Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I
Speaker 1: wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
Speaker 1: So every episode of the week that just happened is
Speaker 1: here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package
Speaker 1: for you to listen to in a long stretch if
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Speaker 2: Either snow nor rain, nor heat nor darkness can stop
Speaker 2: the Persian Courier Service. Welcome to take it out and
Speaker 2: here a podcast about postal services. Who reasked the question
Speaker 2: can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post Office?
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Mio Wong, and with me to talk
Speaker 2: about what is going on with the post office, what's
Speaker 2: going on with the post office unions, and yeah, how
Speaker 2: things are going downhill for the noble people who carry
Speaker 2: your mail. Is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for
Speaker 2: the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so
Speaker 3: much for giving us the Mailcare dollars, the male carriers
Speaker 3: a platform to stand on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm really I'm really happy to you and I'm
Speaker 2: really happy to get to talk to you about this.
Speaker 2: So I think the place we should start is with
Speaker 2: a bunch of very very weird stuff in how labor
Speaker 2: law works. So, Okay, for like most people in the
Speaker 2: United States, you have a fatally protected right to strike
Speaker 2: if you have a union. That is not true for
Speaker 2: federal employees. That is especially not true for members of
Speaker 2: the Post Office, and that is a real issue because
Speaker 2: the government has decided that, like, yeah, I know, all
Speaker 2: these people who do a vital service are not allowed
Speaker 2: to go on strike and it absolutely sucks. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: I think this gets into sort of where I want
Speaker 2: to start, which is with the sort of history of
Speaker 2: the Nationalssociation Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed
Speaker 2: to strike, and how sort of weird that is. So Yeah,
Speaker 2: I was wondering if you could talk a bit about
Speaker 2: sort of the origins of the union and what effect
Speaker 2: that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people
Speaker 3: on our side of our side of politics to be
Speaker 3: infighting a lot. I shouldn't come to a surprise. So
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty nine, just over fifty years ago, the
Speaker 3: salary for postal workers was under two dollars an hour.
Speaker 3: People were working months straight with no days off, and
Speaker 3: those were close to twelve hour days, and so these
Speaker 3: postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy to go on strike despite it being illegal.
Speaker 3: This conversation is not new. It was illegal then, it's
Speaker 3: illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here.
Speaker 3: I am not advocating for a strike that would also
Speaker 3: be against the law, and we don't advocate for anything
Speaker 3: that's against the law. What I do want to advocate
Speaker 3: for is the right to strike, because being quasi federal,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of limitations in what the NAOC and
Speaker 3: the general postal unions are able to do. In total,
Speaker 3: there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the
Speaker 3: Post Office, some of which are the manager's unions, so
Speaker 3: take that as it is. Yet, on top of not
Speaker 3: being able to strike, none of our money that we
Speaker 3: collect as union does can be used for lobbying purposes,
Speaker 3: so they can't support a single candidate or any of
Speaker 3: the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that
Speaker 3: with the NAOC called the Letter Carrier's Political Fund, to
Speaker 3: try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there.
Speaker 3: And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting
Speaker 3: with our hands tied behind our back. We are unable
Speaker 3: to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid
Speaker 3: of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued
Speaker 3: or labeled as a strike, and they're I think generally
Speaker 3: afraid of public opinion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively
Speaker 2: taken away sort of the two major tools that you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, unions of basically across all political stripes used, right,
Speaker 2: You've taken away the ability to strike. You've taken away
Speaker 2: the ability to use your due's money to influence elections.
Speaker 2: So this immediately means you've taken away the tool that
Speaker 2: sort of Milton unions use, which strikes, and you've taken
Speaker 2: away the tools that more conserative unions use, which is
Speaker 2: buying attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership
Speaker 2: is like, we can't strike, I mean, we can't protest
Speaker 2: because someone might think it's a strike and the public
Speaker 2: might commit us. And it's like that that doesn't seem
Speaker 2: I don't know, it really seems like it's like it's
Speaker 2: not only have you tied both hands behind your back,
Speaker 2: you've like tied them behind your back to your legs
Speaker 2: and you're now rolling around on the ground.
Speaker 3: Right, And to talk about what happens when we push
Speaker 3: past all of these barriers and just do it anyways?
Speaker 3: You know, in March nineteen seventy, two hundred and ten
Speaker 3: thousand postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership of
Speaker 3: the time, And it all started in New York where
Speaker 3: people clocked in and at nine o'clock they just walked out. Soon,
Speaker 3: let's see, it was Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles. The nation
Speaker 3: joined very shortly after. Once it broke the news that
Speaker 3: they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in
Speaker 3: the National Guard to try and deliver mail, and the
Speaker 3: National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's
Speaker 3: an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards.
Speaker 3: It's just the National Guard at our cases where we
Speaker 3: sort the mail. An interviewer is asking him, do you
Speaker 3: think that you're doing a good job. It's just like, no,
Speaker 3: it's just some kid, you know. And don't get me wrong,
Speaker 3: I'm just some guy. But you need the training, you
Speaker 3: need to know what you're doing. And it's not something
Speaker 3: that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's
Speaker 3: a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the
Speaker 3: first time, the mail had stopped, and that won us
Speaker 3: collective bargaining binding arbitration, which is the process that I
Speaker 3: think most people within unions know what they mean, but
Speaker 3: to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties
Speaker 3: cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance, and eventually
Speaker 3: we call in a third party, an arbitrator to decide
Speaker 3: for us, and those are generally lawyers. On top of
Speaker 3: binding arbitration, it gave us a new payscale and set
Speaker 3: in motion. I think over it's got to be hundreds
Speaker 3: of raises between the colas and the new pay table.
Speaker 3: It used to be twenty one years for you to
Speaker 3: reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous, and
Speaker 3: I think it's eight. Yeah, So the Post Office was
Speaker 3: forced to reorganize, and so is the union. This is
Speaker 3: where the American Postal Workers union was born, and from
Speaker 3: this strike we were able to settle on the National Agreement.
Speaker 3: So there's the National Agreement, which is our binding contract.
Speaker 3: There's the JCAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual,
Speaker 3: which is what the Post Office and the union use
Speaker 3: as the interpretation of the contract. That way, we are
Speaker 3: not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean.
Speaker 3: We can just focus on whether or not someone broke
Speaker 3: our agreement. So after this, one would imagine that a
Speaker 3: quasi federal institution would honor the contract that was created,
Speaker 3: argain in good faith, and treat their employees. Isn't that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know it's spoken like someone who has never
Speaker 2: watched a federal comd action.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely not. Before we get into issues that we
Speaker 3: face today, I do want to say that one of
Speaker 3: the main goals of our contract negotiations, or of this
Speaker 3: episode really is to create public knowledge of how our
Speaker 3: contract is not being adhered to. If there was one
Speaker 3: main goal that I'd have in mind, is just to
Speaker 3: have the Post Office honor what they signed and agreed
Speaker 3: to do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, this is something that it's a part of.
Speaker 2: Being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much,
Speaker 2: which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the
Speaker 2: union enforces it, because the moment the contract happens, the
Speaker 2: bosses will attempt to not abide by it.
Speaker 4: And this is what a lot.
Speaker 2: Of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of
Speaker 2: miltancy was. I mean, like, you know, if you look
Speaker 2: at like how the UAW worked in like the sixties, right,
Speaker 2: they'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line,
Speaker 2: and if someone did a contract violation, he would blow
Speaker 2: the whistle and everyone would just sit down and you'd
Speaker 2: immediately have a strike right it, you know, And like
Speaker 2: that level of militants. You don't need to be at
Speaker 2: that level to enforce a contract, but you have to
Speaker 2: actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management
Speaker 2: over it. And if you're not willing to do that,
Speaker 2: your contract is effectively meaningless. And that's a real issue
Speaker 2: with a lot of unions.
Speaker 3: Which just kind of circles back to one of the
Speaker 3: big issues that we face is that if we were
Speaker 3: to do that, that would be a willingful delay of
Speaker 3: mail and we could be charged for it just for
Speaker 3: trying to enforce the contract.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which the thing I think is really interesting. Just
Speaker 2: to circle back to the nineteen seventy strike, is that
Speaker 2: so the strike was illegal, right, Nixon brings in the army,
Speaker 2: in the National Guard to break it, and the strike
Speaker 2: still wins. And not only does it you know, I
Speaker 2: mean you could argue whether it achieved total victory, but
Speaker 2: not a single person who walked off the line got arrested,
Speaker 2: even though all of them technically committed a crime. And
Speaker 2: that's something that like, you know, I think, let me okay,
Speaker 2: the the enforcements of laws depends on sort of the
Speaker 2: the depends on a set of of relative balance of
Speaker 2: forces and whether people care about envoice in the law,
Speaker 2: which is how like for example, like if you pirate
Speaker 2: like seven movies and you get you get three copyright strike,
Speaker 2: you go to prison. But you know, like the sam
Speaker 2: Altman or whatever like AI company can literally steal everything
Speaker 2: on the entire Internet and get.
Speaker 1: Money for it and no one will to prosecute him, right, And.
Speaker 2: So so you know, whether or not something is illegal
Speaker 2: is to a large extent or or the difference between
Speaker 2: something being illegal and you going to prison for it
Speaker 2: largely has to do with a balance of forces involved.
Speaker 2: And that's something that you should keep in mind when
Speaker 2: and this is this is the thing, this is the
Speaker 2: thing that that cuts the other way a lot too write.
Speaker 2: Employers just do illegal actions literally all the time, and
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care.
Speaker 3: Yeah, By and large, labor laws in America are set
Speaker 3: up in favor of the businesses of the employers. If
Speaker 3: you're familiar with workers comp or any of the systems
Speaker 3: involved in the Federal Employees Compensation Act, it's not enforced.
Speaker 3: We have cases that are pending arbitration where someone's been
Speaker 3: run over by a worker has been run over by
Speaker 3: a postal vehicle while they were working. The post office
Speaker 3: effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage
Speaker 3: done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes,
Speaker 3: we will pay this individual, and the post office is
Speaker 3: liable to pay them. But now they are off the rolls,
Speaker 3: which means there's a greater period of time before this
Speaker 3: individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that
Speaker 3: within the post office the managers need to fill out.
Speaker 3: I believe it's an eighty one thirty or you know,
Speaker 3: all these forms have some numbers associated with them that
Speaker 3: they just refuse to fill out and there's no recourse,
Speaker 3: there's no cheeze a path for us to take to
Speaker 3: make them hurry or make them get this individual the
Speaker 3: money that they're owed. And some people this doesn't ruin
Speaker 3: their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever.
Speaker 3: But I imagine for many many working Americans that's that's their
Speaker 3: livelihood immediately down the drain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a
Speaker 2: little bit because unfortunately my boss is boss's boss's livelihood
Speaker 2: depends on these ads. Buying technically does too, but like
Speaker 2: lord knows, I don't see that money.
Speaker 4: So ads we are back, And yeah, I guess that.
Speaker 2: Leads into you the next place you want to go to,
Speaker 2: which is talking about what are the specific grievances today
Speaker 2: that y'all are dealing with and the union is not
Speaker 2: dealing with.
Speaker 3: Right, So, in terms of grievances within the union and
Speaker 3: a negotiation, a lot of it does have to do
Speaker 3: with the aforementioned workers' compensation. Employees are just simply not
Speaker 3: getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union
Speaker 3: and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured
Speaker 3: out this really effective strategy if they don't settle on
Speaker 3: the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration.
Speaker 3: Then we have a massive backlog of cases appending arbitration,
Speaker 3: which could be scheduled years out. I think if you
Speaker 3: do the math for our current rate of handling these
Speaker 3: cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around
Speaker 3: fifteen years to get through the long.
Speaker 2: Christ not assuming there's no new ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that's like you know when you go to
Speaker 3: a restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that
Speaker 3: says it's a five hour wait from this point. That's
Speaker 3: that point that we're at. Anything beyond today will be
Speaker 3: further along Jesus Christ. And so I think that is
Speaker 3: just a major problem for us clearly. Yeah, management just
Speaker 3: not complying with any of this, and it makes it
Speaker 3: so that our employees have to wait. Something I do
Speaker 3: want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure
Speaker 3: if we can, is just what's going on with the
Speaker 3: post Office and the Postmaster General. Yeah, all right, So
Speaker 3: I want to go at this from the customer perspective first,
Speaker 3: because I think that's the best way to relate to people.
Speaker 3: I think, by and large, people are losing faith in
Speaker 3: the Post Office. Either you have no idea what's going on,
Speaker 3: or you don't care, and that's fine, I'd say. Before
Speaker 3: I joined, I didn't think of them at all, and
Speaker 3: you know, they're just the guy that shows up at
Speaker 3: my house every morning. A lot of people seem to
Speaker 3: think that the post Office is going out of business,
Speaker 3: and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or
Speaker 3: lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service
Speaker 3: that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service,
Speaker 3: and it's easy to point out those issues from the
Speaker 3: outside and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel
Speaker 3: like we're doing a disservice to our our customers, and
Speaker 3: I'm not really not trying to attack them when I
Speaker 3: say that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings
Speaker 3: of the Post Office. I do directly want to attack
Speaker 3: Congress and say that, yeah, when they post They had
Speaker 3: pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement
Speaker 3: Act in two thousand and six, which required the Post
Speaker 3: Office to prefund one hundred percent of its retiree health
Speaker 3: benefits and liabilities seventy five years into the future. What
Speaker 3: so overnight the post Office was handed a five point
Speaker 3: five billion dollar burden, and that's where the whole I
Speaker 3: don't know if you remember. I certainly wasn't conscious of
Speaker 3: it at the time, to save our post office stickers
Speaker 3: that were being sold and trying to fund the post
Speaker 3: Office office. And really that's where the rhetoric of the
Speaker 3: post Office is going under comes from. The other thing
Speaker 3: I want to point out is that we are a
Speaker 3: quasi federal We actually accept nothing from tax payer monies.
Speaker 3: It says it's a service, but really the post Office
Speaker 3: has ran as a business. We don't even get subsidized
Speaker 3: because they don't need to. My local union president loves
Speaker 3: to remind us that the post Office is a business
Speaker 3: that has a revenue of seventy eight point two billion dollars,
Speaker 3: and he'll want me to stress that the point two
Speaker 3: is extremely important because point two of a billion is
Speaker 3: twenty million. They are not in jeopardy. We are not
Speaker 3: going out of business. And the Postmaster General, Louis de Joy,
Speaker 3: he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just
Speaker 3: underneath the President of the United States.
Speaker 4: He's played Ward and Clarence Thomas.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was like three hundred eighty thousand
Speaker 3: a year or something like that. The Joy was appointed
Speaker 3: by Donald Trump. I'm assuming this is kind of a
Speaker 3: baseless assumption, So forgive me. I'm not doing my research here,
Speaker 3: but I'm assuming that they're buddies because d Joy has
Speaker 3: no idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wasn't Wasn't she the guy that Trump brought in,
Speaker 2: like specifically to destroy the post office as part of
Speaker 2: the campaign to steal the election.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's been a lot about the Joy defrauding
Speaker 3: the election process. I wasn't part of the post office
Speaker 3: to see the inner workings of it, so it's kind
Speaker 3: of hard for me to say if it was hearsay
Speaker 3: or not, but I believe it because the Joy has
Speaker 3: no idea how to run a post office. He's never
Speaker 3: been involved with this kind of business. He is, in
Speaker 3: the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman,
Speaker 3: and is delivering for America. Plan could really be redefined
Speaker 3: as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing
Speaker 3: is their consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing
Speaker 3: post offices in order to save money and shoving three
Speaker 3: installations into one building. That's why the lines are getting longer.
Speaker 3: It also means that from dispatch the employees have to
Speaker 3: drive an extra mile or two into their working zone,
Speaker 3: which of course means that we're going to go into
Speaker 3: overtime and this just throws a wrench in the mail
Speaker 3: handling process. He has single handedly made the service a
Speaker 3: lot more reliable, and I do think that you're right. Irreliable, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 3: more unreliable, and I do think that you're right. He
Speaker 3: wants to destroy the post office not only for the election,
Speaker 3: but to the point where it makes more sense to
Speaker 3: go private. Now is the time to point out that
Speaker 3: the joy is a major shareholder in FedEx, which is
Speaker 3: which is a subcontractor for the USPS, and he has
Speaker 3: millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in
Speaker 3: the game.
Speaker 2: I love open corruption so great.
Speaker 3: And so on the local level on what's going on
Speaker 3: in my office. I actually have one of the better
Speaker 3: offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been
Speaker 3: sent to other offices and I have experience firsthand the
Speaker 3: bullying and harassment from management pushing us to go faster.
Speaker 3: But even at one of the better offices, I work
Speaker 3: sixty hour weeks. I don't have set days off, it's
Speaker 3: not even a rotation. When I get home, I'm spent.
Speaker 3: And my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes each way, and I really can't imagine driving
Speaker 3: two hours after an eleven hour shift just to eat
Speaker 3: and come back and do it again.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's just on. That's safe, Like that's see.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it would be illegal, but since it's in
Speaker 3: the contract, it's not illegal.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the
Speaker 3: post office, well, I guess I should explain. When you
Speaker 3: join as a letter carrier, the first ninety days, they
Speaker 3: can fire you for any reason, and you're something called
Speaker 3: either a CCA or a PTF, and that means part
Speaker 3: time flexible or a city carrier assistant. You are only
Speaker 3: guaranteed four hours for showing up for work. You're not
Speaker 3: guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you,
Speaker 3: they just will schedule schedule you once a week for
Speaker 3: an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if
Speaker 3: you're in a busy place, then that just means that
Speaker 3: they're going to work you to death. So when you
Speaker 3: join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family.
Speaker 3: You lose time with your loved ones and your friends.
Speaker 3: And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved
Speaker 3: ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk
Speaker 3: about it that I get asked the same thing, why
Speaker 3: don't you quit?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And the truth is this job is awesome. I love it,
Speaker 3: I want to work it. I just want it to
Speaker 3: make sense and be livable. And I'm not gonna give
Speaker 3: up just because we haven't reached the point where it is.
Speaker 3: You know, if you walk away now, it doesn't get better.
Speaker 3: I'm sure someone would take my place. But it helps
Speaker 3: to have people stick around.
Speaker 2: That's actually a pretty comedy. I mean, this is one
Speaker 2: of the Amazon strategy right for their warehouses. They intentionally
Speaker 2: want to cycle through people because the more the more
Speaker 2: new people you have continuously cycling through, the less organized
Speaker 2: and the less sort of like must knowledge, they have
Speaker 2: less you have to pay them, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. And so if you can just cause high
Speaker 2: turnover rates on purpose, that's that's the thing that a
Speaker 2: lot of these sort of business goule like Nightmare or
Speaker 2: factory people love in their workforces and makes everyone else's
Speaker 2: life just a living hell. But you know they're getting
Speaker 2: They're still getting paid.
Speaker 3: Right, And so I try and hold that in mind.
Speaker 3: When I've been overworked and I'm at the end of
Speaker 3: one of my major shifts because I had to carry
Speaker 3: part of another route because someone else called out, I
Speaker 3: really have to stop and think to myself that this
Speaker 3: other person who called out is just as exhausted as
Speaker 3: I am is probably going to get a letter of
Speaker 3: warning for calling out. That's another issue. They don't want
Speaker 3: you to use your leave.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've
Speaker 3: and doing that a lot at my office as well.
Speaker 3: It reminds me a lot are issues of your recent episode.
Speaker 3: I think it was you about the nurses union the
Speaker 3: shift change episode. Their members are dealing with a lot
Speaker 3: of the same things, where the unions are so big
Speaker 3: that they become detached from the membership and we are
Speaker 3: finding out afterwards what our bargaining agreements are, what our
Speaker 3: strategy was. Everything's after the contract has been signed, and
Speaker 3: that's just not how unions were meant to be. They're
Speaker 3: meant to be from the bottom up, by the workers,
Speaker 3: for the workers. But it really does feel like it's
Speaker 3: like national is its own entity, and so I guess
Speaker 3: that would bring us to talking about the union and
Speaker 3: the future of the Union.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's get into that.
Speaker 3: So I got to be careful here because Brian renfro Oh,
Speaker 3: he's our national leader of the Union. He's been struggling
Speaker 3: with problems in his personal life, and I don't feel
Speaker 3: like I'm outsteeing him as its public knowledge, at least
Speaker 3: within the Post office. It's public knowledge. He's dealing with
Speaker 3: substance abuse, with alcoholism, and that's something that hits very
Speaker 3: close to home within my family, and I really don't
Speaker 3: want to demonize that he's struggling. But what I do
Speaker 3: want to say is when you're going through something like
Speaker 3: that and you've accepted a position on the national level
Speaker 3: like this, you really need to either step down or
Speaker 3: appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiations
Speaker 3: started over a year ago, he kind of went missing
Speaker 3: and it was later revealed that he was inpatient, which
Speaker 3: is fine, get your help, but there was nothing left,
Speaker 3: no notes left for us to strategize with, and our
Speaker 3: membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the
Speaker 3: leadership has gone missing. It's it's very dark times for
Speaker 3: the NLC.
