4: namesake of a truly dogshit DSA caucus. We're not going
Speaker 4: to talk about this strike enormously. Here the short, the
Speaker 4: very very short version of this strike, and this is
Speaker 4: a nineteen twelve strike. The short version of it is
Speaker 4: that there's a law pass in Massachusetts that would have
Speaker 4: reduced like the number of hours that you could have
Speaker 4: women and children work from a blistering fifty six hours
Speaker 4: to a leisurely fifty four hours a week.
Speaker 12: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: This prompted the local capitalist to get so mad that
Speaker 4: they did this like massive like industrial speed up, so
Speaker 4: they forced everyone to work faster and then also doctor
Speaker 4: everyone's paid for it. And this this set off a strike,
Speaker 4: which's relevant for like our stories that the workers at
Speaker 4: this plant. You know, there's there's lots of coverage of
Speaker 4: the fact that like most of these workers are immigrant women,
Speaker 4: like from a bunch of different places. The part of
Speaker 4: it that's not talked about as much is that another
Speaker 4: huge person of the workers we're is fucking.
Speaker 12: Children, and it seems to get glossed over.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, And it's like, I, I, you know, I
Speaker 4: don't know, maybe maybe maybe we should go back to
Speaker 4: talking about that part because it's really important for like
Speaker 4: the stuff we're going to talk about later in this episode.
Speaker 4: That made me so angry, I was like physically punching
Speaker 4: my pillow. What happens next is that the police crackdown
Speaker 4: on the strike. It's more and more violence, and as
Speaker 4: this goes on, the workers at like the adult workers
Speaker 4: at this plant decide, Okay, we're gonna like send the
Speaker 4: children who are both like both the child workers and
Speaker 4: also like just people's kids to New York to keep
Speaker 4: them safe and also to make a political point. But like, hey,
Speaker 4: look they're they're running our children out of town, and
Speaker 4: this goes great. The first way is just go great
Speaker 4: for the children. Like a bunch of people in New
Speaker 4: York show up are like yay, hey, we'll take care
Speaker 4: of these kids. Like and this makes like the officials
Speaker 4: in Lawrence be like, you have to stop this. It
Speaker 4: looks really bad for us. And so they they like
Speaker 4: assembled outside of the next train that was trying to
Speaker 4: leave and tried to stop them. Oh my god, so
Speaker 4: she shouldn't be really brististics Again, When the next group
Speaker 4: of children prepared to depart the train station, they were
Speaker 4: met by police and soldiers. The police refused to let
Speaker 4: them board the trains and launched an attack on the group.
Speaker 4: A seven year old was given a black eye when
Speaker 4: she was picked up and thrown into a patty wagon
Speaker 4: by police. Another witness. Another witness testified to children being
Speaker 4: thrown around like rags.
Speaker 8: Oh my god, like yeah, thin blue live baby, let's
Speaker 8: fucking go.
Speaker 4: This is this is the thing.
Speaker 8: The cops or the thin blue line ordering chaos that
Speaker 8: sevy little girls. Yeah's not gonna throw herself around, right,
Speaker 8: Like someone has to beat up this children.
Speaker 4: And for that there is the few, the proud, the
Speaker 4: American police.
Speaker 12: But they were scared for their lives, you know what
Speaker 12: I mean, Like there're seven.
Speaker 4: Year olds that that seven year old girl looked at
Speaker 4: me really aggressively.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I was scared for my life. That's what they said.
Speaker 4: It's it's you know, it's this is bad. And like
Speaker 4: you know, the the nineteen hundreds police can get away with,
Speaker 4: like nineteen hundred police. We've tked about another episodes, like
Speaker 4: they could get away with just like shooting people right,
Speaker 4: like the like they could show up to like a
Speaker 4: strike and just open fire into the crowd and it
Speaker 4: doesn't do anything throwing around a bunch of children like rags. Finally,
Speaker 4: it turned out was the thing that was bad enough
Speaker 4: that it like started a congressional investigation.