Speaker 2: Well, and that that's also just sort of like an
Speaker 2: organizational problem, right, like if if you're if your organization
Speaker 2: is set up in such a way that a small
Speaker 2: number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no
Speaker 2: one has any idea what's going on. That's just a
Speaker 2: bad way to run something. And especially it's a terrible
Speaker 2: way to run a union because the union's you know,
Speaker 2: power is supposed to be from from its organization and
Speaker 2: from the collective power of a large, large, organized group
Speaker 2: of people who can make decisions for themselves. And if
Speaker 2: it's if that's not happening and you get to the
Speaker 2: point where these decisions are being made by a very
Speaker 2: small number of people who can just sort of vanish,
Speaker 2: like that's that for whatever, and you know, literally whatever
Speaker 2: reason that is, right, it could just be you get sick.
Speaker 2: It could just be like what happens. That's just a
Speaker 2: terrible way to organize things. And I guess it's also
Speaker 2: like I want to make take it like like like
Speaker 2: a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing
Speaker 2: any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out
Speaker 2: of a job. Like you're like, ideally, if you were
Speaker 2: in an organization, it should be able to function without you.
Speaker 2: There should Not having an indispensable person is a fiasco.
Speaker 4: Don't do that.
Speaker 2: This is true of both like your tiny local mutual
Speaker 2: aid group as much as is true of your giant
Speaker 2: national union. So that this this has been this has
Speaker 2: been mea talking about the indispensable person don't have.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, that's kind of the funny thing about joining
Speaker 3: a union from an anarchist perspective. It gets a little
Speaker 3: funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that
Speaker 3: we know we are going to face when you have
Speaker 3: a system that's built like a pyramid. Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 3: And so I was saying, we're an dark times, but
Speaker 3: there's such a bright future that I can see for
Speaker 3: us Branch nine of the NALC, and namely this individual
Speaker 3: Tyler Vasser, who when I had originally posted on Reddit
Speaker 3: asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would
Speaker 3: be great for this interview. His branch, Branch nine has
Speaker 3: passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for
Speaker 3: contract negotiations, and I hope this sweeps the nation. We're
Speaker 3: not allowed to strike as I've mentioned, and our leadership
Speaker 3: is so shy when it when it comes to activism
Speaker 3: or mobilization of the workforce. They don't want to touch
Speaker 3: the topic. The closest thing we have to it is
Speaker 3: a rally that is Enough is Enough that's being held
Speaker 3: in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to
Speaker 3: to postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed,
Speaker 3: but even then we're missing a large chunk of the
Speaker 3: danger that is posed to postal workers, because yes, we're
Speaker 3: being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied
Speaker 3: and harassed inside of our work places by management, by
Speaker 3: the people who are supposed to empower us to do
Speaker 3: the job effectively. And so they don't want to touch
Speaker 3: the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation.
Speaker 3: But to me, pushing for the right to strike is
Speaker 3: a I'm not sure how to word this. It is
Speaker 3: such an important part of the nilc's identity, the postal
Speaker 3: strike of nineteen seventy, that it seems silly to ignore
Speaker 3: it today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for
Speaker 3: the future, I think that activism is our key to success.
Speaker 3: I think that the old heads that lead our union
Speaker 3: come from a time where unions were frowned upon, where
Speaker 3: activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion
Speaker 3: will be largely in our favor, and that public opinion
Speaker 3: can really put pressure on the legislative branch on Congress,
Speaker 3: and if we are transparent about our union, what we're
Speaker 3: asking for the issues that we're facing. I think that
Speaker 3: the public would be on our side if the people
Speaker 3: in America knew that management was falsifying time records or
Speaker 3: training records and interfering with workers' comps, claim and back pay,
Speaker 3: or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed
Speaker 3: to pay, that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions big or small,
Speaker 3: that they would care, and that they would join us
Speaker 3: in the streets. And major thing that happened I think
Speaker 3: it was last year in the summer, we had a
Speaker 3: letter carrier. His name is Eugene Gates, who died in
Speaker 3: the Texas heat Jesus because management told him not to
Speaker 3: take as many breaks or he would face discipline. She's
Speaker 3: pressures that we face when when you're threatened that you
Speaker 3: will lose your job if you don't listen to us
Speaker 3: you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion. And further, yeah,
Speaker 3: I think that the post Office killed mister Gates and
Speaker 3: there wasn't as much outcry or or anger behind the movement.
Speaker 3: I often find myself thinking that while I don't have
Speaker 3: the answers, I do know that we need to care more. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's hard to care when when you're exhausted. I
Speaker 3: acknowledge that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I think there's two things about that. One, I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't and this is something I've gotten to with
Speaker 2: a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done
Speaker 2: on this show, is that I think a lot of
Speaker 2: very very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably
Speaker 2: appalling that people just don't know about. And I think
Speaker 2: people are very sympathetic too, once they actually understand what's
Speaker 2: happening in the kind of just horror show stuff that's
Speaker 2: happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think
Speaker 2: that's sort of important in terms of getting people to
Speaker 2: you know, like trying to actually do like mass mobilizations
Speaker 2: even just to get people to understand what's going on,
Speaker 2: is that I think a lot of people who are
Speaker 2: facing these kinds of conditions, think that they're alone and
Speaker 2: think that it's just something that happens to them, or
Speaker 2: they've been in them for so long they think that
Speaker 2: it's sort of normal. And having a bunch of people
Speaker 2: go no, like a happens and be it shouldn't happen
Speaker 2: is extraordinarily powerful because you know like that that feeling
Speaker 2: of isolation is is the thing that all of that
Speaker 2: you know, you're that your bosses depend on to make
Speaker 2: sure that you know you you just keep going along
Speaker 2: with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific,
Speaker 2: And I think any strategy that's not based on that
Speaker 2: is just not going to go anywhere.
Speaker 3: Right And one of the strategies that I really want
Speaker 3: to push forward as I grow within the union. And
Speaker 3: don't get me wrong, I want to stay as steward.
Speaker 3: I think that educating our members and uh being part
Speaker 3: of the workforce is my place in the union. But
Speaker 3: what I want to push is for union solidarity. I
Speaker 3: want the NLC to hire organizers, specifically organizers to try
Speaker 3: and get the public mobilized and as well as the
Speaker 3: work so that we can put pressure on Congress so
Speaker 3: that we can show our bargaining teams that we support
Speaker 3: them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and
Speaker 3: reaching out to the other movements in a time where
Speaker 3: union support is higher than ever is such a clear
Speaker 3: path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason because
Speaker 3: people are afraid to speak out against the Post Office.
Speaker 3: And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen
Speaker 3: with our current contract, but I do know that the
Speaker 3: fight never ends, and that while we stand on the
Speaker 3: shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these
Speaker 3: giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively
Speaker 3: new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the
Speaker 3: footsteps of some warriors. The brand president I mentioned, Ken Lurch,
Speaker 3: has given me so much support and education and has
Speaker 3: done so much hard work over the years that I
Speaker 3: don't have to reinvent the wheel, none of us do.
Speaker 3: We just have to continue the struggle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think I think that's a great place
Speaker 2: to end. You unless you have anything else that you
Speaker 2: want to make sure we get.
Speaker 3: To no, nothing, nothing on this topic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So how can how can people support you and
Speaker 2: postal workers just in general? If there's specific place you
Speaker 2: want them to go.
Speaker 3: In general, there is on the na LC site, which
Speaker 3: is just an AOC dot com, there is a section
Speaker 3: where you put in your address and it it'll give
Speaker 3: you the email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives
Speaker 3: so that you can make some noise. Again, we're amazingly
Speaker 3: lim in what we can do, so there's not really
Speaker 3: anything that you can donate to to help us, including
Speaker 3: the letter carrier political fund. But yeah, just pay attention
Speaker 3: to us. Maybe leave a bottle of water out in
Speaker 3: your front door, says for the postal worker. You know,
Speaker 3: there's nothing better that you can do than talking about it.
Speaker 3: Word of mouth is the best advertisement.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, we will, we will. We will put that
Speaker 2: in the show notes. Help you all win. And I
Speaker 2: don't I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in
Speaker 2: my life, but thank you for your service.
Speaker 3: I appreciate that. Yeah. I never imagined myself to become
Speaker 3: a federal employee, and it is just as bad as
Speaker 3: I imagined. Yeah, so I do want to shout out
Speaker 3: Actually it's a little meta, I guess, but I do
Speaker 3: want to shout out some important episodes of it could
Speaker 3: happen here. That hit me very closely if I can. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: go for it, because a lot of the people listening
Speaker 3: will be postal workers that have been pointed in this direction.
Speaker 3: Please look at the Mayan mar episodes, the Free Burmer,
Speaker 3: the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that me.
Speaker 3: I believe you've done the same work as James with
Speaker 3: border kindness. Those are two topics that I think y'all
Speaker 3: hit really well and that really touched me as a person.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I'll relisten to those episodes when I'm having a
Speaker 3: hard day just to remind myself that it's all the same.
Speaker 3: It's all the same fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it absolutely is, And I mean I think that's
Speaker 2: that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's both the
Speaker 2: beauty and the horror of this world is that on
Speaker 2: the one hand, all of us are being crushed by
Speaker 2: the same sets of forces. But on the other hand,
Speaker 2: it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also
Speaker 2: a part of the larger fight forget all.
Speaker 4: Of us free.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, So just fight the burnout and stay in
Speaker 3: the fight.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is been nicked up here. Go make trouble
Speaker 2: for people who suck.
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here, and this is it could happen here,
Speaker 1: and boy, it sure is now. I don't know where
Speaker 1: we go from this point, and neither does anyone else.
Speaker 1: On the moment before I wrote this, I woke up,
Speaker 1: groggy from my chemically assisted sleep to a barrage of horror.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump signing Anti Tran's legislation into law, Elon Musk
Speaker 1: giving a double fascist salute, Donald Trump's saluting and dancing
Speaker 1: with the village people, proud boys tramping through the streets
Speaker 1: of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity. The
Speaker 1: dark days have come again because they never really left.
Speaker 1: All the battles and street fighting and organizing from twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen to twenty twenty brought us four years of badly
Speaker 1: negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated rot. It's a
Speaker 1: term I see a lot these days. My colleague and
Speaker 1: friend ed Zetron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs
Speaker 1: continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus,
Speaker 1: a member of the Canadian Parliament, used the term rage
Speaker 1: rot to refer to now President Trump's Christmas Day message
Speaker 1: suggesting Canada should become the fifty first State. Over the
Speaker 1: last year, I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay,
Speaker 1: the rot plaguing democracy, and the deep rot at the
Speaker 1: heart of our political system. One thing I have done
Speaker 1: the last four years is learn how to efficiently process
Speaker 1: the carcasses of wild animals. So I hunt to raise
Speaker 1: and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side
Speaker 1: of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so
Speaker 1: perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so
Speaker 1: satisfying to me. But it's also changed the way I
Speaker 1: understand the word rot. Rot starts from the bone. If
Speaker 1: you look at the back leg of an animal that's
Speaker 1: been hit by a truck, you'll see it spreading a
Speaker 1: deep black bruise from the ball and socket joint out.
Speaker 1: If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the
Speaker 1: key is to remove those limbs from the body and
Speaker 1: then the meat from the bone sooner rather than later.
Speaker 1: When I think of rot and how to arrest it,
Speaker 1: I think of dismemberment. This seems to be the one
Speaker 1: thing that almost every political person in the country agrees
Speaker 1: with the United States as it is, must be dismembered, disassembled,
Speaker 1: sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more
Speaker 1: palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party failed primarily because they refuse to start cutting.
Speaker 1: Their successors will not make the same mistake on the
Speaker 1: opposing side of the isle. Today, I see a lot
Speaker 1: of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to
Speaker 1: be cutting, and how much better they'd use it if
Speaker 1: it passed into their hands. That doesn't help any of
Speaker 1: us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes
Speaker 1: destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely
Speaker 1: be criminalized in the near future. Homeless Americans trying not
Speaker 1: to freeze to death at knight may soon find themselves arrested,
Speaker 1: forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies.
Speaker 1: Neo Nazi's cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes
Speaker 1: fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity. The
Speaker 1: knife is so far away from our hands, I find
Speaker 1: myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought
Speaker 1: to be used. Where does that leave us, though? Is
Speaker 1: there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen
Speaker 1: to the jackals? Howling outside our doors. I have an
Speaker 1: answer to this question. Yes, now is the time to
Speaker 1: try to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now
Speaker 1: is the time to experiment. Since the time of the
Speaker 1: Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred
Speaker 1: to as the American Experiment. One could see the very
Speaker 1: terms narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism. But
Speaker 1: I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned.
Speaker 1: This country is and always has been a test tube
Speaker 1: for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought
Speaker 1: to run. American civilization's only core value is throw shit
Speaker 1: at the wall and see what sticks. That also happens
Speaker 1: to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism.
Speaker 1: There's a scientific paper I bring up often, the evolution
Speaker 1: of overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so
Speaker 1: often badly overestimate their own abilities. The authors pondered quote
Speaker 1: infidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions.
Speaker 1: So it remains a puzzle how such a false belief
Speaker 1: could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing
Speaker 1: strategies that include accurate unbiased beliefs now. The conclusion these
Speaker 1: researchers came to was that when significant resources are contested
Speaker 1: between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to
Speaker 1: take said resources, even if it is not the strongest,
Speaker 1: tends to succeed, often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial.
Speaker 1: This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements
Speaker 1: continue to arise and improbably take power. Put simply, they
Speaker 1: always go for it. January sixth provides us with a
Speaker 1: fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity,
Speaker 1: mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who four
Speaker 1: years later find themselves with ultimate power. They didn't win
Speaker 1: because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying,
Speaker 1: and the people who should have stopped them feared bad press,
Speaker 1: the pushback of looking unfair, and so stood back well.
Speaker 1: The fascists made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media,
Speaker 1: local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration
Speaker 1: and now, well, we're here, and we'll continue to talk
Speaker 1: about here after these ads we're back. The coming days
Speaker 1: will be ugly. Yet I feel it's my job to
Speaker 1: remind you that bad as this is We are not
Speaker 1: ym our Germany, and this is not nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle hardened trench fighters. They're
Speaker 1: elon musk and a coterie of half enthusiastic, half frightened
Speaker 1: billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you
Speaker 1: rate your classmates tits. Their foot soldiers are used car
Speaker 1: salesmen from Encino, not Freikorps. The United States is not
Speaker 1: starving to death crippled by war. It's irritated anxious because
Speaker 1: it's working people have been robbed blind by the same
Speaker 1: billionaires standing behind Trump now. The one thing we do
Speaker 1: have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now
Speaker 1: find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated
Speaker 1: to them, not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice,
Speaker 1: and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter
Speaker 1: that last one, the feeling that nothing matters. The system
Speaker 1: as fucked, there's no point in engaging or organizing. That
Speaker 1: is the most powerful weapon they have right now, because
Speaker 1: that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them,
Speaker 1: from interrupting as they reach out yet again to take
Speaker 1: something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.
Speaker 1: In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something, anything,
Speaker 1: can be intense, and when we're swept up in that mood,
Speaker 1: the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best,
Speaker 1: the things we've done before, the marches and chants and
Speaker 1: poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all
Speaker 1: century long. Going back to those tactics without iteration or
Speaker 1: acknowledgment of their limitations and failures is a road to
Speaker 1: more failure. I've been to a lot of protests, starting
Speaker 1: at Zuccati Park in twenty eleven an ending last year
Speaker 1: in Chicago at the dn C. One of the most
Speaker 1: dispeariting moments of my life was listening to young anti
Speaker 1: genocide activistsbow to shut down the DNC to quote make
Speaker 1: it great like sixty eight. This was a reference to
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Mass protests were ignited
Speaker 1: there when the favorite anti war candidate, Eugene McCarthy was
Speaker 1: ratfucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor of Vice President
Speaker 1: Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas
Speaker 1: and truncheons. Testers chanted the whole world is watching, and
Speaker 1: it's been a chant ever since. The world may have
Speaker 1: been watching then, but the war went on. Nixon won election,
Speaker 1: then reelection, and then finally pulled US troops out of
Speaker 1: Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have
Speaker 1: ended several Third reips. In twenty twenty four, a new
Speaker 1: batch of anti war protesters chanted the whole world is watching,
Speaker 1: and I can say unequivocally it was not. The Only
Speaker 1: people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course
Speaker 1: some people on Twitter. The police, as they kettled Maston
Speaker 1: arrested members of the crowd barely seemed to care. The
Speaker 1: DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee.
Speaker 1: There wasn't even a real anti war candidate for party
Speaker 1: insiders to rat fuck in her favor. Garrison Davis, my
Speaker 1: colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC
Speaker 1: had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart
Speaker 1: a month earlier. He was right on the stage floor.
Speaker 1: All the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and
Speaker 1: build goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led
Speaker 1: us to the Trump era. In the first place, and
Speaker 1: doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and
Speaker 1: slept in front of the convention center to protest the
Speaker 1: genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the streets, a lot of
Speaker 1: very nice, earnest people alongside a handful of grifters did
Speaker 1: the only thing they could think of doing after months
Speaker 1: of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted.
Speaker 1: The police, and the city largely let them because they
Speaker 1: knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing.
Speaker 1: I'd felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not
Speaker 1: because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking,
Speaker 1: an upset, an experiment, or at least it seemed that way.
Speaker 1: At first. The DNC made it clear that Biden's advisors
Speaker 1: and consiglieris, the powers behind the throne, still ran the
Speaker 1: show and would not allow any real change. The rot
Speaker 1: had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It
Speaker 1: was my accurate belief in twenty twenty that the Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: broken as it was, had the numbers in the organizational
Speaker 1: capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time.
Speaker 1: It was my inaccurate belief in twenty twenty four that
Speaker 1: this might still be the case. I had a hope
Speaker 1: because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We
Speaker 1: lean on hope when we have no ideas. To brace
Speaker 1: ourselves against hope, as George Miller reminded, us, is a mistake.
Speaker 1: If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And
Speaker 1: that's where we are now going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent,
Speaker 1: regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shogoths
Speaker 1: of capital running things, are going crazy because we returned
Speaker 1: to normal, decent politician to office. He kept the economy
Speaker 1: humming along, and everyone still hated him. Us are crazy
Speaker 1: for a different reason. In twenty twenty, this country saw
Speaker 1: the largest sustained uprising of its modern history, and nothing
Speaker 1: fundamentally changed in its aftermath. The oligarchs who control social
Speaker 1: media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms
Speaker 1: to ensure no similar movement whatever gain that kind of
Speaker 1: steam again. Their efforts have largely been successful, and yet
Speaker 1: many organizers, be they progressive, social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever,
Speaker 1: they're all still stuck in the same loops behind each
Speaker 1: march to nowhere, and tired chant is an equally tired hope.
Speaker 1: The social Democrats dream of a giant, continent sized Denmark
Speaker 1: with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and
Speaker 1: a bevy of other lovely things. Both political parties will
Speaker 1: fight tooth and nail to prevent. The communists dream of
Speaker 1: a new October Revolution, but this one will work and
Speaker 1: not just create a new kind of dictatorship that ages
Speaker 1: and dies inside the space of a single human lifetime.
Speaker 1: Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws
Speaker 1: and the logic and futility of the hopes of the
Speaker 1: two previous groups, but they are just as bereft of
Speaker 1: ideas for how to stop what's coming. Some tendencies dream
Speaker 1: of collapse, maybe even accelerationism, an end to industrial society,
Speaker 1: and then either living in the woods eating berries, or
Speaker 1: some kind of solar punk day dream wildflowers spouting from rubble.
Speaker 1: I sympathize, but try offering either future to a single
Speaker 1: mom who can't afford her five year old's insulin and
Speaker 1: see how excited she gets. On the other side of
Speaker 1: the anarchist coin, you've got the helpers the people who
Speaker 1: cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem,
Speaker 1: but they do know how to provide free eye exams
Speaker 1: to homeless people once a month, or do water drops
Speaker 1: down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration,
Speaker 1: or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze
Speaker 1: a forest and build a police training facility. If you
Speaker 1: are where we all are right now, ideas staring down
Speaker 1: the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know.
Speaker 1: Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing,
Speaker 1: but at least what they've been doing helps people. The
Speaker 1: larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive,
Speaker 1: will be something new, something we haven't tried yet. I
Speaker 1: feel very confident that they won't take the form of
Speaker 1: another march, or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the
Speaker 1: same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever. Sean Fain,
Speaker 1: chief of the United Autoworkers' Union, has called for a
Speaker 1: general strike in twenty twenty eight, and so far that
Speaker 1: is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone
Speaker 1: that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.
Speaker 1: It is audacious, and I recommend reading what Sean's laid
Speaker 1: out about it. But half of why I support the
Speaker 1: idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to
Speaker 1: where they are right now in this country by being bold, as.
Speaker 4: I laid out earlier.
Speaker 1: Fascists win because they try, and this is something we
Speaker 1: need to copy. Shit can be different, but not unless
Speaker 1: you're willing to try different shit. Many pundits and columnists
Speaker 1: were shocked and horrified by the mass of an instant
Speaker 1: support for Luigim Mangioni when he assassinated the CEO of
Speaker 1: United Healthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and
Speaker 1: the actually sweating oligarchs characterize this as evidence of bloodthirstiness.
Speaker 1: Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Luigi
Speaker 1: as proof that the body politic did indeed have energy
Speaker 1: for an uprising. I saw something a bit different, more
Speaker 1: than the actual killing itself. I think people were excited
Speaker 1: to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic.
Speaker 1: He carried it out in a novel way, and in
Speaker 1: doing so, he did more to punish one of the
Speaker 1: oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire occupy movement. Novelty
Speaker 1: is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigimanngioni together.
Speaker 1: The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the
Speaker 1: simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, Trump still had enough novelty to convince
Speaker 1: people that he might upset the apple cart in a
Speaker 1: way that benefited them. He rode a global anti incumbent
Speaker 1: wave back to the White House. The consequence of this
Speaker 1: is that he and his are now on their way
Speaker 1: to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of
Speaker 1: the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating
Speaker 1: their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright, he
Speaker 1: is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are
Speaker 1: now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.
Speaker 1: I suspect the same thing will be true of the
Speaker 1: copycats who follow in Luigi Maggioni's footsteps. Most of his
Speaker 1: plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best,
Speaker 1: newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they
Speaker 1: get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will
Speaker 1: be killed or aimed by bullets and bombs that fail
Speaker 1: to hit their intended targets or do, but with a
Speaker 1: lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the
Speaker 1: next new thing to actually work will be. But between
Speaker 1: Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter.
Speaker 1: We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new
Speaker 1: things are about to be tried, and as awful and
Speaker 1: bloody as the fallout from some of them will be,
Speaker 1: we all have no choice but to strap in and
Speaker 1: roll some dice of our own. The present is ugly,
Speaker 1: the future unwritten, but the only way we'll make it
Speaker 1: a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and
Speaker 1: perhaps a little over confidence of our own. And this
Speaker 1: is not the end of the episode. We've got something
Speaker 1: else for you, folks. But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody,
Speaker 1: we're back, And obviously what you just listened to is
Speaker 1: an essay I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today,
Speaker 1: the first day of the new Trump administration. I felt
Speaker 1: like that wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I
Speaker 1: actually came across this morning when I woke up, before
Speaker 1: I started subjecting myself to a barrage of horrible news,
Speaker 1: was a poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorzyinski.
Speaker 1: It's called the Time of Cowards, and I think it's
Speaker 1: a very useful thing for you to hear right now.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good companion to what I wrote,
Speaker 1: So I'm going to let Emily take it away before
Speaker 1: I do that. If you want to read the poem
Speaker 1: in text form or find her other work, you can
Speaker 1: go to Emily Gorzynski g o r ce n ski
Speaker 1: dot com. That's Emily g o r c e n
Speaker 1: ski dot com.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 1: It is the time of cowards.
Speaker 6: It is the time of the coward. Is the age
Speaker 6: of the lyre and greed and avarice and lost boys
Speaker 6: and a dopamine hit in fractals and velocity and velocity
Speaker 6: and velocity, and go, go, go, don't stop. Don't stop
Speaker 6: to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability,
Speaker 6: the parsimony, the hordes hoarded behind the gates, the gatekeepers keep.
Speaker 6: This is the dawn of masculine energy, not the energy
Speaker 6: your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once,
Speaker 6: about picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen
Speaker 6: peroxide means it's working or your grandfather who spent the
Speaker 6: days you spent smoking weed behind a seven to eleven,
Speaker 6: serving on a torpedo boat, waiting for the sharks, who
Speaker 6: never failed to stop to lend a hand to those
Speaker 6: in need, or say grace before dinner, or to help
Speaker 6: you with your math homework, or teach you not to
Speaker 6: wear a necktie at a lathe. This is the year
Speaker 6: of cutting once and never measuring. Pencil in the blueprints
Speaker 6: with whatever comes out. It's faster that way. The season
Speaker 6: of hypocrites, and not of confidence, but confidence men. The
Speaker 6: masculine energy of the can, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud,
Speaker 6: the pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.
Speaker 6: Now is the killing hour. The clockhands float over the
Speaker 6: blood in the streets, and the rage, and the rage,
Speaker 6: and the uncorked hatred overflows, the minutes of impotence, expanding overflowing, fizzling.
Speaker 6: Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise
Speaker 6: is kept. Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting
Speaker 6: of corners and KPIs A newborn died in the baby
Speaker 6: box in Italy because the alarm censor didn't work. It
Speaker 6: is an honorless time, a time of only one question,
Speaker 6: not how or may or can or if or whether,
Speaker 6: but when how soon? No legacy, no history, no reputation.
Speaker 6: Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory,
Speaker 6: and and scars, and the floodwaters, and the clear windshields
Speaker 6: where the splatters of bugguts used to be, and the
Speaker 6: images in the twenty year old magazine still in the rack,
Speaker 6: and the guest bathrooms never used that showed how children
Speaker 6: used to go sledding. And maybe the house is too big,
Speaker 6: No one comes by. I shoveled the neighbor's walk in
Speaker 6: the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on
Speaker 6: the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man,
Speaker 6: one of the few black men left living in this
Speaker 6: neighborhood that was theirs. Once he sent me a letter,
Speaker 6: it went all the way to Richmond to come to
Speaker 6: my door. He's the last man with dignity. In the letter,
Speaker 6: he told me he has a new toy, a laptop,
Speaker 6: which makes him happy because he's a big lover of
Speaker 6: history and he can go online and read about it.
Speaker 6: And I weep for this last dignified man who proudly
Speaker 6: wears a cap honoring his service. Because this is the
Speaker 6: era of synthesis and generation, and revision and content content, content,
Speaker 6: and inverifiability and manipulation. This is the pseudo scene. I
Speaker 6: bought a bottle of wine from a century's old ye
Speaker 6: destroyed in a devastating flood, an unsellable bottle in the
Speaker 6: retail market, fundraiser souvenir. I kept it as a memento
Speaker 6: Mary of our changing world, a mud covered reminder of
Speaker 6: how we all must work, little by little to give
Speaker 6: the world forward. It broke when I tried to move
Speaker 6: it home on my seventy second flight of the year.
Speaker 6: It is the decade of hypocrisy. Even for those who
Speaker 6: can see hypocrisy, they may be a vice president. And
Speaker 6: with every title change, I move farther from God, a
Speaker 6: God I never believed in. I was raised in New
Speaker 6: England towns named for Biblical places by people who thought
Speaker 6: working the rocky soil brought them closer to God. The
Speaker 6: only holy Men left are those in the fields Basra
Speaker 6: and Lebanon, and the Gilead and Hebron. The people who
Speaker 6: named those towns committed a genocide to name them, and
Speaker 6: four hundred years later in their namesakes the same. It
Speaker 6: is the epoch of cadaverin. It is the knight of
Speaker 6: bonfires and Feuershpusche, then highlight of stories that dared in
Speaker 6: poems and albums. And I tried to sell a book,
Speaker 6: and I learned that there's only interest in a book
Speaker 6: when you put yourself into it to be consumed. Words
Speaker 6: are calories, measured in the amount of heat they gave
Speaker 6: a flame. I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night
Speaker 6: with a journalist who told me that they can't publish
Speaker 6: two good stories at a time because if one goes viral,
Speaker 6: it punishes the other. The arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance.
Speaker 6: It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down
Speaker 6: in heritage, the waxing of a crass and pandering moon
Speaker 6: of pantomime, a frictionless night, a night where nothing dared,
Speaker 6: nothing gained, a night of shutters and locks. These are
Speaker 6: the dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future. There's a
Speaker 6: shame here that penance cannot satisfy. The sturdy empty shells,
Speaker 6: the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and a generation lost must
Speaker 6: be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea.
Speaker 6: I think of the mimiograph machine stuck under the floorboards
Speaker 6: of the Solidara Nosche house, and the punks and the
Speaker 6: whores who copied radical zines in the public library, xerox machines,
Speaker 6: and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some
Speaker 6: of the greatest of all time, once banned for obscenity.
Speaker 6: In Chochescu's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't
Speaker 6: bother to steal it because there were only thirty minutes
Speaker 6: of broadcast TV each day. In the crepuscular light, birds
Speaker 6: dare to sing, even though they know the cats hunt below.
Speaker 6: In Vilnius, there is a tile in a square. They say,
Speaker 6: if you make a wish and spin around it three times,
Speaker 6: your wish will come true. At this tile a human
Speaker 6: chain formed and spanned three countries, and they sang at
Speaker 6: Hadra Kim. On the right day, the morning light filters
Speaker 6: in over the lonesome island of Philfla and fills a
Speaker 6: hole drilled in the sandstone five thousand years ago, and
Speaker 6: has done so unfailingly over the millennia that have seen
Speaker 6: countless empires rise and fall, and the solstice of retribution
Speaker 6: will come again.
Speaker 4: Hi, if you want, and welcome to the podcast. I
Speaker 4: was going to go for a really Robert Evans' intro there,
Speaker 4: but I bottled it. I am a coward and I
Speaker 4: couldn't do it. I hate all of you. It's Margaret Kiljoy,
Speaker 4: everyone here to spread the good news. I was trying
Speaker 4: to rap at Evans that, oh, okay, yeah, and it
Speaker 4: doesn't he only hate a certain percentage of them, all right,
Speaker 4: Statistically speaking, he likes some of you. Yeah, And because
Speaker 4: I know some nice people listen there Robert likes. Maybe
Speaker 4: it's you, maybe it's not. You'll never know. Today we're
Speaker 4: not here to talk about who Robert Evans likes. But
Speaker 4: we are here to talk about what to do if
Speaker 4: your house is going to burn down or you have
Speaker 4: to leave because they think it might burn down. This
Speaker 4: is obviously a topic that is front of mind for
Speaker 4: people in southern California currently, given the massive wildfires that
Speaker 4: have engulfed whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles. There are fires
Speaker 4: in venturin Oxtard as well. Now the whole of East
Speaker 4: County San Diego is under a red flag warning. Fire
Speaker 4: conditions continue because climate change continues, and we have decided
Speaker 4: as a society not to do anything about that, and
Speaker 4: so this shit is going to be the rest of
Speaker 4: our lives.
Speaker 7: If you're on the East Coast or somewhere else and
Speaker 7: you're like, oh, I'm fine, I'm not on the West coast,
Speaker 7: bad news for you.
Speaker 4: You're not fine.
Speaker 7: Slowly, more and more the East Coast, including the northeast,
Speaker 7: is being seen as a fire prone area, and we're
Speaker 7: seeing an increase in fire out east as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the United Kingdom as wildfires now a thing did
Speaker 4: not exist. Do you all even have wild over there?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: We have like land owned by the monarch fires, we
Speaker 4: have like parks and protected land. We don't really have.
Speaker 4: We have commons to a degree, but not not like
Speaker 4: public land out the US does. Like when I was
Speaker 4: a kid, we used to burn the stubble in straw fields.
Speaker 4: Like that's how how few fucks we gave about fires.
Speaker 4: We just burn it in a plat back in and
Speaker 4: air quality, I guess. Yeah, that is not a thing
Speaker 4: that people engage in anymore. That's probably for the best.
Speaker 4: Fire it's coming for you. It's happening everywhere. Hooray, hooray. Yeah,
Speaker 4: lucky you the cleansing fire. I feel like there's a
Speaker 4: John Betchaman poem I could go off with here, but
Speaker 4: I'll spare you all right. So, if you are in
Speaker 4: a place where you are very likely to have to
Speaker 4: evacuate your home soonish for a fire, here are some
Speaker 4: things that you may wish to consider doing. I've harvested
Speaker 4: these from mutual a groups in LA and from the
Speaker 4: Cowfire website, where they give you advice on what to
Speaker 4: do if you're evacuating. The first thing that you want
Speaker 4: to do is turn off your gas. For those of
Speaker 4: you who are not familiar, this is a flammable substance,
Speaker 4: and your gas pipe rupturing and then catching on fire
Speaker 4: would be bad, would be sad. It's pretty easy to
Speaker 4: do this. Normally, you should have a valve near the meter.
Speaker 4: Some places we'll have what's called an earthquake shut off
Speaker 4: or an earthquake valve, where you won't need a tool.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure that. In fact, i'm pretty certain those
Speaker 4: are not mandatory, even in California, because I've lived places
Speaker 4: that don't have them. Then again, there are things that
Speaker 4: are mandatory that landlords just aren't doing. I think we
Speaker 4: all know that. Yeah, or like grandfathered into or whatever.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm, yeah. Yeah, given that people outside California are
Speaker 4: listening and the earthquakes are are fortunately not coming for
Speaker 4: us all just yet, I would just suggest that you
Speaker 4: try and find where your gas shut off is. Now.
Speaker 4: It's often where the gas comes into the property, like
Speaker 4: there's a gas meter, and normally you're going to need
Speaker 4: some kind of tool to turn that. What I've used
Speaker 4: normally is just like an adjustable spanner or wrench for
Speaker 4: those of you in the United States, the people at
Speaker 4: California that you're talking to. Yeah, yes, yeah, I follow Californians.
Speaker 4: You can turn that valve so it's parallel with the
Speaker 4: pipe that's kind of shut off the gas coming into
Speaker 4: your house. Do you mean perpendicular to the pipe. I'm curious.
Speaker 4: I think parallel is shut off.
Speaker 7: Interesting with water, you turn it off by moving it perpendicular.
Speaker 7: I've never messed with a gas line. I've lived weird
Speaker 7: and off grid instead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let me have a look. I'm checking now. Yeah. Sorry,
Speaker 4: it wants to be at ninety degrees to the pipe. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so it should be in line with the pipe when
Speaker 4: you start in ninety degrees to the pipe when you turn.
Speaker 7: It off, which you can just kind of imagine as
Speaker 7: like when it's in line, you can imagine like, oh,
Speaker 7: that's how the gas and water can flow through, and
Speaker 7: then when it's to the side, it's like, oh, now
Speaker 7: it's blocking it.
Speaker 4: That's how I remember that. That's much easier visually if
Speaker 4: you imagine like the hole in the valve lining up
Speaker 4: with the handle thing on there. Yeah, do you want
Speaker 4: to turn that off? I've seen some suggestions that you
Speaker 4: want to turn water off. Generally, the advice is not
Speaker 4: to turn your water off, and to hook up your
Speaker 4: outdoor hoses to your outdoor taps such that they can
Speaker 4: be used if they need to be used. I have
Speaker 4: seen some suggestions to turn water off because I guess
Speaker 4: people's pipes are which is decreasing water pressure.
Speaker 7: And it seems like that's probably a like city versus
Speaker 7: rural or like city to city kind of divide. You
Speaker 7: should listen to your local authorities around this kind of thing, right,
Speaker 7: Like in the case of California, you can go to
Speaker 7: CalFire right and there will be evacuation advice on the
Speaker 7: CalFire website.
Speaker 4: There might even be on your city website. Some of
Speaker 4: it is useful. This is a useful thing if you
Speaker 4: do need to turn off your water. Again, water shut
Speaker 4: offs could be in a variety of places, so it
Speaker 4: kind of depends. Especially if you're on a well, you're
Speaker 4: probably row and if you're rollo, you're probably gonna be
Speaker 4: leaving it on.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you're probably going to turning off your water. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but if you do need to do it's just a
Speaker 7: pipe going into your basement that you turn it on.
Speaker 4: You can sometimes be at the side of your house.
Speaker 4: You might need to give this a little bit of
Speaker 4: WD forty Sometimes on a little little plastic box as well,
Speaker 4: And a little plastic box has a little hole and
Speaker 4: you kind of have to shove a screwdriver in that
Speaker 4: hole and pop it open. We're now talking about city
Speaker 4: water again, right, municipal water, yes, yeah, that's city water.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's where if you have a water meeting box
Speaker 4: it could and the shut offs in there. Familiarize yourself
Speaker 4: with that stuff now so that you're not doing it
Speaker 4: in a panic later, And that's kind of where a
Speaker 4: lot of what we're talking about today is important. It's
Speaker 4: if you do it now, you don't have to dash
Speaker 4: about your house grabbing thinking is this important? Do I
Speaker 4: need this? Do I need that? Right? Because like I've
Speaker 4: evacuated for wildfires living in California a few times. I'd
Speaker 4: like to think I have it pretty down now, But
Speaker 4: definitely the first time I was, you know, freshly minted
Speaker 4: European migrant. It was not familiar with this stuff, and
Speaker 4: it definitely just ran around grabbing things. So it turned
Speaker 4: out to be the wrong thing. It's like, cool, I've
Speaker 4: got three bicycles here, let me let me go to
Speaker 4: the shelter.
Speaker 7: And you can get something called a water key or
Speaker 7: a silcock key. And I have a thing I have
Speaker 7: not personally used it. I have a thing called an
Speaker 7: eight way key. Sometimes they are called four way keys,
Speaker 7: depends on how many little wrenches on them are on them.
Speaker 7: And these are just cheap things that have like basically
Speaker 7: all of the weird wrench style things that you would
Speaker 7: never otherwise use, like all the weird like triangle things.
Speaker 7: They can get you into like the boxes on a
Speaker 7: subway car, and they can turn on and off water,
Speaker 7: like I carry one in case you know you're in
Speaker 7: the apocalypse and you need to turn on the water
Speaker 7: at a rest area. You know that kind of thing.
Speaker 7: I've first learned about these from squatters, so it would
Speaker 7: just move into houses and then turn the water on.
Speaker 7: And they they're built in specialized ways to try and
Speaker 7: prevent squatter from doing exactly what I'm describing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you couldn't use your standard socket set or
Speaker 4: what happens. So that's where you need these specialized keys. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and they're not very expensive you can buy.
Speaker 7: They're also not very high quality. This isn't the kind
Speaker 7: of thing you're going to want to use over and
Speaker 7: over again. They're usually cast and like they break, it's
Speaker 7: like pot metal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but there are right
Speaker 7: as far as I can tell. Yeah, and any you
Speaker 7: hope youre not going to need to use them very much.
Speaker 7: Are the things that you should turn on or off.
Speaker 7: Turn off your air conditioning.
Speaker 4: No one's in the house anyway, I would consider leaving
Speaker 4: your exterior lights on. This is just going to help
Speaker 4: firefighters see things and see your house in the event
Speaker 4: that your house is still there. You can close your
Speaker 4: windows and doors. It's amazing how much difference closed doors
Speaker 4: even internally make it in fire spread that There are
Speaker 4: plenty of videos you can watch about this online, but
Speaker 4: like it's amazing how much difference it makes having those closed.
Speaker 4: But you don't want to lock your front door like
Speaker 4: you're going to see a lot of stuff about looting.
Speaker 4: I will tell you right now that the people who
Speaker 4: are looting from wildfare survivors are the landlords who are
Speaker 4: charging one hundred and fifty percent of the rent that
Speaker 4: they were a month ago for people to find a
Speaker 4: flaceplace to live.
Speaker 7: Also, if my house is about to burn down and
Speaker 7: you go steal all my stuff, good have it?
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, lucky you like I hope you don't get burned,
Speaker 4: like yeah, yeah, compared to if a firefighter needs to
Speaker 4: enter that house to prevent it burning down. It takes
Speaker 4: a meaningful amount of time to break down a door, yeah,
Speaker 4: and you can save that time by leaving it open.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that is something that I think you will
Speaker 4: get the wrong impression of if you're watching too much
Speaker 4: corporate news. If you can close metal shutters on your
Speaker 4: windows but remove curtains, flammable things near windows generally not
Speaker 4: a good idea, right, that makes sense. So if you've
Speaker 4: got fabric curtains, I know they look nice, but take
Speaker 4: them down. Or you could just live like me and
Speaker 4: never purchase curtains and just I don't have to have
Speaker 4: the sun your face. What is happening to me right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're going to.
Speaker 7: Start a whole interior design thing. And when I James
Speaker 7: interior design, where you hang your curtains.