Speaker 12: Wow, I guess that's good and bad.
Speaker 9: But yeah, so.
Speaker 4: There's a call launched this investigation, and there's like this
Speaker 4: fourteen year old immigrant girl named Kamela Tielli testifies about
Speaker 4: how she was working at the mill when a machine
Speaker 4: caught her hair and tore her scalp off. The police
Speaker 4: promptly and this is going and okay, the police promptly
Speaker 4: arrested her dad. Didn't do anything to the company, arrested
Speaker 4: her dad for lying about her age. Oh my god,
Speaker 4: what now this hold that wood in your fucking mind,
Speaker 4: because we're gonna come back to that shit, do I
Speaker 4: have to? Okay? Unfortunately, because it's gonna get so much
Speaker 4: worse when Tyler's episode is over. So the product of
Speaker 4: this is that there starts to be like a really
Speaker 4: mainstream push against child labor, which is, you know, a
Speaker 4: thing you would have thought would have started earlier, because again,
Speaker 4: we're on like century two of child labor in the
Speaker 4: US by this point, right like in the in an
Speaker 4: entity called the United States. But you know, apparently it
Speaker 4: takes this to actually make people go, wait, maybe this
Speaker 4: is bad. And the product of this is you get
Speaker 4: this thing called the Kenning Owen Child Labor Act nineteen sixteen. Now,
Speaker 4: as we sort of talked about earlier, right, the weakness
Speaker 4: of this law is that it, you know, it allows
Speaker 4: kids to be used as laborers, like inside of the
Speaker 4: family unit. So like if you're on a family and
Speaker 4: this is a very very broad category. Right, so it's
Speaker 4: you know, you can you can force your child to
Speaker 4: work as long as like you're their parents, right, you're
Speaker 4: the one making the money off of them, and not
Speaker 4: like a capitalist. But even this, even this is considered
Speaker 4: too strong of a law. And in nineteen eighteen, the
Speaker 4: Supreme Court rules and it's unconstitutional to ban child labor.
Speaker 4: Wait what Yeah, they do it the uiple times, multiple times.
Speaker 4: And we really cannot emphasize this enough on this show.
Speaker 4: The Supreme Court is and has always been just one
Speaker 4: of history's greatest monsters.
Speaker 12: Like, yeah, wait, I was right then, child labor does
Speaker 12: equal patriotism. That's basically what's so.
Speaker 4: Eventually FDR gets into this giant fight with Supreme Court,
Speaker 4: and the first child labor law we get in federal
Speaker 4: child labor law that gets that sticks. I like doesn't
Speaker 4: happen till nineteen thirty eight when FDR threatens to pack
Speaker 4: the court if the Court refuses to fucking stop stop
Speaker 4: saying that that that the state, that the state doesn't
Speaker 4: have the government doesn't have the power to regulate child labor.
Speaker 12: Wow, it's like literally less than a century ago. That is,
Speaker 12: like yesterday, you.
Speaker 4: Know, but but but you know, and this actually works, right,
Speaker 4: but but and this is a real problem. And this
Speaker 4: is a problem that we're gonna we're gonna talk about
Speaker 4: later in this fucking episode. In the modern day, those
Speaker 4: child labor laws don't get enforced. It doesn't that act,
Speaker 4: that actual the nineteen thirty eight Fair Labor Act, like
Speaker 4: basically doesn't actually do shit to like reduce the amount
Speaker 4: of child labor in the country. And here's the thing,
Speaker 4: like even now, even before all the horror show stuff
Speaker 4: that we're about to get to that's happening right now,
Speaker 4: like not kids, like we never actually dealt with child
Speaker 4: labor through like the law. Like we just basically outsourced,
Speaker 4: you know, Okay, we we had to find someone whose
Speaker 4: labor is cheaper than like an American child, and we did.