Speaker 4: Yeah, James is effectively squatting in a house that he
Speaker 4: actually rents. You should also move flammable items into the
Speaker 4: middle of the room again, right, that's where the fire
Speaker 4: is not. And then before you go, choose an outfit
Speaker 4: that covers your legs and arms. Right, and you want
Speaker 4: to wear some sturdy shoes as well, something that's comfort,
Speaker 4: something you could potentially sleep in and wear for a
Speaker 4: few days and not be uncomfortable. Shoes that you could
Speaker 4: walk in.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: We saw a lot of people in La weren't able
Speaker 4: to take their vehicles as far as they had expected
Speaker 4: to be able to, and so having a pair of
Speaker 4: shoes that you're comfortable in, your nice, comfy walking shoes
Speaker 4: is definitely a useful thing to have something to think about.
Speaker 4: I hope you're not listening to this dashing around your
Speaker 4: house if you are, best of luck? Yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 4: you know you can prepare all this stuff now for
Speaker 4: the outside of your house. Flammable stuff that might catch
Speaker 4: outside your house is best either bought inside inside your
Speaker 4: shed if you have a shed or a garage or something,
Speaker 4: or in a particularly California piece of advice, CalFire suggests
Speaker 4: chucking your path to your furniture in the pool. So
Speaker 4: that is the thing that you can do. That makes
Speaker 4: some sense, it does. Have you seen the picture of
Speaker 4: this lady in the nineties who put all her fine
Speaker 4: china in her swimming pool before evacuating in a wildfire.
Speaker 4: Oh that's amazing. Yeah, it's very like of the time,
Speaker 4: like it was a time when people could afford swimming pools. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and also people had china that they cared about, which
Speaker 4: is something that our generation Germany does.
Speaker 7: Not unless they inherited it from their parents, and in
Speaker 7: which case they still also yeah right they have like
Speaker 7: one plate, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently it's a big issue with
Speaker 4: people like inheriting china and not want to get in
Speaker 4: and just dumping on good wills. Yeah I believe it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I can see that. So, yeah, you can put stuff
Speaker 4: in your pool if you don't want it to burn.
Speaker 4: If it is possible for you to do that, you
Speaker 4: have something you mentioned Margaret about your fence right living
Speaker 4: in a more rural setting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, can I actually just kind of like really quickly
Speaker 7: run through some if you yes, fire protecting your house,
Speaker 7: There's two things you're going to do. One is the oh,
Speaker 7: I'm going to run away now version, and then there's
Speaker 7: the ahead of time version. The really quick basic version
Speaker 7: of the ahead of time is that and this is
Speaker 7: more applicable rurally. But you want to have a defensible space.
Speaker 7: You know, everyone's going to give you a different number,
Speaker 7: but like one hundred feet from your house. You don't
Speaker 7: want sleep packed trees, especially conifers, and you're gonna want
Speaker 7: you know, the one tree is okay as long as
Speaker 7: it's a little bit further from the other. You're gonna
Speaker 7: want to clear out yard debris. Even leaving leaves on
Speaker 7: the ground is overall good. You kind of want to
Speaker 7: create this space where there's not a lot of leaf
Speaker 7: litter and things like that directly under your house so
Speaker 7: that the eaves don't catch. You want to make sure
Speaker 7: that you don't keep a lot of flammable stuff there.
Speaker 7: And if like if I was fleeing my house in
Speaker 7: a hurry, I would be pulling all the stuff away
Speaker 7: from under the eaves that I should have pulled away
Speaker 7: from under the eaves months ago. If I were to
Speaker 7: design my house better, there would be a basically a
Speaker 7: three foot like gravel line around the edge of my
Speaker 7: house right of landscaping. But the other things that you're
Speaker 7: going to want to do is you're going to want
Speaker 7: to look for how embers can get in through the
Speaker 7: vents and stuff like in your roof area.
Speaker 4: Or under wherever.
Speaker 7: And you're gonna want to basically make sure and it
Speaker 7: might already have that, but you want to make sure
Speaker 7: that there's tighter than chicken wire. I think it's I
Speaker 7: think you want quarter inch mesh covering those things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like construction netting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well metal, but yeah, it's metals.
Speaker 4: The name of it. Oh okay, it's what they put
Speaker 4: into concrete. I think I use it to build chicken
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, runs for similar reasons. Well, yeah, because raccoon
Speaker 4: hands can't get through it, and raccoons they're bastards as
Speaker 4: it turns out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that makes sense. If your porch is wooden, you
Speaker 7: have a porch, you don't want fire to get underneath it,
Speaker 7: and so you can keep your wooden porch, but you
Speaker 7: want to screen off underneath of it to keep flaming
Speaker 7: debris from going under there. And then if you have
Speaker 7: a wooden fence, consider having the like first ten feet
Speaker 7: or so of the fence the brick or something like that.
Speaker 7: I can't afford this, but imagine you can. Then you
Speaker 7: would want the first chunk of it to be that way.
Speaker 7: If you have gates, you open them. The deal with
Speaker 7: fences and everything is that you don't want like a
Speaker 7: wick that brings fire to your house. So if the
Speaker 7: forest around you is burning, you don't want it to
Speaker 7: catch your fence and have that go right up to
Speaker 7: under the eaves catch eaves on fire.
Speaker 4: And now I you have a structure fire.
Speaker 7: So what you're gonna do is you open the gates
Speaker 7: if you're leaving. And then, for example, my plan, because
Speaker 7: I have wooden fence that goes all the way up
Speaker 7: to my house, is that if I have more than
Speaker 7: like five minutes to flee a fire, by a half
Speaker 7: an hour to flee a fire, I am taking the
Speaker 7: chainsaw and I am cutting down about ten feet of
Speaker 7: that wooden fence before I leave, and that should dramatically
Speaker 7: increase the chances that my house.
Speaker 4: Will survive a fire. Yeah, smart move.
Speaker 7: And then another thing with the pool thing, And I
Speaker 7: think I've read about but I've never there's no version
Speaker 7: of my life where I'm ever gonna have a pool
Speaker 7: if you live in a fire prone area. They actually
Speaker 7: make pumps that are designed to pump your pool water
Speaker 7: into a fire hose and they have saved a lot
Speaker 7: of rural areas and probably city areas too by having
Speaker 7: that accessible to firefighters. Immediately, your pool can become a
Speaker 7: resource for the people who are coming in to try
Speaker 7: and keep your house intact.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Amusingly, we use one of those. When I was
Speaker 4: a kid, we had a whole liked to get out,
Speaker 4: and one day she got out. We all went looking
Speaker 4: for Of course, there were some wealthy people who like well,
Speaker 4: they didn't live in the village that we lived in.
Speaker 4: They owned it because Britain has never moved on from
Speaker 4: the Fugal era, and they had a pool and that
Speaker 4: that was where our horse was. And so the fire
Speaker 4: brigade came and they used one of those things, just
Speaker 4: pumped out the water and just like host down the
Speaker 4: surrounding garden. And then we came with the tractor and
Speaker 4: we put some different strawbeeres of different sizes, made a
Speaker 4: set of stairs and got her out.
Speaker 7: That's the least relatable story I've ever heard about England.
Speaker 7: It's just like a rural people living the dream. Yeah
Speaker 7: she was a good horse, misty. Yeah, we had a
Speaker 7: lot of horses that, like, we had access to land
Speaker 7: and not a great deal of finances, so we inherited
Speaker 7: problematic horses. I think for people who had, like who
Speaker 7: had the means to purchase, that.
Speaker 4: Is relatable to the Americans. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: any people themselves in this situation, I'm sure. Yeah, horse
Speaker 4: poor is a whole thing. Yeah it is. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's it's the rich people who buy fancy horses and
Speaker 4: then like find that horse not to their liking and
Speaker 4: can afford to discard a living thing that they spent
Speaker 4: more than a car is worth on.
Speaker 7: Well then also, I mean, horse poor is you have
Speaker 7: a horse, but you don't have any money, and you're like, yeah,
Speaker 7: you're partly poor because you have the horse. Because horses
Speaker 7: are incredibly expensive to ye maintain, Yes they are, that's
Speaker 7: cost a lot. Yeah anyway, so yeah, make sure not
Speaker 7: quite a horse relation. But if you are more of
Speaker 7: a horseless carriage transport person. If you are, this is
Speaker 7: a very American thing. In possession of an electric garage
Speaker 7: door opener, it is a good idea to work out
Speaker 7: how to open your garage without that. Yeah, because you
Speaker 7: don't want to be in a situation where you.
Speaker 4: Can't use your vehicle because you can't open your garage,
Speaker 4: or you don't want to be dashing around going where's
Speaker 4: the bloody cord? Not the time, Yeah, so work out
Speaker 4: how to do it now. Also, your front gate. Hopefully
Speaker 4: you don't live in a gated community. It's not the
Speaker 4: way to live. But if you do, for whatever reason,
Speaker 4: you know no how to open the gates, or if
Speaker 4: you have an electric front gate, you'r drive. I suppose
Speaker 4: know how to open that, Margaret, Now will be a
Speaker 4: good time for us to pause for ads. I wonder
Speaker 4: if we will get an advert for electric garage.
Speaker 7: Doors or electric courses. Oh yeah, maybe do they dream
Speaker 7: of electric care? We'll find out in its advertising break.
Speaker 4: All right, we are back, and now we're continuing on
Speaker 4: the theme of animals because they are our little friends. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so if you have animals inside your house, pets, Oh,
Speaker 4: we have farm animals inside my house growing up, so
Speaker 4: I guess it's not exclusive to pets. We used to
Speaker 4: bring the lambs in when it was cold. Little off
Speaker 4: the lambs. Again, this is turning into like James story.
Speaker 4: That's okay, it's cute stories. People are in possession of
Speaker 4: a range, like like a big cooking if you have
Speaker 4: a very old house in the UK, or again if
Speaker 4: you're rich, you have these like cold burning or oil
Speaker 4: burning ovens, so they stay at a temperature and only
Speaker 4: have a number of doors. The coldest one you can
Speaker 4: put a lamb in there in the winter time and
Speaker 4: you can keep it warm that way, like in a
Speaker 4: live one. Yeah yeah, yeah, well, I mean any of them.
Speaker 4: You can put a dead one and if you felt
Speaker 4: the need, if you look, you're saying okay, yeah, yeaheah no, yeah,
Speaker 4: yeah yeah. If you're looking to take care of your animal,
Speaker 4: you put them in there and keep the More so,
Speaker 4: if you have pets in your house, things to do
Speaker 4: before you evacuate would be make sure they have a
Speaker 4: collar on which has your name and your contact information.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm a big fan of the breakaway collars, especially for dogs.
Speaker 4: We never had collars and a dog's wearing upcause the
Speaker 4: dogs were always out in the fields and going through
Speaker 4: hedges and stuff, and you don't want them to get
Speaker 4: caught up. Yeah, and so I'm a big fan of those,
Speaker 4: especially in a situation where your pet's going to be scared.
Speaker 4: You know, God forbid that you'd lose your pet goes
Speaker 4: running for a bit. You don't want them to get
Speaker 4: caught up by that neck. Doesn't probably want to chip
Speaker 4: your dog. Are you chip your pets?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was going to say, now it's a good
Speaker 4: time where you have the time to chip your pets.
Speaker 4: To make sure you have a carrier, make sure you
Speaker 4: have their vaccination records, all that.
Speaker 7: Stuff, and also particularly the particularly rabies vaccination is like
Speaker 7: the thing that you need to make sure that you
Speaker 7: have with you. There's a lot of places you can't
Speaker 7: go with a pet, like Canada unless you have.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, hopefully you and your pet will be fine.
Speaker 4: You'll come home in a few days. But keeping that
Speaker 4: stuff is important. If you have a cat having a sort,
Speaker 4: you can buy those little mobile litter boxes. If you're
Speaker 4: in danger of having to evacuate, just buy one and
Speaker 4: check in your vehicle.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: Of course, any medications that your pet has right, you'll
Speaker 4: want to have a supply of those and those who
Speaker 4: want to be in your go back. It's also nice
Speaker 4: to have some familiar toys and things that's not like home. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so consider putting them in the carrier now and then
Speaker 4: they'll just be there and you won't have to look
Speaker 4: for them. They have advice if you have to leave
Speaker 4: your pet, which would be a pretty heartbreaking situation, to
Speaker 4: be honest.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that she was in to be in
Speaker 7: charge of an animal's entire life is a pretty solemn vow.
Speaker 4: Yes, I would agree, And I don't think I would
Speaker 4: leave them to burn. I think ye, But I.
Speaker 7: Guess there's probably I mean, you see, like for example,
Speaker 7: I know we're gonna talk about livestock in a second,
Speaker 7: but like you know, people have had to like let
Speaker 7: loose some of their horses because they can only personally
Speaker 7: escort so many horses or whatever.
Speaker 4: Right. Yeah, a few years ago, my friend and I
Speaker 4: were in a situation where a stables had more horses
Speaker 4: than it did vehicles. Yeah, and were able to go
Speaker 4: in a vehicle with a towdruck and just help, like
Speaker 4: they would load them up and just be like go
Speaker 4: to the evacuation point with these horses. Yeah, and so
Speaker 4: having a plan for that is good. But yeah, I
Speaker 4: know I struggle becauceive of leaving pets. I grew up
Speaker 4: with dogs and like they were part of my family.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I suppose there's some situation I am not imagining
Speaker 7: where it is literally a necessity, but I struggle to Yeah.
Speaker 4: I heard about people in LA who were forced to
Speaker 4: leave relatives who were not mobile, which is just fucking heartbreaking,
Speaker 4: just you know, one of the worst things I could imagine.
Speaker 7: Happening, which is literally why I actually think that you're
Speaker 7: a vacuate plans. Not trying to blame those people that
Speaker 7: we're talking about, but I believe that your evacuation plans
Speaker 7: need to include people with disabilities who are in your area,
Speaker 7: not just where you not just in your house, but elsewhere. Like, yeah,
Speaker 7: if you have someone who can only travel by a wheelchair,
Speaker 7: then you should be considering for your only vehicle a
Speaker 7: wheelchair accessible vehicle. Like this is the kind of thing
Speaker 7: that I think that, like plans need to include people
Speaker 7: who are at different levels of ability.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, if you have older people in your neighborhood, Yeah,
Speaker 4: people who might not have their cell phone on them
Speaker 4: all the time. They might not get that like beat
Speaker 4: beat buzz buzz. Yeah. If you have like older folks
Speaker 4: who live alone in your neighborhood, you should know that,
Speaker 4: you know. Yeah, yeah, a few years ago I helped
Speaker 4: some older neighbors evacuate. Yeah. You live in a community
Speaker 4: and you need to take responsibility and take care of
Speaker 4: one another. If you have livestock again, like you know,
Speaker 4: I grew up with livestock, I think you're taking responsibility
Speaker 4: for the animal's life, and that includes situations where you
Speaker 4: might have to help that animal escape in a way
Speaker 4: that leg is not necessarily like lucrative for you. Right,
Speaker 4: So that might just mean opening your fences, right, opening
Speaker 4: your gates. If you're not able to evacuate that animal,
Speaker 4: at least giving it a chance you can before. Just
Speaker 4: to avoid having yourself in that situation, you need to
Speaker 4: make transport arrangements. You should be able to look where
Speaker 4: large animals refuges are, like in San Diego in the
Speaker 4: big fires, maybe fifteen years ago, they have them on
Speaker 4: Fiesta Island for a while. Little Island out in the
Speaker 4: bay or del Mar Racecourse is often a place in
Speaker 4: San Diego where you can take them. You should be
Speaker 4: able to find that now, if you're in Los Angeles,
Speaker 4: you can find that. Now. Again, you're going to want
Speaker 4: to have your essential documentation. You are not going to
Speaker 4: want nylon halters for your livestock. I've seen a lot
Speaker 4: of people have, Like people have nyel on lead ropes
Speaker 4: for horses. We had like more hempy ones when I
Speaker 4: was younger, just because those a much left likely to melt, right,
Speaker 4: So that's why we had them in the UK. But
Speaker 4: we had them because we'd have them for a long time.
Speaker 4: But plastic key things that can melt. You don't want
Speaker 4: to put them around your horse's head or near your horse. Okay,
Speaker 4: that makes some sense. Yeah, if you have chickens right now,
Speaker 4: you're going to run into the issue of AV and flu.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, which is a further complication. So, like this
Speaker 4: is a scenario of like a big chicken shelter where
Speaker 4: you take them. It is not a good one for
Speaker 4: AV you and flu reasons also for like chicken dynamics reasons.
Speaker 4: So that means you should make a plan. Now, you
Speaker 4: might have a friend who you're like, hey, I know
Speaker 4: that you're not normally a paltry person, but would it
Speaker 4: be cool in the event of us having to evacuate
Speaker 4: for me and my chickens to come and stay at
Speaker 4: your house. Making a plan now is going to avoid
Speaker 4: you being in a very difficult situation of either driving
Speaker 4: around with your birds in your in your truck being
Speaker 4: like where the fuck can I go? Or like being
Speaker 4: turned away from places. Right. Yeah, The last thing I
Speaker 4: have here and then we're going to move on to
Speaker 4: packing your go bag is insurance. My house flooded when
Speaker 4: I was a kid, Like, it completely leveled the first
Speaker 4: floor of the house.
Speaker 7: Everything was gone, which, since it's England, is actually the
Speaker 7: second floor to Americans. Yeah, it's true, it was actually
Speaker 7: the Yeah. I love to uh it's the ground It
Speaker 7: the ground floor. You had to hide on the first thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. I love to go into a lift and
Speaker 4: be confused in this country after sixteen years of living here,
Speaker 4: go up and down, up and down, playing this stupid
Speaker 4: game until I google what do American call the flaws?
Speaker 4: And but you can't do it, so you're in the
Speaker 4: lift and your phone doesn't work. It's one of my
Speaker 4: favorite experiences.
Speaker 7: It's because you try to google what do American lifts do?
Speaker 7: And they're like, what the fuck is the lift?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah yeah, an elevator. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's not an elevating experience.
Speaker 7: Away my favorite thing to pick James, Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 4: Sure, I'm the only person who does it, I'm sure. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it never happened to me. Yeah, it was never an
Speaker 4: issue when I worked at a building with a lift
Speaker 4: and would routinely miss my own floor so much so
Speaker 4: that I just took the fire escape. So I remember
Speaker 4: it taking months the time I was working in construction,
Speaker 4: and what we were doing was for the most part, pulling
Speaker 4: wet carpet out of people's homes that have flooded. Highly
Speaker 4: recommend not doing that. There's a way to make a
Speaker 4: living if you can. It's not good for the body,
Speaker 4: not good for the soul, for the lungest. Probably cleaning
Speaker 4: out restaurants. Like a month later the power had been
Speaker 4: off for a month. Just going into the walk in,
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I've never seen so many people vomit,
Speaker 4: like one after the other being like no, I could
Speaker 4: do it. I'm a builder straight, Like, yeah, pretty horrific.
Speaker 4: So don't recommend. If you can go around your house
Speaker 4: taking a video of your yeah, stuffs, it will just
Speaker 4: make it easier, Like this happened to my family, and
Speaker 4: like maybe you know the early two thousands, so it
Speaker 4: wasn't possible. Well, I mean I could have got the
Speaker 4: old like Sony handicam out I didn't. So now you
Speaker 4: know you have a video camera in your pocket going
Speaker 4: around your house taking a video especially of you know,
Speaker 4: the things that are expensive and hard to move, you're
Speaker 4: going to align insurance to replace.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then this is actually a decent regular prepper
Speaker 7: practice regardless. This isn't a like, oh I'm just about
Speaker 7: to have to run out for a fire. This is
Speaker 7: a like every six months or every year, or every
Speaker 7: time you get a new, weird, expensive thing that you
Speaker 7: put in your house, make this video so that it's
Speaker 7: easier to prove.
Speaker 4: All of the stuff that you had that needs to
Speaker 4: be replaced.
Speaker 7: Yeah, if you do that on a regular basis, there's
Speaker 7: a little bit of like security of like where do
Speaker 7: you put it?
Speaker 4: Do you really want?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 7: But it's honestly for almost all people probably totally fine
Speaker 7: to just have that.
Speaker 4: Yeah on the clouds. Yeah, yeah, I think I think it.
Speaker 4: Don't put it on Facebook, but you can get to
Speaker 4: direct the insurre. It's going to be your Instagram where
Speaker 4: you post an interior video of your home every month.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's that's your thing. I guess join us next
Speaker 7: month for behind the podcasts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, podcasts, crips, it's just me in my shed. It's
Speaker 4: me critiquing your interior sign you have. That would be
Speaker 4: a weekly podcast for some time. Shame James, James, Shame
Speaker 4: podcasts la things that I've heard people thinks that you
Speaker 4: will need. If you have a nebulizer of a person
Speaker 4: who uses a nebulizer to help them breathe, those are
Speaker 4: in very high demands. You're probably not going to be
Speaker 4: able to replace it, so bring that with you. If
Speaker 4: you have medications, ideally grab the meds in the little
Speaker 4: orange thing and take those with you. That where you've
Speaker 4: got the RX number and you can easily go to
Speaker 4: a pharmacy and be like, hey, this is my prescription
Speaker 4: for me. It has my name and the RX number.
Speaker 4: Can you issue me an emergency supply? And that's something
Speaker 4: they should be able to do. And also if you
Speaker 4: grab the whole bottle, then you've got you know, hopefully
Speaker 4: a decent supply. Hopefully your insurance isn't annoying and only
Speaker 4: lets you go three weeks at a time. Yeah, that's
Speaker 4: that comes up for a lot of people. But I
Speaker 4: will not name any companies because I think it is
Speaker 4: against my contract to do that. I will say that
Speaker 4: if you have like your important documents, right, you're potentially
Speaker 4: your d to your house, if you're in on your car,
Speaker 4: your passport, your birth certificate is a big one. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you're right to be in this country. Yeah, any dream card, visa,
Speaker 4: that kind of thing, especially those in the after Well,
Speaker 4: this will come out in the era of Trump two
Speaker 4: point zero. So those documents are going to be very
Speaker 4: important for some people. Right, you're darker registration, Put those
Speaker 4: in a file and grab the whole thing, bring it
Speaker 4: with you. Do not rely on scan copies of those,
Speaker 4: especially your immigration documents. If you're a person who has firearms,
Speaker 4: records of the serial numbers of those are going to
Speaker 4: be useful. And again I would just snap a picture.
Speaker 4: It's not reasonable or sensible to be taking a lot
Speaker 4: of firearms with you in a situation like this. You're
Speaker 4: not going to need them, and there's gonna be a
Speaker 4: lot of places that you won't want to bring them. Yes,
Speaker 4: you know, I would suggest locking them up, and like
Speaker 4: I say, documenting that you've done that, you may have
Speaker 4: to prove at some point that firearm no longer exists,
Speaker 4: and then that's probably the best way to do that.
Speaker 4: And being prepared to travel on foot. Like I said,
Speaker 4: another thing that people have been needing and not having
Speaker 4: is P one hundred masks. So that's a particle filter
Speaker 4: generally in the three M and I think the Honeywell
Speaker 4: filters they're pink, so I'm talking about like a screw
Speaker 4: in filter here.
Speaker 7: Although they do make P one hundred masks that are
Speaker 7: more like they look more like COVID masks. Yeah, they're
Speaker 7: just a little bit thicker and yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah they're a little bit more sort of burdens than
Speaker 4: those masks, but that is what you need if you're
Speaker 4: in those situations. Yeah, so if you have one of those,
Speaker 4: I have ones like when I'm when I'm apoxyting wood,
Speaker 4: I have a little half face respirated I wear for that.
Speaker 4: We will actually talk about masks, Margaret after some of
Speaker 4: the products and services support the show have talked about themselves.
Speaker 4: Would be pretty sick of a honey Well. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: they'd be pretty small.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 4: All right here we go. All right, we're back, thank you, honey.
Speaker 4: Well yeah, keeping us safe here gas.
Speaker 7: Although I'm kind of a three M girl, I gotta admit,
Speaker 7: oh controversial in case I know so. One of the
Speaker 7: things that I did during twenty twenty was a lot
Speaker 7: of testing of protest care. And if you want to see,
Speaker 7: they've written up a whole bunch of pieces about exactly
Speaker 7: everything about masks and body armour and blah blah blah
Speaker 7: blah blah. But in general, when you think about masks,
Speaker 7: there's sort of three levels that actually are matter useful.
Speaker 7: There's the version that we kind of see as a
Speaker 7: COVID mask. There's a version where it's like you you
Speaker 7: wear it around your face and you make sure you
Speaker 7: need to get a rated one and N ninety five
Speaker 7: is better than nothing for smoke, but a P one
Speaker 7: hundred is better. And then there is a half mask respirator.
Speaker 7: Half mask respirators are great. They are probably the sweet
Speaker 7: spot for this. They are less good for pandemics because
Speaker 7: they do not filter the exhale. They are better for
Speaker 7: your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's
Speaker 7: much easier to breathe with a half mask respirator than
Speaker 7: a fabric mask, and you can switch out the cartridges
Speaker 7: and unfortunately almost all of them are various proprietary types
Speaker 7: of filters. Yeah, the bayonet mount is the three M style.
Speaker 7: There's a NATO version. If something looks more like a
Speaker 7: gas mask, it's probably the NATO screw on kind. So
Speaker 7: you can get a half mask respirator, or you can
Speaker 7: get a fold face respirator, which is more or less
Speaker 7: what looks like a gas mask, but those coming kind
Speaker 7: of civilian styles that are using the same three M
Speaker 7: brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges, or you can get
Speaker 7: the more military style that'll have the NATO style screw in.
Speaker 7: The military style is kind of overkill in terms of
Speaker 7: it'll position you oddly socially. Yes, set me a fire, Yeah,
Speaker 7: I think that a thing that is worth everyone having.
Speaker 7: Are these respirators a half mask respirator or depending on
Speaker 7: your life, like if you use them a lot, or
Speaker 7: you're going to be protesting, or I don't know, there's
Speaker 7: a lot of different reasons you might want a full
Speaker 7: face one. They make really cheap knockoff ones that you
Speaker 7: can get imported. Although maybe if you're listening to this
Speaker 7: in the future. You can't get it imported. But they
Speaker 7: work fairly well, they're just not quite as good. I've
Speaker 7: tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and
Speaker 7: things like that.
Speaker 4: I think that half masks are great.
Speaker 7: I keep a half mask in my truck literally for
Speaker 7: wildfire smoke, because when I'm traveling, if I'm driving out west,
Speaker 7: I've been around wildfire smoke while traveling before. Another thing,
Speaker 7: just really quickly. They make these for dogs as well.
Speaker 7: Oh cool, they're more like COVID mask style, and my
Speaker 7: dog hates it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, but you could train your dog into
Speaker 4: not hating it. I just haven't.
Speaker 7: I just keep it around to be like, well, if
Speaker 7: it really if we had to sleep in the vehicle
Speaker 7: in a smoky area, my dog would hate it, and
Speaker 7: he would put up with it, you know, and he
Speaker 7: would survive.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I like masks. Yes, they're great. Yeah, they are good.
Speaker 4: The half face respirator is great. Yeah, that's what I used,
Speaker 4: Like I say, when I'm at poxying, so I don't
Speaker 4: get high because that would be bad. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Oh, and then really quickly about physical stuff like deeds
Speaker 7: and all of that stuff. Yeah, I'm actually kind of
Speaker 7: curious because it's like, I see why it matters the
Speaker 7: most to have the physical originals m hm for most crises.
Speaker 7: A lot of people talk about how safety deposit boxes
Speaker 7: at banks are kind of the way to go for
Speaker 7: stuff like that you don't need on a regular basis.
Speaker 7: This wouldn't be your proof of documentation necessarily, but it
Speaker 7: might be your like birth certificate, maybe like deeds and
Speaker 7: titles and things at a safe deposit box, because then
Speaker 7: if your house burns down, it's still fine.
Speaker 3: LA.
Speaker 7: Wildfire kind of disproves this a little bit, right, because
Speaker 7: then you're like, well, what if your bank burns down?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And then.
Speaker 7: If it's not on your property, you can't grab it
Speaker 7: and go. So it's a little bit complicated. I think overall,
Speaker 7: I think that there's a real advantage to keeping stuff
Speaker 7: in a safety deposit box off site. And then also,
Speaker 7: I just want to shout out that fire proof safes
Speaker 7: aren't fireproof.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not for the situation and we're talking about here, right.
Speaker 7: They are designed for like your kitchen catches fire or
Speaker 7: your bed catches fire, and your safe is under your bed, yeah.
Speaker 4: And the firefighters come and they get out in fifteen minutes,
Speaker 4: but some stuff gets charred.
Speaker 7: Right when there is a structure fire and a structure
Speaker 7: is destroyed. Fireproof safes, like all other safes, are generally
Speaker 7: not protecting their contents, and that's not the safe. Fault
Speaker 7: of the fire safe is just they're not designed for that.
Speaker 4: Google the melting point of steel for this and many
Speaker 4: other interesting Internet things that you can learn. Jet fuel
Speaker 4: can't melt fireproof.
Speaker 7: Safe, yeah, which is why they build buildings out of it.
Speaker 7: Oh and one more thing about documents really quick, while
Speaker 7: the original matters, having copies is like better than nothing.
Speaker 7: And also just like scanning and having them on encrypted
Speaker 7: hard like encrypted USB stick, a little USB stick with
Speaker 7: all of your stuff is a really pretty good thing
Speaker 7: to have. It has some advantages too, right, because sometimes
Speaker 7: you don't want the originals of your documents, Like, for example,
Speaker 7: you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts,
Speaker 7: the bank account numbers, your pins or your credit card numbers,
Speaker 7: like all of that stuff that you really don't want
Speaker 7: someone else to have, but if you lost you would
Speaker 7: be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies.
Speaker 4: Of that available to you.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, also your like master passwords and all that terrible
Speaker 7: horrible stuff that's scary to put onto a USB stick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's why you're putting it then on the internet. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so really quickly, Margaret, it's going to be a long one.
Speaker 4: I guess you and I talked about prepper stuff. It
Speaker 4: went long. Yeah, shocking go bags. We've done our whole
Speaker 4: episode on go bags. If you're new to the show, Hello, welcome.
Speaker 4: You can go back and listen to Margaret and James
Speaker 4: talking about go bags. We'll try and put a link
Speaker 4: in the description here for you. But what is the
Speaker 4: like super fast speed round version of what you want
Speaker 4: to put in your go back?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 7: Lord, change of socks and underwear, your basic toiletries, like
Speaker 7: the kind of like travel toiletries, because your go back
Speaker 7: is like more like so it's not gonna be a
Speaker 7: long tangent. Your go back is like more likely I
Speaker 7: have to spend the night in my car than like
Speaker 7: I'm starting a new life somewhere out in the planes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And so the small little things like bring deodorant even
Speaker 7: if you don't have deodorant in your daily life, because
Speaker 7: you might be crammed into a place with lots of
Speaker 7: other people.
Speaker 4: I've seen tons of requests for deodorant in the La
Speaker 4: Mutual a chat almost every day.
Speaker 7: Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. So basic
Speaker 7: toiletries and a little bit extra to share. I think
Speaker 7: whether or not you menstrate, you should have tampons, for example,
Speaker 7: in your go bag, and so I think that the
Speaker 7: basic toiletries basic first days, last survival stuff, and then
Speaker 7: like change of clothes, and also like at least one
Speaker 7: or two morale items. I keep a Nintendo switch in
Speaker 7: my go bag. It Skyrim is I need a Skyrim
Speaker 7: box in order to fight anxiety sometimes.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, you can get those tiny little game boys
Speaker 4: now which have like it looks like a game boys.
Speaker 7: Every game every game ever. Yeah yeah, I have one
Speaker 7: of those in their two okay sick. Yeah, those would
Speaker 7: be a perfect item for one of those that. Actually
Speaker 7: I had like almost no electricity at the beginning of COVID,
Speaker 7: and so the ability to play the Sega Genesis version
Speaker 7: of Shadow Run from like the nineties was crucial to
Speaker 7: me because I didn't have enough electricity to run a computer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and look, that's fine, and it's probably going to
Speaker 4: be more important to you than half the shit you
Speaker 4: see people online putting in their go backs, like Yeah,
Speaker 4: you don't need a gender affirming hatchet. You will. You
Speaker 4: will have a lot more fun with your tiny game
Speaker 4: boy things that you don't needther I see people. I
Speaker 4: see people houlding a lot of food. Everyone who's evacuated
Speaker 4: in NA having a miserable time. They are eating the
Speaker 4: best they ever have. So many people want to help,
Speaker 4: and food is a way that so many of us
Speaker 4: express affection and careful one another. So many people are
Speaker 4: getting fed right now thanks to the efforts of mutual
Speaker 4: A groups really remarkably doesn't seem to be so much
Speaker 4: by you'd think La, a city on a major fault line,
Speaker 4: would would have some kind of supplies for an earthquake
Speaker 4: that required feeding lots of people. Seems like it's it's
Speaker 4: more vibes based for the city. But you know, surprise surprises,
Speaker 4: mutual A groups who are feeding people, and they're doing
Speaker 4: that really well. So you don't need to hold a
Speaker 4: lot of food.
Speaker 7: Having a little bit of food, though a little bit
Speaker 7: of shelf stable food. I really recommend bars you don't
Speaker 7: like as the food that you put in your go bag,
Speaker 7: because if you put in bars that you do like,
Speaker 7: you're going to eat them when you're bored one day, yeah,
Speaker 7: and you don't want to.
Speaker 4: Go to the store. I highly recommend. I say that.
Speaker 7: Literally all of the bars in all my bags have
Speaker 7: been eating yeah the past week. But that's because there's
Speaker 7: been like a winter storm, so I haven't been out
Speaker 7: to the grocery store and I just have been like
Speaker 7: sugarcrevy and so I eat even the gross barers.
Speaker 4: I live in San Diego. I have no hues so
Speaker 4: to do it because I can't be bothered to leave
Speaker 4: my offace and go to my kitchen sometimes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So find the one that you don't like, put
Speaker 7: it in your bag.
Speaker 4: Just have a couple.
Speaker 7: It's not to keep you sustained, it's to keep you
Speaker 7: from being grouchy. Like, don't think of it as like
Speaker 7: I need to put entire meals in my go bag.
Speaker 7: Think of it as like I need enough sugar and
Speaker 7: whatever to keep my headspace right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I kind of like to lay them in between
Speaker 4: things I do. Is what I'm camping too. I'll get
Speaker 4: like those little peanut butter packets, yeah, and just like
Speaker 4: just to throw a few in there, and then you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know what, I am being cranky and that means
Speaker 4: you just snuff this and I'm going to be dead
Speaker 4: at Yeah, I do highly recommend peanut butter. I take
Speaker 4: it when I travel a lot as well. It's like
Speaker 4: a comfort food for me. It's filling, it's compact, it's
Speaker 4: not that bad for you.
Speaker 7: When I lived out of a backpack, I kept a
Speaker 7: plastic jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my
Speaker 7: pack always because I knew, no matter what, I had
Speaker 7: at least two days worth of calories in the bottom
Speaker 7: of my bag.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's a wonderful thing, peanut butter. So yeah,
Speaker 4: put some of that in there. There are things that, like,
Speaker 4: you probably don't need shelter, right, but it might be
Speaker 4: nice to have a little compact blanket, right especial if
Speaker 4: you're going to have to stay. One of those one
Speaker 4: thing or comfort item that I always take, I've taken
Speaker 4: this all over the world is an inflatable pillow. Like
Speaker 4: there are a lot of hardships that I will endure.
Speaker 4: I like to sleep on a pillow, and so I
Speaker 4: take a little inflatable pillow. So it's something that, like,
Speaker 4: you know, you will have comfort items like that that
Speaker 4: are things for you. I'll put those in there. I
Speaker 4: would avoid watching too much go bag content on YouTube
Speaker 4: because you're going to get anxious about the fact that
Speaker 4: you don't have like a folding short barreled rifle. And
Speaker 4: that's because you don't need it. No, what do you need? Like, like,
Speaker 4: I'm sitting next to my bullet proofst that I've used
Speaker 4: before for work. I'm not taking it with me staying here.
Speaker 4: I can spend a lot of money on the plate,
Speaker 4: so I will be claiming those on inssurance. But you
Speaker 4: don't need that stuff. People are taking care of one another,
Speaker 4: and so pack with the things that will help you
Speaker 4: be comfortable. And consider that you might be spending a
Speaker 4: while in a hotel or a hostel or a refuge,
Speaker 4: or staying with a friend or family memor Yeah, and
Speaker 4: think what would make that more comfortable for you.
Speaker 7: I think that's the really good way to put it.
Speaker 7: It's the get out of town for the weekend bag. Yes,
Speaker 7: not the end of the world bag. I think that
Speaker 7: if you are more rural, you might want some basic
Speaker 7: camping stuff. Yeah, yep, definitely, but the average person probably doesn't.
Speaker 7: I mostly have this at the like there's my go
Speaker 7: bag and then there's the stuff that's kind of always
Speaker 7: in my truck.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's where I'm at too. I like to go camping,
Speaker 4: so I have my camping stuff in my truck because
Speaker 4: then it takes me less time to go camping.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and so like, I am almost certainly not bugging
Speaker 7: out on foot from my house. And if I had to,
Speaker 7: then I would have to bring a not my go bag,
Speaker 7: I would have to bring a hiking bag, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 7: most of the time, if you have access to a
Speaker 7: car and roads, because you're escaping an emergency, you're getting
Speaker 7: to somewhere with enough civilization that you have, you can
Speaker 7: expect some level of shelter and food.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, but I do. I will say, have some water.
Speaker 7: Don't go overboard, Like I think that having like a
Speaker 7: little bit of like chemical water filtration and a water
Speaker 7: bottle or a little water filter and a water bottle,
Speaker 7: you know, the reason not.
Speaker 4: To Yeah, I will say specifically, like get a Soyer squeeze. Yeah,
Speaker 4: tiny filtration is better than most other filters that are
Speaker 4: that size. Get it, put it in your backpack, leave
Speaker 4: it there. They're handy to have. And then yeah, get
Speaker 4: a little uh I like to have again, this is
Speaker 4: a little comfort thing. I like to have a stain
Speaker 4: of steel now gene size bottle. It's not made by
Speaker 4: analogy things made by clean canteen. I like it so
Speaker 4: I could drink water out of it. I like it
Speaker 4: because it's not plastic. And I like it because I
Speaker 4: can use it to heat up water when it's really
Speaker 4: cold and have it like a little hot water bottle
Speaker 4: and snuggle with it. Yeah, so that's a nice thing. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I use also like a single wall steel canteen so
Speaker 7: that you can heat water in it. If you get
Speaker 7: the double wall ones, then you can't heat them over
Speaker 7: the fire because they're you know, vacuum insulated or whatever.
Speaker 7: But then other people I know are like, well they
Speaker 7: want the ability to have like and their insulated deep bottles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, you do you So, I.
Speaker 7: Will also say battery packs for phones is a big one. Again,
Speaker 7: you're less likely to need to hunt squirrels with axes,
Speaker 7: and you're more likely need to keep your phone charged
Speaker 7: and other people's phones charged.
Speaker 4: One of those little hydra charging cables which breaks one.
Speaker 4: That's what I was about to say too, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: get get one of those, get a little wall water
Speaker 4: and keep it in there. So you can turn a
Speaker 4: wall socket into a USB socket if you need that
Speaker 4: to charge your stuff. Another thing that is surprisingly handy
Speaker 4: and lots of situations is I like to run a lot,
Speaker 4: and sometimes you're doing ultramarathon. When you get to the
Speaker 4: aid station, they just have like big things of water, right,
Speaker 4: and you fill up your little water bottles you're carrying
Speaker 4: in your vest, and lots of people have these tiny
Speaker 4: collapsible cups that are made of like a thin rubber.
Speaker 4: They're made of the stuff that camel back bladders are
Speaker 4: made of. And then they can fill up that cup
Speaker 4: and they can drink from it, and they just keep
Speaker 4: it attached to their vest, right, and then off they
Speaker 4: go running along. Oh interesting. These are very useful and
Speaker 4: I've started incorporating them in lots of my travel and like, yeah,
Speaker 4: emergency supplies because if you're in a place where people
Speaker 4: don't have cups, right that they have big things water,
Speaker 4: Now you have a vessel from which to drink. So
Speaker 4: those are surprisingly handy. Yeah. I also keep one of those.
Speaker 7: I don't know if it's the same one you're talking
Speaker 7: about it, but it like collapses up almost like forty
Speaker 7: and style.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like it's like the camping ones, but even
Speaker 4: it's way lighter than those.
Speaker 7: Ah okay, I have the camping style one and I
Speaker 7: keep it in there as a like emergency dog bowl.
Speaker 4: Yes I know. Yeah, those are great for that too,
Speaker 4: and you can drink hot things out of them, which
Speaker 4: is nice. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And another thing that I keep in my go bag
Speaker 7: is I keep the meds that my dog is on,
Speaker 7: and I keep some of the meds that I take
Speaker 7: in there. And you know, it's like, my dog only
Speaker 7: gets the meds once a month, So I go to
Speaker 7: my bag and I pull out the meds and I
Speaker 7: give them to my dog from my bag, because why not.
Speaker 7: And if you have, you know, other people, whether they're
Speaker 7: not fully grown yet or are that you also take
Speaker 7: care of, you know, you need to make sure you
Speaker 7: have a little bit of their stuff in there.
Speaker 4: Like like you keep a dog toy in your go bag.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you have a child, keep a child toy.