Speaker 4: It's either like mechanization other immigrants who like don't have
Speaker 4: legal citizenship status, or just outsourcing. And then you know,
Speaker 4: our kids still fucking do work, you know, like are
Speaker 4: like they're like it's very common for ten and twelve
Speaker 4: year olds to work. It's just that it's usually like
Speaker 4: babysitting or like bowing lawns. And we've we've decided that like, no,
Speaker 4: this is actually fine, Like it is actually fine to
Speaker 4: fucking put twelve year olds in a labor market.
Speaker 12: Yeah. I mean I think most people today anyway, I
Speaker 12: think the common person thinks that child labor happens like
Speaker 12: in other countries over there, you know what I mean.
Speaker 12: I don't think they think America is still that archaic
Speaker 12: and stupid.
Speaker 4: But yeah, and oh my god, yeah, so we need
Speaker 4: to take an ad break. And then I'm not even
Speaker 4: gonna make a joke about our sponsors and child labor because,
Speaker 4: like Jesus fucking Christ, this is good about to be
Speaker 4: it so bad? But yeah, here's what ads. Okay, So
Speaker 4: you know, we never really got rid of child labor, right,
Speaker 4: what we did basically was, to some extent, we've been
Speaker 4: able to successfully decrease the severity of it. And you know,
Speaker 4: in the last twenty years, there'd been a decline in
Speaker 4: what economists and I really cannot emphasize enough this is
Speaker 4: the actual phrase they use, is child participation in the
Speaker 4: labor markets.
Speaker 12: Wow, so vanilla of a way to say that.
Speaker 4: So return to present day, present day. The thing that's
Speaker 4: been happening in the last few months is that in
Speaker 4: a five week span in this country. Three children died
Speaker 4: or I, you know, I would actually argue we're killed
Speaker 4: by their employers on the job. Wow, five children in
Speaker 4: three building in five weeks. So sixteen these there, these
Speaker 4: kids were all sixteen. Sixteen year old Duven Thomas Perez
Speaker 4: got killed by machinery, had a conveyor belt. Sixteen year
Speaker 4: old Will Hampton died working at a landfill, and sixteen
Speaker 4: year old Michael Schulz died working for a logging company.
Speaker 4: There have been other child labor deaths recently. Those are
Speaker 4: just sort of the most recent ones. And I want
Speaker 4: to get in to this shit that's been happening because
Speaker 4: in the last really in the last been under like
Speaker 4: eight years, things have gotten you know, like the til
Speaker 4: labor situation in the US was never good, and we'll
Speaker 4: talk about that later, but like things have gotten so
Speaker 4: much worse. There's been almost a factor of four increase
Speaker 4: in twenty fifteen in kids working illegally and hazardous jobs.
Speaker 4: It's actually probably well, it's unclear to me whether the
Speaker 4: numbers are actually worse than that. I don't know, because
Speaker 4: I think almost all of this these districts are being
Speaker 4: undercounted like dramatically because those numbers are just like violations
Speaker 4: that are caught and go into that a bit later.
Speaker 4: But meanwhile, like right now, Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey,
Speaker 4: and Vermont have already passed laws in the last two
Speaker 4: years that weakened restrictions on child labor, and bills are
Speaker 4: appearing like across the country to do fucking more of
Speaker 4: the same stuff, like they want to allow fourteen year
Speaker 4: olds to serve alcohol in bars. It's you know, it is.
Speaker 4: It is truly horrific, and it's being driven by restaurant
Speaker 4: business associations across the country who want to, you know,
Speaker 4: use child labor. And that's bad. The fact that there's
Speaker 4: more stuff that's that you know, is on the horizon
Speaker 4: is not good. But for an enormous number of people,
Speaker 4: regardless of what the law says, the situation is absolutely intolerable.
Speaker 4: Here's from the New York Times. In many parts of
Speaker 4: the country, middle and high school teachers in English language
Speaker 4: larder programs say it is now common for nearly all
Speaker 4: of their students to rush off to law long shift
Speaker 4: after their classes end. They should not be working twelve
Speaker 4: hour days, but it's happening here, said Valeria Lindsay, an
Speaker 4: arts language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami.