Speaker 4: If you need to keep medicines cold, there's a product
Speaker 4: called freo Io. They're not paying me. I've never got
Speaker 4: one for free. But you dip it in water and
Speaker 4: it uses evaporative cooling to keep your insulin cold. I
Speaker 4: have used them. Oh, they are very handy. They don't
Speaker 4: rely on electricity. It's very nice. So yeah, if that's
Speaker 4: something that you need, then then then that is hopefully
Speaker 4: something useful to you. My last thing would be a
Speaker 4: little torch, a little pocket flashlight, or even better a
Speaker 4: headlamp like a head torch, because lots of places in
Speaker 4: La lost power, right, and if you're having to go
Speaker 4: places at night, it's much easier if you can see
Speaker 4: where you're going. Yeah, they're not expensive, they're great gifts.
Speaker 4: Bring a few, give them to friends, make new friends.
Speaker 4: Hopefully this has repared you. The last thing, of course,
Speaker 4: Margaret is a gold bullion with Ronald Reagan's face on it.
Speaker 7: Oh, I forgot to mention that, Yeah, you need trade.
Speaker 7: Rather than having a system of mutual aid, which we
Speaker 7: naturally do. Instead, we should interject a complicated barter system,
Speaker 7: ideally on the gold Standard, in.
Speaker 4: Which shiny metal replaces our naturally instinct to help one another. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's how it's been. That's that's humans famously, notice species.
Speaker 4: Just bring a copy of Debt by David Graeber and
Speaker 4: your Yeah, yeah, bring at the shrugs and then as
Speaker 4: you pass the fires. Just start ripping that shit off,
Speaker 4: throwing it in there, let it burn.
Speaker 7: Having a paperback book if you like that, it's not
Speaker 7: weight efficient, but you know what, like.
Speaker 4: That's how you like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bring the Dawn
Speaker 4: of Everything by David Graeber. That'll that'll occupy you through
Speaker 4: most natural disasters. It's a it's a thick book. It
Speaker 4: is if you can't reach something very handy. Stand on that.
Speaker 4: He really thought he did us one final solid RP.
Speaker 4: David Graeber. Yeah, and and and on rip to David
Speaker 4: Wengro is a lot. Yes, yeah, yeah, shout out to
Speaker 4: David Wegro the other David, the less venerated David who
Speaker 4: also wrote that book.
Speaker 7: I always feel bad when I just talk about Gramer
Speaker 7: stuff and the I talk about Thought of Everything, and
Speaker 7: then I don't talk about the other David.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Sometimes I'll just say the David's and then people
Speaker 4: will look at me and yeah, totally the level. But
Speaker 4: I know, yeah, yeah, when I'm pick to Margaret, I
Speaker 4: can say that David's. She knows which David's. I mean,
Speaker 4: that's why we're friends. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, anyway, yeah, it's gonna be okay, or it's not
Speaker 7: but you know what, you weren't going to survive being
Speaker 7: alive anyway. And keep your car half full of gas,
Speaker 7: like when you're on your way home, and make sure
Speaker 7: that you fill up if it's less than halfway full.
Speaker 4: Plug your electric car in. Don't don't skip plugging your
Speaker 4: little electric car in at night. Yeah, because the night
Speaker 4: that you do is you know that you need it,
Speaker 4: So you do the little things. Take care of one another.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show
Speaker 1: where it's now happening here. A thing that we've said
Speaker 1: in a joking way a number of times, but now
Speaker 1: it just is. This is, you know, a podcast. We're
Speaker 1: having a good time. I'm Robert Garrison Davis, my co
Speaker 1: host colleague, and today we're talking about Trump's inauguration with
Speaker 1: a good friend of ours who was present at the
Speaker 1: thing itself, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome to the program.
Speaker 9: Thank you for having me. It's actually my first time
Speaker 9: on It Can Happen Here. I'm like a little like nervous.
Speaker 5: I hope it goes well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're an og guest over on Bastard, so it's
Speaker 1: about time we had you on here. How you feeling
Speaker 1: bridget just in general before we get into the specifics,
Speaker 1: how are you doing in the first full day of
Speaker 1: this new era?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 5: Not great, Bob, not great?
Speaker 1: Not great? Not great?
Speaker 5: Yeah, bad.
Speaker 9: Like we were talking off Mike, like, I need to
Speaker 9: figure out a self care plan, And part of this
Speaker 9: is on me that I feel like I am one
Speaker 9: of those people that has kind.
Speaker 5: Of checked out a little bit, and I'm like, ough,
Speaker 5: who I am.
Speaker 9: I got a take a step back from this, and
Speaker 9: now that I'm taking a step back in, I'm like,
Speaker 9: I need a plan for how I'm going to pace
Speaker 9: myself and not lose my fucking shit every fucking day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably not for the best that Like, right
Speaker 1: at the same time as this has all happened, the
Speaker 1: people who make gas station drugs have figured out how
Speaker 1: to take the chemicals and kretom, which you know, in
Speaker 1: leaf forms is generally safe drug, and hyper concentrate them
Speaker 1: into basically fucking heroin. So I'm just working on staying
Speaker 1: away from that shit too much of the news, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the way you gotta do it.
Speaker 9: I'm also doing dry January and trying to eat healthy.
Speaker 4: That's tough.
Speaker 1: I'm not doing that.
Speaker 9: So I have no outlets. I can't drink, I don't
Speaker 9: do drugs. I'm fucking eating lentil soup every night. I
Speaker 9: got nothing. There's nothing I can.
Speaker 5: Do to cope.
Speaker 1: I'm keeping myself, okay, have by just eating venison every
Speaker 1: single day.
Speaker 10: But yeah, I'm carrying on our Vegas tradition and I've
Speaker 10: moved into gambling.
Speaker 6: Hie.
Speaker 1: Oh you're gambling now, huh.
Speaker 10: Not actually, but instead of doing something stupid for inauguration Day,
Speaker 10: me and my friends got together and all played anarchist poker,
Speaker 10: So that was that was fun. I lost about ten
Speaker 10: dollars to my friends, So that's it.
Speaker 4: That's fair.
Speaker 1: How often did you say I hardly know it?
Speaker 4: Like about about four times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's the right amount of fact.
Speaker 10: But we also got quite drunk by the time we
Speaker 10: started our second game. I was also dressed like Data
Speaker 10: from the next generation, complete with silver face paint the
Speaker 10: entire time and a poker visor. So that was that
Speaker 10: was how I spent yesterday.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you got to experience the hell that that
Speaker 1: actor experience. Bridget Let's talk about the inauguration. Let's do
Speaker 1: it all right, So I kind of coming in firsthand,
Speaker 1: when did you sort of lock down your plans to
Speaker 1: actually be there.
Speaker 5: So initially my plan was to get out of town totally.
Speaker 5: I'm going to go out town.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm gonna hide it on the mountains with a
Speaker 1: rifle like that.
Speaker 9: You're joking, but like almost no, no, no, I'm not joking,
Speaker 9: And I mean I was in So I live in
Speaker 9: d C, the DC most of my life. I was
Speaker 9: in DC in my apartment when January sixth happened, and
Speaker 9: I remember being so scared. There was a curfew in DC,
Speaker 9: like it just shit got really real really quickly. I
Speaker 9: remember I was on an all staff like the beginning
Speaker 9: of the year planning work call, and somebody just on
Speaker 9: the zoom was like, hey, something's happening and everybody who
Speaker 9: lives in DC should maybe check the TV, and then
Speaker 9: the line went dead.
Speaker 5: That's what I remember the most.
Speaker 9: So I was planning on getting out of town, and
Speaker 9: then I thought, fuck it, why should these people drive
Speaker 9: me out of my own city.
Speaker 5: I want to be out on the streets. I want
Speaker 5: to be out in my community.
Speaker 9: I want to be connected, and so yeah, I went
Speaker 9: out to the People's March protest. I went out as
Speaker 9: far as I could to inauguration downtown just to get
Speaker 9: a sense of what the vibes were.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, well let's let's get into the vibes.
Speaker 1: How were they?
Speaker 5: Weird as hell?
Speaker 9: This is something that I think people might not really
Speaker 9: think about a lot. So like being from DC, living
Speaker 9: her most of my life, people really obviously think of
Speaker 9: it as like a seat of national power, and they
Speaker 9: sometimes forget that there are over six hundred thousand DC
Speaker 9: residents who just like live here, work here, have their
Speaker 9: lives here, and so this stuff all plays out like
Speaker 9: practically in our backyards. While arguably we have less electoral
Speaker 9: political power and.
Speaker 5: Less agency in some ways because DC is not a state.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah, yeah, Our congressional representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, she
Speaker 9: can like vote in committees and introduce legislation and stuff
Speaker 9: like that, but she can't vote, and so all of
Speaker 9: this matters for It's dude, don't even get me started.
Speaker 9: Like I could talk about statehood all day long.
Speaker 1: That's like such a funny, shitty compromise, Like you can.
Speaker 1: You could be there and like talk, but you can't
Speaker 1: do anything like you I'm sorry, that's just so fucked up.
Speaker 9: It is, and it's like, I mean, like, there are
Speaker 9: so many reasons why it sucks that DC's not a state,
Speaker 9: but ultimately.
Speaker 5: It's like, we deserve to have political power. We deserve
Speaker 5: to have a say why Yoming?
Speaker 4: Have you ever fucking been to?
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 8: Good?
Speaker 1: God?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 9: And I mean I could talk all day when Republican
Speaker 9: lawmakers get on TV, and I remember they would shit
Speaker 9: on DC by saying things like there's not even laggers
Speaker 9: who live there, it's not even a real place, like
Speaker 9: as if the only way to actually meaningfully exist in
Speaker 9: the United States, it's like you have to have laggers
Speaker 9: who live there, Like it's so infuriating.
Speaker 1: And none of those motherfuckers know a lagger I know.
Speaker 9: So all of this background really matters to Trump's kind
Speaker 9: of tense relationship with DC, like the district. Trump, as
Speaker 9: y'all might remember, spent quite a lot of time just
Speaker 9: talking straight shit about the district and announcing these like
Speaker 9: big plans to takeover DC. The background is a little
Speaker 9: bit complicated, but the quick and dirty version is that
Speaker 9: DC has what's called home rule. So that's like the
Speaker 9: ability for DC to govern, like for our local government
Speaker 9: and leaders to like make decisions about what happens to
Speaker 9: the district, and on the campaign trail, Trump was saying
Speaker 9: he wants to change this, that DC's home rule would
Speaker 9: be revoked and that the federal government, basically him, would
Speaker 9: dictate how DC is run as a city. Because DC
Speaker 9: is not a state, technically, any president could have that
Speaker 9: authority to interfere with how DC is run, so right, Yeah,
Speaker 9: any president could like take over the police department and
Speaker 9: take over the powers are mayor Muriel Bowser currently has
Speaker 9: over the city.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I guess, first off, like of your friends,
Speaker 1: how many folks kind of made the same call, Like
Speaker 1: what was the general decision? Because I'm looking at like
Speaker 1: footage of proud boys marching through fucking d C again
Speaker 1: for the first time in almost half a decade, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: where are the people you know on this kind of stuff?
Speaker 5: I mean this in the most literal sense, No, nobody zero.
Speaker 9: I was out there fly in solo and I had
Speaker 9: multiple friends and be like, you're crazy to go down there,
Speaker 9: like like everybody.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I guess that's something else.
Speaker 9: That I wanted to talk a bit about, which is that,
Speaker 9: you know, the first time around. During Trump's inauguration I
Speaker 9: was like out on the streets. I was like it
Speaker 9: sounds so silly now, but like, ugh, I mean almost
Speaker 9: only want to get into it. But the idea of
Speaker 9: like resist that had not yet become a cliche to me,
Speaker 9: and in the you know, aftermath of Trump's first election,
Speaker 9: I was really clinging to that for like whatever hope
Speaker 9: or power. I didn't know it was going to turn
Speaker 9: out to be like a bunch of grifters and like
Speaker 9: people saying like hashtag resist and like meeting nothing yea,
Speaker 9: at the time, I really clung to that. This time
Speaker 9: around total night and day difference, like yeah, and I
Speaker 9: think the mood on the street I think reflected that
Speaker 9: I think that DC is exhausted. The people that generally
Speaker 9: I know who are like radicals who would be out
Speaker 9: on the street.
Speaker 5: One of those people were like, We're sitting this one out.
Speaker 1: Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 9: That was like a refrain I hear from a lot
Speaker 9: of black and brown organizing folks here in DC, like
Speaker 9: this is not our fight.
Speaker 5: We are sitting this one out.
Speaker 9: And I don't blame anybody, right, Like it's a lot,
Speaker 9: We've all been through a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's I guess if I could get across
Speaker 1: something and people listen, it would be like, don't just
Speaker 1: show up because they are right now. They have the cops,
Speaker 1: they have the courts. If they want you to show
Speaker 1: up in the street, the best thing to do. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say this is going to be
Speaker 1: consistently the case, but it is like, don't give them
Speaker 1: what they want, don't be where they want you to be,
Speaker 1: don't make it simple for them. You know. Again, I
Speaker 1: keep trying to say and I'm not saying this, and
Speaker 1: like I'm so smart, I know what everyone needs to
Speaker 1: be doing. I don't. But it's like, not what we
Speaker 1: did last time, because that that just didn't didn't do
Speaker 1: it exactly, didn't do it all, didn't not get out
Speaker 1: of the park.
Speaker 5: Was the home run last time Trump was in office.
Speaker 9: Y'all remember like the Women's March and pussy hats and
Speaker 9: all of that. I actually staffed the Women's March that
Speaker 9: time around. I was one of the digital street team folks.
Speaker 9: So I was like very invested. This time around, they
Speaker 9: changed the name, they rebranded to the People's March, and
Speaker 9: they only had a couple of thousand people out there,
Speaker 9: and so, you know, I think it really goes back
Speaker 9: to what you were saying, Robert.
Speaker 5: Personally, I have a hard.
Speaker 9: Time with the idea that what we did then is
Speaker 9: what we should be doing now that that that playbook
Speaker 9: is still going to work. And frankly, like sixty nine
Speaker 9: percent of white women voted for Trump, right, and so
Speaker 9: like the idea that I would feel safe and feel
Speaker 9: solidarity with a bunch of women out on the streets
Speaker 9: like being like boo Trump. It's just like, it's I
Speaker 9: understand why the turnout was so low, because I feel
Speaker 9: like solidarity march on the street is clearly not where
Speaker 9: we're at.
Speaker 5: So that is not how we should be meeting this moment.
Speaker 10: Well, and even last Jay twenty there was like, you know,
Speaker 10: a large, large radical contingent, and those people are similarly
Speaker 10: sitting out, and you're looking towards the next few months,
Speaker 10: looking at like what kind of ice raids are going
Speaker 10: to happen, looking at what's going to happen for like
Speaker 10: reproductive healthcare, transgender healthcare. People are making the calculation that
Speaker 10: it does not make sense to like needlessly throw yourself
Speaker 10: against the walls of the state when we can stick
Speaker 10: together and see and see what happens, and prepare for
Speaker 10: all of those other things that are going to actually
Speaker 10: impact you and people that that you know, like seriously,
Speaker 10: and it sucks to be stuck in that reactive position.
Speaker 10: And there's things you can do proactively, but going outside
Speaker 10: and yelling in front of a fence probably isn't going
Speaker 10: to do any of those things. It's probably not going
Speaker 10: to help the people who are going to need help
Speaker 10: in the next few weeks. Yeah, and people are understanding that,
Speaker 10: and it's leading to people reacting quite differently than than
Speaker 10: what they did, you know, eight years ago.
Speaker 9: I agree, Yeah, I mean, Garrison, you really said it.
Speaker 9: And in this moment personally, I am really wondering, like
Speaker 9: what my role is, Like where could I fit in?
Speaker 9: There was a time where you know, just being out
Speaker 9: on the street yelling, like being so frustrated I have
Speaker 9: to take to the streets and scream in impotent rage.
Speaker 9: That would feel like something. And I just think in
Speaker 9: twenty twenty five, I have to figure out like what
Speaker 9: it is I can contribute and contribute that and I
Speaker 9: don't know that it's protest as it used to be.
Speaker 9: Like I used to be somebody who like protest was
Speaker 9: my thing, Like you know, I really got my start
Speaker 9: in the anti war movement when I was in college,
Speaker 9: and like that felt like something. I don't think that
Speaker 9: that's what it is for me anymore. Maybe it's just
Speaker 9: age too, you age out of it or something.
Speaker 1: Sure, I think some of it is that, like the
Speaker 1: only meaningful definition of intelligence really is the ability to
Speaker 1: adapt to changing circumstances. And when the circumstances change in
Speaker 1: the way that they have and you're like, well, time
Speaker 1: to do exactly what we tried in twenty seventeen. That
Speaker 1: is not intelligent, right, Like, I'm not trying to be mean,
Speaker 1: And again I'm not saying I know what the smart
Speaker 1: thing is, but it is we gotta be pivoting. We
Speaker 1: gotta pivot in a lot of different directions right now.
Speaker 9: So yes, and I don't know that I see some
Speaker 9: of the institutional powers that be, even people who are
Speaker 9: like ostensibly like on our side, doing that pivot, right, Like,
Speaker 9: I'm very much in this sort of like nonprofit industrial complex.
Speaker 9: All the organizations who were like, oh, well, where should
Speaker 9: we be putting our money and this and that the
Speaker 9: first time around, I just see them doing the same
Speaker 9: old thing.
Speaker 5: And it's like, I don't know that that is what's
Speaker 5: going to save us.
Speaker 9: And like, don't get me started on how useless the
Speaker 9: Democrats are, because they'll go all day. But like when
Speaker 9: Trump announced that he was moving the inauguration inside, they
Speaker 9: printed little jokey shirts that said snowflake. I'm just so
Speaker 9: sick of that, like that sort of like sneering, dunking,
Speaker 9: useless stuff that doesn't translate to meaningful action. I'm just
Speaker 9: so sick of it. I wanted to gouge my eyes out.
Speaker 10: Yes, yeah, I mean that's what's in part what lost
Speaker 10: of the election is that is that general attitude and
Speaker 10: that conception of them throughout the country. And yeah, getting
Speaker 10: your little like snide remarks during Haig's est confirmation hearing
Speaker 10: might make you feel good and might generate a good
Speaker 10: clip for social media, but is that actually going to
Speaker 10: stop him from getting into the cabinet position.
Speaker 1: I've had so many arguments about this with people over
Speaker 1: the last few days who still insist that, like what
Speaker 1: the fascists can't stand you making fun of them. That's
Speaker 1: what they hate is you laughing at them. And like,
Speaker 1: I think there was a stage at which that was
Speaker 1: a valid tactic, and you know, there may be elements
Speaker 1: of that in the future, but like, no, they don't care.
Speaker 1: They're winning. I'm not saying like, don't fucking make jokes
Speaker 1: with your friends to like keep your stell self sane.
Speaker 1: I'm saying, don't mistake dunking on them on social media
Speaker 1: for doing anything that matters, because it doesn't.
Speaker 9: Well, okay, I'm not even sure, Like I have so
Speaker 9: much to say about this. So I have been saying
Speaker 9: this for a very long time. And you know, we
Speaker 9: were all at the Democratic National Convention. I I didn'mit
Speaker 9: that I was there as an influencer, But the thing
Speaker 9: that annoyed me so much was like that exact sentiment,
Speaker 9: and that exact sentiment fucking lost. The thing that the
Speaker 9: thing that pisses me off now is the complete unwillingness
Speaker 9: to be like, where did we go wrong? Maybe the
Speaker 9: memes and the jokes and the calling them weird and
Speaker 9: then this and that that. Maybe it felt good in
Speaker 9: the moment, but it actually didn't translate what happened.
Speaker 5: Unwilling to do that, completely unwilling.
Speaker 1: Now, you know, you see, I would almost argue that,
Speaker 1: like the weird stuff, I think if they'd stuck with it,
Speaker 1: there was something there. I think the I think the
Speaker 1: the emphasizing how outside of like the American norm these
Speaker 1: guys were and like what we want to accept in
Speaker 1: our communities, Like there was something there, but they didn't
Speaker 1: stick to it. You know. The next big time we
Speaker 1: saw Tim Walls, he was talking about how how he
Speaker 1: wanted to be friends with Jade Vance on the fucking
Speaker 1: debates Stitch. Yeah, you know, But also I think that's
Speaker 1: a little different than just like calling him fucking Orange
Speaker 1: Mussolini or whatever the fuck. Like, I think there's a
Speaker 1: point in a messaging tactic. It's like Trump gets mileage
Speaker 1: out of the names he uses and the way in
Speaker 1: which that's part of how he got where he is.
Speaker 1: So I'm not saying that aspects of these tactics can't
Speaker 1: be used. Well, I'm talking about the way in which
Speaker 1: people liberals and folks on the left are continuing to
Speaker 1: do the fucking like drump shit that's not getting us anywhere.
Speaker 9: I could not agree more. And yeah, I mean I agree.
Speaker 9: I think the weird stuff could have like had legs.
Speaker 9: I think that they were kind of like scattershot at
Speaker 9: that point, and they were like, let's tell people seem
Speaker 9: to like this let's lean into this, Oh, this new thing,
Speaker 9: let's lean into that.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The thing that I remember.
Speaker 9: Very clearly was when Tim Walls was talking about how,
Speaker 9: oh we have a saying in Minnesota it's mind your
Speaker 9: own damn business.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, yeah, so like.
Speaker 9: My partner is from Minnesota, and he was like, oh,
Speaker 9: that is like absolutely a Minnesotan thing.
Speaker 5: Mind your own damn business.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can sell that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I agree.
Speaker 9: But yeah, the like calling elon Elmo, like all these
Speaker 9: little cutesy things might feel good and like get to
Speaker 9: a hit of dopamine and get you a few you know,
Speaker 9: likes on whatever, but it's just it's not gonna save us.
Speaker 5: And I'm so sick of it.
Speaker 9: I feel like, in some ways it's all anyone has
Speaker 9: to offer right now, and I'm sick of it.
Speaker 10: One of the interesting things when like looking back at
Speaker 10: the last version of Trump's Jay twenties, you did have
Speaker 10: you know, these large, large militant groups you know what
Speaker 10: would later probably be dubbed Antifa by the media, but
Speaker 10: there was there was a presence in the street, and
Speaker 10: this time around, really the only sizeable militant presence in
Speaker 10: the street was like the first return of the Proud Voice.
Speaker 10: Did you stumble across a gaggle of black and yellow
Speaker 10: clad militants in the streets?
Speaker 5: Not a gaggle, I saw one, lone one. I'm sure.
Speaker 5: It was like I've lost my groom.
Speaker 1: Like a little duck. I had to help a baby
Speaker 1: duck get back to its mom last year. It was
Speaker 1: just like that, right down to the IQ.
Speaker 10: I have some friends right now who are in the
Speaker 10: DC airport and it is chud central over there.
Speaker 4: It sounds quite bad.
Speaker 10: I I saw a friend posted about like all of
Speaker 10: the Trump merchant Uh. They were sitting next to two
Speaker 10: individuals debating race science in the airport terminal. So that
Speaker 10: is the vibes of the DC Airport as of as
Speaker 10: of Tuesday, the day after the inauguration. But yeah, like
Speaker 10: the return of the Proud Boys is like one one
Speaker 10: of the big things that I think we're gonna we're
Speaker 10: gonna see these next few weeks is the amount of
Speaker 10: all right militias or these you know, more like street
Speaker 10: gang type groups who've been so emboldened by by Trump
Speaker 10: essentially giving them permission to do whatever they want to
Speaker 10: now now that they know that they're not going to
Speaker 10: face any kind of like real legal repercussions for you know,
Speaker 10: carrying out whatever actions they want to against people of color,
Speaker 10: queer people, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And that's going to be interesting to see. Like this
Speaker 1: is certainly a sign that suggests some embrace, but I'm
Speaker 1: kind of wondering if we're looking back to the Nazis
Speaker 1: the Ogs. What the Nazis did was marginalize and actually
Speaker 1: purge a lot of these guys fairly quickly, because the
Speaker 1: folks that were the best at like rabble rousing and
Speaker 1: fighting in the streets were also kind of like the
Speaker 1: least reliable at helping to keep a stable system in
Speaker 1: the city. Right Like, after the Nazis took power, one
Speaker 1: of the big issues they had is like, we still
Speaker 1: have a lot of people who are kind of like
Speaker 1: in the middle, including most of the military, and one
Speaker 1: of the things that keeps scaring them is all these
Speaker 1: fucking goons running about. And we still want what the
Speaker 1: goons are doing, which is like certain people beaten and
Speaker 1: thrown in camps, but we don't want the goons doing it.
Speaker 1: We want the cops doing it. And I guess kind
Speaker 1: of we're all waiting to see how different or similar
Speaker 1: what comes next looks to that.
Speaker 9: And I mean, what do you make of Like, I
Speaker 9: guess I knew it was, but when all those J
Speaker 9: six booms got pardoned and so like you have like
Speaker 9: the leader of the Oath Keepers, the leader of the
Speaker 9: Proud Boys getting released from DC jail, Like, what do
Speaker 9: you make of that?
Speaker 1: There's two things. Number One, this is something that he
Speaker 1: had campaigned on. It's something that there was a lot
Speaker 1: of support from his base for, you know, like the
Speaker 1: fact that in order to kind of protect himself he
Speaker 1: had to really heavily embrace the idea that nothing bad
Speaker 1: happened on January sixth, then if it did, it was
Speaker 1: the fault of you know, the mean old Biden cops,
Speaker 1: and so he kind of had to do it. The
Speaker 1: degree to which he shows up and is close or
Speaker 1: actually directly embraces Proud Boys and guys like Tario is
Speaker 1: going to tell us a lot. And I think we'll
Speaker 1: be seeing that very soon. If they are kept at
Speaker 1: arm's length and kind of letting them out is all
Speaker 1: they do, then I don't know how much we're going
Speaker 1: to see of these guys. If there's a real embrace
Speaker 1: and an attempt to use them as a way to
Speaker 1: kind of extra legally deal with his enemies. Then I
Speaker 1: think we start seeing them really make inroads and pushes
Speaker 1: in places like Portland, trying to get people out so
Speaker 1: that they can do violence to them and then you know,
Speaker 1: get pardoned or just have the violence ignored and the
Speaker 1: other people get thrown into prison. And I don't really
Speaker 1: know which way I think that the state is landing
Speaker 1: right now, which is not to say, like I think
Speaker 1: one is clearly less violent than the other, because his
Speaker 1: other option is he's going to be having his FEDS
Speaker 1: do that kind of shit.
Speaker 9: I think that's where a lot of my anxiety comes from,
Speaker 9: the not knowing of like it could go this way
Speaker 9: or that way. Both are bad, but what flavor are
Speaker 9: we going to get? Like, That's the thing that is
Speaker 9: really getting to me right now.
Speaker 10: Yeah, do you want to talk about what the probaboys
Speaker 10: were actually like up to on Monday?
Speaker 9: Yeah, So, as you said, this was the first time
Speaker 9: that they in mass came to DC since January six,
Speaker 9: And they marched through the streets of DC holding a
Speaker 9: banner that said congratulations President Trump, and they chanted who
Speaker 9: streets our streets, which, by the way, that is such
Speaker 9: like again as someone who kind of like came up
Speaker 9: on like street protest. Yeah, y'all are doing the chant
Speaker 9: all late, Like I hate that.
Speaker 10: I mean, the situation is continued to be proven correct.
Speaker 10: The levels of recuperation for even like you're like diametrically
Speaker 10: opposed like militant enemy side is just fucking crazy.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 9: And I saw this, I mean, speaking of J six
Speaker 9: rioters who were all, you know, pardoned, I saw this
Speaker 9: video that really kind of broke my heart. It was
Speaker 9: a video that some maga dipshit took outside of the
Speaker 9: jail where all those people were being held. And so
Speaker 9: there's a black DC elder who clearly is just like
Speaker 9: mining her business, walking down the street in her city
Speaker 9: and she gets baited into an on video screaming match
Speaker 9: outside of the DC jail where this maga guy.
Speaker 5: Yells like like like.
Speaker 9: Oh, we didn't do anything wrong, no crime was committed,
Speaker 9: and she's like, you all killed a cop.
Speaker 5: No cops got killed, which is not true. Like the
Speaker 5: it goes back to what you.
Speaker 9: Were saying, Robert about how there is this need to
Speaker 9: quickly have it be like something that wasn't that big
Speaker 9: of a deal and one to see that in person
Speaker 9: in this video was wild to me. But two, seeing
Speaker 9: like a DC elder like take the bait broke my
Speaker 9: heart because I wish I could have could have been
Speaker 9: in that moment to be like, honey, you don't need
Speaker 9: to be screaming. This guy wants you to be screaming
Speaker 9: at him. He wants this video of you screaming at
Speaker 9: him on the street.
Speaker 5: This is like exactly what he wants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I entirely agree.
Speaker 9: You know, the biggest takeaway from being out was just
Speaker 9: how sparse it was. Like, you know, the first time around,
Speaker 9: I probably had four different people staying with me, two
Speaker 9: of whom got arrested during the big anti Trump protests.
Speaker 9: This time around, I didn't have anybody. I didn't know
Speaker 9: anybody who was there. And I do think that reflects
Speaker 9: kind of where people are at. I think people are exhausted,
Speaker 9: people have been through a lot. People are maybe pacing
Speaker 9: themselves and sort of like don't want to blow their
Speaker 9: race wad on the first week, which I totally understand.
Speaker 9: But I think it really remains to be seen, like
Speaker 9: whether or not this vibe is going to take us
Speaker 9: through the next four years.
Speaker 5: Are people just tuning out? Are we checked out?
Speaker 9: Are we so exhausted and overstimulated already that we're not
Speaker 9: going to really be paying attention? And in some ways,
Speaker 9: like I feel like that's exactly what authoritarians want.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's where it's difficult, or that's one of the
Speaker 1: many things that is difficult, is that like checking out
Speaker 1: is not the answer, but you simply can't react to
Speaker 1: everything that happens showing up and burning yourself out in
Speaker 1: the street. It's like the cops continue to do bad things.
Speaker 1: If every time a cop is a bad thing, you
Speaker 1: and your friends throw yourselves at a police station until
Speaker 1: you all get arrested, then you won't be able to
Speaker 1: do anything else because you'll be in jail, you know.
Speaker 1: And like these are hard realities, which is why it
Speaker 1: necessitates new kinds of thinking, creativity, you know, to some
Speaker 1: extent unsad usfying. And I guess part of what I
Speaker 1: would say is if people are giving you answers to
Speaker 1: what we need to do that sound very clear and satisfying,
Speaker 1: you should maybe not trust that totally. Yeah, because the
Speaker 1: responsible answer, in my opinion is that like it's very
Speaker 1: unclear how to get out of this or what the
Speaker 1: right things to do here are?
Speaker 4: We just know that what we've.
Speaker 1: Been doing hasn't been working, and the first step to
Speaker 1: wisdom is accepting that.
Speaker 4: Oof.
Speaker 5: I love that.
Speaker 9: Something I know that isn't working is I'm glad that
Speaker 9: we're not doing.
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to pivot to ads. Actually,
Speaker 1: let's pivot to ads.
Speaker 9: You're so good at ads, like you could teach a
Speaker 9: class on it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well I waited twenty eight minutes this time
Speaker 1: to do it. But at least we have the second
Speaker 1: one out there. We're back, Bridget, Sorry, where were you going?
Speaker 9: Something that I'm glad we are not doing this time
Speaker 9: around is remember during the first Trump administration, how the
Speaker 9: Washington Post changed their tagline to Democracy dies in Darkness
Speaker 9: and everybody gave them a shit ton of money because
Speaker 9: it was like, yeah, we need like good.
Speaker 5: Investigative journalism, traditional media, that's gonna save us.
Speaker 9: I'm glad that this time around we've all cut the
Speaker 9: shit and it's like, no, they're part of it.
Speaker 5: They're not gonna do a goddamn thing.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. Yes, they don't give a fuck. Fucking Jake
Speaker 1: Tapper couldn't roll over fast enough and.
Speaker 9: Like so even I mean, I'm sure y'all have talked
Speaker 9: about this to death and I.
Speaker 5: Have been thinking about it nonstuff.
Speaker 9: But Elon's seeing how the traditional press reported on his salute,
Speaker 9: it's like, like, oh, what.
Speaker 5: Did he do?
Speaker 9: Like, like the way they will contort themselves to not
Speaker 9: just come out and say it is astonishing to me.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that's I mean, that's one of like the
Speaker 1: scariest things is the degree to which they're trying to
Speaker 1: memory all stuff happening as it happened, and at the
Speaker 1: same time, Okay, yeah, he did a Nazi salute. He's
Speaker 1: a Nazi. This is not the first thing that's made
Speaker 1: that clear. We need to move on knowing he's a Nazi,
Speaker 1: but we need to move on, you know, like that
Speaker 1: that's right. I don't know, I don't know what to
Speaker 1: do other than you know, maybe there's some utility and
Speaker 1: spreading clips of him next to the fucking guy from
Speaker 1: American History X, but I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: how that's gonna help.
Speaker 10: The fact that he is in this position where he
Speaker 10: can do something like that on stage and it actually
Speaker 10: doesn't matter is like so much more frightening to me
Speaker 10: than like like Elon Musk like doing like a very
Speaker 10: like low mortar control like version of the salute when
Speaker 10: he's like wrapped up in some like excitement and he's
Speaker 10: trying to like meme to like his like fans on
Speaker 10: four Chan. The fact that like he's even just allowed
Speaker 10: to do that and like it doesn't actually matter, like
Speaker 10: this will not affect him in any way is more
Speaker 10: what's interesting to me, because yes, we've all known that
Speaker 10: he's been a Nazi for quite a while. He's like
Speaker 10: shared things are like essentially like Nazi race science on
Speaker 10: Twitter before he is he has engaged with like extremely
Speaker 10: anti semitic conspiracy theories before, and you know, the largest
Speaker 10: anti semitism org in the country has completely capitulated to
Speaker 10: these people, so like they've hollowed out everything that's like
Speaker 10: supposed to be, like you know, the institutional blockages, whether
Speaker 10: that's you know, places like the Washington Post where that's
Speaker 10: literally all of the tech companies, the degree to which
Speaker 10: like everyone has cozied up to Trump, which is also like,
Speaker 10: you know, very different from twenty sixteen. Exactly everyone was
Speaker 10: like fairly like united institutionally was united against Trump, and
Speaker 10: you know the same way we like we don't see
Speaker 10: you know, people out in the streets, you know, writing
Speaker 10: or even doing like large protests. The actual you know,
Speaker 10: institutional powers have have decided to instead of actually trying
Speaker 10: to fight this guy, they're going to trying to see
Speaker 10: like how friendly they can be, like how much can
Speaker 10: they get out of this. There's this like resignation, and
Speaker 10: I don't know how long that'll last, Like I'm I'm
Speaker 10: not sure if like, you know, once Trump becomes the
Speaker 10: establishment figure that he's been like deriding for the past
Speaker 10: few years, like once he falls back into that zone,
Speaker 10: if we're going to see more resistance to him from
Speaker 10: like institutional levels, but you can't like count on it.
Speaker 10: And the degree to which it's it is like different
Speaker 10: from twenty sixteen is like worth remembering. Like a phrase
Speaker 10: me and Robert talk about sometimes is like the forever
Speaker 10: twenty sixteen, Like the fact that it feels like we've
Speaker 10: never really left twenty sixteen. Everyone kind of acts like
Speaker 10: we're still in twenty sixteen, like this such load bearing
Speaker 10: year on our entire cultural consciousness. But the fact is
Speaker 10: we aren't in twenty sixteen anymore, and you can't act
Speaker 10: like we are. You actually have to move on from that,
Speaker 10: and we're starting to see more of that in certain corners.
Speaker 10: You see some of that among some of the radicals,
Speaker 10: some of the anarchists as well as you know, the
Speaker 10: tech companies and the CEOs and the media companies. They're
Speaker 10: just you know, changing the degree to which they're moving
Speaker 10: away from their twenty sixteen mode.
Speaker 5: You actually just.
Speaker 9: Gave me a little bit of a silver lining that
Speaker 9: I had not read, which is, like, it kind of
Speaker 9: is useful to see so clearly where these institutions and
Speaker 9: power holders stand. And it's like when like I remember
Speaker 9: watching tech companies like change their logos to Black Lives
Speaker 9: Matter or post the Black Square, it's kind of freeing
Speaker 9: to be like, we don't have to do that shit anymore.
Speaker 9: Y'all will have to pretend, and we don't have to
Speaker 9: pretend either. We know where you stand. You've made it
Speaker 9: very clear. You could not make it. You could not
Speaker 9: have made it clear where your alliance is. And let's
Speaker 9: go from there. Like it almost it almost is.
Speaker 5: Sort of like trimming the fat a little bit.
Speaker 9: We no longer have to take these these institutions as
Speaker 9: serious as allies or something.
Speaker 10: Yeah, there's going to be a degree to which, like
Speaker 10: people's masks come off more than usual. I mean, I
Speaker 10: think certainly this next Pride month will be interesting to
Speaker 10: see how people change, you know Pride months twenty twenty two,
Speaker 10: or even you know Pride twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was at Pride in San Francisco in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty and it was very big, very happy, but there
Speaker 1: was like a rind to it, you know, there was
Speaker 1: like an edge to it of are we going to
Speaker 1: be able to keep doing this? You know, there's a dispensary.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't smoke, but a friend of mine
Speaker 1: who I stay with when I'm at San Francisco does,
Speaker 1: and so I was with them at this dispensary and it
Speaker 1: had like a sign talking about its history, which is
Speaker 1: that the person who found it it's a very nice one.
Speaker 1: It's like an apple store inside. And the person who
Speaker 1: like started it and ran it did so because when
Speaker 1: they were younger, their partner had AIDS HIV in the
Speaker 1: AIDS and marijuana reduced some of their symptoms, and they
Speaker 1: had to go buy it in the nearby park, which
Speaker 1: was a lot uglier of a place and a lot
Speaker 1: like it was. It was sketchy, like they got robbed.
Speaker 1: A couple of times there's a lot more violent crime
Speaker 1: and just kind of there are even in a place
Speaker 1: like San Francisco, which is so like gentrified in such
Speaker 1: a way like when you're when you're talking with like
Speaker 1: especially the older members of the queer community, they're not
Speaker 1: just like rich, out of touch tech people. They are old,
Speaker 1: battle scarred queers who went through some of the ugliest
Speaker 1: moments of this nation's history and we're kind of bracing
Speaker 1: themselves forward again. So yeah, I'm very interested to see
Speaker 1: what it's what it's like this year, you know.
Speaker 9: But even that, I feel like there's a I mean,
Speaker 9: it's grim shit, but there's a kind of hope in
Speaker 9: it that like we've been people have been here before, right,
Speaker 9: Like yeah, you know, there have always been queer people,
Speaker 9: trans people, black and brown people, immigrants, Like we are America,
Speaker 9: and like we've always been here, Baby, We're always gonna
Speaker 9: be here and like making our way and like holding
Speaker 9: on and bracing ourselves and doing what we gotta do
Speaker 9: and enduring like that is what we fucking do. And
Speaker 9: so in some ways, as grim as that is, it's
Speaker 9: kind of hopeful.
Speaker 5: Question Mark.
Speaker 10: Also, Yep, I'm just on the edge of my seat ugh, Yeah,
Speaker 10: I mean certainly, you know, lots of people who I
Speaker 10: surround myself with are you know, looking towards ways to
Speaker 10: take control of like their own bodies and stop relying,
Speaker 10: like Holly on any kind of government, government agency or
Speaker 10: model for that, as well as doing a lot of
Speaker 10: a lot of reading on the old like anti deportation,
Speaker 10: anti ice resistance from like years and years ago, not
Speaker 10: just from like the Trump era, but from the stuff
Speaker 10: like like way before. If we're not going to be
Speaker 10: out in the streets doing you know, slightly mindless protest
Speaker 10: for your marching in circles, you can use that time
Speaker 10: to instead like educate yourself and build connections with people,
Speaker 10: and you know, read about these things that may become
Speaker 10: more and more important to know at least so you
Speaker 10: have an understanding of history as the next four years
Speaker 10: to start happening quite quickly.
Speaker 5: That's so insightful.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think when things feel hopeless, reading about how folks,
Speaker 9: you know, our elders, the folks that came before our ancestors,
Speaker 9: how they dealt with stuff like this, has been really hopeful.
Speaker 9: And it's like, yeah, I guess I just try to
Speaker 9: tell myself, you've been here before and people found a
Speaker 9: way to make it through. And you know, it feels
Speaker 9: uniquely tragic, but in some ways it is not. And
Speaker 9: as scary as that is, it can also be sort
Speaker 9: of like grounding.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and like the same things won't work, but you
Speaker 10: also need to understand the things that didn't work last time,
Speaker 10: and it's good to know, and it's good to know
Speaker 10: the things that did. Like it's it's it's important to
Speaker 10: have the understanding so you don't feel like you're having
Speaker 10: to reinvent the wheel every single time. And like that
Speaker 10: type of like generational knowledge sometimes is really tricky to
Speaker 10: pass down in these sorts of spaces and it you know,
Speaker 10: it doesn't and it sometimes it requires a degree of
Speaker 10: initiative to like actually like seek out the information on
Speaker 10: your own. The internet's great, uh and terrible, but it
Speaker 10: has it has a it has a it has a
Speaker 10: vast catalog of history.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I want to talk a bit about the speech
Speaker 1: that that bishop gave at the Trump's first church service
Speaker 1: as president the second time around, because that is of
Speaker 1: all of like the fucking media people getting clapped at
Speaker 1: for making fun of you know, whichever you know, hegg
Speaker 1: Seth or whoever.