Speaker 4: For the past three years, almost every eighth grader in
Speaker 4: her English learner program, about one hundred students, was also
Speaker 4: carrying an adult workload. So there's been a massive surge
Speaker 4: since twenty twenty one in unaccompanied minors entering the US.
Speaker 4: And this has been driven by a lot of sort
Speaker 4: of you know, it's been driven by pandemic driven poverty,
Speaker 4: a massive obseration of violence in a bunch of countries
Speaker 4: in Central America, a lot of which has to do
Speaker 4: with a like you know, the the US back to
Speaker 4: q Andel, Southador about a decade ago. You know, there's
Speaker 4: a lot of stuff going on. It's all very bad,
Speaker 4: and it's been pushing people here. But you know, like
Speaker 4: the situation for immigrants getting into the US is never good,
Speaker 4: but Biden specifically has managed to make it worse because
Speaker 4: Biden's sort of like Biden's immigration policy has been resting
Speaker 4: on getting kids out of shelters as fast as humanly
Speaker 4: possible and just like throwing them at literally anyone who
Speaker 4: claims to be a sponsor, right, And you know, this
Speaker 4: has gone about as well as you would expect it
Speaker 4: would when someone like starts to you know. One of
Speaker 4: the I think was the New York Times was talking
Speaker 4: about this woman who's working. You quit working in a
Speaker 4: health human services like office because they had a quota
Speaker 4: of getting rid of twenty percent of their kids a
Speaker 4: week and if they didn't do it, they would get dated. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they had a quota for we need to get twenty
Speaker 4: percent of the kids out of the shelter every week.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: In the last two years they have lost track of
Speaker 4: a third of the kids they send out, which is
Speaker 4: again in the last two years alone, at least eighty
Speaker 4: five thousand children. They've just lost fucking know who they are.
Speaker 4: Here's some New York Times again. It's getting to be
Speaker 4: a business for some of these sponsors. And yet Pasilaqua,
Speaker 4: who left her job as a caseworker in Central Florida
Speaker 4: last year. Miss Pasilachua said she saw so many children
Speaker 4: put to work and found law enforcement officials so unwilling
Speaker 4: to investigate these cases that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead,
Speaker 4: she settled for explaining to the children that they were
Speaker 4: entitled to lunch breaks in overtime.
Speaker 12: Wow.
Speaker 4: Wow, And you know, I want to make really clear
Speaker 4: what we're talking about here, right, This is not you know,
Speaker 4: like I don't think like you know, whatever your position
Speaker 4: is on like whether like a twelve year old or
Speaker 4: a fourteen year old should be working any job at all.
Speaker 4: We are talking about twelve year olds working on factories.
Speaker 4: We were talking about thirteen year olds cleaning up the
Speaker 4: floors of slaughter the kill floors of slaughterhouses. We are
Speaker 4: talking about like, we are talking about fourteen year olds
Speaker 4: who are like literally making food that like you are eating. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and we're still right, So this is this is happening
Speaker 4: in a large part because there's been a sort of
Speaker 4: like a giant surgeon on a company of miners. Well,
Speaker 4: it turns out a lot of those miners are on
Speaker 4: a company because the Biden administration wouldn't let their fucking
Speaker 4: parents into the country. And this is where this is
Speaker 4: where we need to get into the fucking like the
Speaker 4: whole sort of like sex trafficking panic, right because you know,
Speaker 4: one of the things that that this panic, specifically about
Speaker 4: sex trafficking, has covered up is that most human trafficking
Speaker 4: is not sex trafficking. It's almost all labor trafficking. Almost
Speaker 4: also too strong a word, but it's mostly by volume.
Speaker 4: Most of it is is labor trafficking, which nobody gives
Speaker 4: a single shit about because you know, there's no you
Speaker 4: can't you can't have a moral panic around like you
Speaker 4: can't have a moral panic around labor trafficking like people
Speaker 4: who aren't white. And simultaneously, all the business groups who
Speaker 4: would normally fund these panics like love this shit because
Speaker 4: you know, all all of these capitals ghouls drinking a
Speaker 4: thousand dollars bottles of wine, un they're thirty million dollar yachts.
Speaker 4: All of that shit is paid for by child labor,
Speaker 4: so of course they don't give a shit about it.
Speaker 4: In fact, they love it. And the you know, the
Speaker 4: product of this is you have a bunch of fucking
Speaker 4: twelve year olds who are effectively in debt bondage, working
Speaker 4: twelve hours a fucking day in a slaughterhouse or a
Speaker 4: paper bill. I'm gonna read another thing for the New
Speaker 4: York Times, which is, I don't know, so many of
Speaker 4: these things are so depressing, but like I think this
Speaker 4: is the most depressing thing I've read in this entire
Speaker 4: I don't know, like in ages, I didn't get how
Speaker 4: expensive everything was, says thirteen year old Jose Vasquez, who
Speaker 4: works twelve hour shifts, six days a week at a
Speaker 4: commercial egg farm in Michigan and lives with his teenage sister.
Speaker 4: I'd like to go to school, but then how would
Speaker 4: I pay rent? Thirteen thirteen? You know? And of course
Speaker 4: one of you know, like the everything about this, right
Speaker 4: is these these are people dealing with the fucking American
Speaker 4: housing market. Right. The American housing market is intolerable to
Speaker 4: adults who work full time, who work like full time
Speaker 4: jobs or multiple part time jobs. Right, this is a
Speaker 4: thirteen year old. How the fuck is a thirteen year old?
Speaker 4: It's supposed to be paying rent?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 4: And you know, and every every sort of additional thing
Speaker 4: just makes it worse because the more the more of
Speaker 4: these kids. And one of one of the things is
Speaker 4: happening is these kids are getting funneed into very specific areas,
Speaker 4: right because they're getting they're getting funneled to like specific towns,
Speaker 4: because those specific towns have a bunch of like have
Speaker 4: a bunch of companies who specifically want to hire these
Speaker 4: migrant kids. And when they do that, that fucking continually
Speaker 4: drives out the price of housing. Because all of these
Speaker 4: people are competing for the same like fucking one Vedroe
Speaker 4: apartment for sixteen time dollars a months, right, And so
Speaker 4: every everything just sort of spirals in on each other
Speaker 4: and until you get you get a fucking thirteen year
Speaker 4: old working, working, fucking this is this is nine ninety six.
Speaker 4: This is the fucking like thing I talked about in
Speaker 4: China is at nine am, nine pm, six days a
Speaker 4: week at a fucking egg farm in Michigan. In you know,
Speaker 4: in any just world, people would die for this. In
Speaker 4: this world, and you know, people have fucking died for this.
Speaker 4: It's a bunch of children who are dying on their
Speaker 4: fucking jobs in this world though. The people, you know,
Speaker 4: the people who die for this are children. And the
Speaker 4: Biden administration again is actively aiding fucking human traffickers by
Speaker 4: kicking all these kids out to their families, like they're
Speaker 4: kicking all these people out to just like fucking anyone
Speaker 4: as soon as humanly possible, and not allowing these people's
Speaker 4: families into the country, and then doing literally nothing at
Speaker 4: all to ensure that like the people who are fleeing
Speaker 4: into this country like have a place to live, or
Speaker 4: like any kind of reasonable job or any way to
Speaker 4: support themselves, you know, and we could, we could fucking
Speaker 4: like there are there are individual people in the US
Speaker 4: who benefit from this child labor who you could fucking
Speaker 4: like throw into a box tomorrow, take all of their money,
Speaker 4: and you could fund this entire program or individual people. Right,
Speaker 4: No one will fucking do it. They will let these kids.
Speaker 4: They will let every single one of these kids die
Speaker 4: before a single billionaire has to fucking spend a single
Speaker 4: cent taking care of these kids. Meanwhile, the actual child
Speaker 4: laws that exists in this uh uh you know that
Speaker 4: that exists in the US are completely useless because regulatory
Speaker 4: agencies are taking one of two approaches. Either they do nothing,
Speaker 4: or they spend some time investigating so they can get
Speaker 4: a cut of the child labor money by issuing a
Speaker 4: fine to the company.
Speaker 12: Are you fucking kidding me? It gets worse.
Speaker 4: Now, And and this is the fun part. Merely taking
Speaker 4: a cut of the child labor money or doing nothing,
Speaker 4: those are those might arguably be the best case scenarios.
Speaker 4: Because the other thing that happens, and the Washington Post
Speaker 4: has been talking, you did a very good report about this,
Speaker 4: is the other thing they do is you know, either
Speaker 4: they effectively enter the rev share agreement with the contractors
Speaker 4: who are hiring these fucking human traffickers, or they do raids.
Speaker 4: And the product of these raids is you put is
Speaker 4: they put the families of the kids who are doing
Speaker 4: the child labor in prison or deport them, and then
Speaker 4: they do nothing about the actual you know, so a
Speaker 4: lot of what's happening is happening to contractors, right, so
Speaker 4: they'll find the contractor the parent company. Nothing will fucking happen.
Speaker 4: And the parents of these kids, who also like cannot
Speaker 4: fucking survive and in a lot of cases are doing
Speaker 4: this because literally they do not have enough money to
Speaker 4: pay rent or buy food for their kids. Those people
Speaker 4: are getting fucking sent to prison. Are the only people,
Speaker 4: by the way, again, the only even even though all
Speaker 4: of these companies are systematically hiring children, they are getting
Speaker 4: children killed, the only people going to prison are the
Speaker 4: families of the fucking kids.
Speaker 12: I none of it makes sense, and it makes me
Speaker 12: I mean, I can't really recover from any of this episode,
Speaker 12: and I and I shouldn't. That is the reality, But
Speaker 12: I just I don't know. It's it doesn't feel like
Speaker 12: billionaires uh will ever lose it. I guess capitalism.
Speaker 4: My analysis of this is that any world that allows
Speaker 4: us to happen is intolerable once we've burned to the ground.
Speaker 12: I agree, Oh, I agree. I think we're ready for
Speaker 12: the rapture. But by that I just mean like the
Speaker 12: sun exploding into us and everyone dying.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm going to read a bit more, because you know,
Speaker 4: the horror, the horrors never end. Here's in the Washington Post.
Speaker 4: The Grand Island teens had been hired to scour blood
Speaker 4: and fat from slippery kill floors using high pressure hoses,
Speaker 4: scalding water in a dusty foams and assets. According to
Speaker 4: the Labor Department in federal court records, they sanitize electric knives,
Speaker 4: fat skimmers, and one hundred and ninety pounds saws used
Speaker 4: to split cow carcasses. According to court records, some students,
Speaker 4: and again when they say students, they're not talking about
Speaker 4: college students. They're talking about middle and high school students,
Speaker 4: suffered chemical burns. And we're so sleep deprived after working
Speaker 4: their night shift, they dozed off in classes, according to
Speaker 4: a local prosecutor in court records when asked about the children,
Speaker 4: like the actual kids who are supposed to be you know,
Speaker 4: the ones being saved by these by the fucking Department
Speaker 4: of Labor raids. The Department of Labor pulled a it's
Speaker 4: not my departments, and we're like, yeah, fuck it, we
Speaker 4: don't know what happen to these kids. Hope they're okay,
Speaker 4: have fun. And there's one more part of this Washington
Speaker 4: Post article that I want to read just to sort
Speaker 4: of like, I don't know. I think the big problem
Speaker 4: with all of this coverage is that it's treating this
Speaker 4: problem as if it's new. Yeah, this is sort of
Speaker 4: like a unique product of like, oh, it's a tight
Speaker 4: labor market in the pandemic. It's like, no, no, it's not.
Speaker 4: Here's what the Washington Post. We have never in my
Speaker 4: memory found the types of violations that are being found
Speaker 4: on hazardous occupations that David wheel a professor of social
Speaker 4: policy and management at Brand's University who was a top
Speaker 4: labor official in the Obama administration, it's outrageous. Now, this
Speaker 4: is bullshit, dreaming Wheels Obama administration, there was absolutely a
Speaker 4: shit ton of migrant workers and my specifically migrant children
Speaker 4: workers doing a bunch of incredibly dangerous and hazardous work.
Speaker 4: It's just that they were mostly in agriculture. I mean
Speaker 4: some of them were also in slaughterhouses, right, Like, some
Speaker 4: of the shit was already happening as nobody paid attention
Speaker 4: to it, and it's gotten worse. But again, they were
Speaker 4: also just a shit ton of kids fucking like picking
Speaker 4: tomatoes in like one hundred and ten degrees in California.
Speaker 4: That was always happening. It was always fucking happening. Obama
Speaker 4: specifically made it worse because one of again, one of
Speaker 4: the things about using immigrant child labor is that you like,
Speaker 4: if if you commit a labor violation against one of these,
Speaker 4: against against against again someone someone who is undocumented in
Speaker 4: a child, what the fuck are they gonna do about it? Right?
Speaker 4: They can't go to the government. They go to the government,
Speaker 4: they get deported.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and Obama, Yeah, the employers know that, I mean employers, yeah,
Speaker 12: but like they know that they're control of the situation.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And Obama fucking helped them do it because he deported
Speaker 4: so many people like Obama and this fucking guy probably
Speaker 4: also too directly, was helping literally the worst abuses of
Speaker 4: this system happen over and over and over again. They
Speaker 4: were they were using you know, immigration, one of the earlier.
Speaker 4: Things you can notice about these stories is that if
Speaker 4: you if you look at the locations right, most of
Speaker 4: the places with these not all, but a lot of
Speaker 4: the places where these are happening are very very anti
Speaker 4: immigrants southern border states in the Southern states and border states.
Speaker 4: And the reason or or or places or some places
Speaker 4: in the Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, and a lot
Speaker 4: of the reason why this stuff happens here, right is
Speaker 4: you know, if you're if if you're like, uh, if
Speaker 4: you're a politician, right, and you know and your your
Speaker 4: allies are local business owners, you get you get you
Speaker 4: get to play this sort of like you get you
Speaker 4: get to play both sides of the of the fucking spectrum. Right.
Speaker 4: On the one hand, you get to you get to
Speaker 4: keep hiring a bunch of mon documented immigrants, and on
Speaker 4: the other hand, you whip up this like enormous social
Speaker 4: hystoria about them so that all these people you know,
Speaker 4: can can be more effectively disciplined and crushed. Right, And
Speaker 4: everyone fucking knows how this game works, right, like all
Speaker 4: the all the people with any real power like actually
Speaker 4: understand this. It's it's why, it's why, Like the Justice
Speaker 4: Department or like you know, all of all the immigration
Speaker 4: agencies never go after the companies you hire people, They
Speaker 4: only ever go after the actual workers themselves.
Speaker 12: Just so upsetting because like the most in their mind,
Speaker 12: like the most helpful like useful person is the person
Speaker 12: that has like the most to lose, and they know
Speaker 12: that and use it against them for that reason. Yeah,
Speaker 12: it's just so it's just fucked up in every possible way.
Speaker 12: I don't know. Yeah, it's also just a little silly,
Speaker 12: like you said to just like I think this just happened,
Speaker 12: Like this is something that has clearly been building to this,
Speaker 12: you know what I mean. I think anyone with a
Speaker 12: brain can figure that out, because this kind of intricate
Speaker 12: system doesn't just like pop up in a year or
Speaker 12: two out of nowhere. It's been building it on itself.
Speaker 12: I don't know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like it yeah, Like you're definitely right, it's
Speaker 4: not just like yeah, it's been building for ages like
Speaker 4: it was just it was deliberately designed by those white
Speaker 4: people who like make a bunch of fucking money from it, right,
Speaker 4: they make slightly more money if they fucking force a
Speaker 4: twelve year old to clean the floor of a slaughterhouse.
Speaker 4: Than they do if they force like a twenty two
Speaker 4: year old to do it, and so they do, and.
Speaker 12: The last is so mad.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And the last thing that I want to sort
Speaker 4: of mention about this, right is that a lot of
Speaker 4: these a lot of the states where this stuff is happening,
Speaker 4: a lot of the states that are passing these laws
Speaker 4: are also states that are like simultaneously passing like enormous
Speaker 4: rass of anti trans legislation, like as part of their
Speaker 4: show called like Protect the Kids thing, And you know,
Speaker 4: you can talk about the hypocrisy of it, right, but
Speaker 4: I think the important thing to understand here is that
Speaker 4: Protect the Kids was always racialized, Like they don't give
Speaker 4: a shit about the kids dying and meatpacking plants because
Speaker 4: they aren't white, right, They're immigrant kids who these freaks
Speaker 4: want to fucking kill anyways, And if those kids die
Speaker 4: in the job, nobody gives a shit, right, So.
Speaker 12: It makes it's upsetting also because the majority of these kids,
Speaker 12: I don't want to say majority, I don't want to
Speaker 12: speak for anybody, but I feel like these kids also
Speaker 12: they need to work in their minds, you know what
Speaker 12: I mean, Like they're like, I have no other choice,
Speaker 12: No one's helping me. This is the only option I have,
Speaker 12: and it just becomes this like snaky in its own
Speaker 12: tail bullshit where it's just I don't know, there's no
Speaker 12: there's no good out for them because no one's fucking
Speaker 12: helping them and their family's not there and they need
Speaker 12: to fucking survive. So it's this thing where it's like
Speaker 12: they're consenting to it in a in a sick way,
Speaker 12: like not because they not, because they're consenting to it
Speaker 12: because they want to because they need to to survive.
Speaker 12: And the people that are in power know that and
Speaker 12: take advantage of it. And I don't know, the lack
Speaker 12: of empathy across the board is just inhumane and disgusting
Speaker 12: and I hate that.
Speaker 4: I don't know. That's that's all I have, other than
Speaker 4: a general exportation that like every single part of the
Speaker 4: system that produces this, the entire border regime, the US
Speaker 4: labor regime, the regime, the sort of family regimes and
Speaker 4: this stuff relies on, like all of it needs to
Speaker 4: fucking go, and we need to do it before another
Speaker 4: kid gets fucking killed on a factory floor.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I have a hard time not feeling like it's
Speaker 12: too big and it's I'm too helpless and there's nothing
Speaker 12: to do. But I think stuff just raising awareness and
Speaker 12: not pretending this doesn't happen here or just started happening.
Speaker 12: I think that's a good step in the right direction.
Speaker 12: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think one way to look at it is that
Speaker 4: like there there there have been regimes that are a
Speaker 4: lot more powerful and a lot sort of a lot
Speaker 4: more willing to kill, that have been brought down and
Speaker 4: have collapsed don't exist anymore. So, you know, as as
Speaker 4: as bad as everything looks on any given day, right,
Speaker 4: like people people have done this before, they'll do it again.
Speaker 4: And you know it's at some at some point they're like,
Speaker 4: we will hit a point where it's fucking too much,
Speaker 4: it will cease to be You're right, and our responsibility
Speaker 4: is to get everyone to that point.
Speaker 12: Yeah. I think it takes longer when the like insidiousness
Speaker 12: or the evilness is more subtle. Quote you know what
Speaker 12: I mean, Like when it's not so outright in your face.
Speaker 12: It's almost like it really takes longer to burn out.
Speaker 12: And yeah, we're just in that burning out phase. Yep, well,
Speaker 12: glad I enjoyed you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, this is to make it up here wage
Speaker 4: war against the capitalist system and the people who kill
Speaker 4: children for money.
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Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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