Speaker 10: Yep.
Speaker 1: That I think actually did matter a little. At least
Speaker 1: it was the there was the courage of saying it
Speaker 1: to their faces in a way where their reactions were
Speaker 1: had to be filmed.
Speaker 10: It's also not trying to dunk. It's not trying to
Speaker 10: create like a viral moment. It's like genuinely upsetting to
Speaker 10: them to get like reminded of like what it means
Speaker 10: to be human. Yeah, and like maybe that's more important
Speaker 10: than trying to get your like Katie Porter top ten
Speaker 10: funniest moments in Congress, like a compilation exactly.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And to be very clear, if you didn't catch this,
Speaker 1: the right Reverend Mary Anne Bud b DDE was the
Speaker 1: Episcopal Bishop of Washington. During a church service where Trump
Speaker 1: and Vance and basically everybody in the new government was sitting,
Speaker 1: made a direct PLEA quote from this is from an
Speaker 1: NBC Washington article referencing Trump's belief that he was saved
Speaker 1: by God from assassination. Bud said, you have felt the
Speaker 1: previdential hand of a loving God, and the name of
Speaker 1: our God. I asked you to have mercy on the
Speaker 1: upon the people in our country who are scared now,
Speaker 1: and she referenced specifically transgender people, queer people, people in
Speaker 1: democratic families, independent families who were frightened right now about
Speaker 1: what the new administration means, as well as migrants, and
Speaker 1: she made a point of saying, like, the vast majority
Speaker 1: of whom are not in any way criminals.
Speaker 4: And yeah, like regardless of whether or not they have
Speaker 4: the right paperwork.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There was rage on Vance's face, which is part
Speaker 1: of why I'm like, that's an act of actual courage.
Speaker 1: There's been one Republican representative who said that she needed
Speaker 1: to be deported, but she's born in New Jersey.
Speaker 5: So deported back to New Jersey.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Representative Mike Collins of Georgia. So one of your
Speaker 1: guys gare, oh.
Speaker 10: Thanks, then there are you from Georgia.
Speaker 4: Well, no, but I live in Georgia.
Speaker 1: I'd live there now.
Speaker 10: And as someone who lives in Georgia, the only people
Speaker 10: that I think should be deported back to New Jersey
Speaker 10: are the Costco guy and his kid. Get them out,
Speaker 10: send them back now.
Speaker 1: I think I do think we should be deporting large
Speaker 1: numbers of people to New Jersey just because my old
Speaker 1: boss and friend, Daniel O'Brien lives there, and I want
Speaker 1: to fuck with them a little bit, make the traffic worse,
Speaker 1: Like see how you deal with that, Danny boy.
Speaker 10: No, it was, like I think, the most useful thing
Speaker 10: i've like i've seen yet. Yeah, it's still like largely symbolic,
Speaker 10: but like at.
Speaker 1: Least someone took a big public risk, you know, yeah, yeah, Perage. Yeah.
Speaker 9: I think it's the writer Sarah Candozer who has this
Speaker 9: line that I always think of, if.
Speaker 5: You can't be brave, be kind.
Speaker 9: I think that like people who you see doing acts
Speaker 9: of big acts of bravery right now, Like that's I mean,
Speaker 9: it's just there are so few of them. And I think,
Speaker 9: especially when I look at like the tech leaders, they have.
Speaker 5: So much fucking money.
Speaker 9: Somebody said on tlusky, what is the point of having
Speaker 9: fuck you money if you never say fuck you to anybody?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 9: Like, the way that these people turned out to be
Speaker 9: such yellow bellied cowards is wild to me. And so
Speaker 9: people actually having conviction and actually speaking seats of power,
Speaker 9: I think we should be lifting that up wherever it happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I can think of like one tech guy with
Speaker 1: a lot of money who's turned out to have any
Speaker 1: kind of a backbone, And it's the guy who made
Speaker 1: that fire watching app that everyone in California's using right now,
Speaker 1: watch Duty, who's basically had said stuff along the lines
Speaker 1: of like, I don't know, I see all these other
Speaker 1: guys you got rich and tech talking about going to Mars,
Speaker 1: and I think it's much more useful to try to
Speaker 1: help people survive on Earth something along those lines, and
Speaker 1: his like novel made a critical like it is a
Speaker 1: critical life saving piece of technology that actually is what
Speaker 1: we should hope for from tech.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Anyway, bridget what else did you want to kind of
Speaker 1: make sure we got into today?
Speaker 5: Well this is going to.
Speaker 9: Sound a bit random, but I have to just make
Speaker 9: sure that this gets in there, because you know, I'm
Speaker 9: talking about the impact of Trump's inauguration and what the
Speaker 9: next four years look like for you know, not just
Speaker 9: for people nationally, but folks right here in DC where
Speaker 9: this is happening in our backyard. And I have to
Speaker 9: give it up for the service industry folks of DC
Speaker 9: the last couple of days, cause they, oh my god,
Speaker 9: I like have heard horror stories and I just I
Speaker 9: guess that's what I mean is that don't forget that
Speaker 9: there are real people who have to like put up
Speaker 9: with these people's bullshit and do it with a smile
Speaker 9: or they might get fired. And you know, in Adams Morgan,
Speaker 9: which is like pretty close to where I live, a
Speaker 9: woman at an Irish bar had to be removed by
Speaker 9: a staffer because she was screaming white power at the bar. Like,
Speaker 9: these people do not get paid enough to deal with this,
Speaker 9: and they are like the backbone of our city. So
Speaker 9: I just wanted to shout them out, especially since you know,
Speaker 9: Trump switched up the inaugurations because of the cold question
Speaker 9: mark and so a lot more of these people were
Speaker 9: just sort of wandering around the district on inauguration who
Speaker 9: otherwise would have been confined to like a very specific
Speaker 9: neighborhood downtown, and so they were going into our bars,
Speaker 9: going into our restaurants, and yeah, I just really feel
Speaker 9: for my industry folks who had to deal with this.
Speaker 9: You know, they're not paid enough, but they really are
Speaker 9: the backbone of our city. Hell yeah, you know, I
Speaker 9: started this conversation talking about all the horrible things that
Speaker 9: Trump has said about DC and how he's going to
Speaker 9: take it over federally, and like you know, he has said,
Speaker 9: like we will take over the horribly run capital of
Speaker 9: our nation and Washington clean up and rebuild the Capitol,
Speaker 9: so there's it's no longer a nightmare of murder and crime,
Speaker 9: but rather hell I know this like hell hole where
Speaker 9: like people live and raise their families and go to
Speaker 9: parks and ride bikes and have great times. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 9: I had a chance to talk to the mayor about this,
Speaker 9: and I will say our mayor, Muriel Bowser, is not
Speaker 9: convinced that any of this will happen. She is saying, like,
Speaker 9: you know, I think that Trump says a lot of things.
Speaker 9: I think at the end of the day, he is
Speaker 9: probably not going to mess with.
Speaker 5: DC's home rule.
Speaker 9: And so I just wanted to say that if you're
Speaker 9: if you're in DC and you're listening and you're thinking, like,
Speaker 9: what does Trump you know, mean for DC? Are all
Speaker 9: of these big threats that he has made going to
Speaker 9: come true? All I can tell you is that our
Speaker 9: mayor does not think it is likely. So if that
Speaker 9: is useful to you, I hope it brings you some comfort.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Oddly enough, one thing that's given me comfort is like
Speaker 1: Trump has twice in the last day, both when talking
Speaker 1: about Gaza and when talking about North Korea, weirdly enough,
Speaker 1: gone under degre rress about how good that it is
Speaker 1: a place to build condos, and the degree to which
Speaker 1: he's still focused on like real estate feels as opposed
Speaker 1: to the broader fascist project is hopeful just because like
Speaker 1: he is a bottleneck through which a lot of this
Speaker 1: has to cover, and he is clearly not as personally
Speaker 1: obsessed with every aspect of this as guys like Stephen Miller, right,
Speaker 1: Like he even makes fun of Miller a little bit
Speaker 1: for that kind of stuff. So there's a degree to which,
Speaker 1: like well, his own personal eccentricities, there's aspects of this
Speaker 1: it might slow down.
Speaker 9: This motherfucker is not out here trying to genuinely govern,
Speaker 9: like come on, I know. So in some ways that
Speaker 9: is heartening of like, oh, well, he's gonna like do
Speaker 9: his scams and whatever whatever, Like if he weren't to
Speaker 9: actually take over DC, that's an incredible amount of work
Speaker 9: and labor, and I don't think he's got it in him.
Speaker 9: So maybe in some ways some of these threats will
Speaker 9: like fly under the radar.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, guess we'll say, yes, we'll see
Speaker 1: bridget Where can people find you?
Speaker 5: Well, you can listen to my podcast.
Speaker 9: There are no girls on the internet about the intersection
Speaker 9: of identity and tech. And you can follow me on
Speaker 9: Instagram at Bridget Marie and DC.
Speaker 1: All right, find Bridget, follow Bridget and uh follow somebody smart.
Speaker 1: I don't know who they are. Figure that out. Good luck, godspeed.
Speaker 1: Fuck them if they can't take a joke.
Speaker 2: The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute
Speaker 2: while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president.
Speaker 2: He does a second one in another age. It is
Speaker 2: the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the
Speaker 2: third most fascist event of the day. And be he
Speaker 2: re uploads the address and cuts away from the sig
Speaker 2: hal at broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline. Everyone is
Speaker 2: arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute. You
Speaker 2: watch the video. It's a Nazi salute. The second one
Speaker 2: is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say
Speaker 2: that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't
Speaker 2: say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed
Speaker 2: to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit, or
Speaker 2: if they're already running cover for the new regime. You
Speaker 2: scroll through your timeline, they made my gender illegal. They
Speaker 2: tried to repeal the fourteenth Amendment through executive order to
Speaker 2: end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it. It's too much.
Speaker 2: The world has become a spectacle, and that spectacle is
Speaker 2: trying to kill you. Welcome to Ikadap and here I'm
Speaker 2: your host, Mio Wong. In societies where modern can editions
Speaker 2: of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an
Speaker 2: immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist
Speaker 2: Gee de Board in his seminal nineteen sixty seven work
Speaker 2: The Society of the Spectacle. The Board is typically written
Speaker 2: off as just another theorist of early mass media, and
Speaker 2: today his work is generally confined to the art world,
Speaker 2: which is, to be fair largely a demonstration of the
Speaker 2: fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten
Speaker 2: past the opening paragraphs of the book and made it
Speaker 2: to the part where he demands the formation of art workers' councils.
Speaker 2: But this is the age of the spectacle. In ways
Speaker 2: when nightmarish that de Board could ever have predicted. His
Speaker 2: elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly literal quote. Everything that was
Speaker 2: directly lived has moved away into representation, and indeed living
Speaker 2: has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomenon
Speaker 2: well is called instagram. The spectacle society of the spectacle
Speaker 2: opens is not a collection of images, but a social
Speaker 2: relation among people mediated by images. Today we literally call
Speaker 2: the collection of images we use to relate to each
Speaker 2: other social media quote. Lived reality is materially invaded by
Speaker 2: the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order,
Speaker 2: giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality TV star, the old
Speaker 2: human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was
Speaker 2: directly lived has been transformed into a representation, is now
Speaker 2: a president, the second time, driven by streamers and influencers
Speaker 2: and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of
Speaker 2: the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule
Speaker 2: it directly. In the nineteen sixties, the debate was whether
Speaker 2: you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. The
Speaker 2: Board's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real.
Speaker 2: None of that matters anymore. You can't ignore the spectacle
Speaker 2: because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald
Speaker 2: Trump is the president, the richest man on Earth is
Speaker 2: Nazi saluting Elon Musk. The autonomous force the Board described
Speaker 2: as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level.
Speaker 2: It is the president of the United States. Everything is
Speaker 2: rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In de Board's usage, the spectacle
Speaker 2: is the management of society by mediating people's social relations
Speaker 2: through images. This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level,
Speaker 2: you already understand this. You and I relate to each
Speaker 2: other through the one way mirror of a podcast app.
Speaker 2: You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos.
Speaker 2: You watch the bomb fall on Palestine on Twitter. You
Speaker 2: relate to each other and the world through images, and
Speaker 2: that relation is a system of control. As de Board
Speaker 2: describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world,
Speaker 2: a world that you can actually change with your actions,
Speaker 2: and thrust you into the world with the spectacle, a
Speaker 2: world where reality is quote an object of mere contemplation.
Speaker 2: Today we call this the discourse. The work that inspired
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixty eight revolutions called it the spectacle. Why
Speaker 2: does it feel like this? The rot, the decay, the
Speaker 2: unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day
Speaker 2: Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again.
Speaker 2: The board has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic,
Speaker 2: and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid,
Speaker 2: and alone.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: Technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates
Speaker 2: in turn. From the automobile to television, all of the
Speaker 2: goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for
Speaker 2: a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds. Later,
Speaker 2: he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more
Speaker 2: than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains
Speaker 2: their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it
Speaker 2: as separate. This is why the world feels like an
Speaker 2: endless doom. Scroll Instagram, TikTok live streaming this podcast. They're
Speaker 2: all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social
Speaker 2: media during the isolation of the pandemic, How it came
Speaker 2: to consume even more of our lives with the promise
Speaker 2: of connection that simply rendered us more and more and
Speaker 2: more isolated. The spectacle, given technological form in the social
Speaker 2: media app turns us into a mass in which we
Speaker 2: are all somehow terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form
Speaker 2: a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday
Speaker 2: to burn. The third precinct, or spectators with listeners were viewers.
Speaker 4: Or chat.
Speaker 2: Not living, but commenting on the image of living the
Speaker 2: spectacle the app The image mediates or social relations with
Speaker 2: each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd,
Speaker 2: we wrought in isolation and do only the two things
Speaker 2: the capitalist system needs us to do, work and consume.
Speaker 2: Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis
Speaker 2: on which everything is built. You entered into a free
Speaker 2: contract to live under a s date, says a social theorist. You,
Speaker 2: the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily
Speaker 2: in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do
Speaker 2: not organize with anyone else to get paid more for
Speaker 2: that labor, or God help you. Try to create a
Speaker 2: system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day.
Speaker 2: That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell
Speaker 2: your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world
Speaker 2: in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the
Speaker 2: spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action, not only
Speaker 2: because we're incapable of forming a collective. We're not even
Speaker 2: engaging in the world in which action can take place.
Speaker 2: The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is
Speaker 2: such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed
Speaker 2: to turn every part of you into a commodity, not
Speaker 2: just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs. Everything that
Speaker 2: you are is sold to everyone else a spectacle, and
Speaker 2: in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.
Speaker 2: In a world where there is no action, just the
Speaker 2: image of someone else's actions somewhere else, a commercialized political
Speaker 2: identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics.
Speaker 4: You don't have to do politics.
Speaker 2: You can just put on a red hat and watch
Speaker 2: the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't
Speaker 2: need relations with your family, you have Facebook groups. The
Speaker 2: relations to the world are relations to images. David Graber
Speaker 2: wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is
Speaker 2: that it is something that we make and could just
Speaker 2: as easily make differently. But the second, slightly less ultimate
Speaker 2: hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital,
Speaker 2: commodities are really just relations between abstracted out onto something physical.
Speaker 2: We interact with each other by using objects as forms
Speaker 2: of command. What do you think money is? Instead of
Speaker 2: having real, equal social relations. And that makes it all
Speaker 2: the more dire that the social relations that compose this
Speaker 2: world are no longer even relations with each other at all,
Speaker 2: but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of control,
Speaker 2: as de Board rights quote, where the real world changes
Speaker 2: into simple images. The simple images become real beings and
Speaker 2: effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency
Speaker 2: to make one see the world by various means of
Speaker 2: specialized mediations. It can no longer be grasped directly. As
Speaker 2: a spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks
Speaker 2: on the symbols of power, never touching power itself.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: But when the insurgents managed to penetrate parliament's presidential palaces
Speaker 2: and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya,
Speaker 2: or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places that
Speaker 2: is empty of power and furnished without any taste. So
Speaker 2: wrote the Invisible Committee of the Distant halcyon days of
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, it could have been written yesterday. Nine years later.
Speaker 2: The insurgents now on the right produced their masterpiece, Brazil's
Speaker 2: even more ineffectual cousin of January sixth, known forever as
Speaker 2: January eighth. On that day in twenty twenty three, for
Speaker 2: reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind
Speaker 2: has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure
Speaker 2: to the spectacle, supporters of defeated President JayR. Bolsonaro stormed
Speaker 2: Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida.
Speaker 2: The Presidential Palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court were literally
Speaker 2: empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to
Speaker 2: be one, nothing to be gained. The protesters vain hopes
Speaker 2: that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a
Speaker 2: military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonara regime
Speaker 2: evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake.
Speaker 2: January sixth at least attacked the site of the ritual
Speaker 2: of power while the ritual was technically in progress. The
Speaker 2: attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of
Speaker 2: the election. Congress was at least in session. Even if
Speaker 2: that attack, too, was the culmination of a series of
Speaker 2: ineffectual reruns of the Brooke Brothers' riots in but it's
Speaker 2: right wing political operatives did manage to steal an election
Speaker 2: by stopping the vote count in Florida in two thousand
Speaker 2: on January eighth. No one was even there, So how
Speaker 2: do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of
Speaker 2: power is pointless. You can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi
Speaker 2: salute really does represent something. The opening of any solution
Speaker 2: is to go to the source. Trump and Elon are symptoms,
Speaker 2: not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism. It's
Speaker 2: a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end
Speaker 2: or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump
Speaker 2: and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies. They are,
Speaker 2: in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of
Speaker 2: colonialism and racism. To boards solution to these problems, of course,
Speaker 2: well the solutions that people bother to read. There is
Speaker 2: a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time
Speaker 2: passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But the
Speaker 2: board's solution was workers' councils, and he got his wish.
Speaker 2: The next year, manufactory occupations of nineteen sixty eight. It
Speaker 2: nearly worked. But the last workers Council fell a quarter
Speaker 2: of a century ago in Argentina, and there's no sign
Speaker 2: at the Workers' Council. The definitive fighting form of the
Speaker 2: working class for over a century is coming back. In
Speaker 2: some ways. This is liberating one hundred and seventy years ago.
Speaker 2: Marx wrote this in the eighteenth through mayor of Louis Bonaparte,
Speaker 2: his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore
Speaker 2: its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader.
Speaker 2: The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its
Speaker 2: poetry from the past, but only from the future. It
Speaker 2: cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away also
Speaker 2: pstitions about the past. In the days and weeks and months,
Speaker 2: and God help us all years to come, we're going
Speaker 2: to have to assemble a new fighting form, and no
Speaker 2: one knows what it looks like yet. We could perhaps
Speaker 2: look at the airport protests from the first months of
Speaker 2: the original Trump administration, or masses of people, including a
Speaker 2: very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender
Speaker 2: she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop
Speaker 2: the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the
Speaker 2: government to release the people who had detained in the airports.
Speaker 2: The power of those protests was that they directly located
Speaker 2: the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them.
Speaker 2: The weakness of those protests was that people went home.
Speaker 2: And they went home because they had been told time
Speaker 2: and time and time again by the ACLU and by
Speaker 2: other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they
Speaker 2: could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated
Speaker 2: by the courts. Most of you lived through it. Some
Speaker 2: of you remember the Muslim ban was never defeated by
Speaker 2: the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments,
Speaker 2: it wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real
Speaker 2: sight of power and into a domain largely ruled by
Speaker 2: the ruling class. But we can learn from both January
Speaker 2: eighth and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't
Speaker 2: guarantee you're actually targeting power. You must understand how the
Speaker 2: system is operating before you attempt to go up its works.
Speaker 2: A thousand miniature January eighths is no solution at all.
Speaker 2: You must do the hard work of sifting to the
Speaker 2: tangle of rumors and lies at attempting to work out
Speaker 2: the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self defense.
Speaker 2: It starts with actually engaging with each other instead of
Speaker 2: the mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to
Speaker 2: break out of the spectacle, talk to the people around you,
Speaker 2: Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your
Speaker 2: life and find out what they actually need. Figure out
Speaker 2: the concrete steps you can take to organize the people
Speaker 2: around you, and the steps you can take to lift
Speaker 2: them out of their despair. We're not going to develop
Speaker 2: a new fighting form glued to our phones alone in
Speaker 2: a digital crowd. We're going to figure it out by
Speaker 2: talking to each other, by acting in the real world,
Speaker 2: not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're
Speaker 2: going to do it by finding the real places where
Speaker 2: power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going
Speaker 2: to do it together.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 4: It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 2: coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app,
Speaker 2: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
Speaker 2: now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly
Speaker 2: in episode descriptions.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening.